| Baghdadi Is Dead. The War on Terror Will Create Another. Posted: 27 Oct 2019 05:11 PM PDT  GettyAfter U.S. special operations forces dealt a violent end to the leader of the premier jihadist group in Iraq, the president hailed the importance of the moment. The man was a monster, the president declared, responsible for a regional campaign of devastation, even the beheadings of American hostages. True, the killing would not mean the end of the broader war, the president noted, but the U.S. had dealt "a severe blow" to the jihadists. George W. Bush said this in 2006, following the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. After U.S. special operations forces dealt a violent end to the leader of the global jihadist movement, the president hailed the importance of the moment. The man was a monster, the president declared, responsible for a global campaign of devastation, and particularly the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. True, the killing would not mean the end of the broader war, the president noted, but the U.S. had reaped "the most significant achievement to date" against the jihadists. Barack Obama said this in 2011, following the killing of Osama bin Laden. After U.S. special operations forces ensured a violent end for the leader of a new global jihadist movement, the president hailed the importance of the moment. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was a monster, the president declared, responsible for a global campaign of devastation, even the beheadings of American hostages. True, the killing would not mean the end of the broader war, the president noted, but it showed that "these savage monsters will never escape their fate." Donald Trump said this on Sunday, following the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.Trump Turns Baghdadi's Killing Into a Reality ShowThese three fatal milestones all point to the strategic incoherence within a global war that has now lasted an entire generation. No one, neither the Trump administration nor its critics, believes that the so-called Islamic State is finished because al-Baghdadi is dead. As proficient as U.S. special operators have become at manhunting these past 18 years, and as central as manhunting has been during that time, there is no campaign plan, not even a theory, by which the killings of jihadist leaders knit up into a lasting victory. Asking for one would require reckoning with the catastrophic failure represented by a war that only perpetuates itself. There would be no Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had Bush not invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003. That war created an opportunity for a mass murderer, Zarqawi, to construct an al-Qaeda franchise more bloodthirsty than even the one bin Laden created. Even after Zarqawi's 2006 death, Bin Laden could never rein in al-Qaeda in Iraq, documents recovered after the 2011 raid on his Abbottabad compound showed, and he grew particularly dyspeptic over the offshoot's clear desire to declare a caliphate. Some believe bin Laden is the real victor of the war on terrorism, since he succeeded at provoking the U.S. into endless war in unfamiliar terrain. But the rise of ISIS showed bin Laden lost control of the movement he started. Bin Laden did not believe the time was right for a caliphate. Baghdadi took advantage of both the Syrian civil war and Obama's 2011 withdrawal from Iraq to make the caliphate a brutal fascist reality, complete with misogynist enslavement and opportunities for men to find meaning through sanctified violence. When al-Qaeda and the elder generation of jihadist theorists opposed ISIS, Baghdadi's organization—now an actual state, complete with an army, and a flag—had no problem attacking them. Baghdadi was less visible than bin Laden, rebuking the leadership style of a previous generation and signaling that the caliphate was more important than he was. The caliphate was ISIS' triumph over bin Laden, whose children ate his revolution. This history matters because it shows that the expansive war the U.S. launched does not fight against a static enemy. It generates enemies – the slain al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki is another example – and provides opportunities for new ones to arise. Baghdadi himself experienced four years of captivity in the U.S. detention facility at Camp Bucca in Iraq before his 2009 release. Trump on Sunday recalled the horror of seeing American detainees dressed in orange jumpsuits without recalling that ISIS chose the orange jumpsuits to evoke the ones worn by detainees at Guantanamo Bay.No one should think the fall of the caliphate, let alone Baghdadi's death, means that U.S.' jihadist adversaries have achieved their final form. Whatever else the war on terrorism is, its history shows it yielding further generations of jihadists as long as there are American forces hunting, surveilling, and killing Muslims worldwide. Part of that dynamic involves those newer generations emerging when U.S. forces pull back but leave intact the apparatus of the war on terrorism—the drone strikes, the surveillance dragnets, the lethal raids—as happened in Iraq in 2011 and, very likely, now in Syria in 2019. Maintaining that apparatus is supposed to hedge against withdrawals from agonizing ground conflicts. Yet at each turn of the war's ratchet, the jihadists have only come back in more violent form and greater mass, the exact opposite of what any war is supposed to achieve. Trump Says U.S. Troops Have Quit Syria. It's Not True.Trump's pullback from northeastern Syria, like from the Forever War more broadly, was never total. Like Obama before him, Trump's rhetoric about wishing to be done with endless wars obscures the reality of how he prosecutes them. Trump escalated drone strikes in the undeclared regions of the war on terrorism and, in Afghanistan, escalated air strikes, with a commensurate rise in civilian deaths. Syria has long displayed the decadence of a strategically exhausted war on terrorism: Obama invaded without congressional approval—to no real congressional outrage—and Trump has made the residual mission one of plundering oil and, in the background, threatening Iran. Trump made clear last week that he expects "Turkey, Syria and others in the region" to do the work of preventing an ISIS return. All that means ISIS, in whatever future form, has a new lease on life. A series of ISIS jailbreaks occurred after Trump's green light for the Turkish invasion led the United States' Syrian Kurdish partners to prioritize their own survival. Like Baghdadi out of Camp Bucca, new generations of ISIS leadership may have made their way out of the Syrian prisons. The U.S. is hardly the only actor that matters here: the unconcluded Syrian civil war helps set the context for whatever comes next, and the U.S. has never been able to shape events within that war. Nicholas Rasmussen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center from the dawn of the anti-ISIS war until 2017, tweeted that Baghdadi's death was a "big blow" to ISIS but "may not leave us safer from ISIS attack." Trump's pullback from northeastern Syria has troubled American strategists. The persistence of the war on terrorism, which set the context for that pullback, troubles them less. At a Reuters forum in September, I asked former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis why military officers never put forward a theory of victory in the war on terrorism. He responded that terrorism was a persistent reality, "an ambient threat," and so was an American response. "This desire to have the war over, I understand it, but this is a war that springs from root causes that will have to be addressed at the same time we're fighting," Mattis said. "It will be there throughout our lifetimes."Terrorism, as old as human history, will indeed be present throughout our lifetimes. But that elides the choice America makes to wage a war against it that only makes jihadism worse. While the bombs drop, American officials never get around to addressing Mattis' undefined "root causes," because some of those root causes are the bombs themselves. And all that means Baghdadi's death gains the U.S. as much as the broader war on terrorism does: ultimately nothing, only a fleeting feeling of national pride briefly concealing the worsening wreckage of a generation. Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet 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.
|
| Xi Uses China’s Biggest Annual Meeting for Politics, Not Economy Posted: 27 Oct 2019 04:13 PM PDT ![Xi Uses China's Biggest Annual Meeting for Politics, Not Economy]( "Xi Uses China's Biggest Annual Meeting for Politics, Not Economy") (Bloomberg) -- Sign up for Next China, a weekly email on where the nation stands now and where it's going next.China's economic challenges have proliferated in the almost two years since Xi Jinping last convened a full meeting of the Communist Party. But politics remain at the top of his agenda.The party's Central Committee is expected to gather behind closed doors Monday for the first time since February 2018 -- the longest stretch the 200-plus-member body has gone without meeting since China began its reform era four decades ago. And Xi looks poised to pick up where he left off: solidifying control over the ruling party and the country of almost 1.4 billion people.While such "plenums" are closely guarded affairs, state media have said party leaders would make "greater efforts in sticking to and improving the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, as well as strengthening China's system and capacity for governance." That arcane language suggests a sweeping agenda focused on further centralizing power around the president that may include reshuffling some key leadership roles when it ends on Thursday."Xi has defined China's governing system as really incredibly broad, encompassing everything from how the party manages politics to the economy to society to culture to itself to the environment," said Trey McArver, co-founder of Beijing-based research firm Trivium China. "It could end up being a relatively comprehensive or broad-based approach to everything."Xi has repeatedly warned against complacency in recent months, complaining in a speech last month that some cadres were "weak-kneed and unwilling to fight" against the party's growing and long-term challenges. China is projected to see the slowest growth in gross domestic product in almost three decades this year -- a concern made worse by the trade war with U.S. President Donald Trump.Some observers had expected this plenum to focus more on economic policies, since the one last year also dealt with politics. While a rash of negative economic data have raised speculation that the party leadership might take more decisive action to boost domestic demand, Xi also needs to make sure the party's -- and thus his -- rule can endure the coming downturn."We'd like to see how the big topics such as growth, stability and reforms are being prioritized," said Peiqian Liu, China economist at Natwest Markets Plc. in Singapore. "For instance, the pledge for better party building might lead to higher confidence and greater acceptance of slower growth among the top leaders, and that local officials can be more focused on reforms."'Low Expectations'The last time the Central Committee met 20 months ago, Xi secured the body's blessing to repeal constitutional term limits keeping him from serving as president past 2023. The move represented one of the party's sharpest departures from the model of collective leadership embraced after Mao Zedong's tumultuous and personality-driven rule.Still, plenums are rarely that dramatic and the results often take months or even years to come into focus. The outcome will probably first be detailed in a jargon-laden communique released after the meeting.Although the communique may provide important signals about where China's political system and its economy are headed, it's unlikely to answer key questions such as how the leadership will manage slowing growth, mounting debt and a rapidly aging population.China's list of economic headaches includes the downdraft from the trade war with the U.S, factory-price deflation, a fragile financial system and spiraling food costs in the wake of a catastrophic disease epidemic among the nation's pig herd. Even so, policy makers are wary of embarking on large-scale stimulus measures for fear of resurgent debt levels or bursting the bubble in the property market."We have pretty low expectations of this plenum producing a decision that will be meaningful for markets and investors," said Tom Rafferty, principle China economist for the Economist Intelligence Unit. "What they are looking for is a clearer economic road map for the 2020s, but this plenum is not going to provide that."(Updates with length of meeting in third paragraph. An earlier version corrected a deck headline to show the gap between meetings was long.)\--With assistance from Jeffrey Black.To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Peter Martin in Beijing at pmartin138@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Scott at bscott66@bloomberg.net, Daniel Ten KateFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
|
| The tip, the raid, the reveal: The takedown of al-Baghdadi Posted: 27 Oct 2019 03:42 PM PDT  The helicopters flew low and fast into the night, ferrying U.S. special forces to a compound where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was hiding in Syria. Half a world away, President Donald Trump watched the raid in real time via a video link as troops blasted into the hideout and sent the most-wanted militant running the last steps of his life. The daring raid was the culmination of years of steady intelligence-gathering work — and 48 hours of hurry-up planning once Washington got word that al-Baghdadi would be at a compound in northwestern Syria.
|
| Raid Gives Trump Timely Win But Unlikely to Slow Impeachment Posted: 27 Oct 2019 02:12 PM PDT  (Bloomberg) -- An audacious military raid that ended with the death of the U.S. government's most-wanted terrorist delivered Donald Trump a political boost just when he needed it most.Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's demise provided the president at least a brief respite from the House's accelerating impeachment inquiry, and also served as a measure of redemption after a messy retreat of U.S. forces in Syria that had drawn criticism from both parties.Al-Baghdadi's death during a U.S. special forces raid drew measured praise from Democrats but surely won't eclipse impeachment, which looks increasingly likely to end with Trump's trial in the Senate. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called on Trump to brief Congress on the Syria operation, after the president said he specifically didn't tell her in advance out of concern the mission would be leaked.The raid also served to highlight longstanding tensions between Trump and the U.S. intelligence community, which he has repeatedly criticized for its conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on his behalf. In this instance, the nation's spies delivered the president an accomplishment, a fact he acknowledged with a back-handed compliment."When we use our intelligence correctly, what we can do is incredible," Trump said, after first thanking Russia and Turkey for their help with the al-Baghdadi mission. "When we waste our time with intelligence, that hurts our country because we had poor leadership at the top, that's not good." Accelerating InquiryTrump has repeatedly questioned how Democrats can impeach him if he's doing a good job, and the al-Baghdadi raid -- which the president ordered without hesitation, according to a person familiar with the matter -- may help that argument. On Sunday, voters watched on live television as the president described a risky and yet near-flawless military operation that ended with the death of a man the U.S. holds responsible for a string of atrocities, including the capture and execution of several Americans.But momentum toward impeachment is so great that even Trump's finest moment as commander-in-chief is unlikely to derail it. Last week's testimony by senior diplomat William Taylor -- who described a secret, alternative U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine directed by Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani -- has accelerated Democrats' efforts. Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, said Taylor's testimony left lawmakers with "smoking gun sitting on top of smoking gun." Public HearingsClosed-door interviews of witnesses are expected to conclude in about two weeks, and will be followed by public hearings. Lawmakers in both parties now view an eventual House vote on articles of impeachment as inevitable.Sunday's announcement included familiar Trumpian notes: he teased the news on Twitter the night before -- "Something very big has just happened!" -- and held an ad hoc news conference after his statement in the White House Diplomatic Room, speaking for nearly 50 minutes.In a comment that raised some eyebrows, Trump declared al-Baghdadi's death more significant than the killing of Osama Bin Laden, a hallmark achievement of his predecessor, Barack Obama, that the former president announced in about a 10-minute televised address. "This is the biggest there is, this is the worst ever," Trump said.He also claimed on Sunday that he had recommended the U.S. kill Bin Laden in a book he published in 2000, "The America We Deserve," and said "if they would have listened to me, a lot of things would have been different."But Bin Laden is mentioned just once in the book, described as one of a number of American adversaries. Dramatic Re-TellingTrump recounted the Syria raid with camera-ready flair. He described American forces flying in eight helicopters at low altitude over foreign territory, suppressing "local gunfire" at the site of the operation, blowing a hole in the wall of the Islamic State leader's compound and chasing their target -- whom Trump said was "whimpering and crying" -- into a dead-end tunnel, where he detonated an explosive vest, killing himself and three children and injuring a "beautiful" American military dog."He died like a dog; he died like a coward; the world is now a much safer place. God bless America," Trump said.As Trump spoke, his social media director Dan Scavino posted a picture on Twitter of the president, Vice President Mike Pence, National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien and Defense Secretary Mark Esper in the White House Situation Room on Saturday with military leaders. Scavino said the picture showed them "monitoring developments as U.S. Special Operations forces close in on notorious ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's compound."The photo is a study in contrasts with a similar image from the Bin Laden raid that is now famous, in which Obama, former Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sit at a crowded conference table with military and national security officials observing the operation.Obama and Biden were dressed casually, sitting to the right of a general at the head of the table. In Trump's picture, he, Pence, O'Brien and Esper are all in suits and the president is center of the frame, with military leaders to the side.Trump has previously said that Obama shouldn't have received credit for Bin Laden's death.Islamic State's FutureNo American troops were injured in the al-Baghdadi operation. They rescued 11 children in the Syria compound and turned them over to the care of "someone we understand," Trump said, while killing an unspecified number of adults. The president indicated some adults in the compound were captured and said some "highly sensitive material" about Islamic State was retrieved.While the mission was a success, it won't mean dramatic change for Islamic State, which has become a highly decentralized network since losing its territory to a U.S. campaign begun under Obama, James Stavridis, former supreme allied commander of NATO, said on ABC's "This Week." He added that the region has become more destabilized by Trump's withdrawal of U.S. forces from an area along Turkey's border that the Turks subsequently invaded earlier this month.Stavridis recalled that there were hopes a 2006 air strike that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, would be the beginning of the end of al-Qaeda. It wasn't, and Islamic State would eventually rise in western Iraq."Unfortunately, this is not the end of the Islamic State," Stavridis said. "But it is a very good day."Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota made a similar comment on CBS's "Face the Nation," saying the "take-down of a very, very dangerous terrorist" doesn't mean Islamic State can't regroup. The raid also raises questions about decision-making related to pulling troops from Syria and broader foreign policy, said Klobuchar, a 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful. She said Trump's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement, a Russian weapons pact and the Paris climate accord were "very bad decisions." To contact the reporters on this story: Jennifer Jacobs in Washington at jjacobs68@bloomberg.net;Josh Wingrove in Washington at jwingrove4@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Bill FariesFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
|
| Trump says US forces cornered IS leader in dead-end tunnel Posted: 27 Oct 2019 02:06 PM PDT  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi , the shadowy leader of the Islamic State group who presided over its global jihad and became arguably the world's most wanted man, died after U.S. special operators cornered him during a raid in Syria, President Donald Trump said Sunday. "Last night, the United States brought the world's No. 1 terrorist leader to justice," Trump announced at the White House, providing graphic details of al-Baghdadi's final moments at the helm of the militant organization. In a national address, Trump described the nighttime airborne raid in Syria's northwestern Idlib province, with American special operations forces flying over heavily militarized territory controlled by multiple nations and forces.
