| Johnson Bolsters Security Message After London Knife Attack Posted: 01 Dec 2019 04:00 PM PST ![Johnson Bolsters Security Message After London Knife Attack]( "Johnson Bolsters Security Message After London Knife Attack") (Bloomberg) -- Boris Johnson's Conservatives will paint their party as one of law and order on Monday, while London reels from a terror attack and prepares to welcome Donald Trump this week for a NATO summit.Both the president's visit and the deadly assault threaten to derail campaigning and crimp the Tories' lead over Labour, less than two weeks before the U.K. votes in the general election.When Trump lands in London on Monday, Johnson will be hoping he doesn't say anything that hinders his lead in the polls. Trump's support would play into the hands of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who says the two men are right-wing soul mates who pose an threat to the U.K.'s National Health Service. The Tories Secretly Fear Trump Could Wreck Johnson's ElectionJohnson is also trying to distance himself from the previous Tory administration after convicted terrorist Usman Khan killed two people on Friday in central London. Khan had been released early from jail in December 2018 and was attending a conference on prisoner rehabilitation when he launched his attack.A poll released Monday added to signs that Labour is slowly eating into the Conservatives' lead before the Dec. 12 vote. While the Tories stood at 42% in the latest Survation poll, they were ahead by just 9 percentage points, down from 14 two weeks ago.Johnson is seeking to capitalize on his strengths. Voters trust Johnson significantly more than Corbyn on security. A YouGov poll for the Sunday Times showed found 44% of voters have confidence in Johnson. For Corbyn, 67% of voters don't have confidence in him, while just 21% do.With that in mind, Home Secretary Priti Patel will double down on the Tories' message that delivering Brexit could bolster U.K. security. She'll reiterate that Brexit can give back to the U.K. control of its borders to help reduce smuggling of goods, people and curb terrorism.Her comments come amid a row between Johnson and Corbyn over the early release of the attacker. Corbyn blamed a decade of spending cuts to the prison service for weakening its ability to detect the risk, while Johnson pledged to end a 2008 law that was brought in under a Labour government that gives prisoners automatic early release.Patel also will speak following the late October discovery of 39 bodies in the back of a lorry in Kent, southeast England, after having been smuggled across the border into the U.K."People traffickers don't think twice about risking people's lives for profit," Patel will say. "And most shockingly of all we know that terrorists have been able to enter the country by exploiting free movement."Corbyn will seek to return to a debate on the cost of living, with a promise to cut train fares through state ownership of the railways. On Saturday, millions of commuters learned they will have to pay an average of 2.7% more for rail tickets from Jan. 2., which is about 100 pounds ($129) more per year.The party leader is due to announce more details of Labour's plan for public ownership of the railways, including a 33% cut to regulated fares that the party says will save the average commuter 1,097 pounds a year."Taking back control of our railways is the only way to bring down fares and create a railway network that is fit for the future," he'll say.(Updates with Survation poll results in fifth paragraph)To contact the reporters on this story: Jessica Shankleman in London at jshankleman@bloomberg.net;David Goodman in London at dgoodman28@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Steve GeimannFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Tear Gas Fired as Protesters Return to Streets: Hong Kong Update Posted: 01 Dec 2019 02:09 PM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Police fired tear gas as thousands of black-clad protesters marched in Hong Kong's tourist district Tsim Sha Tsui on Sunday, as tensions re-emerged after the euphoria of pro-democracy victories at district elections last weekend.Protesters also marched to the U.S. consulate in a rally to express gratitude after President Donald Trump signed legislation last week expressing support for the demonstrators. Late Saturday, a group of protesters blocked roads and set fire to a subway station entrance.Here's the latest (all times local):MTR to add train captains (5:30 a.m.)The city's subway operator says some sections of its network will need more train captains to ensure there aren't objects hindering the operation of trains. Some traffic lights were damaged that may affect its Light Rail services.Police in riot gear line streets (2 a.m.)Police in riot gear were still seen lining some streets even as the crowd dispersed.Police disperse crowds in Whampoa (11 p.m.)Police also fired tear gas in nearby Whampoa, where bricks were hurled at them. A passer-by was attacked, roads were blocked and stores were vandalized in the area.Tear gas fired in Tsim Sha Tsui (5:45 p.m.)Police fired tear gas and used pepper spray as thousands of protesters marched in Hong Kong's busy tourist district of Tsim Sha Tsui. The police said in a statement that tear gas was fired in response to protesters throwing bricks at officers.March to U.S. consulate (Sunday, 1:30 p.m.)Thousands of protesters carrying U.S. flags and banners marched peacefully to the consulate. In a separate rally Sunday, demonstrators headed to Polytechnic University and the Cross-Harbour Tunnel.China accuses UN Human Rights Head of meddling (late Saturday)China said it "strongly" opposed an op-ed by United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, accusing her of meddling in the country's affairs and emboldening Hong Kong protesters to commit violence.Bachelet urged the Hong Kong government to conduct a "proper independent and impartial judge-led investigation" into reports of excessive use of force by police, according to an opinion piece in the South China Morning Post on Saturday. She also urged Carrie Lam's government to "prioritize a long-overdue process" of meaningful and inclusive dialogue with the people of Hong Kong.China said Bachelet and her office should "stop making irresponsible comments, and refrain from interfering by any means in the internal affairs" of Hong Kong."The Central Government will continue to firmly support the Chief Executive in governing the Hong Kong SAR in accordance with law, support the Hong Kong police in strictly enforcing law, and support the Hong Kong judicial organs in bringing violent criminals to justice according to law," China's UN mission in Geneva said in the statement.Tensions rise again (11 p.m.)About 200 protesters blocked roads, closed an exit at the Prince Edward MTR station and set fire to an entrance of Mong Kok MTR station late Saturday, the South China Morning Post reported. Police fired at least one round of tear gas, it said.Foreign nationals arrested in China (6 p.m.)China arrested two overseas nationals for their alleged involvement in the Hong Kong protest movement, state newspaper Southern Daily reported, citing information from the national security agency. Taiwan citizen Lee Meng-chu and Lee Henley Hu Xiang of Belize were arrested by the national security authorities in the southern Guangdong province, the local paper said.The Taiwanese was suspected of spying and leaking Chinese state secrets, while the other person was accused of funding criminal activities that endanger national security, the paper said. Prosecutors have approved the arrests in both cases and are going through legal procedures, it said.Protesters return (Saturday, 2 p.m.)Hundreds of secondary-school students and elderly people rallied in a park in the city center in support of Hong Kong's ongoing protests and against police use of tear gas. A number of people addressed the crowd before a band played on a makeshift stage in front of background poster that said: The elderly and the young hold hands and we walk together with you.1,377 arrested in relation to PolyU (4:54 p.m.)Hong Kong police have arrested 1,377 people who left the then-besieged PolyU campus or were in the vicinity, the force's Chief Superintendent Kwok Ka-chuen said at a daily briefing. More than 300 people under age 18 had their information taken down when they left the campus, he said, adding that he was "pleased" the episode at the school was coming to an end and that he hoped it could be a "turning point" for the city's unrest, as it was resolved peacefullyPolice have now made 5,890 protest-related arrests since rallies began on June 9, he said.Hong Kong insurance sales to China slip (3:32 p.m.)Insurance sales in the financial hub to mainland customers declined in the third quarter as the protests halted visits to the city. Their purchases of insurance and related investment policies declined 18% to HK$9.7 billion ($1.2 billion) from a year earlier, according to figures from Hong Kong's Insurance Authority. That year-on-year drop was the biggest since the start of last year, weighing on insurance giants such as Prudential Plc and AIA Group Ltd.Hong Kong is a hot market to buy insurance for mainland customers since it offers a wider array of investment products and access to foreign currencies. Since rules stipulate that customers need to finalize contracts in person, sales have been pummeled as many prospective Chinese customers have avoided the former British colony.PolyU siege ends (Friday 12:51 p.m.)Police said they lifted their blockade on PolyU after officers cleared the campus. Chow Yat-ming, the city's assistant police commissioner, said he believed PolyU could be handed back to university management after dangerous items that remained on campus were removed.Firemen and a police safety team did a final sweep of the campus in the morning after searching every level of each building to handle hazardous items and collect evidence the day before. The police said they seized items including 3,989 petrol bombs, 1,339 explosive items and 601 bottles of corrosive liquids.\--With assistance from Zheping Huang and Aaron Mc Nicholas.To contact the reporters on this story: Karen Leigh in Hong Kong at kleigh4@bloomberg.net;Natalie Lung in Hong Kong at flung6@bloomberg.net;Manuel Baigorri in Hong Kong at mbaigorri@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Shamim Adam at sadam2@bloomberg.net, Tony CzuczkaFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Belgian Carnival town renounces UNESCO title over racism row Posted: 01 Dec 2019 01:15 PM PST  The famed Belgian Carnival town of Aalst wants to renounce its place on the U.N. cultural heritage list, saying it is sick of widespread complaints that this spring's edition contained blatant anti-Semitism. Town officials say the float objected to, with stereotypical depictions of hook-nosed Jews sitting on piles of money, was trying to make a joke and they contend no one should try to muzzle humor of any kind during the three-day Carnival. UNESCO, Jewish groups and the European Union have condemned the float as anti-Semitic, with the EU saying it conjured up visions of the 1930s.
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| Crypto expert arrested for allegedly helping North Korea evade sanctions Posted: 01 Dec 2019 12:29 PM PST  North Korea has long been accused of using cryptocurrency to avoid sanctions, but the US is now accusing a man of giving the country some help American law enforcement has arrested crypto expert and Ethereum project member Virgil Griffith for allegedly providing North Korea with information on how cryptocurrency and blockchain tech could help the isolated nation evade US sanctions. He presented at a crypto conference in Pyongyang despite being denied permission to travel to North Korea, and reportedly discussed how the country could "launder money" and otherwise skirt trade barriers. There were several North Korean officials in the audience who asked him questions, according to the Justice Department.
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| NBC's Chuck Todd Scolds GOP Senator For Pushing Russian Talking Points Posted: 01 Dec 2019 11:42 AM PST  The "Meet The Press" host told Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy that Vladimir Putin is "selling" the same claims.
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| Hong Kong Unrest Rages on as Police Clash With Protesters Posted: 01 Dec 2019 11:22 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Clouds of tear gas returned to Hong Kong over the weekend as police and protesters clashed, signaling pro-democracy rallies are set to drag on after demonstrators got a boost from an election win and support from the U.S. Congress.Tensions rose in the former British colony -- a special administrative region of China since 1997 -- as thousands of black-clad protesters marched in the busy tourist district of Tsim Sha Tsui on Sunday afternoon. Unrest had been brewing since late Saturday, when a group blocked roads and set fire to a subway station entrance.The violence took a pause with the elections a week earlier, as Hong Kong residents handed an overwhelming victory to pro-democracy candidates in a vote for local district councils on Nov. 24. While the officials they elected represent what's considered as the lowest rung of the government, the win was a stunning repudiation of the city's Beijing-backed government. Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam didn't make any new concessions to protesters after the poll, a move that could have fueled the anger seen over the weekend.At the Tsim Sha Tsui event, police said smoke grenades were hurled by what it labeled "rioters" to cause fear and panic among demonstrators, prompting law enforcement action that included tear gas to disperse the crowd. Bricks were thrown at police officers in the area, as well as in nearby Whampoa, where shops were also vandalized. One passerby was attacked, police said.Earlier in the day, people carrying U.S. flags and banners marched to the U.S. consulate in a peaceful rally to express gratitude after President Donald Trump signed legislation last week in support of the demonstrators. While the crowds have dispersed Sunday night, scores of police officers in riot gear were still seen lining the streets as of 2 a.m. on Monday.MTR Corp., the city's subway operator, said it expects rail and bus services to resume normally on Monday, with the possibility that some stations and rail sections may close early, especially on weekends. The University station on the East Rail line will remain shut for repairs, and entrances and exits to some stops that had excessive damage from the protests will also not be accessible.Subway stations and even tracks were vandalized during the protests in the past few months, with MTR's crews rushing through repairs. The stock -- once one of Hong Kong's safest stock bets -- has lost more than a fifth of its value since its peak this year in July, making it the second-worst performer on Hong Kong's benchmark Hang Seng Index. The stock is poised to recover quickly when the city's situation eventually settles, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analysts, who've upgraded MTR to buy from neutral.Police ConductMeanwhile, China said it "strongly" opposed an opinion piece by United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet in the South China Morning Post on Saturday, accusing her of meddling in the country's affairs and emboldening Hong Kong protesters to commit violence.Bachelet urged the city's government to conduct a "proper independent and impartial judge-led investigation" into reports of excessive use of force by police. She also called on Lam's administration to "prioritize a long-overdue process" of meaningful and inclusive dialogue with the people of Hong Kong.Hong Kong's newly appointed police chief, Chris Tang, said an independent probe into the use of force by police would be unjust, the South China Morning Post reported Sunday, citing comments he made in a radio program.China has also arrested two overseas nationals for their alleged involvement in Hong Kong's protest movement, state newspaper Southern Daily reported, citing information from the national security agency. Taiwanese Lee Meng-chu and Lee Henley Hu Xiang of Belize were arrested by the national security authorities in the southern Guangdong province, the local paper said in two reports published Saturday.(Updates with clashes in fourth paragraph, subway plans for Monday in sixth.)To contact the reporter on this story: Manuel Baigorri in Hong Kong at mbaigorri@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Scott at bscott66@bloomberg.net, Linus Chua, Tony CzuczkaFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Lebanese army separates rival protests near president palace Posted: 01 Dec 2019 09:22 AM PST  Lebanon's armed forces have deployed near the presidential palace east of Beirut to prevent friction between rival Lebanese protesters as the stalemate over forming a crisis government continues. Anti-government protesters had called for a rally Sunday outside the Presidential Palace in Baabda to press President Michel Aoun to formally begin the process of forming a new government. Prime Minister Saad Hariri resigned over a month ago amid nationwide protests accusing the political elite of corruption and mismanagement of the economy.
