| Former US adviser warns of 'imminent' North Korea risk Posted: 23 Dec 2019 05:34 PM PST  Former US national security adviser John Bolton on Monday sharply criticized President Donald Trump's North Korea policy, warning that the Asian country posed an "imminent" threat. "The risk to US forces & our allies is imminent & more effective policy is required before NK has the technology to threaten the American homeland," tweeted Bolton, who was dismissed in September amid growing disagreements with Trump, particularly regarding his North Korea policy. The erstwhile advisor, a longtime hawk on North Korea, was openly skeptical of the 2018 summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and encouraged the US president to be cautious.
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| Queen Elizabeth Calls on U.K. to Reconcile in Christmas Address Posted: 23 Dec 2019 04:01 PM PST ![Queen Elizabeth Calls on U.K. to Reconcile in Christmas Address]( "Queen Elizabeth Calls on U.K. to Reconcile in Christmas Address") (Bloomberg) -- Queen Elizabeth II will urge Britons to "overcome long-held differences" less than two weeks after a bitterly-fought general election offered an end to three-and-a-half years of political deadlock over Brexit.The monarch will use her annual Christmas Day message to pay tribute to veterans of D-Day, the 1944 operation which led to the liberation of western Europe. Describing events to mark the invasion's 75th anniversary, she will urge people to adopt the spirit of reconciliation shown as "those who had formerly been sworn enemies came together in friendly commemorations," according to extracts of the address released by her office."By being willing to put past differences behind us and move forward together, we honor the freedom and democracy once won for us at so great a cost," she will say. "The path, of course, is not always smooth, and may at times this year have felt quite bumpy, but small steps can make a world of difference."The message comes as the U.K.'s political paralysis since the 2016 Brexit referendum appears to have ended. Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservatives won a large majority on Dec. 12 after promising to get Britain out of the European Union by the end of January.The first vote on Johnson's proposed Brexit deal comfortably passed in the House of Commons on Friday, and Members of Parliament are scheduled to resume debate on the legislation in early January.This is not the first time the Queen has called for unity. In her 2018 address, the monarch urged the British people to be respectful of one another while referencing "deeply-held divisions." She did not explicitly mention Brexit then, nor is she expected to this year.To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Ritchie in Edinburgh at gritchie10@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Thomas Penny, Alex MoralesFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| US awards immigration detention contracts in California Posted: 23 Dec 2019 02:20 PM PST  The Trump administration awarded billions of dollars in contracts for private companies to operate immigration detention centers in California —- less than two weeks before a new state law takes effect to prohibit them. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill in October to ban contracts for for-profit prisons starting Jan. 1. Supporters hoped the law would force U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to look elsewhere after current contracts expire.
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| Roberts will tap his inner umpire in impeachment trial Posted: 23 Dec 2019 02:05 PM PST  America's last prolonged look at Chief Justice John Roberts came 14 years ago, when he told senators during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing that judges should be like baseball umpires, impartially calling balls and strikes. "He's going to look the part, he's going to play the part and he's the last person who wants the part," said Carter Phillips, who has argued 88 Supreme Court cases, 43 of them in front of Roberts.
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| House committee raises prospect of more impeachment articles Posted: 23 Dec 2019 12:25 PM PST ![House committee raises prospect of more impeachment articles]( "House committee raises prospect of more impeachment articles") The House Judiciary Committee held open the possibility Monday of recommending additional articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump as it pressed anew for the testimony of former White House counsel Don McGahn. The committee wants a federal appeals court to order McGahn to testify as it examines potential obstruction of justice by the president during special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. The committee says McGahn's testimony could also be useful for any Senate impeachment trial.
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| North Korea's threat of 'Christmas gift' puts US, South Korea on high alert Posted: 23 Dec 2019 12:15 PM PST  After months of stalled nuclear negotiations and ratcheting up rhetoric, North Korea has promised to deliver a "Christmas gift" to the U.S. -- a warning that has American and South Korean officials on high alert this week for a potential long-range missile test. If so, it would be the first long-range missile test in over two years, which is not only another flagrant violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions on Pyongyang, but also a breach of Kim Jong Un's personal pledge to President Donald Trump not to test such weapons.
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| It's Putin's World. We Just Live in It. Posted: 23 Dec 2019 11:41 AM PST  MOSCOW -- Its economy, already smaller than Italy's, may be sputtering but, two decades after a virtually unknown former KGB spy took power in the Kremlin on Dec. 31, 1999, Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, have just had what could be their best year yet.The United States, an implacable foe during the Cold War but now presided over by a president determined to "get along with Russia," is convulsed and distracted by impeachment; Britain, the other main pillar of a trans-Atlantic alliance that Putin has worked for years to undermine, is also turning inward and just voted for a government that vows to exit the European Union by the end of January.The Middle East, where American and British influence once reigned supreme, has increasingly tilted toward Moscow as it turned the tide of war in Syria; provided Turkey, a member of NATO, with advanced missile systems; and signed contracts worth billions of dollars with Saudi Arabia, America's closest ally in the Arab world. Russia has also drawn close to Egypt, another longtime U.S. ally; become a key player in Libya's civil war; and moved toward what looks more and more like an alliance with China.It has been barely five years since President Barack Obama's dismissive 2014 judgment of Russia as a "regional power" capable only of threatening its neighbors "not out of strength but out of weakness." Its successes raise a mystifying question: How has a country like Russia, huge in size -- it has 11 time zones -- but puny when measured by economic and other important metrics, become such a potent force?"When the Soviet Union collapsed, everyone was asking the same question," recalled Nina Khrushcheva, granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and a Russia expert at the New School in New York: "How is it that such a rotten system punched so far above its weight?"The West, Khrushcheva said, has repeatedly misread a country whose ambitions are as immense as its territory -- it stretches from the Pacific Ocean to the Baltic Sea -- and that is often untethered from what looks like reality. Putin, she said, "is at once a technocrat and a religious zealot, an exhibitionist and a master of secrets. You expect one thing, linearly, and suddenly it's entirely something else, smoke and mirrors."Under Putin, Vladislav Surkov, a longtime Kremlin adviser, wrote in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, a Moscow newspaper, earlier this year, Russia "is playing with the West's minds."Also its own.Standing TallAs a reporter based in Moscow two decades ago when Russia's first democratically elected president, Boris N. Yeltsin, handed power to Putin, I traveled to St. Petersburg, the new president's hometown, to try and figure out what chance -- if any -- Putin had of ruling, never mind reversing, the bleak scene he had been handed.Russia was a mess, its economy still blighted by a post-Soviet collapse worse than the Great Depression in the United States, its military so feeble that it had lost a war in tiny Chechnya, its population so disillusioned with Yeltsin's promises of new capitalist dawn that it had elected a parliament filled with communists, cranks and crypto-fascists.A conversation with Putin's former high school biology teacher, however, quickly made clear that, as a popular Russian saying goes, "hope dies last." She remembered Putin as not only a diligent student but also an exceptional basketball player because "he was very tall."That the diminutive new president had grown in her memory to become a giant gave me my first glimpse of what, over the 20 years since, has been a defining feature of Putin's rule: his ability to present himself and his country as standing far taller than objective facts would seem to justify.It is not all just legerdemain."Maybe he's holding small cards, but he seems unafraid to play them," said Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow and now a scholar at Stanford. "That's what makes Putin so scary."Putin acknowledged as much in an interview with film director Oliver Stone. "The question is not about having much power," he said. "It's about using the power you have in the right way."Putin has harnessed Russian patriotism, which he described in his recent year-end news conference as "the only possible ideology in modern, democratic society," to achieve some real results, notably curbing the disorder of the Yeltsin era, along with the freedoms.He crushed a rebellion in Chechnya, which he visited just hours after taking office in a show of can-do bravado, modernized the armed forces and reined in -- driving into exile, jailing or simply terrifying -- the oligarchs who, under Yeltsin, had done so much to discredit capitalism and democracy. He has nurtured a new clique of obedient oligarchs loyal to the Kremlin.All the same, said Gleb Pavlovsky, a political scientist who worked for more than a decade as a Kremlin adviser, Russia under Putin still reminds him of a sci-fi movie exoskeleton: "Inside is sitting a small, weak and perhaps frightened person, but from the outside it looks terrifying."'The Ideology of the Future'Russia's economy is dwarfed by that of America's, which is more than 10 times bigger in dollar terms; it is too small to make even a list of the top 10, and it grew by around just 1% this year. Nor does Russia pack much cultural punch beyond its borders, despite excelling in classical music, ballet and many other arts. South Korea, thanks to K-pop and its movies, has more reach.Yet Russia has become a lodestar for autocrats and aspiring autocrats around the world, a pioneer of the media and other tools -- known in Russia as "political technologies" -- that these leaders now deploy, with or without Moscow's help, to disrupt a world order once dominated by the United States. These include the propagation of fake or at least highly misleading news; the masking of simple facts with complicated conspiracy theories; and denunciations of political rivals as traitors or, in a term President Donald Trump borrowed from Stalin, "enemies of the people."Whatever its problems, Surkov, the Kremlin adviser, said, Russia has created "the ideology of the future" by dispensing with the "illusion of choice" offered by the West and rooting itself in the will of a single leader capable of swiftly making the choices without constraint.China, too, has advocated autocracy as the way to get results fast, but even Xi Jinping, head of the Chinese Communist Party, can't match the lightening speed with which Putin ordered and executed the seizure of Crimea. The decision to grab the Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine was made at a single all-night Kremlin meeting in February 2014 and then carried out just four days later with the dispatch of a few score Russian special forces officers to seize a handful of government buildings in Simferopol, the Crimean capital.The temptations of authoritarianism a la Russe have found fertile ground in countries that long saw themselves as bastions of Western values like Hungary and Poland, and that had long histories of hostility toward Moscow. They have seduced voters elsewhere in Europe, too, and also in parts of the United States. Pavlovsky, the former Kremlin adviser, said he was stunned during a recent trip to Western Europe to have people tell him "how lucky we are in Russia to have such a brilliant and strong president.""There is almost a consensus that Putin is a great man, a resurrection of de Gaulle," he said. "Putin thinks this himself. It is not just an illusion, because it works."Not all Russians are convinced, particularly the young in Moscow and St. Petersburg, who staged protests over the summer to declare that Putin's time is up.But the security forces quickly put an end to that, using often brutal force, and Putin's approval rating nationwide, which had dipped slightly, is now back up to around 70%, according to an opinion poll published in November by the Levada Center.This is down from the period of nationalist euphoria that followed the annexation of Crimea but is still remarkably high in a country with stagnant growth and, for many, shrinking prospects.Heartened by the shifting winds in Russia's direction, and his own, in an interview with The Financial Times, Putin pronounced dead the West's governing creed since the end of World War II. The ideology of liberal democracy, he said, "has outlived its purpose."Russian mind games have been particularly successful in the United States, which Putin and his officials regularly accuse of paranoid Russophobia but whose fixation on Russia has only multiplied the force of its influence. Moscow's efforts to sow division through Facebook and other social media platforms were low-budget and often primitive, but they have had a disproportionate effect on the American political process.The result is a state of fretful and anything-goes uncertainty, a condition summed up by Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born British author, in the title of his 2014 book about Putin's Russia: "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible."In Russia, Khrushcheva said, "it's not what is on the surface, it's doublespeak, triple-think. That's why we are so good at art."A New PathWhen Putin first took charge after Yeltsin's surprise resignation on the eve of the new millennium, he declared his commitment to a very different direction for Russia than the one he has since taken.Bid farewell by Yeltsin on the steps of the Kremlin with a melancholy request that he "take care of Russia," Putin appeared on television a few hours later to deliver his first New Year Eve's address to the nation, vowing to "protect freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the mass media, ownership rights, these fundamental elements of a civilized society."He delivered much the same message 18 months later in a historic speech, the first by a Russian leader, in the Reichstag in Berlin, sketching a vision of Russia as inextricably bound to Europe and its values.By 2002, however, he was already growing weary of Russia being viewed as a supplicant junior partner. "Russia was never as strong as it wants to be, and never as weak as it is thought to be," he warned.Bitterly disillusioned with the West on security issues, in 2007 Putin delivered a speech in Munich bristling with resentment and anger at U.S. unilateralism and disregard for Russian opposition to the expansion of NATO. "They bring us to the abyss of one conflict after another," he said, creating such insecurity that "nobody feels safe."But the real turning point, said Pavlovsky, who was then working in the Kremlin, came a year later with the meltdown of global financial systems."For Putin this was a decisive threshold," he said. "Before this he orientated himself toward America. Yes, he disliked in the extreme what the Americans were doing around the world, but all the same he saw America as the strongest economy that runs the world economic system. Suddenly it turned out: No, they are not running anything."This, Pavlovsky said, "was the moment of truth," when "all the old norms vanished."Since then, he said, Russia has set about creating its own norms."Reality is not a children's matinee or the handing out of mandarin oranges," he said. "In other words, things simply don't look like you thought they do, like you wanted them to, like you expected them to."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
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| Top baby names in NYC were Liam, Emma in 2018, officials say Posted: 23 Dec 2019 10:57 AM PST ![Top baby names in NYC were Liam, Emma in 2018, officials say]( "Top baby names in NYC were Liam, Emma in 2018, officials say") The most popular baby names in New York City last year were Liam and Emma, according to data released by city health officials Monday. Of the babies born in New York City in 2018, there were 779 Liams and 501 Emmas, according to the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's birth certificate records. Liam has been the top name for boys since 2016, and Emma has been the top name for girls since 2017.
