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President Joe Biden’s son Hunter will detail his struggles with alcohol and drug addiction in a memoir scheduled for release in April, publisher Gallery Books announced on Thursday.

Hunter Biden, a frequent target of conservative ire in the United States, also writes about the death of his brother Beau in “Beautiful Things,” due out on April 6.

The memoir recalls “Hunter’s descent into substance abuse and his tortuous path to sobriety,” Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, said in a statement.

Biden, who turned 51 on Thursday, was discharged from the Navy Reserve in 2014 after a positive test for cocaine.

In July 2019, he recalled to The New Yorker magazine how three years earlier someone put a gun to his head in Los Angeles after he asked a homeless man where he could buy crack.

President Biden has been unwavering in his support for Hunter and he and his wife, Jill, praised Hunter’s decision to publish the autobiography.

“We admire our son Hunter’s strength and courage to talk openly about his addiction so that others might see themselves in his journey and find hope,” they said in a statement read out by White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

Hunter became a regular focus of Donald Trump’s attacks ahead of the November 3 vote for his business dealings in Ukraine and China.

Hunter, now an artist based in Los Angeles, has admitted to displaying “poor judgment” in some of his business dealings, but denied any wrongdoing.

During the final presidential debate, when Trump mocked Hunter’s cocaine use, the former vice president simply said: “I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.”

Hunter and Beau survived a car crash that killed their mother and sister in December 1972, just weeks after their father was first elected a US senator from Delaware.

Beau died of brain cancer in 2015 at age 46, less than two years after he was diagnosed.

“This is an astonishingly candid and brave book about loss, human frailty, wayward souls and hard-fought redemption,” author Dave Eggers wrote in a blurb for “Beautiful Things.”

It has been reported that officials of the police in Angola have killed several protesting Separatists in the Country’s northeast over the weekend.

This was disclosed on Tuesday by the authorities and rights defenders, raising fresh concerns over a long-standing culture of police brutality.

The crackdown took place against an unauthorised demonstration in the diamond mining town of Cafunfo in the remote Luanda Norte province, around 750 kilometres east of the capital Luanda and near Angola’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Members of the Lunda Tchokwe Protectorate Movement, one of two active secessionist groups in the vast southwest African country, took to the streets on Saturday without the go-ahead from local authorities.

Accounts by authorities and rights defenders said the deadly incident that followed do not match.

Luanda Norte police claim officers acted in self-defence after around 300 armed protesters assaulted the Cafunfo police station under cover of dark, wounding two officers. 

“In response to such an evident rebellion and in an attempt to disperse them… the death of four citizens (ensued),” they said in a statement issued by the government on Saturday, adding that two wounded protesters died later in hospital.

But unverified video footage of the incident circulated on Twitter shows military and police officers standing over a dozen unarmed bodies in broad daylight.

Some lie motionless, covered in blood, while others are visibly injured and appear unable to stand. One official is seen kicking a man sitting on the ground and stamping on his head. 

Senior Human Rights Watch researcher Zenaida Machado, who shared the video, said it was sent to her directly by a police officer at the scene.

“Protesters were met by excessive use of force from the police,” Machado told AFP on Monday.

“The group claims that 12 of their activists were killed,” she added, saying that HRW was “in the process of verifying the footage”.

Angola’s main opposition UNITA party has meanwhile condemned the “barbaric murder of at least 21 citizens” by security forces and called on the government to “take a position”.

Police are notoriously violent in Angola — the legacy of a 1975-2002 civil war and almost four decades of repressed dissent under former president Jose Eduardo dos Santos.

Machado said attitudes towards demonstrations had remained the same undercurrent President Joao Lourenco, who took office in 2017.

Police violently dispersed several protests against poor living conditions in the capital Luanda last year, firing live bullets and tear gas into the crowds.

“One of the main issues we have frequently raised is the need to reform the security and defence forces,” Machado said. “They cannot continue to operate as if they were in a state of war.”

Separatist movements are banned by Angolan law.