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| Merkel's coalition in peril as new leader of SPD calls union 'crap for democracy' Posted: 01 Dec 2019 09:12 AM PST  Germany's ruling coalition is facing collapse after the new leader of the junior partner to Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) branded the parties' long-standing arrangement "crap for democracy". The leftist duo of Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans won a shock victory to take control of the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) party on Saturday, defeating a centrist pair led by finance minister Olaf Scholz. Their victory in the membership poll will soon be formalised by party delegates. Speaking to broadcaster ARD, Ms Esken held her cards close to her chest on whether she intends to walk out on the coalition, something that would accelerate the end of Chancellor Merkel's career. But she made clear that she saw the coalition as damaging her party and German democracy, with both parties having to make compromises that alienated supporters. "We've seen both big parties lose a lot due to the coalition, so we both have an interest in governing in other alliances," Ms Esken said. The Chancellor could be forced into early retirement Credit: REX The new leadership will set out their plans at the party conference over the coming weekend, where delegates will vote on several decisions key to the country's immediate future including whether to stay in the coalition until 2021. Ms Esken has suggested she would be willing to stay in the pact but only if the CDU agreed to half a trillion euros in public spending on key infrastructure over the next decade. Such a huge spending package would mean blowing up the centre-right party's hallowed "schwarze null" spending rules, which commit Berlin to maintaining a balanced budget. With Germany's economy stagnating, a growing chorus of economists and left-wing politicians have called for the government to make use of historically low interest rates and increase investment in roads, rail infrastructure and schools via new debts. But the CDU's economic council warned the party leadership on Sunday not to "give in to the SPD's utopian demands only for the sake of staying in power." Mrs Merkel's would-be successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, urged the Social Democrats on Sunday to remain part of the government but ruled out re-negotiating their agreement. "For the CDU it is quite clear: we stand by this coalition," she said. "We stand by this coalition on the basis that has been negotiated." Several CDU heavyweights also made clear they were in no mood to talk, with one dismissing the SPD as being in "self-destruction mode." If the SPD walk out, the most likely outcome would be the CDU going it alone as a minority government under Ms Merkel or new elections being called for next year. Such an outcome would mean the end of the veteran Chancellor's rule. The power struggle inside the SPD is set to continue at party conference where moderates, who had to swallow an 8 percent defeat for their candidates, will seek to balance the leftists' new strength by winning elections for the vacant deputy leader positions. The SPD has been without a leader since June when Andrea Nahles resigned after a poor showing in the European elections and months of desperate polling figures.
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| Students Fainting From Hunger in Venezuela's Failing School System Posted: 01 Dec 2019 09:02 AM PST  BOCA DE UCHIRE, Venezuela -- Hundreds of children filed into their school courtyard to hear a local Catholic bishop lead prayers for their education."We pray for the youths who are on the streets and can't come to school," said Bishop Jorge Quintero, addressing the Augusto D'Aubeterre Lyceum school in the beach town of Boca de Uchire on a steamy morning in October. "There are a lot of them."By the end of the 15-minute ceremony, five children had fainted and two of them were whisked away in an ambulance.The faintings at the primary school have become a regular occurrence because so many students come to class without eating breakfast, or dinner the night before. In other schools, children want to know if there is any food before they decide whether to go at all."You can't educate skeletal and hungry people," said Maira Marin, a teacher and union leader in Boca de Uchire.Venezuela's devastating six-year economic crisis is hollowing out the school system -- once the pride of the oil-rich nation and, for decades, an engine that made the country one of the most upwardly mobile in the region. These schools in the past provided children even in remote areas with a solid shot at the country's best universities, which in turn opened doors to top U.S. schools and a place among Venezuela's elite.Hunger is just one of the many problems chipping away at them now. Millions of Venezuelans have fled the country in recent years, depleting the ranks of students and teachers alike. Many of the educators who remain have been driven from the profession, their wages made nearly worthless by years of relentless hyperinflation. In some places, barely 100 students show up at schools that once taught thousands.The collapse of the education system in Venezuela is not only condemning an entire generation to poverty, but risks setting the country's development back decades and severely stunting its growth potential, experts and teachers say."An entire generation is being left behind," said Luis Bravo, an education researcher at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas. "Today's education system doesn't allow children to become meaningful members of society."The government stopped publishing education statistics in 2014. But visits to more than a dozen schools in five Venezuelan states and interviews with dozens of teachers and parents indicate that attendance has plummeted this year.Many schools are shuttering in the once-wealthy nation as malnourished children and teachers who earn almost nothing abandon classrooms to scratch out a living on the streets or flee abroad.It is a major embarrassment for the self-proclaimed socialist government, which has long preached social inclusion. The situation is in sharp contrast to countries that Venezuelan leaders have held up as role models -- Cuba and Russia -- both of which have managed to shelter the primary education system from the worst effects of a comparable downturn in the 1990s.Students began skipping school in Venezuela shortly after President Nicolas Maduro came to power in 2013. A fall in the price of the country's main export, crude oil, combined with Maduro's ill-timed effort to double down on price and currency controls sent the economy into a recession from which it has not yet emerged.Some Venezuelan children are staying home because many schools have stopped providing meals or because their parents can no longer afford uniforms, school utensils or bus fares. Others have joined parents in one of the world's biggest displacement crises: About 4 million Venezuelans have fled the country since 2015, according to the United Nations.Thousands of the country's 550,000 teachers did not show up for classes when schools reopened in September, according to the national teachers union, ditching their $8-a-month wages to try their luck abroad or in Venezuela's booming illegal gold mines.In Venezuela's most-populous state, Zulia, up to 60% of about 65,000 teachers have deserted in recent years, according to estimates by Alexander Castro, head of the local teachers union."They tell us that they prefer painting nails for a few dollars than work for a minimum wage," Castro said.To keep schools going, the remaining teachers often teach all of the subjects or combine different school years in one classroom. Nearly all of the one dozen schools visited have slashed working hours; some open for only a day or two a week.In the village of Parmana in Venezuela's central plains, only 4 out of 150 registered students attended school in October. The four students, of varying ages, sat in the same dilapidated classroom without electricity, practicing everything from the alphabet to algebra as the school's sole remaining teacher tried to encourage them with a dejected smile.The rest of the village's children have joined their parents in the fields and fishing boats to help feed their families.In the country's second biggest city of Maracaibo, a sign outside a dilapidated school without electricity recently read: "Please come to classes, even without uniforms." The children ask teachers at the entrance if there is food before deciding whether to come in.Maracaibo's biggest school no longer has any functioning bathrooms. It was designed for 3,000 students; only 100 show up.Half of the teachers didn't return to work after the summer holidays to a school in the town of Santa Barbara outside the capital of Caracas, forcing the principal to enlist parent volunteers to keep the classes going.On the other side of the capital, in the town of Rio Chico, most of the rooms in a local school are boarded up for lack of students and teachers. When the remaining pupils arrive, they first ask the whereabouts of the school's cook, the teachers said.Maduro's mentor and predecessor, Hugo Chavez, made the expansion of public education one of the pillars of his popular "21st Century Socialism" campaign.For a decade until 2013, the country made steady improvements in school enrollment thanks to generous school meals and handouts of food, utensils and cash to parents and children. Chavez built hundreds of new schools.Chavez's populist policies, however, had focused more on the quantity of students in school rather than the quality of the education. Then, as the country's coffers ran dry, his government's educational progress unraveled.As attendance collapsed, Maduro continued to claim his government was focused on education spending despite the "brutal economic war" waged by his enemies."In Venezuela, not one school has closed or will ever close, not one classroom," the president said in a televised address in April. "We will never deny access to education."To boost the ranks of teachers, Maduro in August promised to send thousands of the ruling party's youth members to the classrooms. Education experts say few of these untrained activists will add any pedagogical value or even make it to schools.At the same time, Venezuela's pool of real teachers is drying up. The number of graduates at Venezuela's main teacher training center, the Libertador Experimental Pedagogical University, fell 70% from 2014 to 2018.Venezuelan teachers have been among the worst affected by the country's economic collapse, as gross domestic product shrank by two thirds since 2013 and minimum wages fell to $8 a month.Maduro's de facto dollarization of the economy this year allowed many public employees in Venezuela to supplement their official salaries in nearly worthless local currency by charging in dollars for their services.His backdoor liberalization of Venezuela's controlled economy, however, brought little benefit to teachers in poor communities, where pupils' families have little access to foreign currency.In Boca de Uchire, the Caruto family has stopped sending its nine children to a nearby school when the cafeteria doesn't open."I can't send them to class hungry," said Jose Luis Caruto, a 36-year-old unemployed father of two.His sister, Yuxi Caruto, 17, was the last in the family to drop out from school, discouraged by the unaffordable bus fare. She tried taking up studies again at a local community center, but its teachers stopped showing up after two weeks of classes.She now spends her time taking care of her 1-year-old son."I want to learn to do the math and read and write rapidly. I'm scared that when my son grows and starts asking questions, I won't know how to respond. But right now, we don't even have enough to eat."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
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| Israel plans new settler homes in flashpoint West Bank city Posted: 01 Dec 2019 08:55 AM PST  Israel's new defense minister has ordered plans for new settler housing in the volatile West Bank city of Hebron. In a letter sent to defense officials Sunday, pro-settler Defense Minister Naftali Bennett called for "planning processes to be advanced" for new Jewish settler housing. Enlarging the Jewish population in Hebron is likely to deepen tensions there.