|
| Merkel Coalition Battered as Germans Turn on Mainstream Parties Posted: 27 Oct 2019 02:05 PM PDT  (Bloomberg) -- Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition faced a renewed setback with a resounding defeat in a state election and its main ally wavering over support for the government.Merkel's Christian Democrats plummeted 11 percentage points from 2014 to 22.5% in an election for state assembly in the eastern state of Thuringia, according to an exit poll by ARD TV on Sunday. At the same time, the populist right-wing AfD more than doubled its standing and was marginally ahead of the CDU at 24%, the poll showed.The Social Democrats, Merkel's junior coalition partner, also lost ground, shedding roughly four percentage points to 8.5%. As a result, the incumbent Left party will no longer have sufficient support to govern Thuringia with its current alliance that also include the Greens.The result in the eastern German state reflects the increasingly splintered political spectrum in Germany, where traditional centrist parties have been losing steadily. The refugee crisis, climate protests, and more recently an economic slowdown and geopolitical tension in Europe's backyard have fueled rifts among and even within political parties."Since 1949, we have not had such a result, where the parties of the democratic center in Germany are unable to form a government," CDU candidate Mike Mohring told reporters in Erfurt Sunday night. "This is a really bitter result."StumbleIt's the latest sign of trouble for Merkel in the twilight of her chancellorship. Europe's largest economy has slowed sharply and will expand only a projected 0.5% this year, compared with 2.5% two years ago. At the same time, her designated successor, Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, has failed to gain traction in her party, while repeatedly stumbling as she seeks to win back voters from the far-right.Kramp-Karrenbauer, who replaced Merkel as chief of the CDU late last year, fueled animosity in the coalition when she proposed a peace-keeping force for northern Syria involving German troops without consulting the SPD."Given the strong showing by the far right, the CDU debate about the best path into the post-Merkel world is set to continue," Carsten Nickel, analyst at Teneo Intelligence in London, wrote in a research note.On Saturday, the SPD failed to end months of debate over whether to leave government. Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, the only candidate who unequivocally backed staying in government, won a first-round party leadership ballot but had only a narrow margin over the runner-up.Candidates of the leftist camp that favor easing Germany's fiscal rigor and exiting the coalition got more than half of the vote, versus Scholz's 22.7%.The run-off vote is scheduled to conclude Nov. 30 and the party is to decide in December whether to stay in the coalition.(Updates with Teneo analyst in eighth paragraph.)\--With assistance from Birgit Jennen.To contact the reporter on this story: Arne Delfs in Berlin at adelfs@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Ben Sills at bsills@bloomberg.net, Raymond Colitt, Tony CzuczkaFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
|
| Analysis: With ISIS death, Trump touts much-needed triumph Posted: 27 Oct 2019 02:05 PM PDT  The killing of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi gave President Donald Trump an undeniable national security triumph and also a much-needed political victory at the most precarious moment of his presidency. Imperiled by an impeachment inquiry and facing fierce foreign policy criticism from within his own party, Trump basked in the win Sunday, at first announcing the raid like so many of his predecessors, with solemnity for the mission in Syria and praise for the brave Americans and allies who carried it out.
|
| Situation Room: 2 photos capture vastly different presidents Posted: 27 Oct 2019 01:35 PM PDT  Photos taken in the White House Situation Room during the killings of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Saturday and of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden eight years earlier capture the vastly different styles of two American presidents. The White House on Sunday released a photo of President Donald Trump with five of his senior national security advisers monitoring the Saturday night operation against al-Baghdadi in Syria. The photo invites comparisons to the Situation Room photo released by President Barack Obama's White House following the May 2011 operation in which Navy Seals killed bin Laden.
|
| The Latest: Parents want to know more about daughter's fate Posted: 27 Oct 2019 01:29 PM PDT  The Prescott, Arizona parents of slain American hostage Kayla Mueller say they have mixed emotions about the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Mueller's death was reported in February 2015 and U.S. intelligence officials told her family four months later that she was raped repeatedly by al-Baghdadi.
|
| Panic in Pakistani City After 900 Children Test Positive for HIV Posted: 27 Oct 2019 01:09 PM PDT  RATODERO, Pakistan -- Nearly 900 children in the small Pakistani city of Ratodero were bedridden early this year with raging fevers that resisted treatment. Parents were frantic, with everyone seeming to know a family with a sick child.In April, the disease was pinned down and the diagnosis was devastating: The city was the epicenter of an HIV outbreak that overwhelmingly affected children. Health officials initially blamed the outbreak on a single pediatrician, saying he was reusing syringes.Since then, about 1,100 citizens have tested positive for the virus, or one in every 200 residents. Almost 900 are younger than 12. Health officials believe the real numbers are probably much higher, as only a fraction of the population has been tested so far.Gulbahar Shaikh, the local journalist who broke the news of the epidemic to residents of his city and the nation in April, watched as his neighbors and relatives rushed to clinics to line up and test for the virus.When officials descended on Ratodero to investigate, they discovered that many of the infected children had gone to the same pediatrician, Muzaffar Ghanghro, who served the city's poorest families and appeared to be at the center of the outbreak.Shaikh panicked -- that was his children's pediatrician. He rushed his family to be tested, and his 2-year-old daughter was confirmed to have the virus, which is the cause of AIDS."It was devastating," said Shaikh, a 44-year-old television journalist in Ratodero, a city of 200,000 whose residents are some of Pakistan's poorest, with high illiteracy rates.Ghanghro was the cheapest option in this city, charging 20 cents a visit for the many parents here who earn less than $60 a month.The pediatrician treated all six of Imtiaz Jalbani's children, four of whom contracted HIV. His two youngest, 14-month-old Rida and 3-year-old Sameena, have died.Jalbani, a laborer, said he first grew alarmed when he saw Ghanghro rummage through the trash for a syringe to use on Ali, his 6-year-old son, who is also infected. When Jalbani protested, he said, Ghanghro snapped at him and told him he was using an old syringe because Jalbani was too poor to pay for a new one."He said, 'If you don't want my treatment, go to another doctor,'" Jalbani said. "My wife and I had to starve ourselves to pay for the medicine."Ghanghro was arrested and charged by the police with negligence, manslaughter and causing unintentional harm. But he has not yet been convicted, and in an interview with The New York Times, he insisted he is innocent and has never reused syringes.The doctor recently renewed his medical certificate and now works as a general practitioner at a government hospital on the outskirts of Ratodero, despite laws that make the reuse of syringes an offense that is not eligible for bail.Health officials now say that Ghanghro is unlikely to be the sole cause of the outbreak. Visiting health workers saw many cases of doctors reusing syringes and IV needles. Barbers take the same razor to the faces of multiple customers, they said, and roadside dentists crack away at patients' teeth on sidewalks with unsterilized tools.Such unhygienic practices are prevalent across Pakistan and probably the leading cause of the country's surging rates of HIV infection, according to health officials. But Ratodero is so poor that such practices are likely to be much more common, as residents struggle to make ends meet and scrimp wherever they can.At first, the government was slow to respond to Ratodero's outbreak and barely had the resources to test residents and treat the sick. Teams of international health workers from various countries came to the city to help and the World Health Organization donated hundreds of testing kits.Testing centers were set up in government buildings, while dozens of yellow tents sprouted up across the city to deal with the influx of terrified residents eager to be tested.Still, with not even a quarter of the city's population yet tested for the virus, officials are dreading that the real number of infected is much higher than the 1,112 confirmed cases so far.The daughter of Shaikh, the journalist, has become an outcast in the community, he said. Education about the virus is sparse and many fear contracting it by touch. Relatives will not hug the girl and other children will not play with her.At school, the sick children are segregated from the healthy, forced to sit on one side of the classroom."My wife and I, fortunately, we are literate. We hug and love our daughter. But our relatives stopped touching her and are now reluctant to visit us," said Shaikh, whose daughter is now responding well to treatment.Five months on, the panic of the outbreak still hangs over Ratodero. Doctors and paramedics are struggling to cope with the number of HIV-positive patients, while residents are still lining up to be tested.Farzana Bibi was one of those waiting in a long line that snaked hundreds of yards out the door of a government hospital. She had just had her 3-year-old son tested after he had run a fever for three months, and doctors had confirmed that he was HIV-positive. She held his hand as they waited in line to receive medicine for his treatment, a desperate frown on her face."It seems it is God's affliction on us," she said. "How could so many of our children have such a terrible disease?"The outbreak in Ratodero reflects a nationwide uptick in HIV cases, despite a global decline of new infections.From 2010 to 2018, the number of HIV-positive people in Pakistan nearly doubled, to about 160,000, according to estimates by UNAIDS, the United Nations task force that specializes in HIV and AIDS. During that time, the number of new infections jumped 38% in those 15 to 24.The real number is likely higher; much of the population goes untested, while only about 10% of people thought to be HIV-positive are being treated.The country spends very little on its efforts to counter HIV and AIDS and is nearly entirely dependent on support from other countries for its programs, whether for funding to staff testing centers or to provide retroviral drugs to counter the virus."With competing priorities, HIV and AIDS is at the back seat of the government's agenda," said Maria Elena Filio-Borromeo, the UNAIDS director for Pakistan and Afghanistan.Since 2003, there have been eight HIV outbreaks in Pakistan. And Ratodero had been the site of one before: In 2016, an outbreak hit some 1,500 adult men who had engaged in sex with infected prostitutes, officials said.But this year's outbreak in Ratodero is the first time that children have been the most frequent victims on such a large scale, Filio-Borromeo said.To counter the outbreak, Pakistani authorities in May began shutting down the clinics of unqualified doctors and illegal blood banks -- many of which were found to be reusing syringes. Months later, however, some of those clinics had since reopened, locals say."Unless these quack doctors, barbers and dentists are not checked, the number of incidents of HIV infection will continue going up," said Dr. Imran Akbar Arbani, a local doctor, who had tipped off Shaikh about the outbreak as he also alerted government authorities.In February, Arbani started noticing dozens of children coming to his office with persistent fevers, from newborns to 8-year-olds."In Pakistan, the government does not act unless there is a national uproar sparked by media coverage," Arbani said, explaining why he was quick to tell Shaikh, the journalist, when he realized the scale of infection.At least 35 children have died in the area since April 25, according to Arbani.The effect on Ratodero's social fabric has been grim.In May, one man strangled his HIV-positive wife to death.And in June, residents in another town discovered their neighbor tied to a tree by her family, after she had tested positive for the virus. The family said they had bound her to prevent her from spreading the virus to the rest of the town.After public outcry and police intervention, the family untied her. She now lives in an isolated room in the house, her every movement monitored by her family.Shaikh said he had sold all his wife's jewelry and borrowed money to afford the treatment his daughter needs."But how will the children from very poor families live?" he asked. "At the beginning, there was attention and an outcry, the patients were in the spotlight. Now, they are nearly forgotten."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
|
| Islamic State leader leaves a legacy of terror Posted: 27 Oct 2019 12:54 PM PDT  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi sought to establish a new Islamic "caliphate" across Syria and Iraq, but he might be remembered more as the ruthlessly calculating militant leader of the Islamic State group who brought terror to the heart of Europe and set up a short-lived organization so extreme that it was shunned even by al-Qaida. One of the few senior IS commanders still at large after two years of steady battlefield losses, al-Baghdadi died Saturday when he detonated his suicide vest in a tunnel while being pursued by U.S. forces north of Idlib, Syria, killing himself and three of his children, U.S. President Donald Trump announced Sunday. "He didn't die a hero, he died a coward, crying, whimpering and screaming," Trump said at the White House, adding that the U.S. had al-Baghdadi under surveillance for weeks.
|
| EU Proposes Brexit Extension to Jan. 31 Ahead of Envoy Talks Posted: 27 Oct 2019 12:47 PM PDT  (Bloomberg) -- Follow @Brexit, sign up to our Brexit Bulletin, and tell us your Brexit story. The European Union is proposing to extend the deadline for Brexit by three months to Jan. 31, according to a draft declaration seen by Bloomberg that will be discussed by envoys in Brussels on Monday.Under the proposal, the U.K. would be able to leave the EU earlier -- on Nov. 30 or Dec. 31 -- if both sides ratify the divorce deal in time. It excludes any potential to renegotiate the withdrawal agreement and requires the U.K. to meet its EU obligations in full during the extension.EU diplomats are due to meet at 10 a.m. in Brussels to discuss the proposal. It's possible that, just as on Friday, not all countries will agree. French President Emmanuel Macron blocked the EU's attempt to delay Brexit for three months, insisting instead on a one-month delay to Nov. 30.The bloc has said it wants to resolve the issue of an extension without calling an emergency summit, and said Friday a final decision would be announced by Tuesday.The meeting of envoys will take place hours before British politicians vote on Boris Johnson's bid for an early general election on Dec. 12. The U.K. prime minister looks likely to fall short of the necessary two-thirds majority in the House of Commons, with opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reiterating on Sunday that he won't back the plan unless the threat of a no-deal Brexit is completely off the table.Johnson has made the ratification of his Brexit deal with Brussels contingent on MPs backing an early election, with the legislation needed to put the withdrawal agreement into U.K. law paused until they do so.(Updates with new potential Brexit dates in second paragraph.)To contact the reporters on this story: Stuart Biggs in London at sbiggs3@bloomberg.net;Nikos Chrysoloras in Brussels at nchrysoloras@bloomberg.net;Ian Wishart in Brussels at iwishart@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Tony CzuczkaFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
|
| AfD candidate compared to Hitler inflicts crushing losses on Merkel’s party in regional vote Posted: 27 Oct 2019 12:31 PM PDT  The nationalist Alternative for Germany party (AfD) made sweeping gains in regional elections on Sunday, inflicting heavy losses on Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU). Björn Höcke, a politician who has been compared to Hitler by German national television, led the AfD to second place in the eastern state of Thuringia with 23.8 per cent, according to initial projections. The AfD was held off by the Left Party of the current regional prime minister, Bodo Ramelow, which came first with 29.5 per cent. But Mr Höcke beat Mrs Merkel's party into third place in a state it has dominated since German reunification. Following a campaign that saw far-Right death threats against its regional leader, the CDU limped in with just 22.5 per cent - by far its worst ever result in a state where it has come first in every previous election since 1990. With the centre-Left Social Democrats (SPD) also recording their worst ever result in the state with just 8.5 per cent, the mainstream German parties appear to have lost control of Thuringia. Instead the state is now starkly divided between the hard-Left and the hard-Right. The result will be seen as personal vindication for Mr Ramelow, Germany's first regional prime minister from the Left Party, a successor to the former East German communist party. "I see myself strengthened. My party has a clear mandate to form the next government," a triumphant Mr Ramelow said. Bodo Ramelow claimed a mandate to govern after his Left Party came first but fell short of a majority Credit: FILIP SINGER/EPA-EFE/REX But the results were also a success for Mr Höcke, the most controversial figure within the AfD, who more than doubled his party's share of the vote since the last election in 2014. "Gains of more than 100 per cent have never been recorded before in the history of Thuringia," a gleeful Mr Höcke told German television. "This is a sign that a large part of Thuringia says: 'No more!'" Mr Höcke is under observation by German intelligence as a possible threat to the democratic order. In the course of the campaign he was described as a "Nazi" by the regional leader of Mrs Merkel's party, and accused by the German interior minister of personally stoking an atmosphere of anti-Semitism that led to this month's failed far-Right attack on a synagogue in Halle. But he shrugged all that off to inflict heavy losses on his rivals. Although he did not match the 27.5 per cent the AfD won in Saxony earlier this year, he arguably scored a more telling blow by beating the CDU into third place. He will now be expected to look to use that success to strengthen his position against his more moderate rivals within the AfD. For Mrs Merkel's party, the results were disastrous. "For the democratic centre this is a bitter result," Mike Mohring, the regional CDU leader said. "For the first time a centrist government is not possible." Talks on forming a new regional government are expected to be protracted. Although Mr Ramelow claimed a mandate, he failed to secure a majority and there is no obvious coalition. With the CDU refusing to join any coalition that includes the Left Party, and all other parties ruling out any alliance with the AfD, Mr Ramelow may be forced into forming a minority government.
