ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Jill Biden used a tour of the United Arab Emirates' capital Thursday to praise efforts to fight cancer and call for more attention on women's health issues as part of her final solo foreign tour as first lady.
Biden, 73, arrived in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday night after visiting Italy and seeing her ancestral home of Gesso in Sicily.
On Thursday, she began a tour of the capital in the afternoon, stopping first to visit Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak Al Ketbi at the massive compound for Qasr Al Bahra. Sheikha Fatima, known as the “mother of the nation,” is a wife of the UAE's late first ruler Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan and the mother of its current ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
The visit, while not focused on political issues, shows the importance the United States holds for the UAE, an autocratically ruled federation of seven sheikhdoms on the Arabian Peninsula. The Emirates hosts thousands of American troops. The country's Jebel Ali port in Dubai also is the U.S. Navy's busiest port of call outside of the U.S.
The UAE also is a major buyer of Boeing Co. aircraft for its long-haul airlines Emirates and Etihad, and has been focused on winning American support for its push into artificial intelligence.
Biden then stopped at the Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, where she and her daughter, Ashley Biden, met with doctors at the hospital to learn about the clinic's efforts to battle cancer. She recounted the shock of losing Beau Biden, a son of President Joe Biden and his late first wife, to brain cancer.
“It was the same for us. We were just like everyone else," she recounted. “We walked in. We heard: ‘Brain cancer.’ We heard nothing else.”
Afterward, Biden visited Qasr Al Hosn, a historic fort in the center of Abu Dhabi's gleaming skyscrapers. She paused to look at kerosene lamps lining one wall and signed a guestbook.
“May the wisdom of these walls continue to light a way forward in peace and prosperity for centuries to come,” Biden wrote.
Biden has come to the country previously. In March 2016, she accompanied her husband, then the vice president in the last year of the Obama administration, on a trip to the Emirates.
But this trip comes after President Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden over federal crimes after previously pledging that he wouldn't. The president dodged questions about the pardon while he was on a trip to Angola.
For her part, Jill Biden on Monday said: “Of course, I support the pardon of my son.”
Biden found herself welcomed without any political questions, only acknowledging in passing at the Milken Institute’s Middle East and Africa Summit Thursday afternoon that she and her husband will soon “leave office together.”
“Women deserve answers about their health, because this is really an economic issue I think for women, and globally really, the research and the funding and the products," Biden told the summit, noting that medical research for too long had focused primarily on men.
Biden traveled Thursday night to nearby Qatar. After that, she'll fly to Paris and join President-elect Donald Trump and other dignitaries in Paris to celebrate the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral. She'll then return to Washington.
