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Trump, Harris Clash in Fiery Presidential Debate 

US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris (R) shakes hands with former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a presidential debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 2024. (AFP)
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris (R) shakes hands with former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a presidential debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 2024. (AFP)
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Trump, Harris Clash in Fiery Presidential Debate 

US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris (R) shakes hands with former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a presidential debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 2024. (AFP)
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris (R) shakes hands with former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a presidential debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 2024. (AFP)

Kamala Harris savaged Donald Trump as "extreme" and the friend of dictators, while the Republican branded her a "Marxist" in a bitter televised debate Tuesday that poured fuel on an already explosive US presidential election.

On hot-button issues ranging from abortion and race to the fate of US democracy, the two held their first -- and possibly only -- debate ahead of the November 5 election, with each hoping for a breakthrough in an agonizingly close race.

Trump, who only a few weeks ago had believed himself to be cruising to victory, reacted to pressure from Harris by raising his voice and resorting to the kinds of colorful invective and often meandering insults that he uses at his rallies.

Harris, 59, responded by looking on in amusement, then clearly got under his skin, declaring that she represents a fresh start after the "mess" of the Trump presidency -- and saying: "We're not going back."

The ABC News debate began when the Democratic vice president unexpectedly approached the Republican former president to shake his hand, before they took to their lecterns in the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

Then the niceties ended.

Within minutes, 78-year-old Trump called her a "Marxist" and also falsely claimed that she and President Joe Biden had allowed "millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums."

Harris pointed out that Trump is a convicted felon, called him "extreme" and said it is "a tragedy" that throughout his career he had used "race to divide the American people."

One of their most jarring exchanges was on Trump's unprecedented refusal to accept losing to Biden in the 2020 election, before trying to overturn the result.

In front of the audience expected to run into the tens of millions of voters, Trump doubled down, insisting there is "so much proof" that he really won.

Harris turned to Trump and said that his own former security officials in the White House have called him a "disgrace."

"World leaders are laughing at Donald Trump," she said.

Trump would "give up" Ukraine to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, "a dictator who would eat you for lunch," she charged. "Dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again."

Another intense exchange was on abortion.

Trump insisted that while having pushed for the end of the federal right to abortion, he wanted individual states to make their own policy.

Harris said he was telling a "bunch of lies" and called his policies "insulting to the women of America."

- Harris mocks Trump rallies -

The last presidential debate in June doomed Biden's reelection campaign, after he delivered a catastrophic performance against Trump. Harris took over as nominee amid Democratic fears that Biden was too old and infirm to defeat the scandal-plagued Republican.

Harris has earned a reputation in past debates and while serving as a US senator for ice-cold put-downs and tough questions.

Her five days of intensive preparation appeared to pay off against Trump, perhaps the most brutal public speaker in American politics.

Trump has long defied political gravity by seeming invulnerable to usual attacks.

He has been convicted of falsifying business records to cover up an affair with an adult film star, found liable for sexual abuse, and faces trial on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election.

But Harris clearly needled him on one of his favorite, if less serious topics -- his trademark rallies.

Attendees, she said, prompting an angry retort, were leaving early out of "exhaustion and boredom."

At another moment where Trump appeared to be losing his cool, he talked at length about a debunked conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants have been eating local people's pets in Ohio.

"They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats," he said before being corrected by the ABC News moderator that the authorities in the town of Springfield have said this did not happen.

With only 56 days left before the election, the intense spotlight was a rare opportunity for both candidates to shift the balance in what polls show is an almost evenly split contest.

And the debate was a key chance for Harris to introduce herself to more voters after only jumping into the race less than eight weeks ago, when 81-year-old Biden abruptly quit.

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US Commemorates 9/11 Attacks with Victims in Focus, but Politics in View 

Flags and flowers are placed by the names of those killed during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks at the reflecting pools at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in New York. (AP)
Flags and flowers are placed by the names of those killed during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks at the reflecting pools at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in New York. (AP)
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US Commemorates 9/11 Attacks with Victims in Focus, but Politics in View 

Flags and flowers are placed by the names of those killed during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks at the reflecting pools at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in New York. (AP)
Flags and flowers are placed by the names of those killed during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks at the reflecting pools at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in New York. (AP)

The US is remembering the lives taken and those reshaped by 9/11, marking an anniversary laced this year with presidential campaign politics.