|
| One-year commemoration of synagogue shooting marked Posted: 27 Oct 2019 12:24 PM PDT  The first anniversary of the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history was being marked around the world Sunday with community service projects, music and an online remembrance. The shooting on Oct. 27, 2018, killed 11 worshippers and wounded seven at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood, where a steady stream of people stopped by Sunday. "Today we remember those we lost and come together as a commonwealth to stand united as neighbors," said a Twitter message from Governor Tom Wolf, who is scheduled to attend a memorial service in Pittsburgh on Sunday evening.
|
| Germany's far-right AfD surges in eastern heartland vote Posted: 27 Oct 2019 12:09 PM PDT  Germany's far-right AfD scored strong gains Sunday in the ex-communist eastern state of Thuringia, home to one of its most radical figures, beating mainstream parties such as Angela Merkel's centre-right CDU, exit polls showed. While popular premier Bodo Ramelow's far-left Die Linke party easily won with just under 30 percent, the Alternative for Germany scored at least 23 percent, according to public broadcasters ARD and ZDF, more than doubling its result in the previous election in 2014.
|
| The Latest: Flowers at synagogue honor shooting victims Posted: 27 Oct 2019 12:07 PM PDT  A steady stream of people have been stopping by the closed Pittsburgh synagogue that one year ago was the scene of the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history. Lining the fence outside the Tree of Life synagogue stands 11 flowerpots, each bearing one of the names of a person killed in the attack, which also wounded seven others. Pittsburgh's sports teams are joining other organizations to honor the victims of the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history.
|
| Hong Kong’s Unrest Poses a Threat to China’s Legitimacy Posted: 27 Oct 2019 12:06 PM PDT  An unintended consequence of the current unrest in Hong Kong has been to derail Xi Jinping's proposal to use the "one country, two systems" formula to settle the Taiwan issue.
|
| Timeline of the rise and fall of the Islamic State group Posted: 27 Oct 2019 11:43 AM PDT  Its territorial rule, which at its height in 2014 stretched across nearly a third of both Syria and Iraq, ended in March with a last stand by several hundred of its militants at a tiny Syrian village on the banks of the Euphrates near the border with Iraq. On Sunday, the U.S. said al-Baghdadi had died a day earlier when he detonated his suicide vest in a tunnel while being pursued by U.S. forces in Syria's Idlib province.
|
| The Latest: Macron warns leader's death not end of IS group Posted: 27 Oct 2019 11:18 AM PDT  French President Emmanuel Macron has gone on Twitter to warn that the death of Islamic State group founder and leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a knock for the extremist organization, but not its end. Macron said Sunday the U.S. raid that killed the leader who sought to establish a new Islamic "caliphate" across Syria and Iraq was a "blow against Daesh," using the French term for the group.
|
| Al-Baghdadi's death a blow, but IS has survived other losses Posted: 27 Oct 2019 11:17 AM PDT  The death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi marks the demise of one of the most brutally effective jihadist leaders of modern times — a man who commanded tens of thousands of fighters from around the world, carved out a territorial caliphate in the Middle East and refined a horrific ideology that survives him. U.S. President Donald Trump announced Sunday that al-Baghdadi died in a U.S. raid in Syria after he was chased into a tunnel with three of his children and set off a vest of explosives. Born Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai in 1971 in Samarra, Iraq, he adopted the nom de guerre al-Baghdadi and joined the Sunni insurgency against U.S. forces after the 2003 invasion.
|
| Israel's Gantz, Netanyahu hold talks to break gov't deadlock Posted: 27 Oct 2019 10:52 AM PDT  Israel's prime minister and his main rival opened a new round of unity talks Sunday in the latest effort to break a political stalemate and avoid an unprecedented third parliamentary election in less than a year. Israel has been paralyzed by political deadlock following an inconclusive election last month, with neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud nor the rival Blue and White party in control of a 61-seat majority in parliament. After nearly a month of efforts, Netanyahu last week said he had failed to cobble together a coalition.
|
| Trump criticized for not briefing congressional leadership, thanking Russia first, and vivid description of Baghdadi's death Posted: 27 Oct 2019 10:51 AM PDT ![Trump criticized for not briefing congressional leadership, thanking Russia first, and vivid description of Baghdadi's death]( "Trump criticized for not briefing congressional leadership, thanking Russia first, and vivid description of Baghdadi's death") U.S. lawmakers have responded positively to the military raid that resulted in the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but that doesn't mean President Trump is getting off scot-free in their eyes.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) praised the "heroism" of the military effort, but was not pleased with the fact that Moscow -- whose airspace U.S. forces reportedly flew through to reach Baghdadi's compound -- was allegedly briefed on the raid and congressional leadership was not. Trump said the U.S. told Russia it was entering their airspace for an unspecified reason, although Moscow has since said they were unaware of the operation. Regardless, Pelosi argued she and other leaders of the House should have known what was going on much sooner.> .@SpeakerPelosi calls death of al-Baghdadi "significant" but takes issue with fact that Russians were briefed on raid but congressional leadership was not: pic.twitter.com/IbDWa4E9JZ> > -- Scott Wong (@scottwongDC) October 27, 2019Trump also faced some criticism for thanking Russia first, when listing off the countries or other allies, such as the Kurds, who aided the U.S. in some way en route to the mission's completion.> First country that Trump thanks in Bagdadi mission is Russia \- never misses a chance to curry favor with Putin> > -- Shanlon Wu (@shanlonwu) October 27, 2019Others just didn't love how the president spoke so brazenly about the military operation, in which he described Baghdadi as "whimpering and crying" before he "died like a dog." Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, told Jake Tapper during an appearance Sunday on CNN's State of the Union that he was "a little uncomfortable" with Trump's description, though he did say "there's a value" in making Baghdadi look "less inspirational" to potential followers.
|
| UPDATE 2-Far-right AfD hurts Merkel's CDU in German state vote Posted: 27 Oct 2019 10:48 AM PDT ![UPDATE 2-Far-right AfD hurts Merkel's CDU in German state vote]( "UPDATE 2-Far-right AfD hurts Merkel's CDU in German state vote") The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) beat Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives into third place in Sunday's regional election in the eastern state of Thuringia, in which the incumbent far-left Linke came first, an exit poll showed. The result follows the AfD's successes in the eastern states of Saxony and Brandenburg, where it surged into second place in Sept. 1 elections, and marks a setback for Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU).
|
| Islamic State leader leaves a legacy of terror Posted: 27 Oct 2019 10:46 AM PDT  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi sought to establish an Islamic "caliphate" across Syria and Iraq, but he might be remembered more as the ruthlessly calculating leader of the Islamic State group who brought terror to the heart of Europe and set up a short-lived organization so extreme that it was shunned even by al-Qaida. One of the few senior IS commanders still at large, al-Baghdadi died Saturday when he detonated his suicide vest in a tunnel while being pursued by U.S. forces in Syria's Idlib province, killing himself and three of his children, U.S. President Donald Trump announced Sunday. News of his death came five years after the Islamic State humiliated Iraq's military by seizing nearly a third of the country.
|
| Killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi gives Trump lifeline amid political battle Posted: 27 Oct 2019 10:00 AM PDT  President's supporters framing the impeachment hearings as an unpatriotic attack on a leader keeping America safe * Baghdadi's death comes as new order takes shape in Middle EastDonald Trump makes a statement following reports that US forces attacked and killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Photograph: Jim Bourg/ReutersThe killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has given Donald Trump a lifeline in the midst of a battle for his own political survival and he has grabbed it with both hands.Trump's fifty minute television appearance on Sunday to announce the successful mission began with a sombre announcement before drifting into something more rambling and vainglorious, foreshadowing how he will use it for political ends, and as a club to swing at his political enemies pushing for his impeachment.He stressed that congressional Democratic leaders had been kept out of the loop, as they could not be relied on to keep it secret. Within minutes, his supporters were framing the impeachment hearings as an unpatriotic attack on a leader keeping America safe.Trump celebrated the death of Baghdadi, noting he had "died after running into a dead end tunnel whimpering and crying and screaming". The Isis leader was a "dog", a "gutless animal", and the Isis militants who died alongside him were "losers" and "frightened puppies".It sounded like the dialogue of a triumphant chieftain in a made-for-TV warrior epic, and at one point Trump confirmed he had witnessed it almost as a piece of cinema, "as though you were watching a movie. The technology alone is really great."While the prepared statement focused on the special forces who had carried out the raid, the president's impromptu remarks in answer to reporters' questions, reverted to the Trumpian norm, presenting it as a personal achievement."I kept saying where's Al-Baghdadi," he said. "I have been looking for him for three years." Days earlier, Trump had denigrated his former defence secretary, James Mattis, for being "overrated" and "not tough enough", and boasted: "I captured Isis. Mattis said it would take two years. I captured them in one month."The personality cult that Trump is seeking to construct had already taken on an alarming tone. Over the weekend, his press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, had denounced another former aide turned critic, John Kelly, as "totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president".Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is thought to have been born in the central Iraqi city of Samarra in 1971. Though a weak student, whose poor eyesight disqualified him from joining the Iraqi military, he rose to command al-Qaeda's Iraqi division and then broke away to form Islamic State (Isis).In July 2014, shortly after Isis said it had established a caliphate in Iraq and Syria, Baghdadi delivered a sermon from a mosque in the captured Iraqi city of Mosul. Appearing unmasked for the first time, he declared himself to be the caliph: the political and religious leader of the global Muslim community.His declaration was roundly rejected by almost all Islamic religious authorities but his caliphate became a magnet for thousands of foreign fighters and women. The group attempted not just to hold territory but to administer it like a state, establishing a brutal justice system, collecting taxes and doling out public services.Baghdadi had been seen publicly on one other occasion, in an 18-minute video released in April this year. From 2016 he had a $25m bounty on his head.He had been reported to have suffered serious injuries in airstrikes over the years, and there had occasionally been speculation that he had been killed, but he continued to resurface in audio tapes and videos. He killed himself in October 2019, while under attack from US forces.Michael SafiIt was clear within minutes of announcing Baghdadi's death, that the delusional bubble around the president would now be even harder to puncture. In one particularly bizarre claim for someone known not to use a computer, the president said that Isis "use the internet better than almost anyone in the world, perhaps other than Donald Trump".Trump's obsession with his predecessor was also very much at the fore. He left little doubt that Barack Obama's success in tracking down and killing Osama bin Laden was on his mind. Baghdadi was the greater scalp, he argued. "Osama bin Laden was very big but Osama bin Laden became big with the World Trade Center," Trump declared. "This is a man who built a whole … country, a caliphate, and was trying to do it again."Trump also repeated a claim that he had somehow had a hand in Bin Laden's downfall by calling for him to be targeted before the 9/11 attacks, before he was generally perceived as a threat. It is a false claim. Trump mentions Bin Laden in passing in one of his books, does not call for him to be tracked down, and the al-Qaida leader was already widely seen as a substantial threat following several attacks on the US.Within minutes a photograph was put online of Trump in the situation room, that recalled the famous picture of Obama and his top aides witnessing the final moments in the hunt for Bin Laden. The Trump version was more formal, more staged, and with the president much more clearly the central, focal point.When Bin Laden was killed in 2011, one of Obama's first calls was to George W Bush, who had launched the hunt for the al-Qaida leader. By contrast, Trump is seeking to erase the Obama legacy. Secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, repeatedly makes the false claim that it was the current administration that amassed a coalition to defeat Isis. That coalition was almost totally put together and made operational under Obama.In anticipating how Trump is likely to spend this treasure trove of political capital, the order in which other parties were given credit is instructive. Russia was named first and repeatedly. Moscow had no part in the operation but after being informed through deconfliction channels that an operation in the Idlib area was imminent they did not try to shoot the US gunships down.Turkey was thanked several times too, and even the Syrian regime, for no more than being the sovereign power in the territory where the raid took place.The commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, Mazloum Kobani, tweeted on Sunday morning that the hunt for Baghdadi had been a five-month US-SDF joint intelligence operation, but in Trump's remarks, the Kurds were mentioned last and somewhat grudgingly.Trump has abandoned the SDF and the Kurds in a deal with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, that has allowed Turkey, Russia and the Syrian regime to take over control of northeast Syria, and at the expense of the Kurds. If Mazloum's claim of the SDF role in the Baghdadi hunt is accurate, the scale of Trump's betrayal is all the greater.In his remarks on Sunday, Trump said Turkey has taken tremendous deaths … they've lost thousands and thousands of people from that safe zone" referring to the border area that was under SDF control. The claim is untrue, but it echoes Ankara's talking points, equating the SDF with the PKK Kurdish insurgents inside Turkey, and arguing the invasion was an urgent necessity for Turkish security.If there was any doubt before this week, Trump made even clearer that his sole preoccupation in Syria was with the oil reserves in the east."The oil is so valuable," he said. US forces, who have already begun streaming back into Syria heading for the oil fields around Deir Ezzor, would help to keep them out of the hands of Isis. Secondly, oil revenues would help the Kurds."And number three, it can help us because we should be able to take some also," Trump said. "And what I intend to do perhaps is make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly."Baghdadi's killing will help underline the simple foreign policy message that Trump is crafting for his re-election campaign. He alone inflicted a decisive defeat on Isis. Having achieved that, US troops will be withdrawn except when it is direct US economic interests to stay. Trump's cooperation with Russian and Turkish leaders had brought about this great success. And lastly, and most importantly, the Democrats, like the intelligence committee chair, Adam Schiff, are seeking to undermine these achievements with their politically motivated pursuit of impeachment.One of the president's Fox News surrogates, Jeanine Pirro, gave an early taste of White House messaging. "Judge Jeanine" tweeted: "So proud of @realDonaldTrump taking out abu bakr al bagdadi. Maybe the intelligence committee under @Adam schiff should start focusing on America's enemies and not their selfish political agenda."A lot can still go wrong for Trump. A desire for revenge could trigger an Isis resurgence, aided by the chaos caused by the Turkish offensive. Escaped Isis detainees could be involved in attacks. Conflicts with Iran and North Korea could sour the Trump pitch of having saved America from global conflicts.But there is no doubt that a damaged, embattled Trump, who was losing the confidence of even staunch politically allies, is now greatly strengthened.