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| Saudi controversies under Prince Mohammed Posted: 23 Dec 2019 09:53 AM PST  Saudi Arabia has been engulfed by a series of controversies since Mohammed bin Salman was named crown prince and heir to the throne in June 2017. The brutal murder of critic Jamal Khashoggi and the increased repression of dissidents have overshadowed the prince's efforts to modernise the economy and society. Since March 2015, shortly after Prince Mohammed was appointed defence minister, Saudi Arabia has spearheaded a regional military intervention in Yemen to support the government against the Iran-backed Huthi rebels.
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| Five Sentenced to Death in Khashoggi Murder, Royal Aides Cleared Posted: 23 Dec 2019 08:48 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- A Saudi court sentenced five people to death for the murder of government critic Jamal Khashoggi but ruled that last year's assassination wasn't premeditated and said it didn't have enough evidence to incriminate two top officials close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.The verdict, read out by the public prosecutor on Monday in Riyadh, is unlikely to mute criticism in the U.S. against the kingdom and Prince Mohammed for the murder of the Washington Post columnist by government agents in Istanbul.While Prince Mohammed has repeatedly denied sanctioning the killing, U.S. lawmakers and CIA analysts concluded it couldn't have taken place without his knowledge. The accusations focused on two of his key aides, royal court adviser Saud al-Qahtani and top intelligence official Ahmed Alassiri.But Deputy Attorney General Shalaan Shalaan said authorities questioned Qahtani, who was removed from his position by King Salman and sanctioned by the U.S. after the killing, and didn't find enough evidence against him. Alassiri, a top intelligence official also removed from his position, was found not guilty by the court.The sentencing probably won't "turn off the fires that started after the Khashoggi issue in the U.S. Congress," said Ayham Kamel, head of Middle East and North Africa research at Eurasia Group, a consultancy.'Difficult to Imagine'"There seems to be an effort not to implicate the most significant or senior officials who were once close to the crown prince," said Kamel. "The viewpoint in the U.S. and in Europe is that it's difficult to imagine that a decision of this magnitude would've been carried out by junior officials without directive from their seniors."Three out of 11 who stood trial for the murder at the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul were given a total of 24-year prison terms. The court found three others not guilty. It didn't identify any of those who were convicted.Khashoggi's killing drew global condemnation, bruising the reputation of Prince Mohammed as a reformer of Saudi Arabia and prompting bipartisan efforts in the U.S. Congress to limit arms sales to the kingdom. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham called him a "wrecking ball" and "toxic" figure.President Donald Trump has repeatedly defended the prince and shielded the kingdom against any major retaliation by lawmakers.A senior Trump administration official called the court proceedings an important step in holding accountable those responsible for the killing. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, encouraged the Saudis to continue with a fair and transparent judicial process.Prince Mohammed has denounced the murder and in a September interview for CBS's "60 Minutes" said he took "full responsibility" for it. Asked how he could have been unaware of the operation, he said he can't know "what 3 million people working for the Saudi government do daily."UN ReportThe finding that Khashoggi's murder on Oct. 2, 2018, was not premeditated also contradicts conclusions by Turkish authorities and Western intelligence services.A report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur Agnes Callamard found that Saudi agents were recorded discussing how to dismember Khashoggi's body several minutes before he had entered the consulate, referring to him as a "sacrificial lamb."Callamard has recommended further investigation into Prince Mohammed and al-Qahtani over Khashoggi's murder and has called the murder a "state killing" that should prompt world leaders to reconsider having the Group of 20 summit in Riyadh next November.Salah Khashoggi, Jamal's son, said on twitter after the announcement that justice had been served in a timely fashion. "Today the judiciary gave us our right as children of the departed," he wrote. "We affirm our trust in the Saudi judicial system at all levels." Turkey's Foreign Ministry criticized the verdict on Monday, saying it failed to shed light on who ordered the murder.A prominent Saudi journalist and government insider, Khashoggi never considered himself a dissident. But in 2017, as a crackdown on domestic dissent under Prince Mohammed intensified, Khashoggi fled, fearing he could be detained. He settled in the U.S., penning a series of critical columns for the Washington Post.The 59-year-old went to the Saudi consulate to obtain paperwork for his marriage. He was killed by a team of government agents that lay in wait for him. His body was never recovered.Saudi officials initially said Khashoggi had left the Istanbul consulate on his own, then claimed he died in an interrogation gone awry. A stream of leaks from Turkish intelligence officials repeatedly undermined the Saudi attempts to explain away the death.The trial began in January, according to local media. Nine sessions were held before Monday's sentencing, according to Shalaan. Representatives of the Turkish government, Saudi human rights groups and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council were allowed to attend, but the media had been banned from covering the trial.(Updates with Trump administration comment in 10th paragraph.)\--With assistance from Jordan Fabian.To contact the reporter on this story: Donna Abu-Nasr in Riyadh at dabunasr@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Lin Noueihed at lnoueihed@bloomberg.net, Justin Blum, Gregory MottFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Diplomats visit American jailed in Russia on spying charges Posted: 23 Dec 2019 08:43 AM PST ![Diplomats visit American jailed in Russia on spying charges]( "Diplomats visit American jailed in Russia on spying charges") A U.S. diplomat on Monday visited an American jailed in Moscow for nearly a year on spying charges and said he is in good condition mentally. Paul Whelan was arrested at a Moscow hotel at the end of last year and charged with espionage. American officials have complained about the delay and say investigators have produced no evidence against Whelan, a Michigan resident who also holds Canadian, British and Irish citizenship.
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| Poor air quality keeps schools closed in Iran’s capital Posted: 23 Dec 2019 08:23 AM PST  Dangerously poor air quality forced Iran's government on Monday to extend school closures in the capital Tehran, a city home to over 10 million people. Schools have been closed since Saturday and will remain shut until Wednesday, the end of Iran's workweek, according to the official IRNA news agency. Nearby mountains were completely obscured by the a thick layer of air pollution called an inversion that's been hovering over the capital since last month.
