Biden news today: Jamal Khashoggi’s US lawyer sentenced to three years following detention in UAE

A member of the Secret Service has been sent back to the US after being detained by Israeli police in Jerusalem.

It is alleged he assaulted a woman outside of a bar, according to reports. It is not known exactly how the incident came about, but local reporting suggests he was intoxicated.

“Late Monday, the United States Secret Service was informed that an agency employee working in Israel was allegedly involved in a physical encounter. The employee was briefly detained and questioned by Israeli police, who released him without charges. The employee has returned to the United States,” the agency said in a statement.

“In accordance with agency protocol, his access to Secret Service systems and facilities was suspended pending further investigation.”

Joe Biden has been urged to raise the plight of three political prisoners in different nations when he visits the Middle East – as well as to press for action over every person “unjustly” held in the region.

The relatives of political prisoners being held in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Egypt – the person held in Cairo, Alaa Abdel El-Fattah, has joint UK-Egyptian citizenship – travelled to Washington DC, where they have called on the US leader to raise the specific cases.

They also want Mr Biden to more generally press the issue of human rights in the region, something the US president has long vowed he will do.

The Independent’s Andrew Buncombe reports.

President Joe Biden is six years older than the state of Israel, which was established in 1948, and he’s met every one of the country’s prime ministers since he first became a US senator in 1973 and visited just before the Yom Kippur war.

A member of the US Secret Service has returned to the United States after allegedly assaulting a woman outside a bar and being detained by Israeli national police in Jerusalem.

Joe Biden will touch down in Saudi Arabia on Friday in a move that will bring an unceremonious end to his campaign promise to make the wealthy Gulf state a “pariah” in the global community.

The president’s visit, which he attempted to explain in a Washington Post op-ed and through a statement from his press secretary last month, is a clear reversal of his onetime vow to make the Kingom pay for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist critical of the Saudi crown prince, Mohamed bin Salman.

A year and a half into his White House term, Mr Biden’s evolving view on Saudi Arabia remains one of the starkest differences between Joe Biden the president and Joe Biden the presidential candidate.

When Joe Biden travels to Bethlehem he will be greeted by large billboards emblazoned with the words: “Mr President, this is apartheid,” alongside a map of what is left of the disconnected Palestinian territories — a stunt arranged by Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

Richard Hall reports on how some of the world’s leading human rights groups have condemned Israel for committing what the president opposed so fiercely as a senator in the 1980s and how he is accused of ignoring it today.

During his interview with Israel’s Channel 12, President Joe Biden also defended his administration’s push to restore the Obama-era agreement which had briefly halted Iran’s nuclear programme. The Biden administration has been in negotiations with Tehran in an attempt to bring back the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the formal name of the deal negotiated between Iran, the EU, and the five permanent nuclear weapons states, the US, the UK, China, Russia, and France.

“The only thing worse than the Iran that exists now is the Iran with nuclear weapons,” Mr Biden said.

He added that he believes it was a “giant mistake” for the Trump administration to back out of the agreement because Iran is “closer to a nuclear weapon now than they were before,” but he also said he is committed to keeping Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organisations, even if it kills any chance of rebooting the agreement.

There will be several issues on the agenda when Joe Biden touches down friday in Jeddah, the centuries-old port city on the coast of Red Sea.

Mr Biden will arrive in Saudi Arabia on Friday, his first visit to an Arab country since taking office, as part of his participation at King Salman’s invitation in a summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council: a political, economic and military alliance which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates alongside Saudi Arabia, which is hosting the summit.

John Bowden takes a look at what’s on the president’s agenda.