Vance attack on Europe overshadows Ukraine talks at security conference

MAYVILLE: Lawyers are set to deliver their closing arguments Friday in the trial of a New Jersey man charged with trying to kill Salman Rushdie on a New York lecture stage in a knife attack that left the author blind in one eye and with other serious injuries.
Hadi Matar, 27, is charged with attempted murder and assault in the August 2022 attack at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. He faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
Rushdie, 77, was the key witness during testimony that began last week. The Booker Prize-winning author told jurors he thought he was dying when a masked stranger ran onto the stage and stabbed and slashed at him until being tackled by bystanders. Rushdie showed jurors his now-blinded right eye, usually hidden behind a darkened eyeglass lens.
Jurors also heard from a trauma surgeon who said Rushdie’s injuries would have been fatal without quick treatment, and a law enforcement officer who said Matar was calm and cooperative in his custody.
They were shown video of the assault and aftermath that was captured from multiple angles by Chautauqua Institution cameras. The recordings also picked up the gasps and screams from audience members who had been seated to hear Rushdie speak with City of Asylum Pittsburgh founder Henry Reese about keeping writers safe. Reese suffered a gash to his forehead.
From the witness stand, institution staff and others present that day pointed to Matar as the assailant.
Stabbed and slashed more than a dozen times in the head, throat, torso, thigh and hand, Rushdie spent 17 days at a Pennsylvania hospital and more than three weeks at a New York City rehabilitation center. He detailed his long and painful recovery in his 2024 memoir, “Knife.”
Throughout the trial, Matar often took notes with a pen and sometimes laughed or smiled with defense attorneys during breaks in testimony.
His lawyers declined to call any witnesses of their own and Matar did not testify in his defense. Instead, the attorneys challenged prosecution witnesses as part of a strategy intended to cast doubt on whether Matar intended to kill, and not just injure, Rushdie. The distinction is important for an attempted murder conviction.
Matar had with him knives, not a gun or bomb, his attorneys said. And Rushdie’s heart and lungs were uninjured, they noted in response to testimony that the injuries were life-threatening.
Public Defender Nathaniel Barone said Matar likely would have faced a lesser charge of assault were it not for Rushdie’s celebrity.
“We think that it became an attempted murder because of the notoriety of the alleged victim in the case,” Barone told reporters after testimony concluded Thursday. “That’s been it from the very beginning. It’s been nothing more, nothing less. And it’s for publicity purposes. It’s for self-interest purposes.”
A separate federal indictment alleges that Matar, of Fairview, New Jersey, was motivated to attack Rushdie by a 2006 speech in which the leader of the militant group Hezbollah endorsed a decades-old fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death. Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa in 1989 after publication of the novel “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous.
Rushdie spent years in hiding. But after Iran announced that it would not enforce the decree, he had traveled freely over the past quarter century.
A trial on the federal terrorism-related charges will be scheduled in US District Court in Buffalo.

KYIV: The US national security adviser warned Ukraine’s leader to stop hurling “insults” at Donald Trump, as pressure built Friday on Volodymyr Zelensky to sign away precious mineral rights in exchange for Washington’s help defending against Russia.
Tensions between Trump and Zelensky over the proposed mineral deal — which Kyiv has rejected — and Washington’s outreach to Moscow have exploded this week in a series of barbs traded at press conferences and on social media.
Zelensky has warned that Trump has succumbed to Russian “disinformation,” while the US leader has accused his counterpart of starting the war and branded him a “dictator without elections.”
“Some of the rhetoric coming out of Kyiv, frankly, and insults to President Trump were unacceptable,” US national security adviser Mike Waltz told a Thursday briefing at the White House.
“President Trump is obviously very frustrated right now with President Zelensky, the fact that he hasn’t come to the table, that he hasn’t been willing to take this opportunity that we have offered,” he said.
The United States is a vital financial and military supporter of Ukraine, but Trump has rattled Kyiv and its European backers by opening talks with Moscow they fear could end the war on terms that reward Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The spat has turned personal with Trump falsely claiming Zelensky is hugely unpopular among his own people and the Ukrainian leader saying Trump lives in a Russian “disinformation space.”
Tech tycoon and Trump backer Elon Musk weighed in Thursday, saying Ukrainians “despised” their president and that the US leader was right to leave him out of talks with Russia.
Amid the war of words, Zelensky said Thursday he had held a “productive meeting” with US envoy Keith Kellogg in Kyiv.
“We had a detailed conversation about the battlefield situation, how to return our prisoners of war, and effective security guarantees,” Zelensky said on social media after the meeting.
“Strong Ukraine-US relations benefit the entire world,” he added.
However, there was no joint press conference or statements after the discussions, as would typically accompany such a visit.
Trump is calling for Kyiv to hand over access to its mineral wealth as compensation for tens of billions of dollars in US aid delivered under his predecessor Joe Biden.
Zelensky rejected a deal proposed by Trump as it did not include “security guarantees” — Kyiv’s key demand from its Western backers in any agreement with Russia to halt the fighting.
The feud marks a dramatic reversal from US policy under Biden, who lauded Zelensky as a hero, shipped vast supplies of arms to Kyiv and hammered Moscow with sanctions.
Trump has instead criticized Zelensky and blamed him for starting the war that began with Russia’s full-scale invasion three years ago.
“A Dictator without Elections, Zelensky better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday.
Zelensky was elected in 2019 for a five-year term and has remained leader in line with Ukrainian rules under martial law, imposed as his country fights for its survival.
While Zelensky’s popularity has fallen, the percentage of Ukrainians who trust him has never dipped below 50 percent since the conflict started, according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS).
Trump’s invective drew shock reactions from Europe.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said it was “wrong and dangerous” to call Zelensky a dictator.
The White House said France’s Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s Keir Starmer will visit Trump next week after European leaders held emergency summits in recent days over how to deal with Trump’s threats to overhaul decades of transatlantic security ties.
The Kremlin, buoyed by its rapprochement with Washington, has hailed Trump’s comments.
Russia, which for years has railed against the US military presence in Europe, wants a reorganization of the continent’s security framework as part of any deal to end the Ukraine fighting.
Putin said Wednesday that US allies “only have themselves to blame for what’s happening,” suggesting they were paying the price for opposing Trump’s return to the White House.
Neither Kyiv nor European countries were invited to high-level talks between top diplomats from Russia and the US in Saudi Arabia earlier this week, deepening fears they are being sidelined.