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| Saudis Put Jamal Khashoggi’s Murder Behind Them With Death Sentences and a Three-Day Rave Posted: 23 Dec 2019 07:48 AM PST  PARIS—It looks like heads will roll in Saudi Arabia, literally, for the murder last year of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But they'll be detached from people that few Saudis and fewer Americans have ever heard of, and certainly not Crown Prince Mohammed Salman (MBS), the mercurial and malign monarch-in-waiting beloved of the Trump clan.Never mind the CIA's belief that the elaborately choreographed and gruesomely executed murder of The Washington Post columnist could not have been carried out unless MBS authorized it. Conveniently, the two top aides who would have connected the crown prince to the crime reportedly were cleared.The court statement Monday announcing the sentence named none of the five condemned to death. But Saudi Deputy General Prosecutor Shalaan Al-Shalaan told a press conference "We found that Khashoggi's murder was not premeditated." This travesty is in fact much bigger news outside the kingdom of Saudi Arabia than inside. There, it's party time (or hangover time) in the wake of a high-tech three-day rave meant to titillate the kingdom's young people with hitherto banned music, dancing, and even a few far-from-veiled semi-celebrities from the United States and Britain. As the Associated Press described it, "More than 70 world-renowned DJs were invited to perform across five stages to the backdrop of surrealist performances—including one with a woman in a skintight sky blue leotard writhing from a hot-air balloon over a crowd of young Saudi men."MBS, better than any of his forebears, understands the power of what Roman tyrants used to call "bread and circuses," a phrase attributed to Juvenal and satisfactorily defined on Wikipedia as "the creation of public approval, not through exemplary or excellent public service or public policy, but through diversion; distraction; or the mere satisfaction of the immediate, shallow requirements of a populace."Trump Bet the Whole Middle East on Khashoggi's Alleged Murderer. Now He's Doubling Down.As MBS' decrepit father, King Salman, fades from the scene, the crown prince has made colossal mistakes, including the Yemen war that's become Riyadh's quagmire. But he has managed to crush and intimidate virtually all challenges to his power. Rival princes have been imprisoned and stripped of fortunes. Liberal critics have been jailed, flogged, and in some cases sentenced to death while the once-powerful religious police have been threatened or bribed into submission.(As I write this, I cannot help but think how envious an American president from Queens must be when he looks at this man who will be king—a prince rich beyond even Donald Trump's dreams of avarice, with power as absolute as any tyrant's in the Middle Ages.)But let us return for a moment to the matter of Jamal Khashoggi—the murder that Trump and MBS would like us to forget, and an inconvenient atrocity that most young Saudis already are tossing in the circular file of their well-distracted memories.In Saudi Arabia as elsewhere, as long as people feel prosperous and are allowed to indulge their appetites, the abuse of authority by their rulers is treated as political theater beyond their control, and they respond with a willing suspension of disbelief.Thus it hardly matters that the Saudi prosecutor's claim defies credulity when he says the butchering of Khashoggi—for such it was—"was not premeditated."But permit me to go over a few of the grisly details again as revealed last summer by the United Nations' special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and reported in The Daily Beast. Turkish authorities had bugged the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and various investigators, including the CIA, subsequently were allowed to listen to the recordings. Members of the U.N. team took meticulous notes on the dialogue and the other sounds monitored as Khashoggi was killed and then chopped up for disposal on Oct. 2, 2018.They heard Dr. Salah Mohammed Tubaigy, from the Saudi interior ministry, explaining to the head of the hit team before Khashoggi's arrived how they'd get dispose of the portly journalist, referred to as "the sacrificial animal.""Joints will be separated. It is not a problem," says Tubaigy. "If we take plastic bags and cut it into pieces, it will be finished. We will wrap each of them."A man more or less of Khashoggi's build then dressed in Khashoggi's clothes and walked out the back of the consulate to be seen by closed-circuit cameras, while plastic garbage bags were carried out the front.We don't know at this juncture whether Tubaigy or the man in Khashoggi's clothes were among those sentenced to death, or given lesser penalties, or cleared somehow of the crime. In any case, Khashoggi's remains have never been found, and MBS must have known all along how this would play at home. Out of sight, out of mind. Party on.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.
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| Residents of NW Syria flee new government offensive Posted: 23 Dec 2019 07:28 AM PST  Syrian government forces pressed ahead Monday with a new military assault on the country's last rebel stronghold that began last week, an offensive that has set off a mass exodus of civilians fleeing to safer areas near the Turkish border. Under the cover of airstrikes and heavy shelling, Syrian troops have been pushing into the northwestern province of Idlib toward a major rebel-held town, Maaret al-Numan. The town sits on a key highway linking the capital Damascus with the northern city of Aleppo, Syria's largest.
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| Germany Expects Gas Pipeline Delay Before Completion in 2020 Posted: 23 Dec 2019 07:00 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline will be delayed and more costly due to U.S. sanctions but should be completed in the second half of next year, a senior German official said.Switzerland's AllSeas Group SA removed vessels that were laying the last section of the pipeline connecting Russia with Germany, which was just weeks away from completion, after U.S. President Donald Trump approved sanctions targeting the project.Despite delays and higher costs, the pipeline should be completed in the second half of 2020, Peter Beyer, the German government's coordinator for trans-Atlantic issues, said Monday in an interview with Deutschlandfunk radio. Less than 160 kilometers of the total 2,460 kilometers remain to be laid, according to Nord Stream 2 AG, the project operator.Trump's decision was not a surprise but the sanctions are "completely incomprehensible" given the agreement between Russia and Ukraine on gas transit and "not a way to treat friends," Beyer said.Germany "would have expected a great deal more understanding from the American friends," added the lawmaker, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union party.Nord Stream 2 is set to ship as much as 55 billion cubic meters of Russian gas annually directly to Germany, doubling the capacity of the existing link. As many as 350 European companies are helping to build the pipeline, the German DIHK industry group estimates.Trump has criticized Germany for not doing more to diversify imports away from Russia, while Merkel's government argues that the $11 billion link is crucial to ensure energy security.The firms involved will continue to work to complete the pipeline as soon as possible "in the interest of energy security, affordable gas prices for European consumers and EU economic competitiveness as well as climate protection commitments," according to Monday's Nord Stream 2 AG statement.Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday Russia will retaliate against the U.S. sanctions, which he called "unacceptable." Russia doesn't expect them to impede the completion of construction, but it's too early to say when the pipeline will be ready, Peskov told reporters.'Incredible Provocation'The consortium may resort to using Russian-owned ships to complete the Baltic Sea project, German lawmaker Timon Gremmels said at the weekend."There's likely to be a Plan B but it's hardly ideal to change your horse just before the finishing line," said Gremmels, who is a spokesman on energy policy for Merkel's junior coalition partner, the Social Democrats. "The sanctions are an incredible provocation but won't halt the project."The pipeline's completion would bring fresh supplies of gas to Europe's already glutted market and make it more difficult for the U.S. to gain a bigger foothold in shipping cargoes of liquefied natural gas by tanker into Europe.Beyer said the U.S. is trying to push its LNG on the continent and that the more expensive gas could push up prices for German consumers.(Updates with Nord Stream comment in third and eighth paragraphs)\--With assistance from Brian Parkin, Ilya Arkhipov and Olga Tanas.To contact the reporter on this story: Iain Rogers in Berlin at irogers11@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Chad Thomas at cthomas16@bloomberg.net, Raymond ColittFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Biden's new endorsement reflects battle for Latino support Posted: 23 Dec 2019 06:46 AM PST  Joe Biden's presidential bid got a boost Monday from one of the leading Latinos in Congress, with the chairman of the Hispanic Caucus' political arm endorsing the former vice president as Democrats' best hope to defeat President Donald Trump. "People realize it's a matter of life and death for certain communities," Rep. Tony Cárdenas, D-Calif., told The Associated Press in an interview, explaining the necessity of halting Trump's populist nationalism, hard-line immigration policies and xenophobic rhetoric that the California congressman called cruel. Cárdenas' is the chairman of Bold PAC, the political arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
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| Berlin expects US sanctions to slightly delay Russian pipeline Posted: 23 Dec 2019 06:40 AM PST  The US sanctions slapped on a controversial Russian gas pipeline to Europe will likely delay the project by several months but it will still be completed next year, a top German official said Monday. The sanctions "will postpone the completion" of the undersea pipeline, said Peter Beyer, Chancellor Angela Merkel's transatlantic coordinator. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline was initially slated for completion in early 2020 with a view to being operational in mid-2020.
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| New construction seen at missile-related site in North Korea Posted: 23 Dec 2019 06:29 AM PST  A new satellite image of a factory where North Korea makes military equipment used to launch long-range missiles shows the construction of a new structure. The release of several images from Planet Labs comes amid concern that North Korea could launch a rocket or missile as it seeks concessions in stalled nuclear negotiations with the United States. North Korea has warned that what "Christmas gift" it gives the U.S. depends on what action Washington takes.
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| Iran starts new operations at heavy water reactor Posted: 23 Dec 2019 06:28 AM PST  Iran began new operations on Monday at a heavy water nuclear reactor, the head of the country's nuclear agency said. Starting up the Arak heavy water reactor's secondary circuit doesn't violate Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
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| Putin takes first train across Crimea bridge Posted: 23 Dec 2019 06:07 AM PST  President Vladimir Putin on Monday stood in the driver's cabin of a train for the official opening of a railway bridge that links annexed Crimea to southern Russia. The rail bridge, which Putin praised as "magnificent," is 19 kilometres (12 miles) long. Putin said the bridge would restore rail links to Crimea severed in 2014 when Moscow annexed the peninsula, sparking an ongoing separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine that has claimed some 13,000 lives.
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| Iran's Arak reactor secondary circuit goes online Posted: 23 Dec 2019 05:49 AM PST  A secondary circuit for Iran's Arak heavy water reactor has become operational as part of its redesign under the 2015 nuclear deal, the country's atomic energy chief said on Monday. "Today a significant part of the reactor becomes operational," Ali Akbar Salehi told reporters at Arak. The secondary circuit "transfers the heat generated in the reactor's heart to cooling towers" and is now complete, he added, in remarks aired on state television.