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| EU’s Von Der Leyen to Pose a Climate Challenge to China, U.S. Posted: 01 Dec 2019 08:44 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- The European Union will challenge the U.S. and China on climate-change targets as the fight against global warming becomes a major international issue, according to new European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.The EU is considering a target to bring emission levels down to zero by the middle of this century in its bid to lead the push to reduce greenhouse gases. Von der Leyen will pitch this plan to envoys from more than 200 nations on Monday when she travels to Madrid to take part in the opening of the United Nations climate talks. It will be her first event in the role, in which she started her five-year term on Sunday."The European Union wants to be the first climate-neutral continent by 2050," she told reporters on Sunday in Brussels. "Europe is leading in this topic and we know that we have to be ambitious for our planet but also to be a front-runner."The climate neutrality goal is estimated to require an extra 175 billion euros ($193 billion) to 290 billion euros a year in investment for energy systems and infrastructure from 2030.Von der Leyen set the Green Deal project as a top priority for her tenure. It would affect areas from energy production to transport and agriculture, putting Europe in sync with the objectives of the Paris Agreement to limit the rise in the global temperature.The move would also put the EU ahead of other major emitters, including China, India and Japan, which have yet to translate their voluntary Paris pledges into binding national measures. U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris agreement in 2017.The climate policy will be part of the "geopolitical commission" concept von der Leyen intends to pursue to ensure Europe's voice is heard on the same level as the likes of China and the U.S. The strategy will encourage other countries to follow suit by flagging options like a carbon tariff to be imposed on nations which fall behind.Von der Leyen held several calls on her first day with a number of leaders, including Chinese Premier Li Keqiang."The good news is that China says that they are aware of climate change," von der Leyen said. "The fact that China is introducing an emissions trading system shows that it is also a topic that is high on the agenda in China."More details on the Green Deal are expected on Dec. 11, including a document outlining plans for a Just Transition Fund designed to help the countries impacted the most by the emission-reduction policy.To contact the reporter on this story: Ewa Krukowska in Brussels at ekrukowska@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net, Sam Unsted, James AmottFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Ilhan Omar’s Republican Challenger Banned By Twitter After Comments Threatening Her Safety Posted: 01 Dec 2019 07:50 AM PST ![Ilhan Omar's Republican Challenger Banned By Twitter After Comments Threatening Her Safety]( "Ilhan Omar's Republican Challenger Banned By Twitter After Comments Threatening Her Safety") Danielle Stella, a Republican candidate challenging Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, has had her Twitter account permanently suspended for repeated violations of Twitter rules, reports CNN.Stella, one of the five Republican candidates vying for Minnesota's fifth congressional seat in 2020, was banned from the platform on Thursday after suggesting the freshman Democrat "should be tried for treason and hanged" if unproven allegations against her were true. Stella sent two tweets appearing to reference claims — that are completely unverified, and only presented by one man in Florida — that Omar is using her position of power to funnel information to Iran and Qatar, Newsweek reports. On Friday, Omar responded on Twitter, saying "violent rhetoric" leads to "violent threats."> This is the natural result of a political environment where anti-Muslim dogwhistles and dehumanization are normalized by an entire political party and its media outlets. > > Violent rhetoric inevitably leads to violent threats, and ultimately, violent acts. https://t.co/tn6SRFYGmp> > — Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) November 29, 2019"This is the natural result of a political environment where anti-Muslim dogwhistles and dehumanization are normalized by an entire political party and its media outlets," Omar said. "Violent rhetoric inevitably leads to violent threats, and ultimately, violent acts."Following the ban, Stella posted a lengthy Facebook post in which she defended the language used in her Twitter posts.She wrote, "I did not threaten anyone. If you are calling it a threat- you believe that individual is guilty, and therefore it is not a threat, it's treason. You and the fake news MSM are lying by calling it Iynch ing [sic] or terroristic threats."Omar, the first Somali-American elected to Congress, has been in the crosshairs of the Republican party since her election, with President Donald Trump attacking her on Twitter, accusing the refugee of being ungrateful and making anti-U.S. remarks. The tweet followed Trump's decision to post video footage of the September 11 terror attacks intercut with a comment Omar made in a March speech.Omar came to the US more than two decades ago as a refugee and became an American citizen in 2000 at the age of 17. Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?Warren Adds A Member Of The Squad To Her TeamKatie Hill Speaks Out On Santa Clarita ShootingWhy Democrats Hate Tulsi Gabbard Even More Now
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| Chuck Todd to GOP Senator: You’re Selling the Same Argument as Putin! Posted: 01 Dec 2019 07:45 AM PST  A week after claiming that he didn't know whether Russia or Ukraine was responsible for hacking the DNC server during the 2016 election, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) left Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd astounded when he accused the former president of Ukraine of working for Hillary Clinton's campaign.At the top of their interview on Sunday, Todd brought up Kennedy's eventual walk-back of his DNC remarks, asking the Louisiana lawmaker why he backtracked."Well, Chris Wallace was interviewing me and he asked me a question. I answered it. I thought he had asked me if Ukraine had meddled in the 2016 election," the Republican senator replied, reiterating previous excuses he had given. "He didn't, he asked me if Ukraine was responsible for hacking the DNC computer, which is, of course, a form of meddling. I went back and looked at the transcript and I realized Chris was right and I was wrong so I said I was wrong."The NBC News host went on to note that the main criticism Kennedy has faced in recent days is that he is conflating what Russia and Ukraine did during the 2016 election, stating that Kennedy appears to be doing President Trump's "dirty work" for him.Kennedy, meanwhile, insisted that there was sufficient evidence that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election on behalf of Clinton, citing a handful of articles to claim that a number of Ukrainian officials "meddled in the election on social media and otherwise." "In fact, in December of 2018, a Ukrainian court ruled that Ukrainian officials had violated Ukrainian law by meddling in our election and that was reported in The New York Times," Kennedy added, referencing a court ruling that the leaking of the so-called "black ledger" on ex-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort was against the law. (The court has since canceled that ruling.)Todd would eventually confront Kennedy on the U.S. intelligence community recently briefing lawmakers that attempts to frame Ukraine for Russian election meddling was actually "a Russian intelligence propaganda campaign in order to get people like you to say these things about Ukraine," a briefing Kennedy claimed he didn't attend."When does opinion become fact?" Todd wondered aloud. "Does 17 intelligence services saying it, does every western intelligence ally saying Russia did this—I get sort of confused at what point is it no longer an opinion for you?"After once again noting that a Ukrainian court "smacked down several Ukrainian officials for meddling in our elections," Kennedy then made a claim that gobsmacked the Meet the Press host."Russia was very aggressive and they're much more sophisticated," the conservative senator declared. "But the fact that Russia was so aggressive does not exclude the fact that President Poroshenko actively worked for Secretary Clinton.""Actively worked for Secretary Clinton?! My goodness, wait a minute, Senator Kennedy," Todd shot back. "You now have the president of Ukraine saying he worked for the Democratic nominee for president. C'mon. You realize the only other person selling this argument outside the United States is this man, Vladimir Putin!"The NBC host then highlighted the Russian president recently boasting that "nobody is accusing us anymore of interfering in U.S. election" but instead blaming Ukraine.Todd further pushed back on Kennedy's assertion, asking him if he believed that Ukrainian officials criticizing Trump during the election over his endorsement of Russia's annexation of Crimea was equivalent to Russia's hacking.Kennedy, for his part, said that there would be no harm allowing President Trump to "introduce evidence" that could support these assertions since Trump "has a demonstrated record fighting foreign corruption."Fox News Host Hits Trump for Attacking Chris Wallace: You're 'Not Entitled to Praise'Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Bumps ahead for Merkel after ally loses shock vote Posted: 01 Dec 2019 07:00 AM PST  Angela Merkel faces a rocky political road ahead as she battles to hang on until 2021 as German chancellor, after her junior coalition partner SPD elected a left-leaning leadership duo. Rank and file Social Democrats late Saturday delivered a humiliating blow to Finance Minister Olaf Scholz's run for co-chair of his centre-left party, picking instead two relative unknowns as their new leaders. The shock result heralded a week of uncertainty for the coalition, with next Friday a key date as the SPD is to vote on whether to stay in government when it meets for its annual congress.
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| 'War against nature must stop,' UN chief says before climate talks Posted: 01 Dec 2019 06:40 AM PST !['War against nature must stop,' UN chief says before climate talks]( "'War against nature must stop,' UN chief says before climate talks") The world must stop a "war against nature" and find more political will to combat climate change, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Sunday, the eve of a two-week global climate summit in Madrid. Around the world, extreme weather ranging from wildfires to floods is being linked to manmade global warming, putting pressure on the summit to strengthen the implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement on limiting the rise in temperature. "Our war against nature must stop, and we know that it is possible," Guterres said ahead of the Dec. 2-13 summit.
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| UPDATE 3-SPD leadership choice threatens Germany's ruling coalition Posted: 01 Dec 2019 06:08 AM PST ![UPDATE 3-SPD leadership choice threatens Germany's ruling coalition]( "UPDATE 3-SPD leadership choice threatens Germany's ruling coalition") The future of Germany's ruling coalition looked shaky after the election of new leaders of the Social Democrats (SPD) who are demanding a shift in policies, and several senior conservatives on Sunday ruled out talks to renegotiate a governing agreement. Two strong leftist critics of the coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives - Norbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken - won a vote for leadership of the Social Democrats on Saturday, possibly putting the country, Europe's largest economy, at a political crossroads.
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| Carney Takes Climate Finance Envoy Role, UN’s Guterres Says Posted: 01 Dec 2019 05:23 AM PST ![Carney Takes Climate Finance Envoy Role, UN's Guterres Says]( "Carney Takes Climate Finance Envoy Role, UN's Guterres Says") (Bloomberg) -- Explore what's moving the global economy in the new season of the Stephanomics podcast. Subscribe via Apple Podcast, Spotify or Pocket Cast.Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has accepted the role of special envoy for climate action and finances, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said.Carney has taken a pioneering role pushing the climate issue in the financial sphere, Guterres said at a news conference in Madrid, where the next UN climate change conference kicks off on Monday. He'll take on his special envoy role with pay of $1 a year after stepping down from the central banker's job, the Bank of England said in a statement.Carney is due to leave the Bank of England on Jan. 31, although his successor has not yet been named after the selection process was disrupted by Brexit and the upcoming UK general election. That's boosted speculation he may be asked to extend his term at the BOE for a third time, although Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid said last month that he saw no need for such a move and that his party would appoint a new chief "very, very, quickly" if it wins the Dec. 12 vote.Carney has been talking about the risks of climate change since at least 2015 when he used a speech at Lloyds of London to warn that the phenomenon imposed "a cost on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentive to fix." In October, he told the Guardian newspaper that companies and industries that aren't moving toward zero-carbon emissions will be punished by investors and face bankruptcy.At least $100 billion a year should be mobilized for developing countries to adapt for climate action, Guterres said. It's crucial for countries, especially those with high emissions, to pledge more ambitious measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, he added.(Updates from with detail on when Carney will start role from third paragraph)To contact the reporters on this story: Charles Penty in Madrid at cpenty@bloomberg.net;David Goodman in London at dgoodman28@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Chad Thomas at cthomas16@bloomberg.net, Amy Teibel, Sam UnstedFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| CORRECTED-Bank of England's Carney to become U.N. envoy on climate action and finance Posted: 01 Dec 2019 05:12 AM PST ![CORRECTED-Bank of England's Carney to become U.N. envoy on climate action and finance]( "CORRECTED-Bank of England's Carney to become U.N. envoy on climate action and finance") Bank of England Governor Mark Carney will become the United Nations special envoy on climate action and climate finance from 2020, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Sunday. Speaking at a news conference ahead of a climate summit in Madrid Dec. 2-13, Guterres described Carney as "a remarkable pioneer in pushing the financial sector to work on climate".
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| China makes face scanning compulsory for mobile phone owners Posted: 01 Dec 2019 05:12 AM PST  China has made it a legal requirement for people signing up to new mobile phone and data plans to have their faces scanned, in a major growth of the surveillance state. The new rules, outlined by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), came into effect on Sunday. They require new phone plan users to submit face scans alongside their national identification card information, ensuring their devices are linked to their real identities. The MIIT said the move was made "to safeguard the legitimate rights and interest of citizens in cyberspace", and would help protect phone users from fraud. With Chinese authorities cracking down hard on online dissent and arresting government critics, there are concerns that the regulations mark the next step in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s construction of the world's most draconian surveillance regime. Debate about the government's intent with regard to the new requirement was sparked on Chinese social media sites, such as Weibo. China's President Xi Jinping Credit: AFP One commenter pointed out that real-name registration of phone plans with ID cards had been a requirement in China for years already. "Scam and sales phone calls still have not been stopped!" they wrote in a post translated by Quartz. "Gathering citizen's information excessively like this is a violation of people's civic rights." The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) heavily censors the internet in China, which has over 850 million mobile internet users. Many news and social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are blocked by what has come to be known as 'The Great Firewall'. Chinese authorities have invested heavily in face recognition technology recently, as part of measures to keep close tabs on the population. There are reportedly 200 million surveillance cameras operating in the country. The government is also developing a social credit system that will rate citizens on factors including loyalty to the CCP. The system, scheduled to be fully implemented by 2020, results in punishments such as transport restrictions for citizens with low scores.
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| Germany's Kramp-Karrenbauer stands by coalition after SPD vote Posted: 01 Dec 2019 04:56 AM PST ![Germany's Kramp-Karrenbauer stands by coalition after SPD vote]( "Germany's Kramp-Karrenbauer stands by coalition after SPD vote") German Chancellor Angela Merkel's would-be successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, urged the Social Democrats on Sunday to remain part of the government with the Christian Democrats, adding the current coalition agreement provided the basis to move forward. Two leftist critics of Merkel's conservatives, Norbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken, won a contest on Saturday for the leadership of the Social Democracts (SPD), casting doubt over the future of the current government. Walter-Borjans and Esken have said they want to renegotiate the coalition agreement to increase focus on issues closer to the SPD's values, including social justice.