|
| Brexit Impasse Persists as Johnson Says U.K. Held Hostage Posted: 27 Oct 2019 09:54 AM PDT  (Bloomberg) -- Follow @Brexit, sign up to our Brexit Bulletin, and tell us your Brexit story. The Brexit impasse looks set to continue after the main opposition Labour Party made clear it won't back Boris Johnson's bid for an early election, with the prime minister accusing Parliament of holding the country "hostage" by not allowing the vote.Labour's refusal to support Johnson's motion for a snap poll on Dec. 12 means the prime minister is almost certain to fall short of the two-thirds majority in the House of Commons vote on Monday. The European Union has said it will announce by Tuesday the terms of any Brexit delay, likely thwarting Johnson's pledge to leave the trading bloc on Oct. 31 with or without an exit deal.The government reiterated it would keep pushing for an election if it loses the vote, and a U.K. official said the government would also look at "all options" if Labour blocks the motion as expected on Monday. Earlier, ministers rejected a plan put forward by the pro-EU Liberal Democrats and Scottish National Party to secure an election via a law requiring only a simple majority in Parliament -- but which crucially could then be amended by MPs.Conservative Party Chairman James Cleverly called it a "gimmick" that the opposition could use to thwart Brexit altogether by stopping Parliament from debating the divorce deal Johnson reached with the EU."They have obviously made it clear that they have no intention of wanting Brexit to be done, no intention of wanting the Withdrawal Bill," Culture Secretary Nicky Morgan told Sky News on Sunday. "It is important for the sake of the country that we bring this uncertainty to an end."Brexit Twists Point to Election. Here's How It Works: QuickTakeBoth the Liberal Democrats and SNP stand to gain from an election conducted before Brexit is delivered, while their plan to bring forward the poll date to Dec. 9 increases the chances that students -- considered to be among the most pro-EU voters -- will still be at their universities to cast ballots.Liberal Democrat MP Chuka Umunna said the party made the move because it had become "highly unlikely" that the current Parliament would vote for holding a second referendum on leaving the trading bloc. The party has pledged to block Brexit if elected, though they currently hold just 19 seats in the House of Commons.While the route to an election via a simple majority likely has some appeal to the government, the risk lies in any amendments MPs seek to attach to the law. Liberal Democrats leader Jo Swinson tried to assuage those concerns, telling the BBC the party realized "time pressure" meant it couldn't pursue its other goals -- including lowering the voting age from 18 -- via its proposed bill.Labour, which has been criticized by some of its MPs for not matching the Liberal Democrats' full-throated opposition to Brexit, ruled out backing the election proposal, calling it "entirely ridiculous.""It would need cross-party support to get through the House of Commons procedures and then it would be subject to all kinds of amendments," Labour's health spokesman Jon Ashworth told Sky News on Sunday. "It's just a stunt so the Lib Dems can get on the telly today."But Ashworth declined to say whether Labour would back an early election if the EU agrees to a Brexit extension to Jan. 31 as Johnson had been forced by Parliament to request."If they give us that extension until January, then we will have to consider it, but at the moment we don't have that clarification," Ashworth said. "We cannot support Boris Johnson's plans until we've got an absolute reassurance that no-deal is off the table."Catch-22That stance effectively creates a Catch-22 for Monday's vote, with Labour refusing to back a snap poll until it's heard from the EU, and the trading bloc waiting to see what happens in Parliament before announcing its decision on pushing back the Brexit deadline. Finnish Prime Minister Antti Rinne said Sunday he'd be very surprised if the EU didn't agree to extend to the deadline until Jan. 31.The apparent schism among opposition parties -- with the Liberal Democrats and SNP diverging from Labour on the best strategy to bring down Johnson's Tories -- further complicates matters.Meanwhile Arlene Foster, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party that props up the U.K. government, told the Financial Times the party's 10 MPs in Westminster would vote against Johnson's election request because he had linked it to getting his Brexit legislation through the House of Commons."We need to amend that legislation and we need time to do that," Foster said. The DUP will continue to oppose the Brexit deal because it will bring in customs checks between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, she said.Neither Morgan nor Cleverly laid out the government's plans if it loses on Monday, but Johnson's office has previously said it would focus on its domestic agenda rather than trying again to ratify the divorce deal with Brussels. That would raise the risk of the U.K. crashing out of the trading bloc without a divorce deal, which risks creating economic turmoil and causing shortages of basic goods like food and medicine.In comments released late Saturday, Johnson again tried to heap pressure on politicians to back a new vote to resolve the Brexit standoff. Parliament has "run its course," he said."They must also agree to an election on Dec. 12," Johnson said in a broadcast statement. "If they refuse this timetable -- if they refuse to go the extra mile to complete Brexit -- then I will have no choice but to conclude that they are not really sincere in their desire to get Brexit done."(Updates with government comment in third paragraph.)\--With assistance from Kati Pohjanpalo.To contact the reporter on this story: Stuart Biggs in London at sbiggs3@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Andrew Davis, Sara MarleyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
|
| Even Eagles Have Data Roaming Limits, Researchers Find Posted: 27 Oct 2019 09:27 AM PDT  Frequent flyers often find themselves with hefty phone bills, and global travelers can drain their roaming data allowance. But eagles?Russian ornithologists tracking the migration routes of 13 endangered steppe eagles carrying SMS transmitters ran out of money when one of the birds, Min, drained the researchers' phone credit for the project.He suddenly sent hundreds of backlogged text messages at once as he flew from Kazakhstan, where rates are cheaper, to Iran, where they are more expensive, a researcher said.The researchers, from the independent RRR Conservation Network, have been tracking eagles' migration routes since 2015 in an effort to focus conservation efforts on specific areas. The birds can come into contact with power lines, poison traps and a veterinary drug that killed millions of vultures in the 1990s.Elena Shnayder, a scientist based in Siberia who works for the conservation network, said in a phone interview on Saturday that the team had equipped the 13 steppe eagles with tracking devices that send text messages with their coordinates four times a day.Every time a message is sent back, the Russian company operating the eagles' SMS transmitters, MegaFon, bills the network. The scientists expected to receive periodic text messages when the eagles flew over countries.Shnayder said the team also had expected to lose track of some eagles over the summer, but then they lost contact with Min. When he reappeared in Iran in early October, the researchers gasped when they began receiving a rush of data.Hundreds of text messages flooded in from Min at once, each costing 49 rubles, or 77 cents -- more than five times the expected price -- and blowing through the project's budget."He disappeared for five months, and all of a sudden here he is, with a very, very heavy phone bill," Shnayder said.The bird, which the team had been monitoring since 2018, seems to have flown for months in areas without coverage, mostly in Kazakhstan. The roaming messages were sent all at once when it connected to a network in Iran.Shnayder said the eagle's data wiped out the researchers' phone credit, which had already been depleted by eagles that flew to Iran, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.The conservation group has resorted to a crowdfunding campaign to cover the extra costs. As of Friday evening, it had raised $5,000, she said. The money will help track birds throughout 2020, the group wrote in a message posted on the Russian social network VK.MegaFon said it would refund a few months' worth of roaming charges from Min and the other 12 eagles, and it offered special rates to the project going forward, Shnayder said.The company confirmed the refund and future new tariffs for the birds' routes in a Russian-language post on Twitter.Russia had fewer than 10,000 steppe eagles in 2013, according to the conservation group. The bird breeds in southern Russia and in Kazakhstan, but their yearly migration can take them as far as India, the Middle East and Africa.In 2015, the steppe eagle was listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The number of steppe eagles, estimated at 50,000 to 75,000 globally, has plummeted in recent years, according to the group, prompting more efforts like the campaign conducted by the Siberian conservation network.Shnayder said the researchers would begin equipping new eagles in 2020 with free SIM cards after other phone companies reached out with offers."It's quite an irony, because when we started the project and asked for discounts, many of them turned us down," she said.Min, meanwhile, has left Iran. After flying to Saudi Arabia, the bird was in Yemen on Saturday afternoon, according to its tracking device.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
|
| Iran says Baghdadi's death is not end of Islamic State Posted: 27 Oct 2019 09:08 AM PDT ![Iran says Baghdadi's death is not end of Islamic State]( "Iran says Baghdadi's death is not end of Islamic State") Iran said on Sunday the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi will not mean the end of the group and its ideology, Iranian government spokesman Ali Rabiei tweeted. "The killing of Baghdadi will not end Daesh (the Islamic State) and its ideology ... which was created and flourished with the help of regional petrodollars," Rabiei tweeted, in a clear reference to Tehran's regional rival Saudi Arabia.
|
| Who Is Bill Barr? Posted: 27 Oct 2019 09:06 AM PDT  William Barr had returned to private life after his first stint as attorney general when he sat down to write an article for The Catholic Lawyer. It was 1995, and Barr saw an urgent threat to religion generally and to Catholicism, his faith, specifically. The danger came from the rise of "moral relativism," in Barr's view. "There are no objective standards of right and wrong," he wrote. "Everyone writes their own rule book."And so, at first, it seemed surprising that Barr, now 69, would return after 26 years to the job of attorney general, to serve President Donald Trump, the moral relativist in chief, who writes and rewrites the rule book at whim.But a close reading of Barr's speeches and writings shows that, for decades, he has taken a maximalist, Trumpian view of presidential power that critics have called the "imperial executive." He was a match, all along, for a president under siege. "He alone is the executive branch," Barr wrote of whoever occupies the Oval Office, in a memo to the Justice Department in 2018, before he returned.Now, with news reports that his review into the origins of the Russian investigation that so enraged Trump has turned into a full-blown criminal investigation, Barr is arousing fears that he is using the enormous power of the Justice Department to help the president politically, subverting the independence of the nation's top law enforcement agency in the process.Why is he giving the benefit of his reputation, earned over many years in Washington, to this president? His Catholic Lawyer article suggests an answer to that question. The threat of moral relativism he saw then came when "secularists used law as a weapon." Barr cited rules that compel landlords to rent to unmarried couples or require universities to treat "homosexual activist groups like any other student group." He reprised the theme in a speech at Notre Dame this month.In 1995 and now, Barr has voiced the fears and aspirations of the conservative legal movement. By helping Trump, he's protecting a president who has succeeded in confirming more than 150 judges to create a newly conservative judiciary. The federal bench now seems more prepared to lower barriers between church and state and reduce access to abortion -- a procedure that Barr, in his 1995 article, included on a list of societal ills that also included drug addiction, venereal diseases and psychiatric disorders.In his unruffled and lawyerly way, Barr emerged as the president's most effective protector in the spring, when he limited damage from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election by shaping the public narrative of the Mueller report before he released any of it.In his pursuit of investigating the investigators, he even traveled to Britain and Italy to meet with intelligence officials there to persuade them to help it along. Now it is possible that the Justice Department could bring charges against its own officials and agents for decisions they made to investigate Trump campaign advisers in the fraught months around the 2016 election, when the Russian government was mounting what the Mueller report called "a sweeping and systematic" effort to interfere.This criminal investigation seems ominous in the context of Barr's other moves.His Justice Department recently declined to investigate a whistleblower's complaint that the president was "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election" and advised the acting director of national intelligence not to send the complaint to Congress. Last week, dozens of government inspectors general warned in a letter to the Justice Department that its position "could seriously undermine the critical role whistleblowers play in coming forward to report waste, fraud, abuse and misconduct across the federal government."So while Rudy Giuliani is freelancing U.S. diplomacy as the president's personal lawyer, often leaving bedlam in his wake, and Mick Mulvaney flails as acting chief of staff, Barr has used the Justice Department, with precision, on the president's behalf. The New York City Bar Association complained a few days ago that Barr "appears to view his primary obligation as loyalty to the president individually rather than to the nation."William Barr (Billy, when he was young) grew up in an apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan with a framed Barry Goldwater presidential campaign poster in the foyer, according to Vanity Fair. His mother, who was of Irish descent, taught at Columbia University. His father, a Jew who converted to Catholicism, taught at Columbia, too, and then became the headmaster of the elite Dalton School, leaving after 10 years amid criticism over his authoritarian approach to student discipline.Barr went to high school at the equally elite Horace Mann and then to college at Columbia, where he majored in government and then got a master's degree in government and Chinese studies. He went to work for the CIA in Washington in 1973 and attended George Washington University Law School at night.He joined the Reagan White House in 1982, where he sought to curb regulation. After George H.W. Bush was elected president in 1988, he became director of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, which provides legal advice to the president and all executive agencies.It didn't take long for Barr to express his views on executive power. He warned in one of his early opinions, in July 1989, of congressional "encroachments" on presidential authority. "Only by consistently and forcefully resisting such congressional incursions can executive branch prerogatives be preserved," he wrote. Some of his Republican colleagues remember being taken aback."Bill's view on the separation of powers was not overlapping authority keeping all branches in check, but keeping the other branches neutralized, leaving a robust executive power to rule. George III would have loved it," said Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine who preceded Barr as head of the Office of Legal Counsel.Barr also argued that the president had the "inherent authority" to order the FBI to abduct people abroad, in violation of an international treaty principally written by the United States. This view reversed the position that the Office of Legal Counsel had taken nine years earlier. When Congress asked to see Barr's opinion, he refused, even as the government defended the abduction of a man in Mexico accused of participating in the killing of a Drug Enforcement Administration agent. The charges against the man were dismissed. It took four years for Barr's opinion to come to light."You have a secret opinion that violated the internal rules of the Justice Department" and "diminished America's reputation as a country that operates by the rule of law," said Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale law professor who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under the Reagan administration and advised the State Department. "At the time, we thought that was as bad as it was going to get."After becoming deputy attorney general in 1990, Barr continued to push the limits on questions of presidential power. He told the first President Bush that he didn't need congressional approval to invade Iraq. Bush asked for it anyway.Barr, who took over the Justice Department in the fall of 1991, also urged Bush to pardon all six of the Reagan administration officials who faced criminal charges in an arms-for-hostages deal at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal. The president took his advice.When Bush lost his bid for reelection, Barr went back into private practice before taking jobs as the general counsel first for GTE and then Verizon. He served on the boards of several religious groups, including the Catholic Information Center, a self-described "intellectual hub," affiliated with the ultraconservative order Opus Dei.Those groups include other conservative Washington insiders, such as Leonard Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society. Leo has also served on the board of the Catholic Information Center, and he came out strongly in favor of Trump's nomination of Barr for attorney general.In a sense, both Barr and Leo have found parallel ways to use the Trump administration as a vehicle for their causes. Leo has enormous influence from outside the government on the selection of judicial nominees. From the inside, Barr plays a role in federal judicial appointments and has supported a Justice Department task force set up to look for cases of religious discrimination.When Barr undercut the Mueller report, he lost some supporters. While delaying its release, he presented the conclusions as far less damning for Trump than Mueller found them to be. (For example, Barr said that the special counsel did not find sufficient evidence of a crime when in fact Mueller had not exonerated Trump of wrongdoing.)"Not in my memory has a sitting attorney general more diminished the credibility of his department on any subject," wrote Benjamin Wittes, the editor-in-chief of Lawfare.Despite criticism, Barr has continued to champion the presidency -- and this president. But on Friday, a federal judge in Washington ruled against the Justice Department's effort to block Congress from getting grand jury evidence obtained in the Mueller investigation. The department has also asked a federal judge to block a subpoena from the Manhattan district attorney for eight years of Trump's personal and corporate tax returns."From my perspective," Barr told Jan Crawford of CBS News in May, "the idea of resisting