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| How Bloomberg Won First Race as Billionaire Underdog Posted: 23 Dec 2019 05:32 AM PST  Michael R. Bloomberg was not entirely picky.By the late 1990s, financially megasecure and professionally restless, the billionaire businessman had told friends that four jobs on earth could tempt him away from his company: president of the United States, secretary-general of the United Nations, president of the World Bank and mayor of New York.And several months before Bloomberg announced his 2001 bid to fill the looming vacancy at City Hall, some of those friends were worried about him. One of them, Sen. John McCain, sent word to the sitting mayor, Rudy Giuliani, asking him to talk Bloomberg through the grim realities of what even some aides viewed as an electoral suicide mission.Giuliani agreed. "You're going to lose," he told Bloomberg flatly during a meeting at the mayoral residence, Gracie Mansion. This position was sensible. Bloomberg, a rhetorically challenged political newcomer and longtime Democrat, would be running as a Republican in a Democratic town that had grown weary of its Republican incumbent.The warning was of no use. Bloomberg had been paying people for months to explain these risks to him. "The next morning," he often said privately, imagining the day after a defeat, "I'm still better off than the next guy."He entered the race in June, three months before the Republican primary, appearing so stiff at an introductory news conference that a reporter had to instruct him on how to proceed. "That's not going to stop, no matter what I do?" Bloomberg asked anxiously as cameras clicked.He never improved much as a candidate. By January, he was mayor anyway.Nearly two decades later, as Bloomberg plots an unconventional path to the Democratic presidential nomination, allies see his first mayoral run as proof of concept. It was the race that demonstrated, to Bloomberg and to those who might doubt him, that an inelegant campaigner with bottomless resources, party agnosticism and a heap of political baggage could prevail.Then as now, he was prepared to spend whatever it took -- some $70 million in 2001, a figure he is expected to greatly surpass in 2020 -- to burnish his name and bury his opponents. Then as now, those urging him to reconsider were brushed aside.Yet a review of the 2001 race, drawn from dozens of interviews with aides, advisers and adversaries, makes plain that Bloomberg's political origin story owes to almost supernaturally improbable conditions -- a blend of searing tragedy, canny check-writing and a string of flukes so politically fortuitous that his Democratic rival began wondering if the New York Yankees were conspiring against him. (The team's World Series appearance that fall, stretching a full seven games and extending into November for the first time in history, allowed Bloomberg's final advertising blitz to be broadcast before an outsize local audience just before Election Day.)By far most significant, the shock of the Sept. 11 attacks conferred instant resonance upon Bloomberg's message of steady-handed management, which had stirred limited enthusiasm initially. "On September 10th, 2001, the city was doing well. There was no compelling need for an outsider," said Edward Skyler, a campaign aide in 2001 who became one of Bloomberg's deputy mayors. "A career politician would do fine on September 10th."In a flash, the October endorsement from Giuliani, the lame-duck leader suddenly elevated to temporary political deity, also became the highest of municipal blessings.To this day, Bloomberg, 77, is sensitive to any suggestion that he took office as an accidental mayor. Bloomberg has long insisted to associates that he triumphed primarily because of the unpopularity of the Democratic nominee, Mark Green, a liberal former public advocate. But even admirers attribute his success in large measure to the attacks, Giuliani's support and a racially divisive Democratic primary.Veterans of the race tend to say that there were two campaigns in 2001: before the 11th and after."He got the benefit of the doubt in that moment that he wouldn't have gotten," said Randi Weingarten, the teachers' union leader, with whom Bloomberg met repeatedly as he explored a run.And so, too, it seems, were there two Bloombergs: the one who decided he might like to be mayor and saw no harm in trying -- and the one, 18 years out, disinclined to remember a world where he almost never was.Bloomberg often said he intended to bounce a check to the undertaker. And as he moved toward a run in 2001, he appeared ready to make good on the promise.In public, he would broadcast ads trumpeting the more than $100 million he donated to various philanthropies the year before, including Gay Men's Health Crisis and the Committee to Protect Journalists.In private, top-dollar advisers came aboard to synthesize reams of polling and focus group data. Policy experts were summoned for briefings at his company headquarters. Aides were tasked with drilling him, pop-quiz-style: What's the cost of a subway ride? The price of a gallon of milk?Touchy about being caricatured as a flighty tycoon, Bloomberg bristled at any implication that he was flirting with a run for the attention. "How can anyone think I'm not running?" he asked privately months before formally entering.By the spring, he had leased a campaign office in midtown, stocking it with signature flourishes of the Bloomberg brand: an open-plan layout, unlimited snacks and a young, hard-charging staff.Quickly, some uncomfortable alliances were deemed necessary. Bloomberg, who had determined he could not survive a crowded Democratic primary, won the backing of many Republican officials with the promise of self-funding, despite his socially liberal views.In addition to television spots, Bloomberg blanketed small community papers in several languages, purchasing ad space and goodwill in equal measure. Pro-Bloomberg VHS tapes were mailed to individual voters. "He's a firm believer in bringing a gun to a knife fight," said Bill Cunningham, a top adviser on the race.But as the summer wound down, Bloomberg appeared poised to win his Republican primary against Herman Badillo, a former congressman and deputy mayor, even if he remained a long shot in the general.On Sept. 10, the night before the scheduled primary, Bloomberg closed by presenting his campaign as the answer to a citywide political emergency."How do you write Sept. 11?" he asked Republicans on Staten Island. "9-1-1!"The next day, nobody knew quite what to do. So Bloomberg showed up at a blood bank.Three of his employees and the brother of a campaign aide were missing. The primary was postponed -- all political activity was suspended -- but no one much worried about that. Bloomberg had donated one of his company's spaces downtown for emergency workers seeking food.Bloomberg easily won the Republican primary, rescheduled for late September, and a quarrelsome runoff on the Democratic side helped his cause, pitting Green, the former public advocate, against Fernando Ferrer, a Bronx borough president whose supporters included the Rev. Al Sharpton and Donald Trump.After Green secured the nomination, Bloomberg signaled quickly that any political cease-fire had passed. "I am a professional manager," he said. "He is a rookie."The tragedy had scrambled not only the contours of the race but also several lower-order practical and logistical considerations, almost exclusively to Bloomberg's benefit. The dominant focus on the disaster's aftermath left little news media oxygen for the election, sparing Bloomberg from deeper vetting and increasing the relative value of his airwave-clogging paid media strategy. And that spending, in turn, affected the wider advertising market, inflating rates for Green.In the end, Bloomberg earned about half of the Latino vote and a quarter among African-Americans, far exceeding typical Republican showings. He won by fewer than 3 percentage points overall.It has not been lost on civil rights activists that the man who would ultimately use his post to expand and aggressively defend stop-and-frisk policing in communities of color came to power, in large part, with their help. "It's ironic," Sharpton said.Still, as early returns dribbled in on election night, nothing seemed guaranteed. Inside his midtown hotel suite, Bloomberg cautioned against overconfidence, setting expectations for his 92-year-old mother, Charlotte. "He said to her, 'Listen, I'm probably going to lose,'" Cunningham recalled. "'But it's going to be really close, so I won't be embarrassed.'"Aides scribbled vote tallies on napkins. The initial numbers showed Bloomberg behind, but Staten Island, the Republican bulwark, was still coming in. By midnight, the math was clear."I didn't jump up and down cheering, I can tell you that," Bloomberg told a biographer years later. "That's not me."He walked across the street to address his victory party at a jazz club. Giuliani stood behind him, picking confetti off his shoulder and raising a chant of "USA."Bloomberg smirked a little."The easy part is done," he said. "Now comes the hard part."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
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| How a Poisoning in Bulgaria Exposed Russian Assassins in Europe Posted: 23 Dec 2019 05:31 AM PST  SOFIA, Bulgaria -- The Russian assassin used an alias, Sergei Fedotov, and slipped into Bulgaria unnoticed, checking into a hotel in Sofia near the office of a local arms manufacturer who had been selling ammunition to Ukraine.He led a team of three men.Within days, one man sneaked into a locked parking garage, smeared poison on the handle of the arms manufacturer's car, then left, undetected, except for blurry images captured by surveillance video.Shortly after, the arms manufacturer, Emilian Gebrev, was meeting with business partners at a rooftop restaurant when he began to hallucinate and vomit.The poisoning left Gebrev, now 65, hospitalized for a month. His son was poisoned, and so was another top executive at his company. When Gebrev was discharged, the assassins poisoned him and his son again, at their summer home on the Black Sea. They all survived, though Gebrev's business has yet to recover fully.Western security and intelligence officials said the Bulgaria poisonings were a critical clue that helped expose a campaign by the Kremlin and its sprawling web of intelligence operatives to eliminate Russia's enemies abroad and destabilize the West.Entering his third decade in power, President Vladimir Putin of Russia is pushing hard to reestablish Russia as a world power. Russia cannot compete economically or militarily with the United States and China, so Putin is waging an asymmetric shadow war.In October, The New York Times revealed that a specialized group of Russian intelligence operatives -- Unit 29155 -- had for years been assigned to carry out killings and political disruption campaigns in Europe.Based on interviews with officials in Europe and the United States, it is also now clear that the assassination attempts against Gebrev served as a kind of Rosetta Stone that helped Western intelligence agencies to discover Unit 29155 -- and to decipher the kind of threat it presented.Security and intelligence officials are still working to understand how and why the unit is assigned certain targets. Even now, investigators have not determined the precise motive in the Gebrev case. Most likely, intelligence officials said, Gebrev was a target because of the way his business rankled the Kremlin: his arms sales, his company's intrusion into markets long dominated by Russia, and his efforts to purchase a weapons factory coveted by a Russian oligarch.The poison took effect slowly.Gebrev first realized something was wrong on the evening of April 27, 2015, when his right eye suddenly turned "as red as the red on the Russian flag."The next evening, Gebrev went to his favorite restaurant on the 19th floor of the Hotel Marinela. At dinner, Gebrev began to vomit violently and was rushed to a military hospital. There, he began to see explosions of vivid colors. Then, his field of vision suddenly turned to black and white.As his hallucinations intensified, he imagined angry, fantastical creatures that threatened to drag him away.A day later, the company's production manager, Valentin Tahchiev, was hospitalized, too. Days after that, Gebrev's son, Hristo Gebrev, who was being groomed to lead his father's company, Emco, was also rushed to intensive care."When they get rid of me and my son, the company will be destroyed," Gebrev said later. "Who would sign contracts? Who has the rights?"For the next month, as the elder Gebrev recuperated in the hospital, Bulgarian authorities made little progress on the case. In a former Soviet satellite country with a long history of contract killings, Bulgarian news media barely paid attention. The prosecutor general suggested that Gebrev had been sickened by tainted arugula. Eventually, though, officials concluded that all three men had been poisoned.In late May, Gebrev was released from the hospital and joined his son at the family vacation home on the Black Sea. There, the two men were poisoned again. This time, the symptoms were less dramatic, and they drove themselves back to Sofia and checked into the same hospital for about two weeks.Despite two poisonings, Bulgarian prosecutors failed to unearth any leads or evidence.When the hospital failed to determine the substance used in the poisoning, Gebrev enlisted a Finnish laboratory, Verifin, which detected two chemicals in his urine, including diethyl phosphonate, which is found in pesticides. The other chemical could not be identified.By the following summer, Bulgarian authorities had dropped the case. They apparently had no idea that Unit 29155 even existed. Neither did intelligence and security officials in the rest of Europe.Yet as Gebrev's case remained colder than cold, members of Unit 29155 were very busy, according to partial travel records reviewed by the Times. From 2016 to 2018, operatives made at least two dozen trips from Moscow to different European countries.Their operation in Bulgaria most likely would never have been detected.Then there was another poisoning.In March 2018, a former Russian spy named Sergei Skripal was poisoned by a lethal nerve agent in the English town of Salisbury.British prosecutors blamed the attack on assassins working for Russia's military intelligence agency, known widely as the GRU. Working with European allies, British authorities analyzed travel records of known Russian operatives. One stood out: a man using a Russian passport with the name of Sergei Fedotov.For five years, he had traveled extensively in Europe, visiting Serbia, Spain and Switzerland. He was in London a few days before Skripal was poisoned, leaving shortly after that attack, and British authorities have now identified him as the commander of the team that poisoned Skripal.It also turned out that he had been in Bulgaria in 2015, making three visits: in February; in April, when Gebrev was first poisoned; and again in late May, coinciding with the second poisoning.Investigators from the Britain-based open-source news outlet Bellingcat have identified the man using the Fedotov alias as Denis Sergeev, a high-ranking GRU officer and a veteran of Russia's wars in the North Caucasus. British authorities confirmed the accuracy of the report.The revelation that he was connected to the poisonings in both England and Bulgaria was critical in helping Western officials conclude that these were not one-off Russian attacks but rather part of a coordinated campaign run by Unit 29155.Armed with new evidence provided by the British, the Bulgarian prosecutor general, Sotir Tsatsarov, reopened the case in October 2018. Almost immediately, investigators discovered fresh clues. Before the initial poisoning, Fedotov and two other operatives from Unit 29155 had checked into the Hill Hotel, in the same complex where Gebrev has his office. They insisted, prosecutors now indicated, on rooms with views of the entrance to an underground parking garage where Emco executives kept their cars.In the garage, prosecutors discovered grainy surveillance video that showed a well-dressed figure approaching Gebrev's gray Nissan as well as the cars owned by Gebrev's son and the production manager. The figure appears to smear something on the handles of all three cars. Western intelligence officials have surmised that the substance was a poison.There is little doubt that Gebrev's profession -- the manufacture and sale of munitions and light weapons -- places him in a risky field, especially in Bulgaria.In recent years, the Kremlin has grown increasingly alarmed as smaller countries have nibbled away at Russia's dominance in the arms industry. At a meeting in June with high-ranking security officials, Putin warned that Russia's position in the industry was threatened.Bulgaria now sells more than 1.2 billion euros, about $1.3 billion, in weapons annually, a relatively modest figure for the sector, but a sum that has not gone unnoticed by Moscow.Gebrev was also entangled with another project that might have displeased Moscow. Shortly before he was poisoned, Gebrev tried to purchase Dunarit, a large arms production plant in Bulgaria coveted by a Kremlin-backed oligarch, Konstantin Malofeev.The United States and the European Union have imposed sanctions on Malofeev for funding Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.Today, Gebrev has recovered physically, though his business is still ailing. In August 2017, the Bulgarian Economic Ministry temporarily revoked his export license. The ministry is headed by Emil Karanikolov, who was nominated to his post by the far-right Ataka party, which has long faced scrutiny over its close ties with Moscow.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
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| Iran and India agree to speed up major port project Posted: 23 Dec 2019 05:25 AM PST  Tehran and Delhi have agreed to accelerate the development of an important Iranian port, India's foreign minister said during a visit to the sanctions-hit Islamic republic on Monday. Chabahar port -- being jointly developed by India, Iran and Afghanistan -- is on the Indian Ocean about 100 kilometres (62 miles) west of the Pakistan border.
