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DONALD TRUMP HAS returned to the campaign trail, his first appearance since being convicted on all 34 charges in a hush money scandal.
Last week, Trump became the first former US president to be convicted of felony crimes after a New York jury found him guilty of falsifying business records in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
He described the process as “a disgrace” and “a rigged trial”, and sentencing has been set for 11 July.
His first campaign appearance since this conviction came in the battleground state of Arizona, where he spoke to a crowd of thousands inside a mega church.
Joe Biden won Arizona in 2020 by a wafer-thin 10,000 votes, and the state is expected to be crucial to both men’s chances of winning this year’s presidential election.
Trump is expected to appeal his conviction last week and at a Phoenix town hall last night organised by a conservative youth organisation, he called for the “appellate courts have to step up and straighten things out or we’re not going to have a country anymore”.
Trump on his conviction: "Those appellate courts have to step up and straighten things out, or we're not going to have a country any longer." pic.twitter.com/vkdmB4j2HZ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 6, 2024
Trump also focused much of his hour-long speech and subsequent Q&A on the US-Mexico border.
This week, Biden issued an executive order barring migrants who enter the US illegally from claiming asylum when numbers surge past 2,500 in a day.
The order also makes it easier to deport people back to Mexico.
The curbs will remain in place until numbers fall back down below 1,500 illegal crossings a day.
Biden came under fire from all sides for the policy shift, which uses the same law that Trump once employed to ban migrants from Muslim countries when he was president.
However, Republicans see it as being too lenient and Trump last night vowed to reverse the order should he win the election.
“On Day One of my administration, I will be rescinding Crooked Joe’s outrageous executive order,” Trump told a cheering crowd.
“And I will terminate every single open borders policy of the Biden administration,” he added.
Trump also claimed he would use economic measures to prevent migrants from entering the US, though he didn’t give details on what size or kind of tariffs he would impose.
Trump: "On day one, I will seal the border, I will stop the invasion, and we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in the history of our country. We have no choice." pic.twitter.com/IvtVs75V9S
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 6, 2024
“We have tremendous economic power… if China or some other country is behaving badly, we have things called tariffs that are so severe,” said Trump.
“We are going to be so tough and if a country is not going to behave, we’re going to tariff the hell out of that country.”
At one point, Trump also produced two Tic Tac containers – one of which was incredibly small – when claiming that the US would not have experienced inflation had he won the 2020 presidential election.
He also embraced Joe Arpaio, commenting: “I don’t kiss men, but I kiss him… you know he’s 170 years old, but we want him back.”
In 2017, Trump pardoned Arpaio, a former sheriff convicted of violating a court order to halt traffic patrols that targeted suspected unauthorized immigrants.
Arpaio also believes in the “birther” conspiracy, which wrongly claims that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery.
"I don't kiss men, but I kiss him" -- Trump lauds Joe Arpaio and brings him on stage pic.twitter.com/MIxmbxmDwN
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 6, 2024
Meanwhile, the Phoenix Police Department said 11 people at the event were transported to hospitals, treated and released for heat exhaustion.
Officials said an excessive heat warning was in effect for the area during Trump’s town hall, where many of his supporters were unable to get inside before it reached capacity, and Phoenix set a new record high temperature of around 44C by mid-afternoon.
-With additional reporting from Press Association and - © AFP 2024
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In fairness I very rarely have issues with Vodafone broadband.
@John Sheahan: me either. Had a short outage in County Wex earlier. It’s back now.
Vodafone are brilliant. 1 minor issue and the big spoilt boys and girls have a melt down because they can’t watch the toyshow. FFS, if that’s your biggest issue then life ain’t 1/2 bad.
@Santa: totally agree, very rarely are there any issues with their service
@Santa: Minor issue? I was an hour on h old waiting for customer service during which my 2 kids were asking every 5 minutes when will the WiFi be back. I was a Virgin media customer and never had these problems.
@Bramer: what a life and death situation you were in I hope things worked out for you with this serious first world problem
@Bramer: yes its minor and the more people who ring them the longer their response times.
Just don’t bother with the RTE player. Awful app but the adds play perfectly.
@tottkingham: vpn mate. No ads. Works beautifully along with bbc iPlayer all 4 and itv, netflix most radio players to on your phone.
Do yourself a favor. Vpn.