a democratically elected president and basically throwing everything at him and, you know, really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president, that is where the shredding of our norms and our institutions is occurring."In other words, amazingly, it wasn't Trump, or Barr, who was violating the norms of American governance. It was their critics.Since Watergate, a crucial norm of Justice Department independence has prevented presidents from ordering or meddling in investigations for partisan reasons.In 2001, Barr praised the first President Bush for leaving the Justice Department alone. Bush's White House "appreciated the independence of Justice," Barr said. "We didn't lose sight of the fact that there's a difference between being a government lawyer and representing an individual in his personal capacity in a criminal case."Now, Barr seems hard-pressed to maintain a semblance of those boundaries. The criminal investigation of the origins of the Russia investigation that he ordered is official government business. It's headed by an experienced prosecutor, John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, and it's supposed to be on the up and up.But when Barr told Congress in April that he thought "spying" on the Trump campaign by U.S. intelligence agencies occurred -- the FBI director, Christopher Wray, told Congress that "spying" was "not the term I would use" -- he echoed Trump's conspiracy theory of being a victim of the "deep state." And in the last month, Barr has found his review mixed up with the machinations of Giuliani, who was directed by Trump to investigate the 2016 election and the Biden family in Ukraine.Trump made the overlap explicit when he lumped Giuliani and Barr together in his July phone call with Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. "I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call," Trump told Zelenskiy, according to notes released by the White House. Barr was reportedly "surprised and angry" by the president's reference, and a Justice Department representative has denied he had any contacts with Zelenskiy.Then, Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, brought up Barr's review of the Russia investigation at his news conference on Oct. 17 in defense of Trump's request to Zelenskiy for "a favor" and information. ("So you're saying the president of the United States, the chief law enforcement person, cannot ask somebody to cooperate with an ongoing public investigation into wrongdoing?" he asked.)The White House's use of the Justice Department as a shield in the Ukraine scandal risks leaving Barr's review "hopelessly compromised," tweeted Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith, an alumnus of the Office of Legal Counsel who has defended Barr.And in blockbuster testimony before Congress last Tuesday, the topU.S. diplomat in Ukraine, William Taylor, said that he and Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, who was conveying Trump's orders concerning Ukraine, discussed the possibility that Ukraine's prosecutor would make a public statement about "investigations, potentially in coordination with Attorney General Barr's probe." Either people in the president's circle are using Barr as a pawn, or he's in deeper than he has said.Either way, maybe the lesson is the same one that applies throughout the administration: The fallout from the president's maneuvering taints the people around him. The longer Barr stays in office, the more that Trump will look for the attorney general to do for him.When Mueller closed up shop, he left several cases pending with the Justice Department, including charges against the Trump operative Roger Stone, which could end with disclosures at trial that damage the president (Stone has pleaded not guilty). What if Trump would rather make cases like these go away, with pardons or other inducements? Will Barr go along?During the Bush administration, in a more moderate time, Barr worked for a buttoned-down president who called for a "kinder" nation and "gentler" world. Now he has a boss who calls the impeachment process "a lynching," Republican critics "human scum" and the news media "the enemy of the American people."As the buttons fly off, Barr seems unperturbed. He's the perfect attorney general for Trump. Not so much, it seems, for the country.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
|
| Waiting for Bolton: A Capital Speculates on What He Will Say Posted: 27 Oct 2019 08:57 AM PDT  WASHINGTON -- The message that John Bolton, President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, sent supporters of his newly reopened political action committee last week raised as many questions as it answered in a capital consumed by impeachment.Bolton implicitly criticized Trump's foreign policy, declaring that "despite all the friendly notes and photo ops, North Korea isn't our friend and never will be." But he also wrote that the nation's security "is under attack from within," citing "radicalized Democrats."The conflicting signals were maddening. After either resigning or being fired last month depending on whose version is to be believed, is Bolton so estranged from Trump that he might provide damaging testimony to House investigators? Or does he share the president's view of out-of-control Democrats pursuing an illegitimate impeachment out of partisan excess?The question is more than academic. As the House inquiry enters its second month, there may be no one in Washington that investigators want to question more than Bolton. His name has come up repeatedly in testimony that has depicted him resisting Trump's Ukraine pressure campaign and warning that Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, was a "hand grenade who's going to blow everybody up."But even as he has been at the center of the discussion during the impeachment inquiry, the outspoken former Fox News commentator has remained uncharacteristically silent. To Democrats who vilified him for years as an ultraconservative warmonger, suddenly Bolton has emerged as a much-sought witness who in the narrative they are assembling may have made a principled stand against Trump's abuse of power to advance domestic political goals."What it says is this is not about competing Republican versus Democratic visions of American foreign policy," said Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J. "This is about whether our foreign policy should be made in the national interest or in the personal political interests of the president."It may take longer for investigators to find out. Bolton shares a lawyer with his former deputy and longtime ally, Charles Kupperman, who went to court on Friday to ask a judge to decide whether he should obey a House subpoena or a White House order to not testify. Bolton presumably might follow the same course.If and when he does testify, Bolton appears positioned to answer fundamental questions surrounding the events that have led the president to the edge of impeachment. As the national security adviser, Bolton was charged with managing the government's foreign policy apparatus. Yet Trump and Giuliani worked around Bolton to try to pressure Ukraine to investigate Democrats. At the same time, the president froze $391 million in American assistance to the former Soviet republic."According to the testimony given to Congress so far, Bolton was a central figure in trying to prevent any delay in releasing foreign aid to Ukraine," said John Yoo, a University of Berkeley law school professor and senior Justice Department official under President George W. Bush. "I cannot see how any responsible investigation would not seek Bolton's appearance."But he added that the White House would presumably "go to the mat" to fight any effort to interview Bolton. "If the White House were to fight the House impeachment on executive privilege grounds, Bolton would be the hill on which to die," Yoo said. "The Trump White House could claim not just that the impeachment investigation is illegitimate, which is its current line of defense, but that it is defending the right of future presidents to have an effective White House and to conduct a successful foreign policy."A Yale-trained lawyer, Bolton brought years of experience when Trump made him his third national security adviser in March 2018. Bolton served in both the Justice Department, where he headed the civil division under President Ronald Reagan, and the State Department, where he was an assistant secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush and an undersecretary of state and ambassador to the United Nations under the second Bush.While Trump appreciated his firebrand style of politics on Fox News, Bolton saw his job as keeping Trump from making unwise deals with outlier states like North Korea or Iran, leading to friction. Bolton struggled with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for control of foreign policy and left just a day before Trump agreed to restore the frozen aid to Ukraine under pressure from Congress.With his trademark bushy mustache and unapologetic conservative views, Bolton, 70, has built a following on the right, even flirting in the past with running for president himself. His political action committee has donated more than $1.5 million to candidates since 2014 and spent another $6 million to promote his policy views related to national security.Since leaving Trump's team last month, Bolton has already identified five Republican senators and congressmen for whom he plans to raise $50,000 each and, as reported by Bloomberg, sent out the solicitation email on Thursday that seemed to provide conflicting clues. He has also rejoined the Rhone Group, a private equity firm where he worked before the White House, and was spotted in South Korea in recent days talking with investors. And he is reportedly thinking about writing a book.The combination of his pedigree and the possibility that he really does have incriminating information about Trump makes him a particularly appealing witness to Democrats. The prospect of one of the nation's most visible foreign policy conservatives testifying against his former boss would, in their view, underscore the significance of Trump's transgressions.But some Democrats warn that they cannot be sure what he will say once he sits for an interview. "You just can't work from assumptions," said Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., a member of the House Intelligence Committee. "I don't know what he had. I don't know if he has value. I don't know if he is willing to talk about it."The president's defenders dismiss the idea that Bolton could hurt Trump. "I don't care what Bolton says," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a close ally of the president's, said on Fox News on Thursday. If the Ukrainians did not know the president had held up their aid when he was pressing them to investigate Democrats, Graham said, there is no impeachable offense. "You can't have a crime unless you have a victim. There is no victim here."Democrats disagree with that logic, saying it can still be an impeachable offense to pressure a foreign power to provide dirt on a political opponent regardless of when the Ukrainians knew about the suspension of the assistance. Moreover, The New York Times, citing interviews and documents, reported that in fact word of the aid freeze had gotten to high-level Ukrainian officials by the first week in August, earlier than previously known.Bolton has hired Charles J. Cooper, one of Washington's best-known lawyers and a colleague and friend since the Reagan administration, when Cooper was an assistant attorney general. Cooper, whose firm's motto is "victory or death," also represented former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, another Trump adviser who fell out with the president.According to testimony presented so far, Bolton bristled at efforts by Giuliani to bypass the national security process as he pressured Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and a conspiracy theory that Ukrainians, not Russians, intervened in the 2016 election, and did so to boost Democrats, not Republicans. Trump's former homeland security adviser repeatedly told the president that the theory had been "completely debunked."Bolton met on July 10 with Ukrainian officials and Gordon Sondland, a political appointee serving as ambassador to the European Union, who was working with Giuliani and Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, on the issue. When the investigations came up, Bolton grew so irritated that he abruptly ended the meeting, according to Fiona Hill, his former top Europe and Russia adviser.Hill testified that Bolton told her to report what was going on to a White House lawyer. "I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up," he told her to tell the lawyer. She also testified that, on an earlier occasion, Bolton said, "Giuliani's a hand grenade who's going to blow everybody up."Bolton unsuccessfully sought to block Mulvaney's effort to arrange an Oval Office visit in May by Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, an authoritarian leader whose criticism of Ukraine reinforced Trump's already hostile views toward the country. Bolton likewise opposed the July 25 telephone call in which Trump pressed President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine to "do us a favor" by investigating the 2016 conspiracy theory and Biden.Bolton went to Ukraine on Aug. 27 to try to prepare for a meeting between the president and Zelenskiy that ultimately did not happen. While there, William B. Taylor Jr., the acting ambassador to Ukraine, said he raised his concerns about the frozen aid and Bolton recommended he send a cable to Pompeo.But Mulvaney and Sondland have said that Bolton never brought any concerns about the Ukraine pressure campaign to them."I read that and I was surprised, because John Bolton never complained to me about it," Mulvaney said on "Fox News Sunday" last weekend. "No one at NSC ever complained to me about anything that was going on."Sondland testified that Bolton embraced their efforts during a conference call in June. "We went over the entire Ukraine strategy with Ambassador Bolton, who agreed with the strategy and signed off on it," Sondland said. "Indeed, over the spring and summer of 2019, I received nothing but cordial responses from Ambassador Bolton and Dr. Hill."So now Bolton has been left in the middle, a key witness in the unfolding impeachment drama. His friend, Thomas M. Boyd, an assistant attorney general in the Reagan and Bush administrations, said Bolton understands his obligations to guard the confidentiality of communications with the president but will also be prepared to give his unvarnished views if it comes to it."I just don't think that he's in an awkward position at all," said Boyd. "He's very comfortable in his own skin and whatever decisions he's made or plans to make, I'm sure he's comfortable with them as well."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
|
| Lebanese form a human chain to support protests Posted: 27 Oct 2019 08:19 AM PDT  Thousands of Lebanese formed a human chain Sunday along highways and coastal roads in a show of solidarity with anti-government protests. The protesters joined hands along a main bridge connecting central Beirut to the north and south on the 11th day of nationwide protests. Ignited by anger at proposed economic reforms, the protests rapidly escalated into calls for the overthrow of the political elites who have governed the country since the end of its 1975-1990 civil war.
|
| 'Me v Trump’: Joe Biden bullish despite polling and fundraising problems Posted: 27 Oct 2019 07:42 AM PDT  * Lead drops in some polls as some say he's too old to fight Trump * Opinion: Wall Street fears Warren – she speaks for the peopleFormer Vice President Joe Biden speaks with Columbia, South Carolina mayor Stephen K Benjamin at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, on Saturday. Photograph: Sam Wolfe/ReutersJoe Biden is running in a historically large Democratic primary, in which he has slipped from the top of some polls. His fundraising has dropped and some say he may be too moderate or too old to fight Donald Trump next year.But the former vice-president insisted on Saturday that some who back him think "it's a general election, me versus Trump" and claimed: "Trump doesn't want to face me."Biden spoke to the Associated Press before a town hall in Florence, South Carolina, the first southern state to vote.The former Delaware senator leads the realclearpolitics.com national polling average by six points from Elizabeth Warren and maintains a healthy lead in South Carolina itself. But the Massachusetts senator has been surging elsewhere, leading in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to vote."She doesn't affect my strategy, period," Biden told the AP. "And I'm not being facetious. I think she's a fine person, a good candidate, but I didn't get involved in deciding to run because of polling or a particular strategy."> It is not surprising that those who are dedicated to defeating Donald Trump are organizing in every way permitted> > Kate BedingfieldHe added: "There's two things we know for certain. One, Vladimir Putin doesn't want me to be president, according to Facebook taking down the Russian ads going after me. And two, surely Trump doesn't want to face me."Trump's attempts to force Ukraine to investigate Biden are at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.Biden had said he would not accept support from super pacs, which can raise money for candidates but cannot co-ordinate with them.But on Thursday his deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said that while he would still "push to remove private money from our federal elections … in this time of crisis in our politics, it is not surprising that those who are dedicated to defeating Donald Trump are organizing in every way permitted by current law to bring an end to his disastrous presidency."Earlier this month, Biden reported $15.2m raised in the third quarter. That put him fourth in the race, behind Vermont senator Bernie Sanders ($25.3m), Warren ($24.6m) and Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who raised $19.1m and has also surged in Iowa, attracting national headlines.On Saturday, Biden said: "What I'm told is, there are people out there who want to take these ads on, take him on now, because it's a general election, me versus Trump, in their minds right now. But I've had no conversations with them."It has been reported that some donors, faced with Biden's stumbles and Warren's rise as a force for progressive policies, are looking to former New York mayor and media billionaire Michael Bloomberg as a late entrant in the ideological centre.Biden insisted he would do "very well" in Iowa and New Hampshire but said losses wouldn't hurt him and South Carolina could "catapult" him to success across the South.The former vice-president is 76. Sanders is 78 and recently suffered a heart attack. Asked if age mattered, Biden said: "Right now it's a legitimate question to ask… Right now, my age has brought with it a significant amount of experience in government and hopefully wisdom and some sound judgment."Asked if he would pledge to only serve one term, Biden said: "I feel good and all I can say is, watch me, you'll see. It doesn't mean I would run a second term. I'm not going to make that judgment at this moment."
|
| Turkish army says 1 killed in north Syria amid shaky truce Posted: 27 Oct 2019 07:30 AM PDT  Kurdish fighters killed one Turkish soldier and wounded five others amid a shaky truce in northern Syria, Turkey's army said Sunday, bringing its military death toll to 11 since the launch of its cross-border operation. Turkey invaded northern Syria on Oct. 9 to clear the border of Kurdish fighters after President Donald Trump said he would order American troops to withdraw from the area. Turkey considers the Kurdish group a serious security threat because of links to a long-running Kurdish insurgency within eastern Turkey.