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| Germany's Crisis Is a Very Good Thing Posted: 01 Dec 2019 04:30 AM PST ![Germany's Crisis Is a Very Good Thing]( "Germany's Crisis Is a Very Good Thing") (Bloomberg Opinion) -- Norbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken, the new leaders of Germany's Social Democrats (SPD), may be about to do Germany and Europe a favor. That's not thanks to any inherent qualities they possess; both are colorless and unimaginative left-wingers vaguely resembling Britain's Jeremy Corbyn, though not quite as reckless. Rather it's because they may want to take their party out of its coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right bloc, a possibility that has sparked a full-blown government crisis. Anything that shakes the country out of its torpor offers a ray of hope.The current government of the European Union's largest economy has been inexcusably mediocre, and is badly in need of change. Name almost any major challenge facing Europe today, and German flexibility and leadership is as needed as it is absent.The euro area is at risk of stagnating, and Germany is the economy that could help the most, with a big fiscal stimulus. Instead it clings doggedly to its fetish for balanced budgets. The currency union is vulnerable to another euro crisis unless it is strengthened with a full banking union, including a common deposit insurance scheme for the region's lenders. But Germany balks at anything substantive.At a time of geopolitical turmoil, Europe must also rethink its military readiness and alliances. Yet Berlin keeps defying calls from its NATO allies to spend more on its army, which isn't remotely prepared to help protect eastern Europe against Russia, if it ever came to that.The government did try to come up with a plan to tackle climate change recently, which is more than most Western countries can say. But the package wending its way through the legislative system is laughably unambitious.The Merkel administration's domestic policy record is even worse. Germany's last major economic reform took place under her predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder. In her 14 years in power she has attempted nothing on such a grand scale. A tax reform is long overdue, especially as other countries cut their corporate tax rates. Then there's immigration law, which would benefit from a points-based approach like Canada's to alleviate Germany's shortage of skilled workers. But Merkel's cabinets, three of which have included the SPD, have merely tinkered. A ballyhooed digital upgrade of Germany's economy was all talk and no byte.The best that can be said about the present coalition is that it survived the refugee crisis of 2015-16 and restored order subsequently. Yes, the parties checked off most of the projects they agreed on when they reluctantly renewed their governing partnership in early 2018. But that was an underwhelming list signed off by coalition partners who openly loathe each other.The effect is that Germany and Merkel, who's made herself a lame duck by declaring she won't run for office again, have forfeited their leadership role. This has left a vacuum at the heart of Europe, which Fance's president Emmanuel Macron is trying to fill. He has been asking the big questions about the EU's future, expecting support, or at least replies, from Germany. The silence in Berlin has been deafening.In frustration, Macron has started taking ever bigger risks; musing about new European military alliances, a new relationship with Russia, a new economic design for the euro area, and a halt to the enlargement of the EU. The Germans don't know what to say to such adventurism. Suspecting a hidden neo-Gaullist agenda, with France seizing the reins in western Europe, they've reverted to acting as Macron's spoilers.Berlin hates political crisis. It comes out of a cultural fear of "instability" that dates to the chaotic Weimar Republic (or rather, what came after its failure). But these worries are overblown.Consider the main scenarios. First, next weekend the SPD must anoint Walter-Borjans and Esken and decide what to do about the coalition. They will no doubt demand a new direction from Merkel, including a boost to the minimum wage and other leftist goodies. The conservatives (who are struggling in the polls) will have no choice but to stand firm and say no.The SPD might then attempt to walk out of government. Merkel would in that case probably ask for a vote of confidence in parliament. In Germany, a chancellor can only be voted out if parliament simultaneously elects a new one. So either Merkel or a successor would have a good chance of staying in power as a minority government. That idea is anathema to Germans (Weimar, again), but neighboring Denmark and other countries prove minority government can work. Merkel or her successor would have to seek issue-by-issue support from the Greens or the pro-business Free Democrats. That would at least require open debate, which would be a boon to German democracy after years of parliamentary inertia.If a minority government fails, Germany's president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, would call new elections. Yes, Europe has been having rather a lot of those lately. But in Germany — unlike Spain, for example — new elections would actually change the composition of parliament, because the Greens would replace the SPD as the second-largest party and obvious partner of choice for the conservatives. They're thriving these days, and would push the government into bolder action. Macron would have somebody to talk to.The coming weeks and months will make history in post-war Germany, which is not used to such turmoil. But once the dust settles, new constellations could revive political debate and policy-making. For the sake of Germany and Europe, that's worth a try.To contact the author of this story: Andreas Kluth at akluth1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: James Boxell at jboxell@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Andreas Kluth is a member of Bloomberg's editorial board. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Germany's Crisis Is a Very Good Thing Posted: 01 Dec 2019 04:30 AM PST ![Germany's Crisis Is a Very Good Thing]( "Germany's Crisis Is a Very Good Thing") (Bloomberg Opinion) -- Norbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken, the new leaders of Germany's Social Democrats (SPD), may be about to do Germany and Europe a favor. That's not thanks to any inherent qualities they possess; both are colorless and unimaginative left-wingers vaguely resembling Britain's Jeremy Corbyn, though not quite as reckless. Rather it's because they may want to take their party out of its coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right bloc, a possibility that has sparked a full-blown government crisis. Anything that shakes the country out of its torpor offers a ray of hope.The current government of the European Union's largest economy has been inexcusably mediocre, and is badly in need of change. Name almost any major challenge facing Europe today, and German flexibility and leadership is as needed as it is absent.The euro area is at risk of stagnating, and Germany is the economy that could help the most, with a big fiscal stimulus. Instead it clings doggedly to its fetish for balanced budgets. The currency union is vulnerable to another euro crisis unless it is strengthened with a full banking union, including a common deposit insurance scheme for the region's lenders. But Germany balks at anything substantive.At a time of geopolitical turmoil, Europe must also rethink its military readiness and alliances. Yet Berlin keeps defying calls from its NATO allies to spend more on its army, which isn't remotely prepared to help protect eastern Europe against Russia, if it ever came to that.The government did try to come up with a plan to tackle climate change recently, which is more than most Western countries can say. But the package wending its way through the legislative system is laughably unambitious.The Merkel administration's domestic policy record is even worse. Germany's last major economic reform took place under her predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder. In her 14 years in power she has attempted nothing on such a grand scale. A tax reform is long overdue, especially as other countries cut their corporate tax rates. Then there's immigration law, which would benefit from a points-based approach like Canada's to alleviate Germany's shortage of skilled workers. But Merkel's cabinets, three of which have included the SPD, have merely tinkered. A ballyhooed digital upgrade of Germany's economy was all talk and no byte.The best that can be said about the present coalition is that it survived the refugee crisis of 2015-16 and restored order subsequently. Yes, the parties checked off most of the projects they agreed on when they reluctantly renewed their governing partnership in early 2018. But that was an underwhelming list signed off by coalition partners who openly loathe each other.The effect is that Germany and Merkel, who's made herself a lame duck by declaring she won't run for office again, have forfeited their leadership role. This has left a vacuum at the heart of Europe, which Fance's president Emmanuel Macron is trying to fill. He has been asking the big questions about the EU's future, expecting support, or at least replies, from Germany. The silence in Berlin has been deafening.In frustration, Macron has started taking ever bigger risks; musing about new European military alliances, a new relationship with Russia, a new economic design for the euro area, and a halt to the enlargement of the EU. The Germans don't know what to say to such adventurism. Suspecting a hidden neo-Gaullist agenda, with France seizing the reins in western Europe, they've reverted to acting as Macron's spoilers.Berlin hates political crisis. It comes out of a cultural fear of "instability" that dates to the chaotic Weimar Republic (or rather, what came after its failure). But these worries are overblown.Consider the main scenarios. First, next weekend the SPD must anoint Walter-Borjans and Esken and decide what to do about the coalition. They will no doubt demand a new direction from Merkel, including a boost to the minimum wage and other leftist goodies. The conservatives (who are struggling in the polls) will have no choice but to stand firm and say no.The SPD might then attempt to walk out of government. Merkel would in that case probably ask for a vote of confidence in parliament. In Germany, a chancellor can only be voted out if parliament simultaneously elects a new one. So either Merkel or a successor would have a good chance of staying in power as a minority government. That idea is anathema to Germans (Weimar, again), but neighboring Denmark and other countries prove minority government can work. Merkel or her successor would have to seek issue-by-issue support from the Greens or the pro-business Free Democrats. That would at least require open debate, which would be a boon to German democracy after years of parliamentary inertia.If a minority government fails, Germany's president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, would call new elections. Yes, Europe has been having rather a lot of those lately. But in Germany — unlike Spain, for example — new elections would actually change the composition of parliament, because the Greens would replace the SPD as the second-largest party and obvious partner of choice for the conservatives. They're thriving these days, and would push the government into bolder action. Macron would have somebody to talk to.The coming weeks and months will make history in post-war Germany, which is not used to such turmoil. But once the dust settles, new constellations could revive political debate and policy-making. For the sake of Germany and Europe, that's worth a try.To contact the author of this story: Andreas Kluth at akluth1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: James Boxell at jboxell@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Andreas Kluth is a member of Bloomberg's editorial board. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Hundreds rally in Myanmar to show support for Suu Kyi Posted: 01 Dec 2019 04:20 AM PST  About 700 people rallied Sunday to show support for Myanmar's leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, as she prepares to defend the country against charges of genocide at the U.N.'s highest court. Members of Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party swelled the ranks in front of the colonial-era City Hall in Yangon, Myanmar's largest city, as the crowd waved national flags and listened to music and poetry. The case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague relates to a harsh counterinsurgency campaign waged by Myanmar's military against members of the country's Muslim Rohingya community in August 2017 in response to an insurgent attack.
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| UN chief warns of ‘point of no return’ on climate change Posted: 01 Dec 2019 04:19 AM PST  Speaking before the start Monday of a two-week international climate conference in Madrid, the U.N. chief said the impact of rising temperatures — including more extreme weather — is already being felt around the world, with dramatic consequences for humans and other species. "The point of no return is no longer over the horizon," Guterres told reporters in the Spanish capital. Delegates from almost 200 countries will try to put the finishing touches on the rules governing the 2015 Paris climate accord at the Dec. 2-13 meeting, including how to create functioning international emissions trading systems and compensate poor countries for losses they suffer from rising sea levels and other consequences of climate change.
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| Senior German conservatives: no talks on coalition deal after SPD vote Posted: 01 Dec 2019 04:11 AM PST ![Senior German conservatives: no talks on coalition deal after SPD vote]( "Senior German conservatives: no talks on coalition deal after SPD vote") FRANKFURT/BERLIN, Dec 1 (Reuters) - The future of Germany's ruling coalition looked shaky after the election of new leaders of the Social Democrats (SPD) who are demanding a shift in policies, but several senior conservatives on Sunday ruled out talks to renegotiate a governing agreement. Two fierce critics of the coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives - Norbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken - won a vote for leadership of Social Democrats on Saturday.
