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Biden condemns looting and rioting: 'It's lawlessness, plain and simple'



 


(CNN)Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Monday condemned violence, looting and property destruction during protests over racial injustice and police brutality -- while saying President Donald Trump's refusal to call on his own supporters to "stop acting as an armed militia in this country shows how weak he is."
"I want to be very clear about all of this: Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting. It's lawlessness, plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted," Biden said in a speech in Pittsburgh. "Violence will not bring change, it will only bring destruction. It's wrong in every way. It will divide, instead of unite. ... It makes things worse across the board, not better."
He said looting and property damage are a break with the tactics of civil rights champions Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, and "must end."
"We must not burn. We have to build," Biden said.
He said that "the violence we're seeing in Donald Trump's America" is proof that the message of last week's Republican National Convention -- that Trump would seek "law and order," and that the looting and property damage that has taken place in some cities would spread to the suburbs, where Trump needs to win back White voters, if Biden is elected -- is without basis in reality.
Biden harshly condemned Trump's actions amid protests over police brutality and racial injustice, saying that the President's job is to "tell the truth, to be candid, to face facts, to lead, not to incite." He said Trump is "incapable of telling us the truth, incapable of facing the facts and incapable of healing. He doesn't want to shed light, he wants to generate heat, and he's stoking violence in our cities."
Biden also mocked Trump's characterization of him.
"Ask yourself: Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters? Really?" Biden said. He said he wants a "safe America" -- a country protected from the coronavirus pandemic, police brutality, rioters and more. And he wants a country, he said, "safe from four more years" of Trump.
"Do you really feel safer under Donald Trump?" Biden asked repeatedly throughout his speech.
He added that Trump is "supposed to be protecting this country. But instead he's rooting for chaos and violence," and is "trying to scare America."
Biden cast himself as a bridge between peaceful protesters who object to police violence that disproportionately affects Black Americans and local elected officials and law enforcement.
"I'm confident I can bring the police to the table, as well," Biden said.
The speech comes at a fraught moment, ahead of Trump's Tuesday trip -- against the wishes of Wisconsin's Democratic governor, Tony Evers -- to Kenosha, a city wracked with violence following the police shooting of a 29-year-old Black man, Jacob Blake, the property damage and looting that followed, and the killing of two protesters there.
Trump and the Republican Party last week closed a convention focused on the theme of "law and order," painting a deeply distorted picture of cities subsumed by street violence that would soon spread to the suburbs, where he needs to rebuild his standing with White voters in order to defeat Biden, if he does not win reelection.
The political landscape in the wake of both parties' conventions is murky, though polls this week could make clear whether Biden or Trump received a substantial boost exiting the conventions and whether their content changed the way Americans view issues such as police brutality, protests and civic violence.
Trump appears to be inciting unrest on Twitter, such as praising a convoy of supporters heading into restive Portland, Oregon, as "Great Patriots." He also "liked" a Twitter post encouraging people to read a thread of tweets that in part praised Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old charged with allegedly killing two protestors in Kenosha.
Biden's return to the trail also comes after months in which he has seldom traveled outside the Delaware and Philadelphia areas, with the pandemic leading his campaign's health advisers to conclude that doing so wasn't feasible.
He said he plans to resume swing state travel soon, telling supporters at a recent virtual fundraiser that Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Minnesota are states where visits are in the works.
His wife, Jill Biden, plans on Tuesday to kick off what the campaign is calling a "back-to-school" combination of virtual and in-person events in eight states -- Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, Nevada, Minnesota, Arizona and Pennsylvania -- that are all 2020 election battlegrounds, though it's not yet clear how many of those states she will visit in person.
This story has been updated with more from Biden's remarks.
CNN's Stephen Collinson contributed to this report.
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Cartel Now Assassinates Its Enemies With Bomb-Toting Drones

The tactic has become widespread on battlefields overseas and now appears to be proliferating to organized crime.