|
| UK parties argue over election as EU mulls Brexit delay Posted: 27 Oct 2019 06:45 AM PDT  Britain appeared to move a step closer Sunday to holding an early election in December, after two opposition parties backed the idea -- but only if EU leaders delay Brexit until January. The Scottish National Party (SNP) and the Liberal Democrats broke ranks with the main opposition Labour party to offer Prime Minister Boris Johnson the snap poll he wants, only on their terms. Britain is due to end its 46 years of EU membership on Thursday, but Johnson was forced by law to request a three-month delay after MPs last weekend refused to approve his exit deal, the latest twist in the tumultuous divorce process.
|
| ISIS Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Killed ‘Whimpering and Crying’ in U.S.-Syria Raid: Trump Posted: 27 Oct 2019 06:27 AM PDT  ReutersA raid by U.S. Army special forces led to the death Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi when the leader of the so-called Islamic State detonated a suicide vest after being cornered in a cave in Syria's Idlib province. President Trump hailed it as a remarkable victory on Sunday, one that comes after a month of controversy for his decision to withdraw most U.S. forces from Syria."Last night, the United States brought the world's number one terrorist to justice," Trump said at a much-hyped scheduled address. "His body was mutilated by the blast." The White House said that American forces were able to nevertheless positively identify the 48-year-old Baghdadi immediately using portable DNA testing equipment and visual evidence facial recognition software they brought with them, and the Special Operations force commander on the ground reported that Baghdadi was dead at 7:15 p.m. Washington, D.C. time.The U.S. special operations mission in northwestern Syria was staged from an airbase in western Iraq, a Pentagon official told The Daily Beast. The base had for months housed U.S. troops deployed there, and had more recently become the destination for troops withdrawing from northern Syria after the Trump administration ordered a withdrawal.U.S. Surveillance Turns Away From ISIS—and to Its Own TroopsThe president said the successful mission was much more important than even the capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden. "Bin Laden was big, but this was bigger," he boasted. Trump described how special forces executed a "dangerous and daring night time raid" in which American military dogs chased and cornered Baghdadi in a closed tunnel where he detonated his suicide vest killing himself and three of his young children he had taken with him. Trump said he watched the entire mission, noting that "it was just like a movie." "He died like a dog," Trump said. "He was whimpering, screaming, crying. He died like a coward."Others ISIS leaders killed in covert operations included spokesman Abu al-Hassan al Muhajir who was killed in a separate raid from Baghdadi, a U.S. official told The Daily Beast. "We never stopped patrolling, we never stopped analyzing intel and developing targets, the official said, noting that U.S. operations were "just slowed down during the Turkey invasion."The announcement of Baghdadi's death comes as Trump has sought to fend off scrutiny amid an impeachment inquiry over claims he withheld military aid to Ukraine in a bid to force the country to investigate his political rivals. He has also faced heavy criticism—from both Republicans and Democrats—for his decision to pull U.S. troops out of northeastern Syria, a move which sparked fears of a resurgence by ISIS and paved the way for Turkey to attack Washington's Kurdish allies. During his announcement, Trump went on to thank Russia, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq along with Syrian Kurds for "certain support they were able to give us." Trump elaborated on informing Russians present in Syria. "We spoke to the Russians, we told them we were coming in. They said thank you for telling us," he said, adding that he didn't tell them why, only that "you are going to be very happy."The White House added that other countries with military forces in the region "were notified that American forces would be moving through the area."In an apparent slight on Democrats, Trump also suggested he withheld briefings on the raid from the senior congressional Democrats on committees involved in the impeachment inquiry, arguing that they could not be trusted to keep the information confidential. "We notified some [and] others are being notified now as I speak," Trump said. "Washington is a leaking machine. The only people that knew were the few people that I dealt with."Trump said he didn't inform House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ahead of time. A House intelligence committee official told the Daily Beast as the President spoke, "We have not received any notification or briefing." Adam Schiff, Trump's foil atop the House intelligence committee, did not receive any briefing on the raid in any venue, according to the official.The path to finding Baghdadi began over the summer after the CIA received a tip about general location in a village following the arrest and interrogation of one of Baghdadi's wives and a courier, The New York Times reported. Intelligence officers used the tip to work with "Iraqi and Kurdish intelligence officials in Iraq and Syria to identify Mr. al-Baghdadi's more precise whereabouts and to put spies in place to monitor his periodic movements," the Times reported. The president said that the operation started more than a week earlier. "We had him scoped," he said, describing how Baghdadi changed his mind. "He tends to change on a dime," he said, detailing how they had to cancel several missions before locking in on him.A U.S. military source not cleared to talk to reporters told The Daily Beast the military had prepared for the Idlib raid for approximately a week. The Army special forces unit who conducted the raid were told their quarry was Baghdadi, the source said.Vice President Mike Pence outlined more details while appearing Sunday on CBS Face the Nation. He said that Thursday afternoon, he and the president had been told there was a "high probability" that Baghdadi would be at his Idlib compound. He said Trump then directed commanders to give them options, which they did on Friday morning. He said by Saturday morning, they had received "we received the actionable intelligence" they could act on, which they did. Around 5 p.m. Saturday in Washington eight American helicopters, primarily CH-47 Chinooks, took off from the military base near Erbil, Iraq, according to the Times. "They were greeted with a lot of fire power," Trump said of Baghdadi's entourage. "Many of his people were killed. We lost nobody. Think of that. It's incredible."The White House said the American casualties included a wounded American military dog and two United States military members who were "slightly wounded but have returned to duty."Trump said the special forces left 11 children present at the time of the raid with a caretaker and captured some of the fighters who had tried to protect the terrorist leader. He said special forces spent about two hours at the site gathering evidence and then "landed at a very friendly port in a friendly country."In a statement, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, call the death of Baghdadi "a great day for America and a great day for the world," going on to say the "special operations forces and interagency partners flawlessly executed a Commander-in-Chief directed operation to capture or kill" Baghdadi. The president also used the press conference to express disappointment with several European nations who have so far refused to repatriate ISIS fighters captured and being held in Syria. "The U.S. tax payer isn't going to pay to look after other countries' ISIS fighters," he said, implying they might be freed from detention. Trump had hinted at the news late Saturday as Twitter erupted with reports of a heavy gun battle and sounds of helicopters in an area of Idlib known to house the headquarters of militant groups. "Something very big has just happened," Trump tweeted cryptically. As Saudi Arabia Burns, Pompeo Blames Iran—and Trump Makes a Lame Claim About Killing Bin Laden's SonAs White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley announced a "major statement" to be made by Trump early Sunday, Newsweek cited a U.S. Army source saying Baghdadi had been killed in a special operations raid in Idlib approved by Trump a week earlier. The elusive ISIS leader—wanted by U.S. coalition forces, Iran and Russia—had managed to dodge capture for years and the world only caught a glimpse of him twice since he declared ISIS a global caliphate in 2014: once in a video of his sermon from Mosul in 2014, and again earlier this year in an 18-minute video to supporters in which he portrayed the group's mounting military defeats as a sign the world was waging war against Islam. Baghdadi had been reported dead several times in the past only to resurface again and his whereabouts have long been unknown, though he was generally believed not to be in Idlib, a stronghold of rival jihadi groups. — Erin Banco contributed to this storyRead more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet 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.
|
| Iraqi protesters hold Baghdad square after night of clashes Posted: 27 Oct 2019 06:19 AM PDT  Iraqi anti-government protesters remained in Baghdad's central Tahrir Square on Sunday after a night of clashes with security forces who failed to evict them. Elite counterterrorism forces and state-backed militias meanwhile deployed across the capital to protect political party offices and militia headquarters. Iraqis have launched two waves of mass protests this month, calling for the resignation of a government they blame for corruption, economic mismanagement and poor public services.
|
| Johnson Accuses MPs of Holding U.K. ‘Hostage’: Brexit Update Posted: 27 Oct 2019 05:38 AM PDT ![Johnson Accuses MPs of Holding U.K. 'Hostage': Brexit Update]( "Johnson Accuses MPs of Holding U.K. 'Hostage': Brexit Update") (Bloomberg) -- Sign up to our Brexit Bulletin, follow us @Brexit and subscribe to our podcast.Boris Johnson accused members of Parliament of holding the U.K. "hostage" ahead of a vote Monday on an early general election. The prime minister looks set to lose his bid for a snap poll on Dec. 12, after opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn reiterated he'll only support it if the risk of a no-deal Brexit is removed. The European Union has said it will announce its decision by Tuesday on extending the divorce deadline past Oct. 31.Key Developments:Johnson needs a two-thirds majority in Parliament for early general election to take place; a vote in the House of Commons is on MondayCorbyn said he won't vote for an election until the U.K. is no longer at risk of crashing out of the EU without an agreementLiberal Democrats, Scottish National Party are working together to try to force a snap poll on Dec. 9, reflecting schism with LabourRead more: Brexit Twists Point to Election. Here's How It Works: QuickTakeCleverly Denies Tories Want to Erode Rights (10:15 a.m.)Conservative Party Chairman James Cleverly denied the government wants to weaken workers' rights after the U.K. leaves the EU.In an interview with the BBC on Sunday, Cleverly was asked about a Financial Times report that the government is open to significant divergence from EU regulations. That's despite its pledge in the Brexit deal to maintain a "level playing field," the newspaper said, citing an official paper drafted by the Brexit Department and Johnson's office."Divergence doesn't mean lessening," Cleverly told the BBC, saying U.K. regulations are already tighter than the EU's in many areas."If we are saying that we don't trust the people to vote for governments that will enhance workers' rights, and enhance environmental protections, and enhance animal welfare, then we are saying something quite negative about the British people," he said. "And I don't subscribe to that."Cleverly also said the government wants to leave the EU "in good order" with Boris Johnson's divorce deal, but added that Oct. 31 remains Brexit day until the bloc decides otherwise this week.Lib Dems Seek Cross-Party Support for Poll (10 a.m.)Jo Swinson, leader of the pro-EU Liberal Democrats, urged other parties to back her proposal for a general election on Dec. 9 (see 8:30 a.m.)She told the BBC on Sunday that "time pressure" meant she was not seeking to use the proposed bill -- which is also backed by the Scottish National Party -- to secure amendments such as lowering the voting age from 18. "I think we have to pass this as it is drafted," she said. "We cannot assume we will keep getting an extension to Article 50. We do need to resolve this issue."But Conservative Party Chairman James Cleverly told the BBC the plan was "clearly a gimmick" and the Tories would not support something put forward by two parties who want to see Brexit stopped.Labour Digs in Over Early Election (9:30 a.m.)Labour made it clear it won't support Johnson's bid for an early general election when the proposal is put to the House of Commons. A no-deal Brexit must be off the table before the party will consider a snap poll, senior officials said.But speaking on Sky News, Labour's health spokesman Jon Ashworth declined to say whether the party would back an early poll if the EU -- as is widely expected -- announces a Brexit extension until the end of January. Likewise Diane Abbott, Labour's shadow home secretary, told the BBC the party will wait to see the terms of delay before deciding."It is reasonable for Parliament to wait until the EU decision," Abbott said.Both Ashworth and Abbott also said Labour is unlikely to back the proposal for the Liberal Democrats and Scottish National Party for an early election on Dec. 9, secured by a simple majority in Parliament (see 8:30 a.m.)."The Lib Dem's plan is an opportunistic stunt," Ashworth said. "It would need cross-party support and is subject to amendments." That's the same reason the government is unlikely to get behind it.Morgan: Government Will Keep Seeking Early Poll (8:45 a.m.)Culture Secretary Nicky Morgan said the government will keep seeking an early general election if it loses Monday's vote in the Commons, pointing out that the government's motion is to both get the Brexit legislation through and secure a snap poll on Dec. 12.In an interview with Sky News, Morgan said the government still wants to leave the EU on Oct. 31, but with the bloc expected to announce an extension by Tuesday, the government had been forced to find an alternative way to get Brexit done. The U.K. needs the uncertainty to end, she said.Morgan also indicated the government would not adopt the proposal from the Liberal Democrats and Scottish National Party (see 8:30 a.m.) to pass a bill to hold a general election on Dec. 9. Unlike Johnson's motion, which requires a two-thirds majority to pass, the Lib Dem/SNP plan needs only a simple majority.But Morgan made clear the risk for the government is that such a bill could be amended, potentially taking the first part of what Johnson wants to get done -- getting his Brexit legislation ratified -- off the table ahead of an election.SNP, Lib Dems Seek Early Poll as Opposition Splits (8:30 a.m.)The Scottish National Party said it is working with the Liberal Democrats to secure an early general election, and that they had sent a letter to European Council President Donald Tusk to seek a "meaningful" extension to at least the end of January to ensure the risk of a no-deal Brexit is removed.Johnson is trying for the third time to secure a snap poll under the provisions of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, which requires a two-thirds majority in the House of Commons to succeed. But with the opposition Labour Party refusing to support it, the government looks likely to lose the vote on Monday.So the SNP and Liberal Democrats are trying to persuade the government to adopt a bill that overrides the act, requiring only a simple majority to pass. Both parties want an election on Dec. 9 -- three days ahead of Johnson's preferred timetable."The SNP are ready for an election but it must be on Parliament's terms -- not Boris Johnson's," the party's Westminster leader Ian Blackford said in an emailed statement. "Opposition parties must work together to remove this dangerous Tory government from office."Though much simpler, a so-called one-line bill is risky for the government -- which lacks a majority -- because MPs can amend it to force their will on the Brexit process.Johnson Says MPs Holding Country 'Hostage' (8:15 a.m.)Johnson said the current Parliament has "run its course" and accused politicians of holding the U.K. "hostage" over Brexit, ahead of the Commons vote scheduled for Monday."They must also agree to an election on Dec. 12," Johnson said in a broadcast statement. "If they refuse this timetable -- if they refuse to go the extra mile to complete Brexit -- then I will have no choice but to conclude that they are not really sincere in their desire to get Brexit done."Johnson is likely to fall short of the two-thirds majority he needs to win Monday's vote, prolonging the impasse over the U.K. divorce from the EU. The bloc said it will announce by Tuesday the length and terms of any extension to the divorce, making it all but certain the prime minister will break his "do or die" pledge to get Brexit done by the current Oct. 31 deadline."Parliament cannot hold the country hostage any longer," Johnson said. "Millions of businesses and people cannot plan their futures, this paralysis is causing real damage and the country must move on in 2020."Earlier:Johnson and Macron: The Odd Couple Determined to Get Brexit DoneWhy Would Jeremy Corbyn Help Boris Johnson Now?: Therese RaphaelJohnson Sent to 'Naughty Step' on Brexit, DUP's Foster Says\--With assistance from Sara Marley.To contact the reporter on this story: Stuart Biggs in London at sbiggs3@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Jon Menon, Amy TeibelFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
|
| UK government will look at other options if early vote bid fails -source Posted: 27 Oct 2019 04:24 AM PDT ![UK government will look at other options if early vote bid fails -source]( "UK government will look at other options if early vote bid fails -source") Britain's government will look at all options to get Brexit done, including those suggested by other parties, if the main opposition Labour Party rejects Prime Minister Boris Johnson's bid on Monday for a new election, a Downing Street source said. "If Labour oppose being held to account by the people yet again, then we will look at all options to get Brexit done including ideas similar to those proposed by other opposition parties," a Downing Street source said on Sunday.
|
| Stop holding UK "hostage", govt says as it steps up pressure on parliament Posted: 27 Oct 2019 04:07 AM PDT ![Stop holding UK "hostage", govt says as it steps up pressure on parliament]( "Stop holding UK \"hostage\", govt says as it steps up pressure on parliament") Boris Johnson's Conservatives stepped up pressure on lawmakers on Sunday to back the prime minister's bid to hold an early election and break Britain's Brexit impasse, saying the country was being held "hostage" by parliament. Britain was due to leave the EU on Thursday, but despite the government arguing this is still the legal default date, few expect Johnson to meet his "do or die" promise to deliver Brexit on Oct. 31 after the bloc agreed to another delay.