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| Iraq Parliament Approves Prime Minister Mahdi’s Resignation Posted: 01 Dec 2019 03:52 AM PST ![Iraq Parliament Approves Prime Minister Mahdi's Resignation]( "Iraq Parliament Approves Prime Minister Mahdi's Resignation") (Bloomberg) -- Iraq's parliament approved the resignation of Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi after some of the worst violence during two months of anti-government protests.The parliament's speaker will ask the president to appoint a new prime minister, according to its media department.Mahdi had last week called on parliament to accept his resignation and move quickly to find a successor, saying the country needs a new leader to end violent protests. Mahdi, who's backed by neighboring power Iran, had offered to quit earlier but then insisted he'd only go once lawmakers agreed on a replacement.Why Iraqis Are Taking Aim at Their Leaders and Iran's: QuickTakeMore than 400 people have died in clashes between security forces and protesters since Oct. 1, according to Iraq's independent High Human Rights Commission. Iraqis, mostly from the Shiite majority population, are protesting against government corruption, poor services, and wide-ranging Iranian political influence, calling for an overhaul of the ruling class.To contact the reporter on this story: Shaji Mathew in Dubai at shajimathew@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Shaji Mathew at shajimathew@bloomberg.netFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Johnson Distances Himself From Tory Record on Crime: U.K. Votes Posted: 01 Dec 2019 03:43 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced plans to review Britain's security, defense and foreign policy in the wake of a terror attack on Friday, which killed two civilians, and ahead of a NATO summit that begins in London on Monday.The attack has already interrupted this weekend's campaigning for the Dec. 12 election and could influence the final result as voters turn their attention away from Brexit to issues of security. Johnson's opponent, Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, said he didn't agree that convicted terrorists always should serve out their full prison terms. He also accused governments of worsening the threat of such attacks and said the "war on terror has manifestly failed."Must Read: The Tories Secretly Fear Trump Could Wreck Johnson's ElectionFor more on the election visit ELEC.Key Developments:Johnson pledges Conservative government will make sure convicted terrorists serve their full prison sentencesJohnson plans a review of Britain's security, defense and foreign policyLabour narrows Tory lead in four of five new opinion pollsSecurity Minister Says Hung Parliament Disrupted Tory Terror Policy (11:19 a.m.)Security minister Brandon Lewis said the government would have already started the process of stopping the early release of convicted terrorists if it wasn't for the U.K.'s hung parliament.Speaking on BBC Radio's "Pienaar's Politics," Lewis said "we'd already started making steps in that direction" but that "one of the problems with parliament being utterly frozen over Brexit" is that this kind of legislation is unable to pass.The Conservative party won a majority in parliament in 2015, before losing it in 2017 and ruling in a minority government with support from the DUP. A number of resignations and expulsions over Brexit in 2019 further hampered the party's ability to pass its legislation further.Johnson Refuses to Take Blame for Previous Tory Policies (9:55 a.m.)Prime Minister Boris Johnson sought to distance himself from decisions made by previous Conservative governments as he appeared on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show on Sunday.When pushed on the record of the Tories on law and order and spending since 2010, Johnson repeatedly said he's only been prime minister since the summer, and that previous governments had to implement "prudent" management of public finances.Johnson also said a government under him would invest more in the criminal justice system. He said about 74 convicted terrorists have been released early, and that they were now being "properly invigilated" in light of Friday's attack.Umunna Says Terror Attack Shouldn't Be Politicized (9:32 a.m.)Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs spokesman Chuka Umunna criticized the two main parties for turning the terrorist attack into a "political football," saying instead the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats should all accept at least some blame for creating the current justice system because they have all been in government over the last two decades.Umunna, who quit Labour to join the Lib Dems this year, said the focus should be "on properly funding the parole board and the probation service."Raab Says He Takes Nothing for Granted (9:25 a.m.)Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who may be facing a tight race to maintain his seat in Parliament, said he's taking nothing for granted before the Dec. 12 vote.Speaking on Sky's "Sophy Ridge on Sunday," Raab said the closeness of the polls in his constituency shows the risk of a hung Parliament, and that voting Conservative was the only way to avoid such an outcome.Former Adviser Says Ministers Ignored Warnings (8:50 a.m.)A prison expert said he warned in 2016 that the parole system couldn't cope with terrorists, but the government ignored his findings.Writing in the Sunday Times, Ian Acheson, who was hired to advise ministers on the dangers of Islamic extremists in prisons, said he sent then-Justice Secretary Michael Gove a list of 69 recommendations, of which 68 were accepted. However, when the government's report was published, under a new minister Liz Truss, it was weakened so only a fraction of the recommendations remained, including none of those about the probation service.Corbyn Declines to Say How He'd Vote in 2nd Referendum (8:40 a.m.)In the Sky interview, Corbyn avoided saying how he would vote in the second Brexit referendum that he's promised if Labour wins the election.Corbyn also said the party apologized and regretted any antisemitism anyone's suffered and that he wished "our party had acted on it more rapidly." Earlier in the week, Corbyn had repeatedly declined to apologize to Jewish people for the behavior of some in his party.Corbyn Won't Rule Out Early Release for Terrorists (8:30 a.m)Corbyn said convicted terrorists should not necessarily serve out their full prison terms and pledged to increase spending on the prison service. On Friday, a convicted terrorist who was released early from prison killed two people and injured three others in an attack near London Bridge. Usman Khan had been a guest at a conference on prisoner rehabilitation when he started attacking other delegates."It depends on the circumstances; it depends on the sentence, but crucially it depends on what they've done in prison," he said in an interview on Sky's "Sophy Ridge on Sunday." He said he understood that the Parole Board was not involved in Khan's early release and there was no probation service involvement in monitoring him.While Johnson pledged that a Conservative government would ensure convicted terrorists weren't eligible for early release, Corbyn said he wanted to instead focus on increasing spending for the prison service and ensure anyone up for early release has a psychological assessment to see if they are a threat."Our probation service was half privatized, is not up to scratch, is not able to deal with the number of cases they have to deal with and a lot of prisoners are simply put on a tag, or ex-prisoners rather, put on a tag which if they breach clearly the police are alerted.Corbyn Says Foreign Policy Has Worsened Terror Risk (Earlier)In a speech in York later Sunday, Corbyn will say the "war on terror has manifestly failed," and that actions by governments have worsened the threat of attacks.The Labour leader will praise the response of police officers, and say they were right to use lethal force on Friday and say nothing can "absolve terrorists of blame for their murderous action,". But he'll also warn that for too long the U.K.'s "leaders have made the wrong calls on our security.""The threat of terrorism cannot and should not be reduced to questions of foreign policy alone," he will add, according to extracts released by the Labour Party. "But too often the actions of successive governments have fueled, not reduced that threat."To contact the reporters on this story: Jessica Shankleman in London at jshankleman@bloomberg.net;David Goodman in London at dgoodman28@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, James Amott, Helen RobertsonFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| London extremist attack takes center stage in UK campaign Posted: 01 Dec 2019 02:44 AM PST  Britain's political leaders sparred Sunday over who is responsible for the early release of a convicted extremist who launched a stabbing attack in central London that left two dead and injured three. After a one-day pause out of respect for victims, Friday's attack is dominating the political scene as the Dec. 12 election nears, shifting the focus, at least for the moment, from Brexit and the National Health Service to issues of security and criminal justice. The argument centers over the early release from prison of Usman Khan, who served roughly half his sentence before being set free.
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| With prime minister out, Iraq in constitutional ‘black hole’ Posted: 01 Dec 2019 02:37 AM PST  Iraq's parliament on Sunday formally accepted the prime minister's resignation, but the path to replacing Adil Abdul-Mahdi was clouded with legal questions that one lawmaker described as a "black hole in the constitution," which does not clearly spell out the next step. Meanwhile, anti-government demonstrations went on in the capital, and one protester was shot dead. Demonstrators closed roads, including those leading to a major commodities port in southern Iraq.
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| The U.S. Army’s Worst Tradition: Never Ready for the Next War Posted: 01 Dec 2019 02:20 AM PST  GettySince the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Army has been consistently ranked as the most capable land force on the globe by defense analysts of all stripes. So why are so many people in the American military community today worried about the Army's ability to deter conflicts with likely adversaries or prevail against those adversaries in future wars?The short answer is that warfare, always a mysterious amalgam of art, science, and guts, has become an increasingly complicated and unpredictable enterprise. America's leading potential adversaries, China and Russia, have shown no small measure of imagination and dexterity in identifying the U.S. armed forces' vulnerabilities, and exploiting them through the development of subtle yet aggressive geopolitical strategies, and increasingly lethal armed forces.Both "near peer competitors" may well be ahead of the U.S. military in applying newly emerging technologies—artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomous systems, hypersonic weapons, and nanotechnology—to the ancient military problems of constricting an adversary's maneuver, neutralizing its offensive weapons, and disrupting its command and control.These cutting-edge technologies, writes Christian Brose, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "will enable new battle networks of sensors and shooters to rapidly accelerate the process of detecting, targeting, and striking threats, what the military calls the 'kill chain.'"Mattis: 'No Enemy' Has Done More Harm to Military Readiness Than CongressHow is it that "the most lethal land force in world history" finds itself in this unenviable position? While the Army exhausted itself fighting two frustrating and inconclusive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last 19 years, both Russia and China embarked on grand strategies of regional hegemony designed to undermine the rules-based international order that emerged after World War II under American leadership. Both of these rising powers have developed myriad ways to sew discord and dissent in America's network of alliances and to expand their spheres of influence.Beijing presents its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as the best path for underdeveloped countries in Asia and Africa to gain access to modern infrastructure, capital, and prosperity. In practice, it's plain that under the guise of building ports, roads, and communications infrastructure around the globe, China is engaged in predatory lending practices meant to gain political leverage and privileged access to foreign assets.In the South China Sea, Beijing has militarized seven hotly disputed islets, and is attempting to pinch the U.S. forces out of this strategically sensitive area entirely, even though international courts have declared China's claims to these waters to be without foundation.Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has run rings around the Obama and Trump administrations in the chess game of international politics. He successfully annexed the Crimea in 2014 from Ukraine, and interfered in the presidential election of 2016 via "active measures," i.e., information warfare aimed at creating confusion and conflict in the American body politic. Moscow also successfully intervened on behalf of the brutal Assad regime in Syria, and Russia is now a major player in the Middle East.As demonstrated in the Ukraine, the Russians are the master practitioners of "hybrid warfare," in which conventional military operations—and the threat of such operations—are closely integrated with propaganda, proxy campaigns, cyber warfare, coercive diplomacy, and economic threats.Both Russia and China have revitalized creaky and obsolete military establishments into first-class warfighting organizations. The consensus among Western military analysts is that in their respective spheres of influence, both countries have sufficiently sophisticated "anti-access area denial" (A2AD) capabilities to inflict severe punishment on American forces attempting to penetrate those spheres in order to challenge aggression or come to the aid of an ally. According to Army General Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both Russia and China are "deploying capabilities to fight the United States through multiple levels of standoff in all domains—space, cyber, air, sea, and land. The military problem we face is defeating multiple levels of standoff… in order to maintain the coherence of our operations."Gen. Milley and the rest of the Army's top brass are well aware that their service is currently a rusty instrument for carrying out high intensity operations warfare against either potential adversary. The Army Strategy, an 11-page, single-spaced document published in October 2018, provides a rough blueprint for the service's plan to transform itself from a counterinsurgency-oriented organization into the leading practitioner of high intensity war by 2028.It won't be easy. The Army Strategy calls for truly sweeping, even revolutionary, changes in doctrine, training, and organization of forces.For the first time since the Cold War, the Army has to reconfigure itself to be able to fight and win in a contested environment, where it will not have undisputed control over the air and sea. At the same time, it must prepare to engage potential adversaries more or less continuously in "gray zone conflict." General Joseph Votel, the recently retired head of Special Operations Command, succinctly defines this concept as "conflicts characterized by intense political, economic, informational, and military competition more fervent in nature than normal diplomacy, yet short of conventional war."The Army Strategy describes four lines of effort to reach the service's chief objective by 2028, in this order of priority: Readiness, modernization, department reform, and building alliances and partnerships. The last two lines are more or less pro forma in every American military strategy document I've read over the last 30 years: reduce waste and inefficiency, and work with allies to insure military interoperability. The first two lines are worth a close look, for they illuminate the broad contours of the service's quest to regain its pre-eminence in great power conflict. The quest to enhance readiness begins with plans to increase the size of the regular army to over half a million men from its current level of 476,000. In a departure from recent practice, all units earmarked for contingency operations and overseas deployments will be fully manned and given state of the art equipment before deploying. In order to increase the size of the service, the quality and quantity of recruiters and instructors will be increased.The focus of Army unit training will shift from counterinsurgency operations to high intensity fighting, where the adversary is assumed to have cutting edge A2AD, offensive weapons, and cyber systems.Deployments of Army units around the world will be less predictable and more rapid that they've been to date, as the Army and the other armed services begin to put the "Dynamic Force Deployment" concept to work. This concept is closely associated with former Secretary of Defense James Mattis. It's also classified, and few details have been released for public consumption. But the core idea, as Mattis explained in 2018, is for the U.S. military to "stop telegraphing its punches." Combat forces and their support units will