By Joseph Trevithick

Mexico's drug cartels are notoriously well armed and equipped, with some possessing very heavy weaponry, including armored gun trucks sporting heavy machine guns. Now at least one of these groups appears to be increasingly making use of small quadcopter-type drones carrying small explosive devices to attack its enemies. This is just the latest example of a trend that has been growing worldwide in recent years, including among non-state actors, such as terrorists and criminals, which underscores the potential threats commercially-available unmanned systems pose on and off the battlefield.
 A civilian self-defense militia in the city of Tepalcatepec, in Mexico's southwestern Michoacan state, reportedly recovered two dozen explosive-laden quadcopters from a car that a team of sicarios – cartel hitmen – had apparently abandoned, possibly after a failed or aborted hit, on July 25, 2020. The bombs attached to the drones consisted of Tupperware-like containers filled with C4 charges and ball bearings to act as shrapnel.
 
The vehicle and its contents were said to be tied to the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), or Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which has its main hub in neighboring Jalisco state, but exerts control over a wider swatch of territory. This includes areas much further down Mexico's southwestern Pacific coastline and along the Gulf of Mexico on the opposite side of the country.
CJNG first emerged in 2009 as an offshoot of the Milenio Cartel and has since waged a particularly violent campaign against many of Mexico's other drug cartels, as well as Mexican authorities and civilian self-defense organizations, growing in size and scope in the process. As of July, American authorities estimated that CJNG was responsible for the movement of approximately one-third of all drugs from Mexico into the United States. It has also been working to expand its operations into Europe and Asia.
 That revenue has clearly translated into new weapons, vehicles, and equipment for the CJNG's sicarios and other footsoldiers. In July, the cartel released a particularly striking video of a convoy of camouflage-painted trucks, pickups, and SUVs, some with mounted weapons and very visible add-on armor, together with heavily armed personnel in tactical gear, that all looked more like a military unit than a criminal gang.
These personnel, who all shouted of the nickname of their top boss, Nemesio "El Mencho" Oseguera Cervantes, throughout the footage, reportedly belong to a "special forces" contingent within the cartel's overall force structure. This video followed a failed CJNG assassination attempt against Mexico City's police chief Omar Garcia Harfuch in June. Harfuch was wounded in the shootout and two of his bodyguard's died.
CJNG's growing resources have also translated into its new aerial capabilities. There were reports in April that CJNG had been dropping improvised explosive devices from small, conventional manned aircraft in attacks on members of the Tepalcatepec self-defense militia. The cartel apparently dropped this tactic quickly after Mexican authorities stepped up aerial surveillance in the region and has since shifted to using the diminutive drones.
Quadcopters with explosives believed to belong CJNG were recovered in the city of Puebla, in the state of the same name, southeast of Mexico City, in April, as well. Mexican officials said they believed those had been destined for attacks on the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel in Guanajuato state to the northwest. The discovery of those drones led to raids that found more quadcopters, as well as various electronics and bomb-making supplies, including more C4.
It's not surprising at all that CJNG, especially, has turned to small unmanned systems as a means of carrying out its various violent campaigns throughout Mexico. Mexican cartels, among other criminal groups, have already been using them to carry drugs over walls and past other barriers, as well as conduct surveillance. There have been more sporadic reports of other cartels using small explosive-armed drones since at least 2017, too.
The barrier to entry when it comes to crafting small bomb-carrying quad and hexcopter-type drones is notably low, in general. This is something The War Zone has highlighted on multiple occasions in the past, which makes the concept particularly attractive to non-state actors.
In 2018, a group opposed to dictatorial Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro attempted to assassinate him at a public rally using a commercially available multi-rotor drone system. This came years after ISIS terrorists had very much brought the concept to an actual battlefield in Iraq.
Small drones of various kinds of improvised munitions had steadily proliferated among terrorists and other armed groups in Iraq and Syria since then. Russia's Syrian outpost at Khmeimim Air Base has been subjected to a regular stream of drone attacks since 2018.
In July, authorities in the Iraqi capital Baghdad recovered a quadcopter drone with a very purpose-built-looking looking bomb underneath in a neighboring near the heavily fortified Green Zone area that is home to various government buildings and Embassies, including that of the United States. Iranian-backed militias often use these adjacent areas to stage rocket attacks on the U.S. Embassy compound.
 