@De Green Parrot: which vpn app do you use?
@tottkingham: or use brave. Best out of the box ad blocking browser.
Absolutely shocking service from Vodafone tonight. But to be honest very poor service from them in general recently. After 20 years I’m Seriously considering whether or not to continue with this crowd of changers
@Johnny Casey: I think one outage or issue in 20 years is fairly good service, no?
@Johnny Casey: are you having a meltdown because you’re going to miss late late toy show
@Mary OGorman McGuire: I spent three weeks without my broadband. They sent an engineer to check the outside line TWICE in a week to check the outside line and the line into the house. Booth times he told them lines were fine, faulty modem. Took my parent modem (as I needed it for work) which worked perfectly, then spent another 6weeks arguing to get a new modem sent. I wouldn’t call that great!! My modem was 5 yrs old. Hardly required about 50 phone calls and paying an engineer for two visits (who looked completely baffled on his second visit)
@Johnny Casey: yeah, frequent outages here recently too, affecting my ability to work.
@Johnny Casey: with them 20 plus years, to be fair these situations don’t happen very often with Vodafone and I live in an area with no broadband only Wi-Fi
@Johnny Casey: get on digiweb. Vodafone is a joke.
@De Green Parrot: Dodgyweb are rubbish, those Fritzbox routers are a joke along with their support, logged a business support call and still waiting for a response. Its far longer now than the 72 hours they claim and they have ignored subsequent update requests.
Its back working so they did their job much thanks.
With them 4 years, this is the first issue I’ve had with them, siht happens though doesn’t it? Some serious First World Problem people on the Vodafone Twitter account today! It’s grand now again anyway.
If you’re able to, change your DNS settings in your router to something like Google’s: 8.8.8.8 for primary and 8.8.1.1 for secondary. If you don’t know how to do this then wait for Vodafone to resolve the issue I guess. This fixed it for me though.
@Limited Edition: I changed to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
Works fine…. Though connections slightly slower.
Did anyone actually read the 2nd last sentence? Lol
@Frank Flanagan: wait until you read the 23rd, it’s a doozy
I’m with them over 20 years and outages happen but very rarely!
Now it makes sense! In fairness generally super service from Vodafone!
Well mine keeps dropping every hour during work so it’s not the best but at least it has very few outages.
We were out for a couple of hours, but in fairness this is 1st time having a problem
@яα¢нєℓ: 5 yrs using Vodafone TV & Internet. three outages, one pre-notification email sent for 6 hr outage (was back in 4 ) 3 years ago. One this Tues for 1hr and the longer one today. Generally very good service, have used in 2 households (we carried our service over/ seamless transfer)
Change your DNS server to 8.8.8.8 on your device, that will fix it until Vodafone resolve it. Don’t forget to set back to auto after Vodafone fix it.
They had a deadline and hit it so fair play. Would have been a disaster otherwise. I’m with VM and I was without internet for about 5 days recently and I work from home. No other option where I’m living.
I had vodafone gigabit broadband installed yesterday, only started the contract today so I was thinking crap, I shouldn’t have changed providers. I read through the instructions and, I guess as well as the outage today, the guy that installed the fibre used the wrong cable from the router to the modem. Great first impression.
@Laura Halpenny: I just got rid of vodafone gigabit. Every night between 7-11 The speed dropped to 10mb from 1000. Foght my way out of the contract only with them for 2 months. Anyway. With digiweb now. All good. But never again will I go near vodafone. Weeks of telling them the same story and they keep telling me it’s on my end.
@Laura Halpenny: The gigabit service is SIRO. the modem is installed at wall at entry to the fibre cable and has a separate power cable that plugs in to closest socket. Its a standard LAN cable connecting that to the router. Amazing they messed that up
@De Green Parrot: Are you an ad for digiweb?
@John Murray: hi john…I looked at the instructions after and for the gigabit one you have to install the WAN cable from the LAN port on the router – he should’ve read the instructions- I did lol
I received a call from Vodafone customer service yesterday to send me out a brand new Huawei P40 pro, they just wanted me to call out my IBAN number to them over the phone before they could send it on to me..
They sent me a text while talking to verify its them…what does anyone think of this ?
I don’t have sky so while internet down stuck with rte
Ppl still use Vodafone?
Seriously, why?
Can’t complain about Vodafone never had problem before tonight.
have your say