|
| UK PM Johnson should offer commitment rejecting a no-deal Brexit, says Labour Posted: 27 Oct 2019 02:37 AM PDT ![UK PM Johnson should offer commitment rejecting a no-deal Brexit, says Labour]( "UK PM Johnson should offer commitment rejecting a no-deal Brexit, says Labour") Prime Minister Boris Johnson should offer parliament an unequivocal commitment he will not lead Britain out of the European Union without a deal if he wants backing for an early election bid, Labour's home affairs spokeswoman said on Sunday. Diane Abbott reiterated Labour's position on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show that the opposition party cannot back the election bid until it is sure a so-called no deal Brexit is off the table. "One way of doing it is for Boris Johnson to come to the floor of the house and give the House of Commons (lower house of parliament) a commitment that whatever happens, he will not take Britain out of the EU without a deal," she said.
|
| US official: IS leader believed dead in US military assault Posted: 27 Oct 2019 02:31 AM PDT  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the shadowy leader of the Islamic State group who presided over its global jihad and became arguably the world's most wanted man, is believed dead after being targeted by a U.S. military raid in Syria. A U.S. official told The Associated Press late Saturday that al-Baghdadi was targeted in Syria's northwestern Idlib province. President Donald Trump teased a major announcement, tweeting Saturday night that "Something very big has just happened!" A White House spokesman, Hogan Gidley, would say only that the president would be making a "major statement" at 9 a.m. ET Sunday.
|
| Lebanon’s Wild ‘WhatsApp’ Revolution Challenges Hezbollah and the Old Elites Posted: 27 Oct 2019 02:16 AM PDT  JOSEPH EIDBEIRUT—In a country long known for its live-for-the-day parties and grinding social discontent, both have now come together to spawn Lebanon's October Revolution. The Mediterranean air is filled with exhilaration, but also with fear.A spiraling economic crisis that ignited spontaneous protests and clashes with riot police over corruption and the high cost of living has turned into a popular uprising against the political elite and sectarian political system. On the heels of mass protests in Algeria, Sudan, and Iraq, Lebanon has joined a second wave of social discontent in the Arab world emerging in countries that were not transformed by the mass protests of 2011. They seem undeterred by the counter-revolutions, repression and civil war that rolled back the victories of the Arab Spring everywhere but in Tunisia. Discontent with their domestic political system's inability to address social demands and economic crises, as in 2011, has created this new wave of mass social action attempting to transform society and bring down old leaders.Who Are Iran's Covert Missile Minions Arming Hezbollah?Tire-fire barricades and protesters blocking main highways and an open-ended general strike have paralyzed Lebanon. Over a million working- and middle-class people from across the sectarian divide of this state of 6 million have joined together in city squares chanting "the people want the downfall of the regime." "These words mean freedom, they mean changing the economy," says 24-year-old Ali Hassan about the chant made famous during the 2011 uprisings across the region. Smoking a cigarette on a curb in downtown Beirut, he looks over at a crowd of protesters standing on the steps of the Al-Amin Mosque who are denouncing the country's leaders as thieves. The building, designed to emulate Istanbul's Blue Mosque, was erected with a donation by Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister assassinated in 2005. His son, Saad Hariri, is prime minister now. Hassan, here on the curb, hails from the Hariri stronghold of Sidon on the coast south of Beirut, where he was a supporter of the Hariri-led Future Movement. Now working in Beirut as a nurse, however, he says his salary of $800 a month can't cover the cost of rent let alone finance his staggering student debt from four years paying the annual $40,000 university tuition. Hassan blames Lebanon's confessional political system left by French colonial rule as the root of the country's problem. Based on the demography of the early 20th century, it assures the president will be a Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim. The result thwarts the power of the electorate by dividing government and civil service positions along sectarian lines to balance representation of the major faiths and minorities. In practice it has created a system of patronage where the parties that fought the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990 use their governing positions to grant state jobs to their constituents. It has also facilitated the governing parties' role as proxies for foreign powers. "We want to be free from Syria, Iran, America and Saudi," Hassan says of the countries that exert influence on the government through their support of rival political factions. So he joined the hundreds of thousands from around the city regularly converging on the downtown. Carrying Lebanese flags and condemning all the establishment leaders as corrupt and inept in equal measure, they are an unprecedented coalition of people trying to force the collapse of a government made up of faces that have ruled since the civil war. The country is mired in an economic spiral, carrying one of the largest per capita national debts in the world, over $71 billion in total, and facing a shortage of the dollar to which the Lebanese Lira is pegged. Daily power cuts and non-potable tap water have been long-term problems resulting from government infrastructure neglect dating back almost 30 years, when the Hariris' construction company led the reconstruction that followed the civil war.According to Sami Nader, the director of the Levant Institute for Strategic Affairs, 37-percent youth unemployment and private currency traders increasingly abandoning the official Lebanese exchange rate are signs the country is heading toward a debt crisis like Argentina in 2001 or Greece in 2008. As a result, he says, people now feel they don't have anything left to lose. The protests were sparked by unpopular austerity measures and tax increases in a country with few public services and the government has been back peddling, scrambling to cling to power, since they erupted. First the government scrapped a proposed tax on WhatsApp. Used across Lebanon to avoid paying for calls and texts in a country with high mobile phone costs, the tax became the final straw that pushed people from economic despair to political rage. Then, as rival parties blamed each other, police cracked down on the streets with tear gas and water cannons. The protests only grew, forcing Hariri and President Michel Aoun to address the country in speeches promising economic reforms, vowing to fix long term infrastructure problems, and to take anti-corruption measures–but refusing to resign. Hassan Nasrallah, general secretary of Hezbollah (the Party of God) has also spoken to the country, stating clearly that his party will not accept the toppling of the presidency or resignation of the government. Hezbollah's Iranian-backed "militia" is the largest armed force in the country and it leverages this power to shape the government to serve its interests. Nasrallah has warned that if his party brings its supporters into the streets, it will "change the equation." However, the government's refusal to relinquish power has only boosted the movement."This is no longer about the reforms, it's about the people making the reforms," says Nader. "This is a real social and economic revolution." * * *In Beirut protesters have shut down highways that connect the capital with much of the rest of the country. The army is deployed along the main traffic arteries, watching protesters block them while sporadic barricades around the city have left streets, normally jammed to the point of gridlock, now virtually devoid of traffic. In Dahieh, the mostly Shia majority working class suburb of southern Beirut that has been a support base for Hezbollah, what normally are bustling alleys are not quiet, with shops shuttered. In the Sunni majority upscale neighborhood of Hamra, a key constituency of Prime Minister Saad Hariri in the city's west, banking towers are closed and protesters on the streets lined with bars and cafés blame their PM for making life in the city unaffordable. It is as quiet as Easter Sunday in the middle-class eastern Christian district of Ashrafieh, where the right-wing Lebanese Forces party and President Michel Aoun's Hezbollah-allied Free Patriotic Movement have battled for support. The usually booming music emanating from the boisterous nightlife in the district's neighborhoods of Mar Mikhael and Gemmayze is overpowered by the echoing chants of protesters returning from the mass rallies. However, it is in the city's downtown that hundreds of thousands come together in an often festive atmosphere to curse their leaders, chanting "all of them means all of them" in a call for them to go. Rebuilt after the civil war into a French-influenced, manicured Mediterranean promenade filled with foreign-owned investment properties, luxury shops, banks and embassies, Beirut's central business district is now controlled by protesters. Standing in the streets outside Parliament amid throngs of young people chanting "Revolution! Revolution!" 71-year-old Sukaina Salameh is overjoyed. The crowd is filled with contemporary anti-establishment references. Some protesters don the Guy Fawkes masks of the Anonymous movement while others prefer the Salvador Dali masks from the Spanish Bank Heist series "La Casa de Papel." There are Joker face-painting stations. But the aged Salameh is perfectly easy with all that. "I feel like I'm still young and I'm still fighting," she says.Salameh is director of NAVTSS, a Palestinian-Lebanese non-governmental organization that provides educational services in Palestinian and Syrian Refugee camps and to poor Lebanese communities. Lack of opportunities for poor and marginalized people in the country has demoralized people, she says, creating a drop in enrolment in her organization's education and training programs. As a Palestinian who was able to get Lebanese citizenship in the 1990s and has been an activist all her life, Salameh has lived on multiple sides of Lebanon's divide. She was involved in left-wing Palestinian and pan-Arabist struggles in the 1970s and sees some parallels with the mass protests against the political establishment then. "In the details we were fighting for something different when I was younger, but in the bigger picture we are still fighting for dignity and a better life," she says.In the mid-1970s, Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party led the struggle against Lebanon's sectarian system. Now his son Walid, who took over after his father's assassination in the civil war, heads the party. He is seen as a kingmaker in Lebanese politics and has resisted the calls for the government to quit. Salameh does not sympathize. "I want the old guard of the civil war to go and bring in people with new ideas," she says, admiring the younger generation's willingness to criticize the old leaders. For a woman who saw the civil war from some of its worst front lines, it is the cross-confessional political unity that has inspired her the most. "This is the first time in which poor people in every sect are speaking together and making the same demands," she says.* * *The scenes in Beirut are being replicated across the country. In southern Lebanon, in which Hezbollah fought and defeated Israeli occupation, Shia majority protests have condemned both the Party of God and its tenuous ally, Amal, which has been led since the civil war by Parliamentary Speaker Nabil Berri. Hariri is facing rejection by his own constituents as they rally in the northern city of Tripoli. And Christian communities from Mount Lebanon to the Bekaa Valley are saying time is up for President Aoun, Foreign Affairs Minister Gebran Bassil and Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea. Both Aoun and Geagea have gone from civil war strongmen to leading establishment politicians. Geagea was one of the few civil war leaders to be convicted and jailed in Lebanon for crimes committed during the civil war that raged from 1975-1990.Amid a new optimism there is also looming fear. Early in the protests, when rioting broke out in Beirut, two people were killed in fires. The following day, the bodyguard of a former member of parliament opened fire on a crowd in Tripoli, Lebanon's second city, killing two people and injuring two others. Amal members have attacked protesters in the south of the country and Hezbollah supporters have fought with protesters in Beirut, prompting Nasrallah to call on Hezbollah supporters to leave the scenes of protest and warning that continued unrest could lead to civil war. Protesters worry aloud about the potential for mass violence if the governing parties call their loyalists into the streets. Lebanon's political establishment is digging in as a new vision for the country comes together in the streets. What has become a protracted battle over turning the page on the political system that lead the country into and out of civil war is now transforming how people see their future and each other.To Take Down Trump, Take to the StreetsRead 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.
|
| Labour is waiting for EU Brexit delay before taking election decision - health spokesman Posted: 27 Oct 2019 02:14 AM PDT ![Labour is waiting for EU Brexit delay before taking election decision - health spokesman]( "Labour is waiting for EU Brexit delay before taking election decision - health spokesman") Britain's main opposition Labour Party is waiting for the European Union's decision on a Brexit delay before deciding whether to back Prime Minister Boris Johnson's bid for an early election, the party's health spokesman said on Sunday. Jon Ashworth told Sky News Labour would consider its support for an early election if the EU approved an extension to the Brexit process until the end of January. "Of course we want a general election but we've got to make sure that we get those absolute reassurances that Boris Johnson won't use a general election and the campaign to crash us out of the European Union with a disastrous no deal Brexit," he said.