Sept. 11 — the date when hijacked plane attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in 2001 — falls in the thick of the presidential election season every four years, and it comes at an especially pointed moment this time.

Fresh off their first-ever debate Tuesday night, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are both expected to attend 9/11 observances at the World Trade Center in New York and the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania.

Then-senators and presidential campaign rivals John McCain and Barack Obama made a visible effort to put politics aside on the 2008 anniversary. They visited ground zero together to pay their respects and lay flowers in a reflecting pool at what was then still a pit.

It’s not yet clear whether Harris and Trump even will cross paths. If they do, it would be an extraordinary encounter at a somber ceremony hours after they faced off on the debate stage.

Regardless of the campaign calendar, organizers of anniversary ceremonies have long taken pains to try to keep the focus on victims. For years, politicians have been only observers at ground zero observances, with the microphone going instead to relatives who read victims’ names aloud.

“You’re around the people that are feeling the grief, feeling proud or sad — what it’s all about that day, and what these loved ones meant to you. It’s not political,” said Melissa Tarasiewicz, who lost her father, New York City firefighter Allan Tarasiewicz.

President Joe Biden, on the last Sept. 11 of his term and likely his half-century political career, is headed with Harris to the ceremonies in New York, in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon, the three sites where commercial jets crashed after al-Qaeda operatives took them over on Sept. 11, 2001.

Officials later concluded that the aircraft that crashed near rural Shanksville, Pennsylvania, was headed toward Washington. It went down after crew members and passengers tried to wrest control from the hijackers.

The attacks killed 2,977 people and left thousands of bereaved relatives and scarred survivors. The planes carved a gash in the Pentagon, the US military headquarters, and brought down the trade center's twin towers, which were among the world's tallest buildings.

The catastrophe also altered US foreign policy, domestic security practices and the mindset of many Americans who had not previously felt vulnerable to attacks by foreign extremists.

Effects rippled around the world and through generations as the US responded by leading a “Global War on Terrorism,” which included invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Those operations killed hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis and thousands of American troops, and Afghanistan became the site of the United States' longest war.

As the complex legacy of 9/11 continues to evolve, communities around the country have developed remembrance traditions that range from laying wreaths to displaying flags, from marches to police radio messages. Volunteer projects also mark the anniversary, which Congress has titled both Patriot Day and a National Day of Service and Remembrance.

At ground zero, presidents and other officeholders read poems, parts of the Declaration of Independence and other texts during the first several anniversaries.

But that ended after the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum decided in 2012 to limit the ceremony to relatives reading victims’ names. Then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg was board chairman at the time and still is.

Politicians and candidates still have been able to attend the event. Many do, especially New Yorkers who held office during the attacks, such as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was then a US senator.

She and Trump overlapped at the ground zero 9/11 remembrance in 2016, and it became a fraught chapter in the narrative of that year's presidential campaign.

Clinton, then the Democratic nominee, abruptly left the ceremony, stumbled while awaiting her motorcade and later disclosed that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia a couple of days earlier. The episode stirred fresh attention to her health, which Trump had been questioning for months.

To be sure, victims' family members occasionally send their own political messages at the ceremony, where readers generally make brief remarks after finishing their assigned set of names.

Some relatives have used the forum to bemoan Americans' divisions, exhort leaders to prioritize national security, acknowledge the casualties of the war on terror, complain that officials are politicizing 9/11 and even criticize individual officeholders.

But most readers stick to tributes and personal reflections. Increasingly they come from children and young adults who were born after the attacks killed a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle.

“Even though I never got to meet you, I feel like I’ve known you forever,” Annabella Sanchez said last year of her grandfather, Edward Joseph Papa. “We will always remember and honor you, every day.

“We love you, Grandpa Eddie.”