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| The daily business briefing: December 23, 2019 Posted: 23 Dec 2019 05:22 AM PST ![The daily business briefing: December 23, 2019]( "The daily business briefing: December 23, 2019") 1.Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker dominated the weekend box office with $175.5 million in North American ticket sales. The J.J. Abrams movie's debut was the third biggest December launch ever, behind Abrams' Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015 and Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi in 2017. The Rise of Skywalker brought in a total of $373.5 million worldwide. The big debut for the ninth chapter in the Star Wars series topped off a huge year for Disney, which already has six films that have topped $1 billion at the box office this year. Still, The Rise of Skywalker received mixed reviews, and some analysts had expected it to make as much as $200 million domestically in its first weekend. [The Hollywood Reporter, CNN] 2.Bayer shares jumped by 3.5 percent on Monday in Germany after the U.S. government filed a friend-of-the-court brief saying a federal appeals court should reverse a $25 million decision against the company in a Roundup lawsuit. A lower court ruled in favor of a man who sued the company because he blamed the popular weed killer made by Bayer's U.S. unit Monsanto for his cancer. Bayer denies Roundup causes cancer, and the Environmental Protection Agency and the Justice Department on Friday filed the brief supporting the company's position. The Monday stock surge lifted Bayer shares to a 14-month high. [Reuters] 3.U.S. stock index futures were mostly flat early Monday after ending last week with fresh record highs as global trade tensions eased. Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq all were up by about 0.1 percent several hours before the opening bell. The three main U.S. indexes made solid gains on Friday as President Trump tweeted that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping had a "very good talk" about the "phase one" deal American and Chinese negotiators recently reached toward ending the trade war between the world's two largest economies. China said Monday it would cut tariffs on more than 850 products starting Jan. 1. [CNBC] 4.President Trump has invited Boris Johnson for a White House visit following the British prime minister's recent election landslide, The Sunday Times of London reported. Johnson campaigned promising to "Get Brexit Done." He is pushing to lead the U.K. out of the European Union on Jan. 31. Johnson's office said no formal timing for the visit had been set, but a White House source said mid-January was a possibility. The invitation came as the two sides start negotiations for a post-Brexit trade agreement, and Trump faces a Senate impeachment trial. Trump congratulated Johnson after his Conservative party's win, saying the U.S. and Britain could now make a trade deal that could be "far bigger and more lucrative than any deal that could be made with the E.U." [The Sunday Times, New York Post] 5.China announced Monday that it was cutting tariffs on pork and about 800 other products. The reduction of levies on frozen pork comes as the country faces a pork shortage that has become a major domestic challenge for Beijing. The government has taken several steps to ease the crisis, which was cause by an outbreak of African swine fever that devastated the hog population. The tariff cut came days after the Commerce Ministry announced it would release 40,000 tons of pork from the country's strategic reserves in an effort to stabilize prices before the Lunar New Year holiday week in late January. China saw its biggest inflation increase since 2012 in November after pork prices more than doubled from a year earlier. [The Washington Post, CNN]More stories from theweek.com Pelosi's impeachment endgame The substance of Trump's 2020 campaign Rudy Giuliani thinks the Southern District of New York might be investigating him because they're jealous
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| It Seemed Like a Popular Chat App. It's Secretly a Spy Tool. Posted: 23 Dec 2019 04:58 AM PST  WASHINGTON -- It is billed as an easy and secure way to chat by video or text message with friends and family, even in a country that has restricted popular messaging services like WhatsApp and Skype.But the service, ToTok, is actually a spying tool, according to U.S. officials familiar with a classified intelligence assessment and a New York Times investigation into the app and its developers. It is used by the government of the United Arab Emirates to try to track every conversation, movement, relationship, appointment, sound and image of those who install it on their phones.ToTok, introduced only months ago, was downloaded millions of times from the Apple and Google app stores by users throughout the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. While the majority of its users are in the Emirates, ToTok surged to become one of the most downloaded social apps in the U.S. last week, according to app rankings and App Annie, a research firm.ToTok amounts to the latest escalation in a digital arms race among wealthy authoritarian governments, interviews with current and former U.S. foreign officials and a forensic investigation showed. The governments are pursuing more effective and convenient methods to spy on foreign adversaries, criminal and terrorist networks, journalists and critics -- efforts that have ensnared people all over the world in their surveillance nets.Persian Gulf nations like Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Qatar previously turned to private firms -- including Israeli and U.S. contractors -- to hack rivals and, increasingly, their own citizens. The development of ToTok, experts said, showed that the governments can cut out the intermediary to spy directly on their targets, who voluntarily, if unwittingly, hand over their information.A technical analysis and interviews with computer security experts showed that the firm behind ToTok, Breej Holding, is most likely a front company affiliated with DarkMatter, an Abu Dhabi-based cyberintelligence and hacking firm where Emirati intelligence officials, former National Security Agency employees and former Israeli military intelligence operatives work. DarkMatter is under FBI investigation, according to former employees and law enforcement officials, for possible cybercrimes. The U.S. intelligence assessment and the technical analysis also linked ToTok to Pax AI, an Abu Dhabi-based data mining firm that appears to be tied to DarkMatter.Pax AI's headquarters operate from the same Abu Dhabi building as the Emirates' signals intelligence agency, which until recently was where DarkMatter was based.The UAE is one of America's closest allies in the Middle East, seen by the Trump administration as a bulwark against Iran and a close counterterrorism partner. Its ruling family promotes the country as an example of a modern, moderate Arab nation, but it has also been at the forefront of using surveillance technology to crack down on internal dissent -- including hacking Western journalists, emptying the banking accounts of critics, and holding human rights activists in prolonged solitary confinement over Facebook posts.The government blocks specific functions of apps like WhatsApp and Skype, a reality that has made ToTok particularly appealing in the country. Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant, recently promoted ToTok in advertisements.Spokesmen for the CIA and the Emirati government declined to comment. Calls to a phone number for Breej Holding rang unanswered, and Pax employees did not respond to emails and messages. An FBI spokeswoman said that "while the FBI does not comment on specific apps, we always want to make sure to make users aware of the potential risks and vulnerabilities that these mechanisms can pose."When The Times initially contacted Apple and Google representatives with questions about ToTok's connection to the Emirati government, they said they would investigate. On Thursday, Google removed the app from its Play store after determining ToTok violated unspecified policies. Apple removed ToTok from its App Store on Friday and was still researching the app, a spokesman said. ToTok users who already downloaded the app will still be able to use it until they remove it from their phones.It was unclear when U.S. intelligence services first determined that ToTok was a tool of Emirati intelligence, but one person familiar with the assessment said that U.S. officials have warned some allies about its dangers. It is not clear whether U.S. officials have confronted their counterparts in the Emirati government about the app. One digital security expert in the Middle East, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss powerful hacking tools, said that senior Emirati officials told him that ToTok was indeed an app developed to track its users in the Emirates and beyond.ToTok appears to have been relatively easy to develop, according to a forensic analysis performed for The Times by Patrick Wardle, a former NSA hacker who works as a private security researcher. It appears to be a copy of a Chinese messaging app offering free video calls, YeeCall, slightly customized for English and Arabic audiences.ToTok is a cleverly designed tool for mass surveillance, according to the technical analysis and interviews, in that it functions much like the myriad other Apple and Android apps that track users' location and contacts.On the surface, ToTok tracks users' location by offering an accurate weather forecast. It hunts for new contacts any time a user opens the app, under the pretense that it is helping connect with their friends, much like how Instagram flags Facebook friends. It has access to users' microphones, cameras, calendar and other phone data. Even its name is an apparent play on the popular Chinese app TikTok.Though billed as "fast and secure," ToTok makes no claim of end-to-end encryption, like WhatsApp, Signal or Skype. The only hint that the app discloses user data is buried in the privacy policy: "We may share your personal data with group companies."So instead of paying hackers to gain access to a target's phone -- the going rate is up to $2.5 million for a hacking tool that can remotely access Android phones, according to recent price lists -- ToTok gave the Emirati government a way to persuade millions of users to hand over their most personal information for free."There is a beauty in this approach," said Wardle, now a security researcher at Jamf, a software company. "You don't need to hack people to spy on them if you can get people to willingly download this app to their phone. By uploading contacts, video chats, location, what more intelligence do you need?"In an intelligence-gathering operation, Wardle said, ToTok would be Phase 1. Much like the NSA's bulk metadata collection program -- which was quietly shut down this year -- ToTok allows intelligence analysts to analyze users' calls and contacts in search of patterns, though its collection is far more invasive. It is unclear whether ToTok allows the Emiratis to record video or audio calls of its users.Each day, billions of people freely forgo privacy for the convenience of using apps on their phones. The Privacy Project by the Times' Opinion section published an investigation last week revealing how app makers and third parties track the minute-by-minute movements of mobile phone users.Private companies collected that data for targeted marketing. In ToTok's case -- according to current and former officials and digital crumbs the developers left behind -- much of the information is funneled to intelligence analysts working on behalf of the Emirati state.In recent months, semiofficial state publications began promoting ToTok as the free app long sought by Emiratis. This