be moving in and out of potential flashpoint areas more frequently and at unpredictable intervals in order to proactively shape the strategic environment.Improving readiness also involves important upgrades in the Army's defensive missile systems to counter China and Russia's formidable A2AD systems. A new lower-tier air and missile defense sensor project will enhance the ability of Patriot missiles to identify and track targets at long range by 2022. Beginning in 2021, Stryker light armored vehicles will be equipped with a new air defense system to protect mechanized battalions and brigades as they maneuver in harm's way.Missile system upgrades, coupled with an entirely new generation of combat vehicles, both manned and unmanned, will allow the Army of the future to penetrate adversary defenses with an acceptable degree of loss.Ensuring readiness to fight is the top priority of the Army until 2022. After that date, the service plans to turn close attention to implementing entirely new operational concepts and "technologically mature" systems that are currently in the research and development phase.The overarching goal is to be able to conduct sustained "multi-domain operations" against either potential adversary, and win, by 2028. In the modernization phase, the Army plans to introduce a host of new long-range precision weapons, including hypersonic missiles that travel at more than five times the speed of sound. An entirely new generation of combat vehicles and vertical lift aircraft, i.e., new helicopters and aircraft with capabilities similar to those of the V-22 Osprey, both manned and unmanned, are currently in the works.The new Army Network will be an integrated system of hardware, software, and infrastructure capable of withstanding formidable cyber assaults.The leading war-fighting concept at the foundation of the Army's modernization effort, though, is clearly "multi-domain operations (MDO)." The first thing to be said about the concept is that it's very much inchoate. Discussions with several active-duty Army officers suggest even those "in the know" about this classified concept have only a hazy idea of how such operations will work in the field, for the simple reason that many of the systems such operations hope to integrate are still in the early stages of development.The Army has only one experimental MDO unit on active duty. It is deployed in the Indo-Pacific Command and built around a conventional rocket and missile brigade. The brigade contains a unique battalion devoted to intelligence, information, cyber, electronic warfare and space operations (I2CEWS). According to Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., an editor at Breaking Defense, the I2CEWS battalion "appears to not only pull together data from outside sources—satellites, drones, spy planes—to inform friendly forces of threats and targets, it also wages war in cyberspace and across the electronic spectrum, hacking and jamming the sensors and networks that tell the enemy where to shoot."The commander of Army forces in the Indo-Pacific, Gen. Robert Brown, recently told reporters that his experimental brigade has performed brilliantly "in at least ten war games" against what are presumably Chinese and Russian forces. Before the advent of the new unit, American forces repeatedly failed to penetrate either rivals' anti-access area denial systems with acceptable casualties in war games. Another experimental brigade is expected to enter service in Europe soon.The U.S. Army has a long and unenviable history of being ill-prepared to fight the next war. The French and British had to train U.S. Army units before they were deployed in World War I. The Army entered World War II as the 17th largest army in the world, with underpowered tanks, airplanes, and ancient rifles. The Army that went to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan had trained long and hard to engage in conventional operations against nation states, but was ill-prepared, psychologically or organizationally, for counter-insurgency war. The Army's ability to adapt to new developments has long been hampered by infighting and excessive conservatism in the upper reaches of the service's hierarchy.To remedy this problem, in July 2018 the Army created the Futures Command (AFC). Its purpose is to unify the service-wide modernization effort under a single command, and oversee the development of new doctrine, equipment, organization, and training. According to Gen. John Murray, its head, the AFC "will conduct war-fighting and technology experimentation together, producing innovative, field-informed war-fighting concepts and working prototypes of systems that have a low risk of… being rejected by future war fighters. There are no game-changing technologies. There are only game-changing combinations of war-fighting concepts, technologies and organizations."To say that General Murray has his work cut out for him is a massive understatement. He surely has one of the most difficult and important assignments in modern military history. Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Warming toll: 1 degree hotter, trillions of tons of ice gone Posted: 01 Dec 2019 02:06 AM PST  Since leaders first started talking about tackling the problem of climate change, the world has spewed more heat-trapping gases, gotten hotter and suffered hundreds of extreme weather disasters. The first United Nations diplomatic conference to tackle climate change was in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. — The carbon dioxide level in the air has jumped from about 358 parts per million to nearly 412, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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| Mueller, Barr, Giuliani, Comey and Kallstrom Once Fought Terror Together—Now Trump Has Them Fight Each Other Posted: 01 Dec 2019 02:00 AM PST  Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/GettyThe constellation of federal investigators, attorneys, prosecutors and judges orbiting Donald Trump in the last three years have a unique, shared history.Relatively unknown to the American public is the fact that before many of them became household names, cast as either the heroes or villains of the Trump saga (depending on where you stand on Trump), they were colleagues in the trenches of some of America's biggest terrorism cases. They crossed paths numerous times in courtrooms and at crime scenes, often united by a single case. From my perch working for the House Intelligence Committee, at the FBI as a congressional liaison, and then on the 9/11 Joint Inquiry, I observed what in many respects were their finest achievements, how those played out politically, how they fought their turf battles at home and with foreign governments, how they learned to communicate with the American public after each tragedy—and ultimately, fundamentally how they changed America's approach to national security. If Trump's Rage Brings 'Civil War,' Where Will the Military Stand?In the 1990s, as hundreds of Americans were being slaughtered in acts of terrorism from Oklahoma City to Kenya to lower Manhattan—and while Donald Trump was hosting teenage beauty pageants—these men helped capture, extradite, prosecute, and put away for life some of the worst mass murderers of American citizens in our nation's history. But now they have become caricatures and cable news fodder—and their reputations are part of the professional carnage that comes to almost everyone who is part of the Donald Trump story. They are known to the American public primarily for the things they have said, for one reason or the other, about Trump—and even more to the point, for what he has said about them.Rudy Giuliani, James Comey, Robert Mueller, William Barr, James Kallstrom, and Louis Freeh have all taken divergent paths over the past few years. But in the more than two decades that preceded Trump's descent down the golden escalator on election night 2016, their résumés overlapped as they worked to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice in such cases as Pan Am 103, a 747 blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland; the devastated Federal Building in Oklahoma City; the Khobar Towers full of American personnel, blown up in Saudi Arabia; the Atlanta Olympics bombing; the devastated American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya; the attack on the USS Cole at anchor in Yemen; then, of course 9/11. And it's a sad fact that the work they did during their impressive law enforcement careers got lost in the noise created by Trump's presidency.Most interesting of all, however, is the fact that for most of these men, what they thought of Trump in 2016 had a lot to do with their opinion of the occupants of the White House—Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton—during those years their lives had intersected. Those opinions proved to be enduring and consequential. * * *THE DIRECTOR* * *In September 1993, Federal Judge Louis J. Freeh walked out of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and into FBI Headquarters as its new Director. Both his youth, 43 years of age, and his background as a former FBI agent, made him an inspired choice to lead the Bureau when nominated by the new American President, Bill Clinton. Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Cynthia Johnson/The LIFE Images Collection viaGettyFreeh's predecessor, William Sessions, had not completed his 10-year term as director before a report alleging ethical improprieties was released by President George H. W. Bush's Attorney General William Barr (yes, the same William Barr who is today Trump's Attorney General).Sessions refused to exit his position voluntarily, so it was left to Clinton's new attorney general, Janet Reno, to fire him. Clinton may wish he had held on to Sessions. The new president and the new FBI Director would soon be at loggerheads. Although there was still a sense of excitement in Washington over the generational shift that the 1992 election represented, the fact was the Clinton administration began as an unmitigated disaster. It seemed undisciplined and chaotic to Freeh, and its early days were consumed with FBI investigations into Filegate, Travelgate, Whitewater, Paula Jones and Jennifer Flowers, and even an investigation into China's attempts to meddle in the 1992 elections. And, most mysteriously, there was the investigation into the shocking suicide of Bill and Hillary's long-time friend from Arkansas, Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster. FBI agents walked around the halls dispirited, talking about their affection for George H.W. Bush and their disdain for the dirty campaign they felt the Clintons had waged against him. While Clinton came off cool (playing sax on The Arsenio Hall Show, for example), "The Wimp Factor" tagline stuck to George H.W. Bush—a man who had flown 50 combat missions during World War II, had been one of the Navy's youngest aviators and was a recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross. Freeh, who had been appointed a federal judge by the senior Bush, had a deep affection for him. He accepted the job as FBI Director even though he believed not only that the wrong man had won the presidency, but was firmly convinced that the winner, Clinton, was dirty. In those years, the FBI's antipathy towards the Clintons flowed from the top down—and would become ingrained in its organizational culture. For his part, had Clinton wanted an FBI Director who would do his bidding and sweep his scandals under the rug (which the current president seems to believe is part of the job description), he knew damn well it wouldn't be Freeh. Yet, he courted Freeh. Freeh, considered tough and clean as a hound's tooth, would give the new Clinton Administration a patina of ethical validity it desperately needed. But Freeh's FBI was immediately immersed in investigating Clinton's skeletons. Freeh gave back his White House pass that had allowed him unlimited, unrecorded, access to the White House believing it would pose a conflict of interest while the Clintons were under investigation. Clinton, now realizing Freeh would be breathing down his neck, was not happy with this slap in the face. But during his entire administration, and with the endless ethical clouds that hung over him, Clinton did not dare fire Freeh.Freeh and Clinton would not speak for four years, until the bombing of the USS Cole.* * *THE HILL* * *Freeh was an instant darling with Members of Congress, and was accorded great deference and latitude. He would need it. The FBI Freeh walked into had a plethora of problems and investigations of its own to contend with. His earnest demeanor served him well—and he was complemented by his equally earnest Congressional liaison chief, John Collingwood, who was spectacularly effective at putting out the FBI's fires. Without a drop of arrogance and possessing a deep belief in the mission of the Bureau, Collingwood was also a master at turning every FBI screw-up into an opportunity—for more resources or more law enforcement authorities. He was perhaps the greatest asset the Bureau had when facing its many challenges with Congress. When I worked in his office, I learned from Collingwood a simple formula for dealing with the Hill that most federal agencies refused to learn: Congress can be your best friend if you don't treat its members and staff like the enemy. Give them (most of) what they ask for, be personable and on a first-name basis with staffers, and give them a heads-up to important stories before they hit the media—even if its means calling them at home at 2 a.m. (which we often did). If trust is built, Congressional staffers will, in turn, give you a heads up to potential problematic or embarrassing issues that could otherwise blindside the Director at an oversight hearing. (The first rule of any good staff work, anywhere: never, ever allow your boss to be surprised by bad news.)Collingwood could wrap his arm around the shoulder of Senator Robert Byrd (the most powerful man in Congress at the time), and Byrd would feel the entire goodwill of the FBI in that gesture—especially after Byrd made it possible for the FBI to move its badly outdated Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) to Clarksburg, West Virginia, Byrd's home state. The CJIS is the largest division of the FBI responsible for, among other things, its automated fingerprint identification lab and national instant criminal background check system. Byrd was known as "the king of pork" for his ability to shovel millions of dollars to West Virginia. The FBI was smart enough to seize on the opportunity Byrd was offering, thus giving him a stake in the sustainability of the FBI, as well as much needed jobs for West Virginians.And the FBI's sustainability was not a given. Freeh took charge of an FBI still reeling from its role in the carnage that occurred at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas. Both locations had been the site of standoffs between citizens and federal agents, and Waco and Ruby Ridge had become rallying cries for anti-government militias. The overly aggressive actions of federal agents had left 83 Americans dead. The country's faith in federal law enforcement was at an all-time low. Armed, anti-government militia groups were sprouting up across the nation. At the same time, far removed from Ruby Ridge and Waco, in lower Manhattan an even more insidious threat was about to make itself known. On Feb. 26, 1993, a rental truck carrying 1,400 pounds of ammonium nitrate exploded under the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Six people were killed in an attack right in the heart of America's financial center.The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had energized the jihadist movement around the world. After the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, mujahideen veterans and fellow-travelers seemed to replace their anti-Soviet fervor with an extreme anti-American ideology. Many began congregating in Islamic centers and mosques across the U.S., including New York and New Jersey. Although American military assistance had helped turn the tide for the mujahideen in their war against the Soviets, they now turned their sights toward the U.S. This was known as "blowback." But blowback would not be coming just from Afghanistan's jihadists. It was also developing in America's heartland.