These are just a small number of the readily available examples of this tactic being employed. In fact, when it comes to the danger of drones being used for gangland assassinations, Japanese authorities warned back in 2015 about Yakuza families doing exactly what CJNG is doing right now in Mexico.
Even larger nation-state militaries are starting to leverage the relative simplicity of hobby-like quadcopter drones as a starting place for more complex weaponized systems, including designs capable of operating cooperatively in autonomous swarms. Turkey is now putting such a drone system into production, which you read all about here.
This reality has left the United States, among others, scrambling to catch up when it comes to developing countermeasures. The U.S. military, as a whole, has been investigating a wide array of different counter-drone technologies to handle these lower-tier threats, ranging from jammers to directed-energy weapons, including both lasers and high-power microwave beams.
"I argue all the time with my Air Force friends that the future of flight is vertical and it's unmanned," U.S. Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said at a public event in June. "I'm not talking about large unmanned platforms, which are the size of a conventional fighter jet that we can see and deal with, as we would any other platform. I'm talking about the one you can go out and buy at Costco right now in the United States for a thousand dollars, four quad, rotorcraft, or something like that that can be launched and flown," he added. "And with very simple modifications, it can make made into something that can drop a weapon like a hand grenade or something else."
CJNG's recent activities only underscore that there is a serious need for countermeasures off the battlefield to safeguard VIPs, critical infrastructure, and more from spying and potentially dangerous harassment, as well as deliberate lethal attacks. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security identified the need for some kind of mobile counter-drone capability as an "emerging requirement" just this week.
If this cartel successfully adds small armed drones to its already significant arsenal, and shows that they can be useful on a more regular basis, it could easily lead to an explosion of other criminal groups in the country, and elsewhere, adopting this tactic, as well.
Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com
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La disinibita coppia di preedicatori evangelici tanto amici e supporter di Trump

Former pool attendant details alleged relationship with Becki and Jerry Falwell Jr.

Giancarlo Granda claims he had a lengthy affair with Becki Falwell.



By

Santina Leuci
and

Doug Lantz



Former pool attendant details alleged relationship with Becki and Jerry Falwell Jr.





The war of words between a former pool attendant and Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife Becki escalated on Friday morning as Giancarlo Granda claimed on "Good Morning America" that Falwell "enjoyed watching" him have sex with the former Liberty University president's wife.
"He was aware from day one of our relationship and he did, in fact, watch," Granda, 29, told George Stephanopoulos.
Granda contends that in the spring of 2012, Becki Falwell began to flirt with him at the Miami hotel where he worked and invited him to a hotel room for sex, telling him her husband liked to watch. He said he soon met Falwell -- a leading voice in Christian conservative politics -- for the first time.
"Jerry was laying on the bed," Granda said. "He was drunk, and he was giggling."
Granda said that the two men awkwardly discussed the parameters of the impending sexual encounter. He insisted that during that first encounter he reassured Falwell that if the older man became uncomfortable, he would leave, "Hey," he said he told Falwell anxiously, "if at any point you get jealous or you want me to back off, just let me know and I'll walk out of here."
Granda said Falwell reassured him, urging him to "go for it."
"He enjoyed watching," said Granda, who told ABC News that the sexual encounters continued "multiple times a year" until 2018 in hotels in Miami, New York and at the Falwells' Virginia home.
Granda said that the Falwells told him during that first encounter that they had visited a Miami swingers' club the previous night but that they weren't comfortable.
"She mentioned that they were actually at a swinger's club the night before but they said it wasn't their thing … they wanted a more intimate session."
Falwell and his wife have vigorously denied most of Granda's charges. A spokesperson for the Falwells directed questions to Granda's attorneys, who did not immediately respond to a list of emailed questions from ABC News.
Granda and the Falwells have been waging a very public battle over the details of a yearslong relationship that both parties acknowledge included a Miami real estate deal and sex between the young man and Becki Falwell -- but diverge sharply on the length and the nature of the sexual relationship and the dissolution of the business deal.
Earlier this week, Falwell claimed in a statement that he wasn't involved in what he described as a brief 2012 affair between Granda and his wife -- and that he and his wife have long since reconciled.