month, users of a messaging service in the Emirates requiring paid subscriptions, Botim, received an alert telling users to switch to ToTok -- which it called a "free, fast and secure" messaging app. Accompanying the message was a link to install it.The marketing seems to have paid off.In reviews, Emiratis expressed gratitude to ToTok's developers for finally bringing them a free messaging app. "Blessings! Your app is the best App so far that has enable me and my family to stay connected!!!" one wrote. "Kudos," another wrote. "Finally, an app that works in the UAE!"ToTok's popularity extended beyond the Emirates. According to recent Google Play rankings, it was among the top 50 free apps in Saudi Arabia, Britain, India, Sweden and other countries. Some analysts said it was particularly popular in the Middle East because -- at least on the surface -- it was unaffiliated with a large, powerful nation.Though the app is a tool for the Emirati government, the exact relationship between the firms behind it is murky. Pax employees are made up of European, Asian and Emirati data scientists, and the company is run by Andrew Jackson, an Irish data scientist who previously worked at Palantir, a Silicon Valley firm that works with the Pentagon and U.S. spy agencies.Its affiliate company, DarkMatter, is in effect an arm of the Emirati government. Its operations have included hacking government ministries in Iran, Qatar and Turkey; executives of FIFA, the world soccer organization; journalists and dissidents.Last month, the Emirati government announced that DarkMatter would combine with two dozen other companies to create a defense conglomerate focused on repelling cyberattacks.The FBI is investigating American employees of DarkMatter for possible cybercrimes, according to people familiar with the investigation. The inquiry intensified after former NSA hackers working for the company grew concerned about its activities and contacted the bureau. Reuters first reported the program they worked on, Project Raven.At Pax, data scientists openly brag about their work on LinkedIn. One who listed his title as "data science team lead" said he had created a "message intelligence platform" that reads billions of messages to answer four questions: "who you are, what you do, how do you think, and what is your relationship with others.""With the answers to these four questions, we know everything about one person," wrote the data scientist, Jingyan Wang.Other Pax employees describe their experience creating tools that can search government data sets for faces from billions of video feeds and pinpoint Arabic dialects from transcribed video messages.None mention an affiliation with ToTok.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
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| 10 things you need to know today: December 23, 2019 Posted: 23 Dec 2019 04:50 AM PST ![10 things you need to know today: December 23, 2019]( "10 things you need to know today: December 23, 2019") 1.Democrats on Sunday issued a fresh call for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to allow witnesses in the Senate impeachment trial whose testimony President Trump blocked during the House investigation. The demand came after newly released emails indicated that White House budget officials ordered a freeze on military aid to Ukraine about 90 minutes after Trump's controversial July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The documents bolstered evidence of a link between the phone call and the alleged effort by Trump and his associates to use the security aid as leverage to get Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Trump says he did nothing wrong. [CNN] 2.A court in Saudi Arabia on Monday sentenced five people to death over the killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last year. Three others were sentenced in the secret trial to a combined 24 years in prison for covering up the crime and other offenses. Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, went into the consulate seeking documents he needed to get married, as his fiancee waited for him outside. A team of Saudi agents murdered him inside. The agents included close aides to the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who denied involvement but has faced broad international condemnation over the case. State TV reported that the government cleared the crown prince's top adviser, Saud al-Qahtani, whom the U.S. sanctioned over his alleged role. [The Associated Press, The New York Times] 3.A group of more than 100 conservative evangelical Christians on Sunday sent a letter to Christianity Today magazine protesting an editorial the magazine published calling for removing President Trump from office. The signatories painted the criticism of Trump as a swipe at them, the president's supporters. "Your editorial offensively questioned the spiritual integrity and Christian witness of tens-of-millions of believers who take seriously their civic and moral obligations," the evangelicals wrote. The evangelicals focused criticism on Christianity Today Editor-in-Chief Mark Galli, who wrote the anti-Trump editorial, and suggested that they might stop reading and advertising in the magazine. Galli on Sunday acknowledged some readers had canceled subscriptions since the editorial came out, but said three times as many people had bought new ones. [The Associated Press, CNBC] 4.President Trump has invited Boris Johnson for a White House visit following the British prime minister's recent election landslide, The Sunday Times of London reported. Johnson campaigned promising to "Get Brexit Done." He is pushing to lead the U.K. out of the European Union on Jan. 31. Johnson's office said no formal timing for the visit had been set, but a White House source said mid-January was a possibility. The invitation came as the two sides start negotiations for a post-Brexit trade agreement, and Trump faces a Senate impeachment trial. Trump congratulated Johnson after his Conservative party's win, saying the U.S. and Britain could now make a trade deal that could be "far bigger and more lucrative than any deal that could be made with the E.U." [The Sunday Times, New York Post] 5.A chain-reaction crash involving nearly 70 vehicles left 51 people injured and shut down I-64 in Virginia on Sunday. Most of the injuries were minor, although several patients reportedly had "serious" or "moderate" injuries, a spokesman for a local hospital treating 24 of the patients said. The crash occurred on a foggy bridge in the morning. It forced the closure of both directions of the highway on a busy weekend of holiday travel. The eastbound lanes were reopened after about three hours, but the westbound lanes remained closed into the afternoon. Motorist Ivan Levy said he and his wife were heading to Williamsburg in separate cars when he entered thick fog and slowed down. "Next thing I know I see cars just start piling up on top of each other," he said. He stopped in time but his wife was involved in the wreck, escaping with minor injuries. [USA Today] 6.North Korea's threatened "Christmas gift" for the U.S. could be a new hard-line policy toward the U.S., CNN reported Monday, citing a source familiar with the North Korean leadership's thinking. As part of the change, Pyongyang is expected to drop negotiations with the U.S. on curbing its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief, signaling the country's intention to solidify its status as a nuclear-armed state. President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un traded insults and threats shortly after Trump took office in 2017, but they met three times after negotiations raised hopes for a deal. The talks have stalled since then, and the source told CNN that Kim is expected to take a "wait and see" attitude as Trump faces an impeachment trial and a 2020 election challenge. [CNN] 7.Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) said Sunday that he was open to breaking with Democrats and voting against the two articles of impeachment against President Trump. Jones said he would only support removing Trump from office if the evidence was there to prove that Trump abused his power by pressuring Ukraine to investigate Vice President Joe Biden, a leading potential rival in the 2020 election, and tried to obstruct a House investigation into the allegations. Jones told ABC's This Week that he is still "trying to see if the dots get connected," but if the evidence backs up the charges, "it's an impeachable matter." Jones next year faces what is expected to be a tough battle to win re-election in a deeply red state. [USA Today] 8.Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters are preparing a series of demonstrations through Christmas week following a fresh round of clashes with police over the weekend. Protesters plan to rally at five shopping malls on Christmas Eve and will hold a countdown to the holiday in the China-ruled financial hub's busy harbor front shopping district. Several more protests are scheduled for Christmas Day. On Sunday, black-clad, masked protesters at a weekend rally threw bricks and bottles at police, who responded by releasing pepper spray. One police officer drew his pistol but no shots were fired at the rally, which was held to show solidarity for minority Muslim Uighurs facing a Chinese government crackdown in the western region of Xinjiang. China said it "strongly" condemned some of the protesters for calling for Hong Kong independence. [Reuters, Bloomberg] 9.Afghanistan's Electoral Complaints Commission said Monday that the country's election might go into a runoff depending on the result of a review of thousands of complaints. The long-delayed preliminary result announced Sunday showed incumbent President Ashraf Ghani winning narrowly, but the Sept. 28 vote was called into question by allegations of widespread fraud and technical violations. The initial count showed Ghani winning with 50.64 percent of the vote, beating his main rival Abdullah Abdullah by just enough to avoid a second round. Election officials said, however, that if the complaint review drops Ghani below the 50 percent threshold and nobody else rises above it, there is a "strong possibility" the election would head into a second round. [Reuters] 10.Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker dominated the weekend box office with $175.5 million in North American ticket sales. The J.J. Abrams movie's debut was the third biggest December launch ever. It fell short of the $200-million-plus debuts of Abrams' Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015 and Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi in 2017. The Rise of Skywalker brought in a total of $373.5 million worldwide. The big debut for the ninth chapter in the Star Wars series topped off a huge year for Disney, which already has six films that have topped $1 billion at the box office this year. Still, The Rise of Skywalker received many bad reviews, and some analysts had expected it to make as much as $200 million domestically in its first weekend. [The Hollywood Reporter, CNN]More stories from theweek.com Pelosi's impeachment endgame The substance of Trump's 2020 campaign Rudy Giuliani thinks the Southern District of New York might be investigating him because they're jealous
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| To battle opioid crisis, some track overdoses in real time Posted: 23 Dec 2019 04:37 AM PST  Drug overdose patients rushed to some emergency rooms in New York's Hudson Valley are asked a series of questions: Do you have stable housing? The information is entered into a new overdose-tracking system that provides near real-time glimpses into the ravages of the opioid-fueled drug crisis. The Hudson Valley Interlink Analytic System is among a number of surveillance systems being adopted around the country by police, government agencies and community groups.
