Biden likely to meet Saudi crown prince, reversing campaign vow
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden will travel to Saudi Arabia in July, where he is expected to break with his campaign-trail rhetoric by holding a face-to-face meeting with the kingdom’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The crown prince outraged Washington nearly four years ago by ordering, according to U.S. intelligence services, the murder of a dissident journalist and Virginia resident.
Biden’s planned visit to Jeddah represents a reversal from his 2020 presidential campaign promise to make the crown prince a “pariah” for ordering the 2018 assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi consulate in Turkey.
“We can expect the president to see the crown prince,” said a senior administration official briefing reporters in a Monday evening background call on the upcoming trip.
Biden’s first visit to the Middle East as president will take place July 13-16 and will begin with stops in Israel and the occupied West Bank before wrapping up in Saudi Arabia.
—CQ-Roll Call
Medicare fraud suspect caught trying to flee for Cuba on ‘jet ski,’ feds say
MIAMI — Last week, U.S. Coast Guard crews and agents with Customs and Border Protection’s Air and Marine Operations found two men on a disabled personal watercraft floating in the ocean south of Key West.
Feds say that with a special fuel cell onboard and compartments stuffed with bottled water and food, the vessel was embarked on the long journey to Cuba before it broke down.
One man on the personal watercraft — a type of vessel mistakenly called a “jet ski” based on the name of the model made by Kawasaki — is a known human smuggler. The other man, 54-year-old Ernesto Cruz Graveran, is accused of fraudulently billing Medicare more than $4 million between January and April, according to federal court records.
“Based on the forgoing, I believe it is probable that Cruz Graveran was in fact fleeing to Cuba aboard the jet ski to evade prosecution,” Homeland Security Investigations Agent Carlos Suarez wrote in a June 9 probable cause complaint.
—Miami Herald
Major water cutbacks loom as shrinking Colorado River nears ‘moment of reckoning’
LOS ANGELES — As the West endures another year of unrelenting drought worsened by climate change, the Colorado River’s reservoirs have declined so low that major water cuts will be necessary next year to reduce risks of supplies reaching perilously low levels, a top federal water official said Tuesday.
Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton said during a Senate hearing in Washington that federal officials now believe protecting “critical levels” at the country’s largest reservoirs — Lake Mead and Lake Powell — will require much larger reductions in water deliveries.
“A warmer, drier West is what we are seeing today,” Touton told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “And the challenges we are seeing today are unlike anything we have seen in our history.”
The needed cuts, she said, amount to between 2 million acre-feet and 4 million acre-feet next year. For comparison, California is entitled to 4.4 million acre-feet of Colorado River water per year, while Arizona’s allotment is 2.8 million acre-feet.
—Los Angeles Times
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny disappears, aide fears for his life
MOSCOW — Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, one of the most vocal opponents of the Kremlin, has disappeared from the penal camp where he was imprisoned, his lawyer and aides said Tuesday, adding that they feared for his safety.
"Alexei has disappeared, there is no information about where he is," his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh told YouTube program "Populjarnaja Politika," Russian for "popular politics."
Navalny had been at the Pokrov prison camp but his lawyer said he had not received any information about his current location. "He is in danger," Yarmysh said, adding that he could be killed in the brutal prison camp system.
Navalny narrowly survived an assassination attempt with the chemical agent Novichok in August 2020, for which he blames Russian President Vladimir Putin.
—dpa