On Monday, Reuters published an explosive interview with Granda, 29, in which he contended that his seven-year affair with Becki Fallwell began in 2012 – when he was 20 years old. He said that Jerry Falwell Jr. watched his wife's sexual trysts with the younger man from the corner of the room or through video cameras. He provided text messages, screenshots and audio to corroborate his account, according to Reuters. Granda also provided one of the audio tapes to ABC News.
The report suggested the news organization had been working on the story for some time -- and noted that Reuters had first presented its findings to the Falwells nearly a week earlier.
While the Falwells have claimed Granda is trying to extort them, he maintains that he is simply trying to dissolve their business partnership and sell his 25% stake in the venture.
"That's false," Granda said of the extortion claims. "That's ridiculous. That's just them trying to smear me." He mocked the idea that "a 20-year-old" was "targeting and preying upon this power couple."
To underscore his point that the Falwells once trusted him, Granda provided ABC News with a recommendation letter he contends that Falwell wrote for him to Georgetown University in 2018. In the letter, Falwell writes that Granda is "consistent … dependable" and operates "with the highest business and ethics standards."
Granda also sought to qualify a previous statement he'd made accusing Falwell of sending him a compromising picture of a female Liberty University student -- a photo that the Falwells insist was innocent fun.
He said he was having drinks with the couple at a Miami hotel when Jerry Falwell Jr. sent him the picture.
"I don't know context of the photo … The point is why did he have that picture, why did he share it and why was he publicly joking with him."
Granda denied any political motivations for coming forward now as election season is heating up -- but said that he is being represented pro bono by a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, a campaign that is working to prevent Trump's reelection. The adviser was brought on by Granda's attorney, Aaron Resnick, he told ABC News producers.
'Right from the beginning'
Falwell was the earliest and most potent voice in the Evangelical Christian community to endorse Trump's bid for the White House, a fact the president has frequently acknowledged.
"Jerry Falwell Jr. just endorsed me -- from Liberty University," Trump told Stephanopoulos in a Jan. 31, 2016 interview, "… which is probably one of the reasons I went so high with the Evangelicals."
At the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in June 2019, Trump described Falwell, 58, as "a friend of mine [who] was with me right from the beginning."


'I was not involved'
Yet earlier this week that bond, forged over years, began to strain at a decisive moment for the president.
The first hints of impending trouble for the Falwells surfaced on Sunday -- the eve of the Republican National Convention -- when the Washington Examiner published a lengthy statement, dotted with Biblical quotes, from Jerry Falwell Jr.
Falwell's statement reported that "more than eight years ago," his wife Becki Falwell had what he described as a brief affair -- "something in which I was not involved" -- with an unidentified young man the couple had met and befriended and with whom they ultimately went into business.
He contended that the man involved had been threatening to go public about the relationship "to deliberately embarrass my wife, family, and Liberty University unless we agreed to pay him substantial monies."
Falwell had already been on an indefinite leave of absence from his university duties since Aug. 7, after he posted and later deleted a photo on social media which showed him with his arm around the waist of his wife's assistant. In the photo, both parties' pants are partially unzipped, and Falwell refers to the drink in his hand as "a prop" in the photo's caption. Falwell apologized for posting the photo and said "it was in good fun" from a costume party he attended.
Late on Monday night, Falwell formally resigned from his position as university president and stepped down from the school's board of directors.
Yet the mutual recriminations continued into Tuesday, as the nation prepared to hear key RNC speeches that evening from first lady Melania Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
"We couldn't take this torture anymore, so we went public with the story," Becki Falwell, 53, told ABC News' Kyra Phillips early Tuesday morning. "And Jerry resigned to protect the reputation of the university that he and his family spent their lives building."