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| Syrian group: Israeli strike kills 3, most likely Iranians Posted: 23 Dec 2019 04:29 AM PST ![Syrian group: Israeli strike kills 3, most likely Iranians]( "Syrian group: Israeli strike kills 3, most likely Iranians") A Syrian war monitoring group said Monday that an Israeli missile strike overnight near the capital of Damascus killed at least three foreigners, who were most likely Iranians. The top Syrian diplomat accused Israel of carrying out missile "aggression" on Damascus and its suburbs. There was no immediate comment from Israel.
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| North Korea's Progress Towards an ICBM (In One Graphic) Posted: 23 Dec 2019 04:20 AM PST  North Korea now may be embarking on a "new path," scrapping—at least for the foreseeable future—twenty-five years of denuclearization diplomacy under four US presidents. Thus, fears of renewed "fire and fury" and possible conflict on the Korean Peninsula are mounting. Is Kim getting ready to test a new ICBM?
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| From New York to Moscow, Holocaust survivors share memories Posted: 23 Dec 2019 03:36 AM PST  Holocaust survivors sang at Jerusalem's Western Wall, danced in Paris and lit candles in other cities to celebrate Hanukkah together, recalling Nazi horrors that Jewish community leaders fear are fading from the world's collective memory. An 86-year-old man in Moscow described being forced by Nazi occupiers into a ghetto as a child. Elderly survivors in New York shared stories Sunday at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.
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| ‘He doesn’t really mean it’: Trump is bluffing about stopping North Korea’s nuclear weapons, Bolton suggests Posted: 23 Dec 2019 03:26 AM PST  Former national security adviser John Bolton has suggested Donald Trump is bluffing about stopping North Korea from producing nuclear weapons in his most direct criticism of the president's foreign policy yet.Mr Bolton, who resigned from the Trump administration in September, accused Mr Trump of having more of a "rhetorical policy" on North Korea rather than a serious plan in an interview with the news website Axios.
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| Iraq crisis deepens as politicians miss deadline to name PM Posted: 23 Dec 2019 03:21 AM PST  Iraqi politicians have missed another deadline to name a new prime minister because of disagreements over which is the largest bloc in parliament, deepening a crisis that has roiled the country since October amid mass protests and state crackdown that has killed hundreds of people. Thousands of Iraqis continued to protest and block roads on Monday in Baghdad and across the predominantly Shiite south, rejecting any candidate belonging to political groups that have ruled the country for years. The protests follow a long night in which some politicians tried to convince President Barham Saleh to name an Iran-backed politician for the post, two Iraqi officials said.
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| How Putin Got a New Best Friend Forever in Africa Posted: 23 Dec 2019 03:12 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Sign up to our Next Africa newsletter and follow Bloomberg Africa on TwitterAlpha Conde of Guinea had a favor to ask Vladimir Putin when the two presidents met at the inaugural Russia-Africa summit in the Black Sea resort of Sochi in October."I would like, if possible, to spend most of our meeting in a one-in-one format because I have things to say to you that are not worth discussing in such a large group," the 81-year-old West African leader said."My pleasure," Putin, 67, replied as aides began to herd the several dozen officials and reporters in attendance out of the room, leaving him and Conde alone with their respective translators.While neither side has revealed exactly what was said, Conde has made no secret of his interest in finding a way to stay in power after his second -- and legally last -- term ends next October. This week, he unveiled a proposed new constitution that could allow him to extend his rule. Both the U.S. and France, Guinea's former colonial ruler, are urging Conde to avoid risking civil unrest by changing the landmark constitution that allowed the former academic and long-time opposition leader to become the country's first democratically elected head of state in 2010.Russia, on the other hand, is throwing its weight behind Conde's undeclared campaign. That makes Guinea, holder of the world's largest deposits of bauxite, a key raw material for making aluminum, the latest focus in a renewed tug-of-war among global powers for influence and profit across resource-rich Africa.The U.S., western Europe and China have advantages over Russia in other areas of the continent. But in Guinea, the Kremlin is leveraging a mix of old Soviet ties, new capitalist might in the form of aluminum giant United Co. Rusal and Putin's popularity among other leaders.Putin is widely viewed as a kind of "guru" in Africa, Viktor Boyarkin, a former diplomat and ex-Rusal security chief who's known Conde for about a decade, said in an interview in Moscow. "People come to him for advice."Initially hailed when he came to power for ushering in democratic rule, Conde has cracked down in recent years as opposition has grown. In August, the International Monetary Fund called the poor, mainly Muslim nation of 13 million "a fragile country with heightened risks of social and political instability."The same day Putin discussed possible constitutional changes in Moscow, fueling speculation that he was seeking ways to remain in power beyond the end of his term in 2024, Conde unveiled plans for a new version of Guinea's basic law that would lengthen the presidential term. He said the new document would need to be approved in a national referendum."A new constitution would allow him to seek a third mandate if he wishes," said Aboubacar Sylla, a government spokesman. "The president has never spoken about a third mandate and before a referendum can be held it's not even an issue."But opponents said the plan is proof their fears that Conde plans to stay in power are justified. "This confirms his intentions," Sidya Toure, the president of opposition group Union of Republican Forces and a former prime minister, told Guineenews.Back in January, Putin's envoy to Guinea had stunned local opposition groups and foreign governments alike by backing constitutional changes to extend Conde's rule. In a speech broadcast on state television, then-Ambassador Alexander Bregadze called Conde "legendary" and argued that constitutions shouldn't be considered immutable works akin to "The Bible or Koran."Four months later, Rusal hired the ambassador as its country chief in Guinea. Rusal, which was run by billionaire Oleg Deripaska until U.S. sanctions imposed over his ties to Putin forced him to step down in 2018, sources about 40% of its bauxite from Guinean mines.Russian AdviceBoyarkin is consulting Conde's administration ahead of the possible extension to his rule, according to three people with direct knowledge of the efforts. Boyarkin denied being an "adviser" to Conde. That may have something to do with being blacklisted by the U.S. a year ago over his ties to Deripaska, which prompted him to give up ownership of Bureau Legint, a Russian consultancy working in Guinea.Boyarkin said his only activity in Guinea now is offering advice and his "high-level" contacts to foreign companies pursuing investment opportunities, including hydroelectric and mining projects. Sylla, the government spokesman, declined to comment on any connections to Conde.Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia isn't involved in anything to do with Guinea's "internal affairs."Still, Russia's embrace of Conde has put it at odds with the U.S. and France, both of which have mounted public and private diplomatic campaigns to get him to step down at the end of his term.In August, during a tense exchange in southern France, French President Emmanuel Macron told Conde he was concerned about the tensions that a possible third term could cause in Guinea and warned he'd be watching closely, according to two people familiar with the conversation. Conde replied tersely that he'll rely on his own counsel, the people said. Sylla, the Guinean government spokesman, said Conde hasn't discussed the possibility of a third term either with Macron or Putin. A spokeswoman for the French president didn't respond to requests for comment on the meeting.U.S. PressureFrance has also been working with countries bordering Guinea to "safeguard the spirit" of the Guinean constitution and ensure the next elections are "free, peaceful and transparent," French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said earlier this year.U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo delivered a similar message during Conde's trip to Washington in September, stressing the importance of "regular, democratic transitions of power," according to the State Department.A few weeks later, just before Conde met with Putin, mass demonstrations against changing Guinea's constitution erupted in Conakry. At least 14 protesters and one policeman have been killed in clashes since, according to Human Rights Watch.Opposition leaders say Guineans are growing increasingly suspicious of Russia's role because it's starting to look like the Kremlin is blatantly interfering in their politics."We originally thought Bregadze's comment on the constitution was the personal position of an ambassador close to Conde," said Cellou Dalein Diallo, who lost the 2015 presidential election but refused to recognize the results over what he called massive vote-rigging. "But now we don't know because Russia hasn't denied this position."Boyarkin blames the protests mainly on "outside forces" and has nothing but praise for Conde. "I consider him a savior for Guinea."Manafort TiesBoyarkin also has influential ties elsewhere. The U.S. Treasury, imposing sanctions on him a year ago, described Boyarkin as a former military-intelligence officer, something he would neither confirm nor deny.In 2008, he worked with Paul Manafort, a former chairman of U.S. President Donald Trump's election campaign who was later jailed for financial crimes, on African political-consulting projects Boyarkin declined to elaborate on.Boyarkin said he joined Rusal in 2008 and stopped working for Deripaska in 2016.Boyarkin's relationship with Conde -- he says they met in the summer of 2010 -- has been good for the Russian aluminum company. After Conde came to power, Boyarkin says he helped resolve a dispute with the government, successfully averting a $1 billion claim filed by the military junta that preceded him.In the public part of his meeting with Putin, Conde praised Russia for "always being a friendly country.""Since the days of the Soviet Union, you have been alongside us, protecting us," he told Putin.(Corrects year Boyarkin met Conde in third-to-last paragraph)\--With assistance from Brad Cook, Yuliya Fedorinova, Baudelaire Mieu and Katarina Hoije.To contact the reporters on this story: Henry Meyer in Moscow at hmeyer4@bloomberg.net;Ilya Arkhipov in in Moscow at iarkhipov@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Gregory L. White at gwhite64@bloomberg.net, Tony HalpinFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Boris Johnson’s Tories Abandoned Scotland to Win Their Big Victory Posted: 23 Dec 2019 03:10 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- It was November 2014. An election loomed and David Cameron was in trouble. The polls put the British prime minister's Conservatives on course to lose a knife-edge vote to the Labour Party.Then, his team hit on a plan that changed everything. At its heart was the idea the Tories could win if they focused on appealing to voters in England, effectively giving up the fight north of the border in Scotland.It worked, and Cameron won, but the full impact of that campaign four years ago could prove to be even more seismic than the vote to leave the European Union which followed his victory. After another Tory election triumph, with nationalists ascendant in Scotland as well as Northern Ireland, the very existence of the U.K. itself may be at risk.The Conservatives have won the U.K.'s past four elections but on only two of these occasions have they secured an outright majority in Parliament -- in 2015 under Cameron, and again on Dec. 12 this year with Boris Johnson.First Cameron and then Johnson won big by convincing voters across England to back the Tories. Both times they warned that a weak Labour leader would be pushed around in a coalition with the Scottish National Party. And both times, the Tories lost territory in Scotland, while the SNP surged to its own landslide.The pattern is set. To win a majority, the Tories have largely abandoned Scotland and demonized its leaders. The result is that Britain is deeply split between these two ancient nations.Saying PrayersHalf-way from London to Scotland lies Wakefield. In a former mining area of northern England, the city had been held by Labour since 1932 until Johnson's Tories swept through.At 4 p.m. on the last Sunday before Christmas, dusk is falling outside the cathedral, with its 247-foot (75 meter) high spire. Inside, the