* * *OKLAHOMA CITY* * *The security guard sitting outside the offices of the House Intelligence Committee stopped me and pointed to the television on his desk. On the screen was a horrific scene coming out of Oklahoma City. A building was sheared in half. Under tons of rubble lay an unknown number of bodies. A moon-like crater was obvious in the street where a Ryder rental truck had detonated 4,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate—a much bigger and more powerful bomb than the one used in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Ralf-Finn Hestoft/CORBIS viaGettyWhen Timothy McVeigh was apprehended, the motive for the carnage became clear. The date of the slaughter was April 19, 1995, exactly two years after the federal standoff at David Koresh's compound in Waco, Texas. This was McVeigh's revenge—blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people, including 19 children.The scale of the Oklahoma City attack, the very audacity of it, the very cruelty of it, committed by an American against other Americans, seemed like evil incarnate. Here was an "all-American white boy," as people said, brutally killing fellow innocent Americans and children right in America's heartland because of his hatred for federal agencies. If this level of anger existed out there in the country, how and where else might it express itself? Federal law enforcement and the media became obsessed and slightly hysterical over the idea of anti-government militias, even though McVeigh had no formal ties to any of them. Ultimately, however, McVeigh's actions had an effect opposite to the one he intended. Instead of adding fuel to the anti-government movement, militia members resented the fact that the Feds would now be breathing down their necks. And they certainly were disgusted by the killing of so many innocent children. Some militia members began cooperating with the Feds, alerting them to possible violent extremists in their midsts. The FBI created a Domestic Terrorism Planning Section which found itself handling mostly threats against abortion clinics and crimes committed by radical animal rights groups, like the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Without reasonable cause, there was little the FBI could do to surveil American citizens traipsing through the woods with legally owned firearms playing weekend warrior. They couldn't be arrested simply for their views. But after Oklahoma City, the FBI drafted a wish list of expanded authorities to monitor potential terrorists domestically. A coalition of left and right civil libertarians on the Hill thwarted attempts to pass these measures. (Some of the expanded authorities gained new life after 9/11 when they became part of The Patriot Act.)Trump Is First to Use PATRIOT Act to Detain a Man Forever* * *THE SAUDI MIRROR* * *One again the terror spotlight was about to shift. On June 26, 1996, just weeks after the FBI had successfully concluded an 81-day standoff with the anti-government Freeman group in Montana, a truck bomb exploded in a housing complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Air Force personnel who were there to enforce the no-fly zone imposed on the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Hezbollah in the Hijaz (or "Saudi Hezbollah") took credit for the attack. Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/GettyThe Saudis knew more than they let on to the FBI about this group, but getting information from the Saudis involved a very delicate diplomatic dance—something FBI agents abhor. The deference paid to the Saudis after Khobar would never be accorded to another country within whose borders American servicemen had been killed. Less than a year before the Khobar bombing, another bomb had exploded in Riyadh, killing five U.S. Defense Department contractors. But before the FBI could interrogate the suspects, the Saudis extracted confessions from them and had them beheaded. Now 19 American airmen had been killed in Saudi Arabia, and the United States was once again saying "pretty please" to Saudi royals to get them to share information. It's hard to determine whether it was Freeh's strained relationship with the Clinton administration, or the Clinton administration's hope for a rapprochement with Iran that led to other roadblocks in the Khobar investigation. Iran was clearly behind Saudi Hezbollah, but it was the Saudis, and the Saudis alone, who held the key to the investigation. With the information they possessed on the attack the year before, Khobar might have been prevented. To shake information loose from the Saudis, and with less than enthusiastic support from the Clinton Administration, Freeh turned again to his friend, former President George H.W. Bush, who had liberated Kuwait from Saddam's occupation and guaranteed the security of Saudi Arabia four years earlier. Freeh also weighed in with his own pal, the flamboyant Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. As Lawrence Wright reported in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Looming Tower, John O'Neill, the chief of the FBI's Counterterrorism Section, had angered Freeh (who valued his relationship with Bush, Prince Bandar, and his ability to gain access to Saudi Arabia without help from the Clinton White House) by telling him on a flight home from the Kingdom, "Boss, they're blowing smoke up your ass." The FBI did finally get access of sorts to the Khobar detainees held by the Saudis—but only by watching behind a two-way mirror as members of the Mabahith, the Saudi secret police, asked the questions. * * *PRECEDENTS* * *To understand how the Bureau developed its response to terrorist attacks you'd have to go back to the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people. Pan Am 103 was the first major terrorist attack against American civilians. A Hezbollah bombing of the US Marine Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon three years earlier had killed 220 Marines and 21 civilians. But Pan Am 103 was a watershed: 190 passengers had been American citizens on their way home for the Christmas holidays; 43 were British, and at least 19 other nationalities were represented among the lost. Among those killed were 35 students from Syracuse University returning to the U.S. after a semester studying in London. The U.N. Commissioner for Namibia, the CEO for Volkswagen America, the CIA's Beirut Deputy Station Chief and a group of other U.S. Intelligence specialists were on that flight, raising suspicion that it might have been specially targeted. Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Bryn Colton/GettyLegislation was passed giving the FBI extraterritorial jurisdiction over investigations wherever Americans were killed, and the Pan Am 103 investigation would be handled by the Justice Department's Criminal Division—headed by one Robert S. Mueller—a recent Bush 41 appointee. Mueller had been overseeing the prosecution of Manuel Noriega and mob boss John Gotti, but Pan Am 103 had the greatest emotional impact on him. As recently as 2018, Mueller met once again with family members of that ill-fated flight, including the now-adult children of victims, telling them, "There are those who say that time heals all wounds. But you know that not to be true. At its best, time may dull the deepest wounds; it cannot make them disappear." Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/GettyOn Nov. 19, 1991, Acting Attorney General William Barr (yes, the same William Barr who is attorney general today), announced the indictments of two Libyan intelligence operatives for placing the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103. A trial would not begin until 2000. In 2003, Libya would pay $2.7 billion in compensation to the families of the victims. The man found guilty, Abdelbasit Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, would ultimately die at home in Tripoli in 2017.But in 1988, never having dealt with a terrorist attack on the scale of Pan Am 103, the Bureau received very poor marks for its outreach to the grieving families. So when the Khobar Towers bombings occurred, Freeh would go out of his way to promise justice to the victims' families—a justice that would, however, have to be finessed to suit Saudi sensibilities.In his 2005 memoir, My FBI, Freeh credits the ultimately successful indictments of the Khobar Tower suspects to his hand-picked choice as prosecutor, James B. Comey. (Yes, that James Comey.) "I will always be grateful for his leadership and pursuit of justice," Freeh wrote of Comey, who was responsible for a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia returning a 46-count indictment against 14 defendants charged with the bombing of the Khobar Towers.But the Bureau barely had time to catch its breath. Just three weeks after the Khobar Towers attack, the genuine, overwhelming desire by the FBI to convince grieving families they would receive justice would be tested in unimaginable ways. On July 17, 1996, TWA 800 exploded over the Atlantic shortly after taking off from JFK airport, killing 240 people.END OF PART ONETOMORROW: CONSPIRACIES AND DISASTERSRead more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Iran official points to more open elections Posted: 30 Nov 2019 11:54 PM PST  A senior Iranian official has suggested in an interview with AFP that authorities may be more open than in the past in approving candidates for a looming parliamentary election. Kadkhodaee was speaking to AFP on the eve of the opening on Sunday of the registration of candidates for the parliamentary election to be held on February 21. The Guardian Council, which is under the control of ultra-conservatives, is responsible for organising and monitoring elections in Iran, including vetting candidates.
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| Iran official points to more open elections Posted: 30 Nov 2019 10:49 PM PST A senior Iranian official has suggested in an interview with AFP that authorities may be more open than in the past in approving candidates for a looming parliamentary election. Kadkhodaee was speaking to AFP on the eve of the opening on Sunday of the registration of candidates for the parliamentary election to be held on February 21. The Guardian Council, which is under the control of ultra-conservatives, is responsible for organising and monitoring elections in Iran, including vetting candidates.
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| This Time Trump Will Be Just One of the Wild Cards at NATO Posted: 30 Nov 2019 10:00 PM PST  (Bloomberg) -- What was conceived as a celebration for one of the world's most important military alliances risks becoming a show of disunity -- and this time it's not because of anything Donald Trump has said or done.Meeting in London this week, leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have two other presidents to worry about: France's Emmanuel Macron, who in recent weeks has openly questioned the collective defense clause at NATO's heart, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has troubled alliance members with his decisions to send troops into Syria and buy a Russian anti-missile system.To make matters worse, Macron and Erdogan are now trading insults in public.In fact, so much has changed since then-Prime Minister Theresa May offered to host the two-day commemoration of NATO's 70th anniversary that her successor, Boris Johnson could be forgiven for wishing she hadn't."I will tell you again at NATO, first check your own brain death," Erdogan said, addressing Macron in a speech from Istanbul on Friday. He was referring to an interview the French leader gave last month in which he not only criticized Turkey, but described the alliance as brain dead.With three significant member states bringing conflicting agendas to the table at a gathering that takes place in the closing stretch of a charged U.K. election campaign, the event risks fanning concern about NATO's future, rather than celebrating what alliance officials and leaders routinely call the most successful military grouping in history.Officials from the U..S. and Britain were at pains last week to highlight NATO's successes, including a renewed sense of purpose since Russia's 2014 aggression in Ukraine. Defense spending is on the rise and NATO is expanding into counter-terrorism, cyber security, and now even space.And NATO does continue to attract. North Macedonia, set to join next year, will bring the number of leaders at the table this week to 30, up from 15 when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.Such accomplishments however are being drowned out by the increasingly public dispute over what NATO should focus on, and what it should stand for. In an apparent attempt to contain the debate, Germany has proposed forming an expert group to report on the future political shape of the alliance.Macron drove Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel to make an uncharacteristically spirited defense of the alliance last week. "Even more than during the Cold War, maintaining NATO is today in our own best interest," she told lawmakers in Berlin. "Europe cannot currently defend itself alone."Read more: Erdogan May Seek EU Money Even as He Trades Insults With MacronA senior U.S. official said on Friday that Trump would prioritize enlisting NATO to push back against China's growing influence. The official said Trump would also press allies to increase defense spending and to exclude Chinese companies from the construction of 5G mobile networks, something many have been unwilling to do.Instead of containing China, Macron wants NATO to prioritize the fight against terrorism. Thirteen French soldiers died in Mali last week and a lone terrorist on Friday killed two people in London. A French official said Macron also plans to press for greater "operational" burden-sharing as a way of complementing Trump's push for Europe to share more of the alliance's financial burden.Erdogan, meanwhile, is demanding acceptance of Turkish goals in northern Syria, including classifying as a terrorist threat the Kurdish militias that have fought Islamic State alongside other NATO allies. He also rubbed salt into another open wound in Turkey's ties with Western allies, by unpacking and testing the NATO non-compatible S-400 air defense system he recently bought from Russia.Read more: NATO Foresees More Europe Defense Outlays as It Braces for TrumpAnd that's all before Trump makes his first tweet of the event."It will be a great tribute to how much all the NATO allies value the institution if we manage to get through this leaders meeting without President Trump, President Macron or President Erdogan doing something damaging to the alliance," said Kori Schake, a former National Security Council official in the George W. Bush administration who is now deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.The shortened time frame for meeting –- formal sessions will take only about four hours -- may limit the potential for damage. Long term NATO watchers also caution against exaggerating the dangers of intra-alliance tensions, which aren't new to an organization that includes countries with differing geographies and security priorities.Macron's questioning of the collective defense commitment at NATO's heart is certainly dangerous, but in many ways he is simply reverting to France's traditionally semi-detached status. President Charles De Gaulle pulled out of the organization's military command structure in 1966, and France rejoined only in 2009.Read more: Macron Says NATO Should Shift Its Focus Away From Russia"It's not a fashionable view, I know," said Sir Adam Thomson, the U.K.'s envoy to NATO from 2014-2016, but NATO "has been pursuing a new vision since the end of the Cold War and, to some extent, it's already got a lot of the material."He cited three new roles since the Cold War: Crisis management in places like Afghanistan, keeping a lid on potential disputes between members in eastern Europe, and building partnerships with dozens of non-member countries."It is quite distinctive that this alliance, which in the eyes of some is so wicked, finds so many partners to work with it."As the site of NATO's first headquarters, London was a natural choice for this week's anniversary. It was also supposed to make a statement on the global stature of a new post-Brexit Britain.Read more: Johnson Plans Major Review of U.K.'s Defense, Foreign PolicyBrexit, however, has since been delayed. Johnson also called a snap election that will happen just eight days after the leaders fly home. The presence of Trump, a toxic figure among British voters, is a potential political liability for the prime minister.Were Johnson to lose to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, that would give NATO yet another individual to worry about at its next summit, due in 2021.Over his career the socialist firebrand has called NATO "a danger to world peace and a danger to world security," among other things. He has more recently fallen into line with party policy, which is for the U.K. to stay in the alliance, but he would likely prove another awkward partner.The last time Britain hosted NATO leaders, in 2014, he told an anti-NATO rally that the end of the Cold War "should have been the time for NATO to shut up shop, give up, go home and go away."\--With assistance from Onur Ant, Geraldine Amiel and Justin Sink.To contact the reporters on this story: Marc Champion in London at mchampion7@bloomberg.net;Jonathan Stearns in Brussels at jstearns2@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Rosalind Mathieson at rmathieson3@bloomberg.net, Flavia Krause-JacksonFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Iran begins registering candidates for parliamentary polls Posted: 30 Nov 2019 09:22 PM PST ![Iran begins registering candidates for parliamentary polls]( "Iran begins registering candidates for parliamentary polls") Iran has begun registration of candidates for running in the country's parliamentary elections set for February 2020, the official IRNA news agency reported on Sunday. The elections will be a gauge for the popularity of the moderate and reformist camps that President Hassan Rouhani represents. It comes after unrest over government-set petrol prices earlier in November.
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| The Latest: Riot police out in force for Hong Kong march Posted: 30 Nov 2019 07:24 PM PST  Thousands of people are taking to the streets of Hong Kong under the watch of riot police to demand more democracy and an investigation into the use of force to suppress the six-month-long anti-government demonstrations. Both hardened protesters and parents with children were marching Sunday near Hong Kong's waterfront on the Kowloon side of Victoria Harbour. Many held up a hand to indicate the five demands of the movement.