Falwell told Phillips that he considered himself more of a businessman than a spiritual leader.
"I was never called to be a pastor," he said. "My calling was to use my legal and business expertise to make Liberty University the evangelical version of Notre Dame. Some of us are called to be preachers, that wasn't mine. I was called to make Liberty University the greatest Christian university in the world and I couldn't have done that as a preacher."
By Tuesday evening, Granda was out with a new statement which charged that the Falwells had minimized their roles and responsibility for the relationship that appears to have developed.
"The Falwells would have you believe that I seduced Becki into an affair, without Jerry's knowledge, and then spent the intervening 7 years trying to extort them," Granda said in a statement released late Tuesday.
Granda contended that "the truth is, they approached me. She invited me to their hotel room. They offered me an equity partnership in a property venture. They brought me on multiple trips and vacations, including to their family farm in Virginia. And as recently as last year, participated in video calls where Mrs. Falwell was naked and Jerry was watching."
Both sides described each other in dueling statements this week as "a predator" or "predators."
ABC News' Chris Francescani, Kyra Phillips, Chris Donovan, Alisha Davis, Claire Brinberg and Kaitlyn Folmer contributed to this report.
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Voto “No” al Referendum

Voto “No” al Referendum: servono riforme più importanti per il futuro del Paese

Referendum, Prodi: ecco perché voterò “no” al taglio dei parlamentari
Articolo di Romano Prodi su Il Messaggero del 28 agosto 2020
Sto in questi giorni cercando di capire perché ogni persona con cui mi trovo a parlare mostra un crescente disorientamento nei confronti del referendum per il quale siamo chiamati a votare nel prossimo mese di settembre.
Il sentimento del referendum come rivolta contro la classe dirigente si è come assopito, addormentato dal caldo estivo e messo in un angolo dai ben più urgenti problemi legati al Covid e alle sue ancora non misurate conseguenze.
La modesta diminuzione dei costi (0,007% della spesa pubblica italiana) come effetto del minore numero dei parlamentari non viene quasi più presa in considerazione: essa rimane sepolta tra le paurose cifre della finanziaria e la nuova dimensione degli interventi europei.
Il centro dell’attenzione si sta progressivamente spostando nella più ragionevole direzione di quale sia la migliore organizzazione del Parlamento per garantire ad esso efficienza e rispetto della Costituzione. Ed è proprio a questo punto che l’elettore si disorienta di fronte alle raffinate motivazioni dei politici o degli studiosi che sostengono le più svariate tesi.
Si tratta di un disorientamento del tutto giustificato perché il normale cittadino intuisce che il numero dei parlamentari non è il problema principale del crescente distacco fra il Paese e il Parlamento: il dimagrimento del Parlamento può essere solo la conclusione di un necessario processo di riesame del funzionamento delle nostre istituzioni.
Il vero problema non sta infatti nel numero, ma nel modo in cui i parlamentari vengono eletti. Anche senza elaborare profonde analisi teoriche, l’elettore si è reso progressivamente conto che deputati e senatori non sono stati eletti, ma sostanzialmente nominati dai partiti e, come tali, coerentemente si comportano. Non avendo alcun necessario rapporto col territorio,  non hanno ormai (salvo pochissime eccezioni) alcun legame organico con gli elettori, non mettono più in atto i periodici incontri con le diverse categorie o i diversi quartieri e paesi degli elettori e non hanno nemmeno un ufficio locale.
Solo una minima parte degli elettori conosce il nome del parlamentare che, almeno in teoria, rappresenta il suo territorio.
Semplicemente perché non lo rappresenta. Per il cittadino normale diventa quindi del tutto indifferente se sia meglio avere un deputato ogni novantamila o ogni centoquarantamila abitanti, o se sia davvero un danno che una regione sia rappresentata da un numero di senatori molto ridotto. Insomma, più ci si avvicina al referendum più esso viene ritenuto una residuo di impegni presi in passato, di vecchi slogan e di campagne folcloristiche accompagnate da immagini di grandi forbici e di poltrone sfregiate dalle forbici medesime.
Resta quindi difficile convincerci del fatto che la diminuzione del numero dei parlamentari sia il primo passo per portare i problemi del territorio al Parlamento e dal Parlamento al Governo.
Dopo decenni di discussione andati a vuoto, nessuno più crede in una legge elettorale che si ponga questo obiettivo, anche perché il dibattito fra i partiti si orienta, quasi all’unanimità, verso l’adozione di un sistema proporzionale che mantenga sostanzialmente il diritto di nomina, mentre le dispute si concentrano sulla percentuale minima che un partito deve raggiungere per essere rappresentato in parlamento.
Non è certo facile cambiare questa realtà. Ciò non di meno, almeno fino a che l’Italia rimane una Repubblica parlamentare, la qualità e l’autorevolezza dei membri del Parlamento rappresentano il pilastro fondamentale per il buon funzionamento delle nostre istituzioni. A questo si dovrebbero ovviamente aggiungere le altre ben note riforme che ridefiniscano, ad esempio, le funzioni delle due Camere, i lavori delle commissioni, i rapporti con le Regioni e il modo di operare delle commissioni e i rapporti fra Parlamento e Governo.
Se vogliamo raggiungere l’obiettivo di rendere il Parlamento autorevole e responsabile verso i cittadini, occorre quindi fare ogni sforzo per orientarsi verso un sistema elettorale in cui i partiti, sui quali grava la responsabilità di indicare i candidati alle elezioni, siano spinti a scegliere persone che, per la loro autorevolezza e per la stima di cui godono, abbiano maggiore probabilità di essere votate dagli elettori del collegio con il quale dovranno mantenere rapporti continuativi per tutto il corso della legislatura.
Nel sistema elettorale in vigore dal 1994 i tre quarti dei parlamentari venivano eletti in questo modo, obbligando i partiti a scegliere persone capaci, per le proprie caratteristiche personali, di attrarre la fiducia degli elettori: una fiducia che doveva essere rinnovata nel tempo con la fatica quotidiana e con i contatti personali che sono il pilastro della democrazia.
Mi rendo conto di proporre cambiamenti che ben difficilmente potranno essere accettati e mi rendo altrettanto conto che i lettori, anche se la cosa è di scarsa importanza, hanno il diritto di chiedermi quale sarà il mio personale orientamento di voto nei confronti dell’imminente referendum.
Riconfermando la non primaria attenzione che vi attribuisco e pur riconoscendo che, dal punto di vista funzionale, il numero dei parlamentari sia eccessivo, penso che sarebbe più utile al Paese un voto negativo, proprio per evitare che si pensi che la diminuzione del numero dei parlamentari costituisca una riforma così importante per cui non ne debbano seguire le altre, ben più decisive per il futuro del nostro Paese.
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Trump, accepting Republican nomination on White House lawn, says Biden would be 'the destroyer of American greatness' In his RNC speech, the president says a "radical movement" wants to "dismantle and destroy" America.