|
| How Ivanka Trump and Her Team Cry, Cajole and Carp to Get Her Out of Bad Press Posted: 27 Oct 2019 02:05 AM PDT  Photo Illustration by Kristen Hazzard/The Daily Beast/Photos GettyOn August 16, 2016, just a few weeks after his father-in-law, Donald J. Trump, had clinched the Republican nomination for president, Esquire magazine ran a story entitled "Jared Kushner's Second Act." It was written by veteran journalist Vicky Ward and exposed a number of less-than-flattering details about the then 35-year-old head of his family's real estate firm, Kushner Companies. Ward's profile depicted a young, entitled scion who was at turns arrogant and vindictive. In one sense, the story emasculated Kushner, portraying him as a subservient son-in-law. This was certainly not the image of her husband that Ivanka Trump wanted presented to the world in the glossy pages of a popular men's magazine. So she did what any rich, New York City media-connected, powerful spouse would do—and then took it up a couple of notches: Ivanka, according to Ward, called Esquire's editor-in-chief at the time, Jay Fielden, and literally started crying, pleading with him to take down the story. Firing on all cylinders, Ivanka also texted Ward and said she did not recognize her husband in the Esquire piece. Fielden, Ward told me, instantly saw through Ivanka's "crocodile tears." Jared and Ivanka's side leveled against Ward for falsifying the story. But the piece remained online and was published in the October print issue; no substantive changes or retractions were made to Ward's reporting. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment from Ivanka on the Esquire incident.)While Jared and Ivanka might not go full Harvey Weinstein on reporters—the former movie executive hired ex-Mossad agents to track journalists and intimidate sources—there is no question, Ward says, that Jared and Ivanka have no compunction going to the head of news outlets to interfere with pieces they deem unflattering. "Every reporter knows they will be on the phone to Rupert Murdoch. Their guiding credo is PR above everything else. Ivanka thinks she is brilliant at public relations," said Ward, the author of Kushner, Inc., and a senior reporter at CNN.That might explain, in part, why Hunter Biden has gone through a media inquisition about his dealings in Ukraine and China, while Ivanka received virtually no additional press scrutiny after The New Yorker detailed her work on a real estate project in Azerbaijan with local partners who had alleged ties to the Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated terrorist organization. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee subsequently called on the Justice Department and the Treasury Department to investigate the deal for possibly violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Then there was Ivanka's very close brush with a criminal indictment for inflating condo sales to potential buyers at the Trump Soho, a development project she helped oversee. And remember it was Ivanka, among others, who advocated for the hiring of Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn. (A spokesperson for a prominent Washington think tank told me it was "malpractice" by congressional Democrats that Ivanka hasn't been subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee.) Somehow, though, none of these poor judgement calls have made it into the dominant media narrative about the first daughter.While some may see this as business as usual—everyone in politics wants glowing coverage and it wasn't like the Obama administration was a cakewalk for journalists, either—Ivanka, who along with her husband is an unpaid adviser to the President of the United States, is a whole other press animal. To start, she has spent "the near-entirety of her adult life working the media," as The Financial Times noted in a 2017 profile. She also is that rarest of trifectas serving in the West Wing: a celebrity, a social media star, and a child of the sitting president. This status gives her unprecedented power to wield in the media arena, and wield it she does.Ivanka doesn't blast the press as the enemy of the people, like her father does. Rather, she sees the news media as her personal enrichment and image-enhancement tool—which was, for many years, very much the case when she was a socialite living on the Upper East Side, fawned over by the lifestyle and fashion press. One editor who has worked for three leading national publications told me that she thought that Ivanka is the hardest Washington beat to cover. "With Donald, it's all out there. By contrast, Ivanka is secretive, cryptic, controlled, and poised," the editor said speaking on the condition of anonymity.She hasn't been able to maintain this iron media grip alone. Early in 2017, shortly after getting themselves installed in senior Trump administration roles, she and Jared brought on their own PR flack, Josh Raffel, to serve in the West Wing's communications operations. Raffel, who was a White House employee paid with taxpayer dollars, spent countless hours on the phone with reporters, including myself, defending the couple. The premise Raffel, who left the White House in 2018, pushed with some success into media zeitgeist: Ivanka has her narrow lanes—workforce development, human trafficking, global entrepreneurship—and therefore basically has a free pass on everything else.It helps explain how Ivanka has managed to pull off the PR stunt of a lifetime: floating untouched above the reputational decline—she is, according to a June survey, polling better in swing states than her father—that has consumed the Trump administration's entire inner circle, save her. Like many other people living inside the Beltway fishbowl, Ivanka has made herself useful to reporters and employed the age-old Washington media practice of getting her message out there through surrogates and background and off-the-record conversations with journalists. "Everyone, including Jared and Ivanka, leak to the press. I think in general it helps to leak if the person is under scrutiny," said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump adviser and Zelig of the political news media world.But Ivanka can also go into full attack mode when the news cycle winds aren't favorable, specifically when she feels particularly embarrassed and belittled by the coverage. Take, for instance, the reaction of the White House press office after BBC reporter Parham Ghabodi tweeted a video taken by the French presidential palace showing Ivanka trying awkwardly to insert herself into a conversation with world leaders. Ivanka, according to one Washington reporter, was extremely rankled by the media's reaction to the video, which rang up nearly 23 million views and more than 100,000 likes and retweets. So Jessica Ditto, the deputy White House communications director who now handles most of the first daughter's press, wrote a snarling email to Ghabodi: "Your speculative tweet has created negative attacks and press on something that could easily have been explained had you simply asked or read the information the White House and G20 released." Ditto called critics of Ivanka's "haters." Rather than focus on advancing policy messages or American diplomatic objectives, the highest communications office in the country devolved into the attack dog and spin machine for Ivanka Trump. "There are many White House reporters who are afraid to challenge her [Ivanka] and hold her accountable, because she and Jared are their entry into deeper relationships in the administration. I've talked to a least half a dozen reporters who have told me this," one prominent public affairs professional in Washington, D.C., told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to compromise the organization's relationship with the press. I was astonished by how much time Raffel spent on the phone with me during the summer of 2017 while I was reporting a story about Ivanka for the Columbia Journalism Review. Given that Raffel's portfolio ostensibly covered Jared and Ivanka's full slate of policy issues, including the Middle East, why spend so much energy on a single story for a niche publication?There's no mystery here: Ivanka must win, or at least try to win, every piece, every snub, and every news cycle. And here's how that strategy played out with my CJR story, which was examining, among other things, Ivanka's accountability to the public for her record in business and government. On Sept. 3, 2017 I wrote to Raffel asking if I could get confirmation on the record of my distillation of Raffel's previous statements about Ivanka; namely, that the White House believes Ivanka should only be held accountable by the media on the policy areas on which she works and oversees.I told Raffel my deadline was Sept. 13 at noon. The day after my deadline, on Sept. 14, Raffel said Ivanka was officially declining to comment for my story. Coincidentally, that was the same day the Financial Times ran a flattering profile of the first daughter which Ivanka cooperated for, giving the paper three in-person interviews. Raffel wanted to make sure I had seen it, so on Sept. 15, he wrote me an email with a link to the Financial Times story and a short message saying: "probably worth reading this one. She [Ivanka] has said things on the record that are useful to ure [sic] story." Ivanka's North Korea Photobombs Perplex White House OfficialsThe Financial Times piece essentially summed up what I had asked Raffel—in a nutshell, whether it was unfair to blame Ivanka for the transgender military ban or rolling back of EPA regulations—a few weeks before. Here's how the Financial Times framed it: "Ivanka's allies argue that it is unfair to blame her and her husband for controversial issues such as the president's decision to pull out of the Paris climate-change accord, which she reportedly pleaded against."Raffel had gone for, and scored, the PR touchdown—putting his side's spin out there prior to the release of what he perceived would be a critical counter-narrative. I was directed to Ivanka's quotes in the Financial Times as the final word, which meant the message was delivered couched in the flattering FT profile, which landed first, and diminished the message of my piece. I was told the White House wouldn't be saying anything else on the matter.The first daughter wants to be on her own Ivanka policy island, distancing herself from the less savory parts of the administration. Even if this were defensible—i.e., that Ivanka shouldn't be judged by the administration as a whole, but only the policy portfolio as she defines it for herself in the most favorable of light—her initiatives often collide with what the Trump administration is trying to pursue.Last year, for example, Ivanka told the public that the administration is taking bold action to combat the evils of human trafficking, yet the administration she serves is approving the lowest level of so-called "T visas," which provide immigration relief for foreign-born trafficking victims, since 2010. "They are transparently destroying protections for trafficking victims," said Martina E. Vandenberg, the founder and director of the Human Trafficking Legal Center. But what Ivanka's pet issues really provide her with is cover and a very convenient distraction flag when the questions get dicey. For instance, when Ivanka was asked what she thinks about the Democrats' effort to impeach her father for urging the Ukrainian president to open investigations into his political rivals, she can say, as she did on Fox News, that she's just more focused on "fighting for the American worker" than anything else and that's her "priority."Ivanka's image has been immensely bolstered—and protected—by the lifestyle press. Just look at the Daily Mail's breathless, almost sycophantic coverage that assiduously chronicles every outfit Ivanka wears as it would a member of the royal family, reinforcing Ivanka's chosen image as an untouchable celebrity.One way to look at Ivanka and her relationship with the press is that she is just another chapter in what is becoming the prevailing storyline of this era in American history: the protected status afforded to white, wealthy, socially connected, and media-savvy titans of business and culture. Something that has always stuck with me is an off-hand comment an editor made to me when I asked why there were so many roadblocks to covering Ivanka. The editor responded that many in the media see her as one of their own.There is no shortage of bold-faced names—actresses, fashion icons, magazine editors, and socialites, the kinds of people who have or anticipate running into Ivanka on the Davos/Aspen circuit —who will be hysterically critical of the first daughter on social media (some, like Moda Operandi founder and contributing Vogue editor Lauren Santo Domingo will even tweet directly at Ivanka, saying things like she did in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting: "Arming teacher is a terrible, no good, very bad idea. @Ivankatrump, what they done to you?") but will not comment on the record in the press. (Why they feel comfortable going on the written record on social media but not in the news media is somewhat baffling.) Many will speak off the record or anonymously, but never under their own name. In over three years of reporting on Ivanka, the only person I found who was willing to break the Upper East Side code of silence and go on the record criticizing Ivanka was Christina Lewis Halpern. Her father, Reginald Lewis, was once the richest black man in America and she moved in the same social circles of New York City private schools and Ivy League schools as Ivanka. Lewis Halpern also covered real estate for The Wall Street Journal from 2005 to 2010. Lewis Halpern, who has since left journalism and founded a nonprofit called All Star Code, wrote an unpublished profile of Ivanka for the Journal about a decade ago, giving her deep insight into Ivanka and her world. It was Lewis Halpern who tipped me off to the fact that Ivanka had lied on the back cover of her bestselling 2009 autobiographical self-help book, The Trump Card. Ivanka claimed she had graduated from Wharton summa cum laude, the highest distinction of honors given by the school, when she had really graduated cum laude, two notches below. (Ivanka's PR team officially copped to it, calling it an "instance of confusion surrounding the specific level of honors.") Lewis Halpern also told me on the record how "tone-deaf" Ivanka sounded when talking about her quick professional ascent ("No one gets hired as a vice president in a multinational real-estate firm at the age of 24," Lewis Halpern said, alluding to the nepotism that fueled her meteoric rise within the Trump Organization). And in 2016, Lewis Halpern called Ivanka out in a piece I wrote for Huffington Post's Highline. Ivanka, according to Lewis Haplern, was aiding and abetting racism, acting as Donald Trump's "surrogate" in "building a movement that fights against everything that I was raised to believe is true about America," specifically economic and social justice for African-Americans and other historically oppressed people. Since then, we've had Charlottesville, "shithole" countries, and all the rest. Lewis Halpern remains virtually alone among her peers in criticizing Ivanka. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail is teasing how she'll celebrate her 10th wedding anniversary at "'rustic' Camp David with intimate party—and no paparazzi."Ivanka Turns to Control-Freak Dressing as Chaos Comes for TrumpRead 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.
|
| I will not back government's election bid, says UK former finance minister Posted: 27 Oct 2019 01:53 AM PDT ![I will not back government's election bid, says UK former finance minister]( "I will not back government's election bid, says UK former finance minister") Britain's former finance minister Philip Hammond said on Sunday he would vote against Prime Minister Boris Johnson's bid on Monday to force an election, saying parliament should be focused on trying to secure a deal to leave the European Union. This is not the time to be holding a general election, it is a time for cool heads and grown up government," Hammond told Sky News, adding that parliament should instead be scrutinising the Brexit deal.
|
| Report: Iran releases 2 labor activists on bail Posted: 27 Oct 2019 01:05 AM PDT ![Report: Iran releases 2 labor activists on bail]( "Report: Iran releases 2 labor activists on bail") Iran's semi-official news agency says that its judiciary has released two labor activists on bail. Saturday's ISNA report said that Sepideh Gholian was released on some $130,000 bail, along with Atefeh Rangriz, whose bail terms it didn't provide. Gholian was arrested in October 2018 during a demonstration supporting a workers' strike over several months' unpaid salaries at the Haft Tapeh sugar mill in Shush, a city in the country's southwest.
|
| Economists Call for Alternative Path to U.S.-China Trade Wars Posted: 26 Oct 2019 09:30 PM PDT ![Economists Call for Alternative Path to U.S.-China Trade Wars]( "Economists Call for Alternative Path to U.S.-China Trade Wars") (Bloomberg) -- Terms of Trade is a daily newsletter that untangles a world embroiled in trade wars. Sign up here. A group of prominent economists from the U.S. and China called for the world's two largest economies to abandon their trade war and agree to a new path forward that would give both countries more latitude to both pursue their own domestic economic policies and hit back at those that hurt them.In a joint statement issued in China on Sunday, 37 economists -- including Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Spence and three other Nobel winners -- bemoaned what they said has been a descent of the trade conflict into a binary debate where the only emerging solutions are either wholesale economic reforms by China leading to a converging of economic models or an economically-damaging "decoupling."The group argued a more sensible framework for future trade relations would give China room to pursue industrial policies that are often a target of criticism from the U.S., while also allowing the U.S. latitude to respond with targeted tariffs if China's policies were damaging its interests."We believe this approach preserves the bulk of the gains from trade between the two economies, without presuming convergence in economic models," the statement says. It also would be in line with the current multilateral system, they argued, although it would enlarge both the U.S. and China's rights under current World Trade Organization rules.The push is emblematic of the ways in which economists and other thinkers are wrestling with how to respond to U.S. President Donald Trump's challenge to the existing governance of the global economy. While many countries have circled the wagons to try and protect the WTO and other institutions from Trump's attacks, there is also a growing acknowledgment from many sides of politics that the current system has not worked in addressing China's economic rise and its effect on other economies.It comes as Trump is working to close what he has described as "phase one" of a trade truce with China that is designed to avoid a further escalation of their trade wars. It would see China commit to resuming agricultural purchases from the U.S. at levels similar to those seen before the U.S. started imposing new tariffs last year and would put on hold the threat of further U.S. duties. It is also expected to include commitments on intellectual property reforms and currency manipulation by China.But the interim deal, which Trump has said he hopes to sign with China's Xi Jinping at a summit in Chile next month, would crucially push discussions of other U.S. complaints such as China's industrial policies to later rounds of negotiations.The effort unveiled Sunday was led by New York University law professor Jeffrey Lehman, Harvard economist Dani Rodrik and Yang Yao, dean of the National School of Development at Peking University. Rodrik is a long-standing critic of globalization and has advocated giving countries more "policy space" to pursue and protect domestic economic priorities, arguing that current global trading system often violates nations' sovereignty.The statement's other signatories include former World Bank chief economists Justin Yifu Lin and Kaushik Basu.In an interview, Rodrik said Trump's trade attack on China has shifted the debate on how to manage the economic relationship into dangerous territory. "What he is doing is crowding out space for a more reasonable discussion," Rodrik said."What the United States is doing is actually engaging in a trade war and imposing tariffs as a way of forcing China into a series of economic arrangements," he said. "The modus operandi is 'China you are not playing by the rules of the game and we are going to raise our tariffs on you until you fall into line."'At the same time, he said, "China brings to a head the fundamental tensions of the world trading regime like nothing else" and policymakers needed to realize that their expectation that China would simply "fall into line" with global trading rules had not worked."China is the clearest example that that is an unrealistic expectation and because it is such a large economy it makes the tension existential," he said.To contact the reporter on this story: Shawn Donnan in Washington at sdonnan@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Simon Kennedy at skennedy4@bloomberg.net, Sarah McGregor, Linus ChuaFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
|
| Mind your language: Archbishop of Canterbury's Brexit warning for Boris Posted: 26 Oct 2019 07:21 PM PDT  The Archbishop of Canterbury has taken Prime Minister Boris Johnson to task for his use of "inflammatory" language through the Brexit debate. Justin Welby told The Sunday Times there was a risk of pouring "petrol" on the country's divisions on the issue of Britain's departure from the European Union. The archbishop said Mr Johnson had come to symbolise a climate in which Britain had become consumed by "an abusive and binary approach to political decisions", and where those with opposing views treated each other as "total" enemies. In an era in which social media had made it "extraordinarily dangerous to use careless comments", and in which hate speech was on the rise, Mr Welby called for political leaders to take more care with their language. He said his criticisms were not confined to Mr Johnson and his Government, but made it clear he considered the prime minister partly to blame for the fact society had become "quite broken". The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby during an address at Westminster Abbey. Credit: Paul Grover/Paul Grover "I think we have become addicted to an abusive and binary approach to political decisions: 'It's either this or you're my total enemy'," Mr Welby told the paper. "There have been inflammatory words used on all sides, in parliament and outside - 'traitor', 'fascist', all kinds of really bad things have been said at the highest level in politics." Mr Welby said he was "shocked" by Mr Johnson's recent dismissal of concerns extreme language could encourage death threats against politicians as "humbug". And he added political leaders could no longer behave the same way as Mr Johnson's hero, Winston Churchill. "Churchill was well known for his somewhat inflammatory putdowns in parliament," the archbishop said. "But this is happening at a time when we have social media, which amplifies things. "In a time of deep uncertainty, a much smaller amount of petrol is a much more dangerous thing than it was in a time when people were secure. "There is a great danger to doing it when we're already in a very polarised and volatile situation." Mr Welby said action was needed to heal divisions "at almost every level of society, including the political level of society", adding: "I don't only blame government. I think we are quite broken."
|
| North Korea says it's running out of patience with US Posted: 26 Oct 2019 07:08 PM PDT  North Korea on Sunday said it's running out of patience with the United States over what it described as hostile policies and unilateral disarmament demands, and warned that a close personal relationship between the leaders alone wouldn't be enough to prevent nuclear diplomacy from derailing. In a statement published by Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency, senior North Korean official Kim Yong Chol said there has been no substantial progress in relations despite warm ties between leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump.
|
| N. Korea warns US not to exploit 'close' Trump-Kim ties Posted: 26 Oct 2019 06:53 PM PDT  North Korea said Sunday the United States must not exploit the "close personal relations" between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump as negotiations over Pyongyang's nuclear arsenal remain deadlocked. Talks between Pyongyang and Washington have stalled since a second summit between Trump and Kim in Hanoi in February broke down without an agreement.
|