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| What’s So Special About Crimea? Almost Everything. Posted: 30 Nov 2019 06:49 PM PST  Jane Sweeney/GettySEVASTOPOL, Crimea—The seductive voice of the late French songwriter Serge Gainsbourg played as background. "Je t'aime.. moi non plus." And waiters in long white aprons drifted among the tables at the La Brasserie café. Looking at the exaggerated 19th century Parisian interior, nobody would have guessed Sevastopol's tragic past and turbulent present. Several wars and conflicts have left this strategic Black Sea port in ashes, pushing waves of terrified people away from the sandy beaches and green hills of the Crimean peninsula as refugees and exiles. Today, almost five years after Russia took this land from Ukraine, one sees articles in the Western press starting to tout Crimea as a tourist destination, even as sanctions against Russia keep it isolated economically. Some residents say life in this city has come to seem "a parallel universe."Trump at G7 Blames Everybody but Putin for Crimea AnnexationOur tourist guide, Alexander Kuts, a local expert in Crimean history, suggested we step outside of the café to see the main highlights along the embankment. War museums, memorials and monuments were all around us, a vivid map of strife that killed hundreds of thousands of people since the name of Crimea first became a byword for Great Power confrontation in the 1850s.The city of Sevastopol was founded by Russian Empress Catherine the Great in 1783, the first time Crimea was taken over by Moscow. The French philosopher Voltaire, fascinated by Russia, wrote to Catherine that he saw Russia's European destiny in the Black Sea region where it would push out Turkey, and he endorsed the "genius" of the empress who took control of Crimea as well as other regions along the Azov and Black Seas coasts. But its very importance made Crimea hard to hold on to. By the mid-1800s Turkey and Europe were pushing back.Alexander, our guide, pointed to a place in the bay where Admiral Pavel Nakhimov and other Russian navy commanders made the decision in September 1854 to scuttle seven of their own ships to block the entrance to the harbor. Only the masts remained above the water. The tactic stopped the British and French fleet approaching the city center, but the troops landed to the north virtually unopposed, then pushed southward in a long and horrifying campaign. After the battle of Inkerman, now a suburb of Sevastopol, British war correspondent William Howard Russell wrote to his wife about friends he had lost, "buried as they lay all bloody on the hillside amid their ferocious enemies, and I could not but exclaim in all bitterness of heart, 'Cursed is he that delighteth in war.'" Russell wrote that he found it impossible to sleep in his tent that night "owing to the groans of dying Russian prisoners outside. They are as thick on the field as sparrows on a hayrick. They literally die in heaps, and they are buried 30 together in holes in the ground. The air stinks of blood."In Leo Tolstoy's "Tales of Sevastopol" he writes about the carnage of the Crimean War that he saw as a young officer in the Russian army. Tolstoy wondered at the extraordinary courage of the common soldiers risking their lives to defend the city: "the kind of men who are capable of living calmly under a hail of shot and shell … in conditions of constant, toil, vigilance and filth. Men cannot endure such awful conditions for the sake of a Cross or a title, or under threat of punishment: some other, more exalted reason must prompt them. And this reason is a feeling that is rarely displayed, shyly hidden by the Russian, but nonetheless entrenched deep within each—love for the mother country."The siege of Sevastopol (or Sebastopol, as the British and French spelled it) went on for almost a year before, finally, it fell. And yet, when the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire, the Austrian Empire, Sardinia (the most powerful kingdom of Italy), and Prussia signed a peace agreement with the Russian Empire in Paris the following spring, Sevastopol was just another bargaining chip for the monarchs of Europe to trade on the map, and it went back to the tsar.On December 9 this year, there will be an echo of that history when world leaders sit down for one more peace agreement in Paris. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, to try to decide the future of the war in Eastern Ukraine, or Donbas, that began in the spring of 2014 after pro-Russian President Victor Yanukovych was toppled and Russia unilaterally took Crimea away from Ukraine. According to Russia, taking Crimea was not an aggressive act of annexation, it was "reunification" with the motherland, which is one reason history weighs so heavily here, where the air once stank of Russian blood.* * *SHIFTING SOVEREIGNTY* * *In Soviet times, in 1954, Crimea was assigned to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, it kept the peninsula. Under an agreement brokered in part by the United States, Kyiv agreed to give up the many nuclear weapons left in its possession in exchange for guarantees that Russia would "respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine." But that was in 1994. In 2014, Putin simply ignored the agreement and, after the annexation of Crimea he supported separatists in eastern Ukraine to give the government in Kyiv something else to worry about. So far, almost 14,000 people have been killed in the Donbas war. President Zelensky has lamented the fact that Crimea has never been part of the efforts to settle the Donbas conflict in the earlier Minsk accords or what are called "the Normandy format" talks, even though they are now held in Paris. He said recently he hopes that the upcoming round will offer "at least" the chance to bring Crimea back into the discussion. But in truth, as Putin certainly expected, much of the world is coming to accept Russia's annexation of Crimea as irreversible, a fait accompli. The latest incremental appeasement of Moscow: Apple now shows Crimea as Russian territory on its map and weather apps—but only when viewed from Russia.More troubling for Kyiv and many of its supporters in the West, U.S. President Donald Trump, who wants to be friends with Putin and, we recently learned, really does not like Ukraine, seems to be leaving the door open to U.S. and international acceptance of Moscow's dominion over Crimea. Russia was expelled from the G8 in 2014 as one of several measures, including economic sanctions, taken by Europe and the U.S. to punish the Kremlin for its aggression. In August this year, Trump argued Russia should be let back into the G8 club, suggesting the only reason it was expelled was because an "embarrassed" President Barack Obama was "outsmarted by Putin" when Crimea was "taken away from President Obama," as if it had somehow belonged to the United States in the first place. * * *NAME CHANGES* * *Through the generations, Crimea's heroes and its perspectives on their place in history have ebbed and flowed like the waves of the Black Sea. Three decades after the end of the Crimean War, the Russian Empire named a street after Admiral Nakhimov. But 34 years after that, the Bolsheviks' October Revolution destroyed the old Russian Empire and the street lost its name again. Our guide pointed at Grafskaya Dock, another historical spot in Sevastopol. After years of fighting, the Reds had pushed Russian nobility and the White Army south to Crimea. Almost a century ago, on a chilly, grim November morning in 1920, Russian General Petr Vrangel, the last commander of the White Army, arrived at Grafskaya Dock to inspect the ships with noble families waiting to flee from the Bolsheviks' terror. The British and French military now helped to evacuate more than 150,000 Russian refugees and soldiers to Turkey. The Bolsheviks for a time renamed Nakhimov Street after Leon Trotsky, but he was soon out of favor, out of Russia, and murdered in exile in Mexico. And when the Soviets finally renamed the street after Nakhimov in 1946, there was very little of Sevastopol left.During World War II, Nazi aviation destroyed the city, leaving fewer than a dozen of the buildings that dated to the reign of Catherine the Great. Soviet leader Josef Stalin then reconstructed Sevastopol's white edifices.* * *THE SECOND COLD WAR* * *There was no place to exchange foreign currency on the weekend before Unity Day, a Russian national holiday. One could hardly think of another place in Europe where a foreign tourist loaded with U.S. dollars and euros could not pay for a hotel. "Thank the anti-Russian sanctions," said the receptionist at the elegant Hotel Sevastopol. Since 2014, the flow of Western tourists to Sevastopol has been fading away but the city museums are still filled with Russian–and Ukrainian–visitors. In spite of the Donbas conflict and the U.S. and European Union economic sanctions, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian tourists still travel to Crimea every year; in all, more than six million tourists visited Crimea last year. But American writers and historians who come here experience something of the Cold War, or rather "the Second Cold War," as our Sevastopol taxi driver joked. Discussions with American journalists by Russian border guards are routine at the checkpoint where one crosses the line from Ukraine; and it can take some time. A majority of Crimea's tourists violate Ukrainian law, which considers Crimea to be Ukrainian territory. Instead they fly here from Russian airports or drive across the new bridge opened in May 2018 which Moscow now uses to assert control over the militarily and commercially important Sea of Azov. * * *TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES* * *On a recent weekend, dozens of teenagers in blue uniforms who had visited the former Soviet Pioneer Camp Artek came to explore Panorama, the Crimean War museum.Every day Alexander Kuts shows visitors around the museum and speaks of Crimea's tragic and heroic history. "If you want to know why so much blood spilled on this land, just look at the map: if you control Crimea, you control the Black Sea," he tells them. Battles have torn this place apart since the 2nd century BC, when Greeks founded the port city of Chersonesus in the outskirts of what is modern Sevastopol. People died in battles for the peninsula during the Crimean Khanate from 1441 until Catherine the Great's conquest in 1783 and beyond. In living memory, more than 250,000 Soviet soldiers died defending Sevastopol against the Nazi German and Romanian onslaught in 1941-1942. But the central attraction of the museum is a giant painting of the 349-day defense of Sevastopol and the high Malakoff redoubt. We keep turning back to pages from the 1850s. Two great writers, the British journalist William Howard Russell and the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy had learned from the horrors of Crimea just how much they hated war and the deadly follies of those who prosecuted it.Kings, sultans, tsars, emperors and empresses—they were playing a game of nations with rules inherited from conflicts 40 years, 50 years or a century before. But the death-dealing technology of artillery and riflery had changed dramatically, but the care and feeding of soldiers had not. The combined death toll on all sides in the Crimean War would reach 900,000, mostly from disease and neglect.Crimea in 1854 was right on the cusp of what would become modern industrialized warfare, the kind that killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of Americans five years later in the Civil War and reached its apotheosis in the vast carnage of World War I and World War II.How had the Crimean war begun? With the great powers of the time colliding in the Holy Land.Tsar Nicholas I, harboring imperial ambitions similar to those that Voltaire had admired in Catherine the Great, wanted to push into Ottoman realms, and demanded protection for Orthodox Christians on the territories controlled by the Sultan as well as privileges for the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, especially in Jerusalem. In November 1853, as tensions mounted, a Russian naval squadron attacked and soundly defeated Ottoman warships at anchor in an Anatolian harbor. The French, British, and Sardinians, concerned about broader Russian ambitions, decided to throw their weight behind the Turks. The two great witnesses of the Crimean war, Tolstoy on the Russian side and William Howard Russell with the British and French, both described the suffering of the soldiers, but it would be Russell's account of the incredible bravery and utter folly of a British charge directly into the mouths of Russian heavy artillery during the battle of Balaclava in October 1854 that electrified the British public. A vague order issued by a geriatric British general had been misinterpreted by the commander on the ground, who led his men to certain death. The British Light Horse cavalry had begun its advance at "ten minutes past eleven," Russell wrote at the beginning of his account of his battle. The Russian guns decimated them, but still they charged on. "The first line is broken, it is joined by the second, they never hold or check their speed an instant," wrote Russell, who could see the battle clearly from a hillside among the commanding officers. "With diminished ranks, thinned by those 30 guns, which the Russians had laid with the most deadly accuracy, with a halo of flashing steel above their heads, and with a cheer that was many a noble fellow's death-cry, they flew into the smoke of the batteries, but ere they were lost from view the plain was strewn with their bodies and with the carcasses of horses. … At thirty-five minutes past eleven not a British soldier, except the dead and dying, was left in front of those bloody Muscovite guns."Ever since, schoolchildren in Britain and in the United States as well have read the pounding rhythms of Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" as a paean to bravery, even though the battle was a paradigm of stupidity."Forward, the Light Brigade!"Was there a man dismayed?Not though the soldier knew Someone had blundered. Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.Vineyards grow today all over the field where October 25, 1854, the cavalry swept past Russell "in all the pride and splendor of war" to inspire with their sacrifice the British and American imagination. But few in Crimea know the exact location for the memorial at the scene. A small white stela is hiding among the rows of grapes. The fading words on the monument's foundation commemorate "officers and men" who charged with the Light Brigade at Balaclava. The plaque was installed here in October 2004, the 150th anniversary of the battle, by His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, but judging by the peeling paint, the monument has been abandoned ever since. Compared to the French and Turkish cemeteries here, the British graveyard looks absolutely heartbreaking: an ugly, trashed-filled field surrounded with small private homes.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. 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| Tories' Brexit outcasts take on Johnson as independents Posted: 30 Nov 2019 06:36 PM PST  Only a few months ago, David Gauke was a Conservative minister. Now he's standing in Britain's upcoming election as an independent, hoping to deprive the party and its prime minister of victory. "With a majority, Boris Johnson would be able to proceed with a reckless course of action over Brexit," Gauke told AFP he handed out leaflets on a damp afternoon in Tring, a market town in southern England.
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| Twitter bans House candidate who suggested Ilhan Omar should be hanged Posted: 30 Nov 2019 05:48 PM PST  Twitter may be reluctant to crack down on politicians' tweets, but it still has its limits -- and one political candidate may have crossed the line. The social media giant has permanently banned Republican House candidate Danielle Stella's personal and campaign accounts for "repeated violations" of Twitter's policies. While it didn't elaborate on what those violations were, Stella's campaign suggested that her potential rival, incumbent representative Ilhan Omar, should be "tried for #treason and hanged" if she was found to have passed sensitive info to Iran through Qatar. That claim is unsupported by evidence. The posts may have violated Twitter policies forbidding the promotion of violence or threats.
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