By Lauren Egan
NBC News
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump warned that Joe Biden would usher in violence and chaos if elected, making the case for his own re-election as he formally accepted his party's nomination Thursday on the final night of the Republican National Convention.
"This election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life or whether we allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it," Trump said, speaking to a crowd on the White House South Lawn. "In the left's backward view, they do not see America as the most free, just and exceptional nation on Earth. Instead, they see a wicked nation that must be punished for its sins.
"Joe Biden is not the savior of America's soul," Trump continued. "And if given the chance, he will be the destroyer of American greatness."
Trump accepted the nomination trailing his Democratic rival in the polls. Facing criticism for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed over 180,000 people in the U.S. and devastated the economy, Trump is leading an America roiled by national protests against racial injustice, with the latest wave originating in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after police shot Jacob Blake, a Black man.
The four-day convention — forced by the pandemic to abandon the original North Carolina location and relocate to Washington — tried to drive a consistent message: Trump is due credit for his coronavirus response and, if re-elected, will quash protests and rescue the injured economy.
Police funding, PPE and NAFTA: Read a fact check of President Donald Trump's acceptance speech.
Protesters gathered outside the White House grounds Thursday night and could be heard on the South Lawn, the much-criticized location for Trump's acceptance speech. Presidents have traditionally avoided using the public areas of the executive mansion for overt partisan politics.
Image: Donald Trump
President Donald Trump delivers his acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination on the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday.Brendan Smialowski / AFP - Getty Images
Republicans amplified a "law and order" message throughout the convention, warning of violence and chaos under Democratic leadership while seeking to counter perceptions that Trump is a racist who has purposefully inflamed racial tensions for political benefit.
"I have done more in three years for the Black community than Joe Biden has done in 47 years — and when I'm re-elected, the best is yet to come," Trump said.
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson was the only RNC speaker to mention Blake by name.
"Before I begin, I'd like to say that our hearts go out to the Blake family and the other families who've been impacted by the tragic events in Kenosha," Carson said Thursday. "History reminds us that necessary change comes through hope and love, not senseless and destructive violence."
Image: Demonstrations near the White House
Demonstrators rally to protest President Donald Trump's acceptance of the Republican nomination at Black Lives Matter Plaza across from the White House on Thursday.Olivier Douliery / AFP - Getty Images
Trump referred to the recent unrest in Wisconsin briefly but made no mention of Blake or other Black Americans whose deaths have dominated much of the national conversation this election year.
"In the strongest possible terms, the Republican Party condemns the rioting, looting, arson and violence we have seen in Democrat-run cities like Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago and New York," Trump said.
Trump began his remarks by briefly acknowledging Hurricane Laura, which hit along the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, and announced that he would visit the affected areas over the weekend.

The president also addressed the coronavirus Thursday, offering an optimistic view of the pandemic and promising a vaccine by the end of the year — a timeline that health experts say is unrealistic.
"If we had listened to Joe, hundreds of thousands more Americans would have died," Trump said. "Joe Biden's plan is not a solution to the virus but rather a surrender."
Image: Fireworks over the White House
President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump and family members stand to watch fireworks after the president delivered his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination for re-election during the final day of the Republican National Convention from the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday.Doug Mills / AFP - Getty Images
The White House crowd embodied Trump's message that the virus is under control, as 1,500 supporters crowded on the South Lawn for the speech. Chairs for guests were not spaced out, and few wore masks.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadow said "a number of people" attending the event would be tested for the coronavirus. The campaign contracted a firm of experts to advise on appropriate precautions for all parts of the convention that had live audiences.
Trump's remarks were punctuated by rounds of applause and cheers from the crowd — a feature noticeably absent from the Democratic convention.
Trump has raised eyebrows throughout the week over his use of government tools to make his case for re-election, and the South Lawn setting seemed a provocation to his critics.
Download the NBC News app for alerts and all the latest on the Republican convention.
"Gathered here at our beautiful and majestic White House — known all over the world as the people's house — we cannot help but marvel at the miracle that is our great American story," Trump said. "This has been the home of larger-than-life figures like Teddy Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson who rallied Americans to bold visions of a bigger and brighter future."
Some have warned that members of the Trump administration could be at risk of violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in certain political activities. The president and the vice president are exempt from the law, but other White House employees are not.
Trump's speech was followed by a fireworks show near the Washington Monument, across the street from the White House complex. The Trump family was serenaded by a performance from opera signer Christopher Macchio, who performed classics such as "Ave Maria" from the White House balcony, as guests watched from their seats.
Trump spoke for about 1 hour and 10 minutes, the second-longest convention addresses in modern history, following his own speech in 2016, at 1 hour and 16 minutes.
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Un caro amico vende uno splendido appartamento in San Severino Marche - A dear friend sells a splendid apartment in San Severino Marche


The best vantage point for life in an Italian town -
Picturesque Piazza del Popolo, in San Severino Marche
         
For sale at www.monicabrunirealestate.com  (search for Crivelli Penthouse)
Stay for months and enjoy traveling through Italy and Europe. Or visit occasionally and rent it when you want. Either way, this elegant space is convenient and comfortable for anyone who wants to experience Italian life. It’s located in central Italy near the Adriatic coast – If you like Tuscany, you’ll love Le Marche! 
With three or four bedrooms, spacious living and dining areas, two and a half baths, and a private roof terrace, there’s plenty of room for guests. And families or students at nearby Edu Lingua language school enjoy visiting San Severino – The town is enchanting, and Rome, Bologna, and the beautiful Adriatic beaches are easily accessible.  





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