pews are full and the air thick with incense as the choir and congregation sing carols by candle light.People have come to pray on this site for more than 1,000 years, around as long as England has existed as a recognizable country. It's 10 days since Johnson's emphatic victory, which he won by convincing traditional Labour voters in areas like this to back his Tories and "get Brexit done."The hatred of the Tories had been entrenched. Wakefield was one of the first areas to suffer the closure of coal mines under Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s. Despite the history, Johnson's campaign resonated among the 66% of the city's voters who backed Brexit in 2016, and they chose a Tory MP.One mile (1.6 kilometers) from the cathedral, on Parliament Street, the Henry Boons pub is showing a soccer match on big screens. Lee Holden, 35, sips a pint of White Rat, a "hoppy" local ale, and recalls how he was persuaded to vote for Brexit.Duped by BrexitJohnson's red campaign bus was an influential factor, with its pledge to spend money on the National Health Service instead of on EU membership fees. "I bought into the banner on the bus without actually reading about it properly," Holden says. "I was duped into it."Now Holden, who works in the mortgage department of a major bank, says the damage Brexit is likely to do to the economy will make it bad for Britain. Yet he's in a minority. Many blue-collar voters backed the Tories because they were tired of waiting and frustrated by political paralysis in London, he says.While settling the EU question was crucial for the election, Johnson also needed to show voters who their enemies were. According to his campaign, these foes were members of Parliament who had spent three years thwarting Brexit, including many Labour politicians.The enemy was also the Scotland's first minister, Nicola Sturgeon who would help Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn claw his way into power, and call the shots in a shaky coalition. Johnson urged voters to deliver a Conservative majority instead.At a window table, Holden and his friend Jeremy Brook, 57, said Corbyn's questionable leadership made it hard to choose who to vote for, but they both feared for the union between England and Scotland. "When you think about what Boris Johnson has done, he has put all that at risk," says Holden, beer in hand. "It is England that's taking all of the U.K. out of the EU."Leaving LabourAccording to John Denham, a former Cabinet minister in Gordon Brown's government, the left must take a portion of blame for Johnson's success. Corbyn, like Ed Miliband in 2015, failed to speak for English voters who feel sidelined by the social and economic changes of the past 30 years."The line that runs through these two elections in 2015 and 2019, and the Brexit referendum, is the sense that these English voters did not have a voice," says Denham, director of Southampton University's Centre for English Identity and Politics."The Tories aligned their campaign with these people's desire to be heard. The left let them do this because it wasn't prepared to be their voice on issues like immigration, patriotism, the decline of their towns and loss of community — or to stand up for England and English people."On a Sunday afternoon, Henry Boons is not serving food. Instead, it offers gins and beer on tap and in bottles, including a Polish brew to cater for migrants who traveled from eastern Europe for work.One local factory worker, Dorota, 52, predicts that she will return to Poland once more restrictive immigration rules come into force after Brexit. She's been in the area for 10 years but her daughter went back last week. "I have been crying three days," she says.Polish SausagesFrancesca Roper, 26, is feeding her three year-old boy, Dexter a Polish version of a smoked French sausage. She worries about the impact of Brexit and tries to avoid the news because its disturbing. "Boris Johnson reminds me of Donald Trump," she says. "I'm not for that at all."She never wanted Brexit, but nor did she want Corbyn as prime minister. There were no good options for her at this year's election and now she fears for her son's future. "I just want him to get the same opportunities I had," she says. "I feel like everything is just going to change."Back in 2015, there were worries over the price of Cameron's anti-SNP campaign. Brown, the former Labour premier, accused the Tories of fueling English nationalism by portraying Scots as a 'menace.'Brown argued that the union of England and Scotland was at risk again because of Cameron's decision to tap into English nationalism.Brilliant TacticsThe 2019 election has widened the political divide between England and Scotland. The politics of English and Scottish identity looks set to play into the future battles, pulling the two countries further apart. Sturgeon has already stepped up demands for a fresh vote on independence, as England takes Scotland out of the EU next month.Some believe the only chance to save the U.K. is to move to a federal model for its constituent nations. Others say Scottish independence will be inevitable after Brexit.If Cameron had not chosen four years ago to exploit the antipathy of English voters toward Scottish nationalists, the U.K. may have looked very different today.Yet it worked out well for one man, quick to spot the genius in that tactic at the time."What was brilliant about the campaign was spotting this phenomenon of the SNP surge and then turning that into the story and creating this incredible narrative," said Boris Johnson a few months after Cameron won. "It was a brilliant tactic. Absolutely brilliant."To contact the reporter on this story: Tim Ross in London at tross54@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson at fjackson@bloomberg.net, Guy CollinsFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| The substance of Trump's 2020 campaign Posted: 23 Dec 2019 02:55 AM PST  Donald Trump is the first president in American history to run for re-election after having been impeached. We should expect his second presidential campaign to be as singular as everything else in his still-astonishing political career has been.There is another sense, however, in which his second campaign looks very familiar. Externally speaking, Trump is an ordinary incumbent president who should enjoy all the benefits traditionally associated with such a position. Despite the warnings of economists earlier this year, there has been no recession. His approval rating is about even with Barack Obama's at this point in his first term. His party appears more united behind him than it has at any point since his inauguration, including the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. No Republican defections are expected during his Senate trial, though it is possible that a handful of Democrats may vote against his removal from office. Meanwhile, several recent polls show him ahead of his Democratic rivals nationally. Is this what having been impeached is supposed to look like?Trump's rhetoric on the campaign trial will be familiar to his supporters and his detractors alike. He will insult his enemies and rail against the corruption of national institutions technically under his authority, including our intelligence services. He will weaponize immigration and insist that his impeachment was illegitimate.But he will also be able to produce a list of actual accomplishments, among them some that Democrats would be foolish to discount. Despite having spent a third of his term under divided government and subject to an endless series of hearings and investigations that ultimately culminated in impeachment, he was able to renegotiate NAFTA, earning the approval of major labor unions, who also approved of his shuttering of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He signed a sentencing reform bill that has already brought about the release of thousands of inmates from our prisons, one that will probably go down as the most significant piece of criminal justice legislation since the Clinton administration, whose legacy it will largely undo. He cut taxes for millions of working families. He eliminated the individual insurance mandate, the least welcome provision of the Affordable Care Act, while preserving the expansion of Medicaid, which continues to be favored by everyone save for a handful of right-wing governors. He spared us a war in Syria and tore up a feel-good nuclear deal with Iran that had done nothing to check the regime's atomic ambitions. He took the world-historically important, if largely symbolic, step of meeting in person with the North Korean dictator. He has begun the long, painful process of remaking our unbalanced trade relations with China. At home, wages are increasing for the first time since the Great Recession, and the unemployment rate in state after state is historically low.There is only so much here that Trump's opponents will be to explain away. It is a truth universally acknowledged by politicians of both parties that unfavorable economic indicators are always the fault of the president currently in office, while good ones are the delayed result of wise decisions made by the previous administration. But what about the new trade deal? The process that led to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement was undertaken entirely on Trump's own initiative, stalled for months, and only reluctantly approved by his opponents in the middle of impeachment proceedings.Countering Trump's vicious rhetoric should be less important to Democrats in 2020 than figuring out a way to argue that his campaign is lacking in substance. It will not be easy.Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week's "Today's best articles" newsletter here.More stories from theweek.com Pelosi's impeachment endgame Rudy Giuliani thinks the Southern District of New York might be investigating him because they're jealous 6 powerful phrases every parent should use
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| John Bolton said Trump was never serious about stopping North Korea from building nuclear weapons, as the time for Kim Jong Un's ominous 'Christmas gift' approaches Posted: 23 Dec 2019 02:51 AM PST  In his most openly critical remarks yet, Bolton told Axios that Donald Trump has pursued a mere "rhetorical policy" of tough talk against North Korea.
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| Libya’s east-based forces release ship with Turkish crew Posted: 23 Dec 2019 02:41 AM PST  Libya's forces based in the country's east said Monday they have released a vessel with Turkish crew members seized over the weekend amid heightened tensions in the eastern Mediterranean over a contentious maritime border deal involving Tripoli and Ankara. Ahmed al-Mosmari, a spokesman for the self-styled Libyan National Army, said they found no weapons on the vessel flying a Grenada flag, which was carrying a shipment of flour from Malta to the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria. The vessel was seized "because it entered Libya's territorial waters without prior permission," the spokesman said.
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| Jamal Khashoggi: Five sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia over journalist's murder Posted: 23 Dec 2019 02:12 AM PST  Saudi Arabia has sentenced five men to death for the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last year. However, the two most senior officials implicated in the brutal killing were exonerated because of a lack of evidence, prompting rights groups to criticise the trial as a "whitewash". Mr Khashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post, was lured to the Saudi embassy in Istanbul to obtain paperwork to marry his Turkish fiancee. Inside he was confronted by Saudi agents and was kidnapped, tortured, murdered and dismembered. His remains have not been found. The journalist's disappearance sparked demands for justice around the world Credit: REUTERS/Sarah Silbiger The crime has battered the Kingdom's reputation, with a leaked CIA assessment from last year claiming "medium to high confidence" that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally ordered the slaying. Announcing the verdict of the secret trial in Riyadh on Monday, deputy public prosecutor Shalaan al-Shalaan said that three men had also received a total of 24 years in prison for "their role in covering up this crime". None of the 11 who went on trial were named. The prosecutor maintained that the operation had not intended to kill Mr Khashoggi, who had been critical of the prince and repression in Saudi Arabia. The Trump administration placed sanctions on 17 individuals in connection with the murder of Mr Khashoggi. Among them was Saud al Qathani, a top adviser to the crown prince who last November the prosecutor said had discussed the activities of Mr Khashoggi with the team that murdered him before he entered the consulate. Al Qathani was not tried due to a lack of evidence, Shalaan said on Monday. Working in coordination with al Qathani, deputy intelligence chief, Ahmed al-Asiri was initially charged for ordering the repatriation of Mr Khashoggi from Turkey. He was released after the trial due to insufficient evidence. Khashoggi was captured on CCTV entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul but never left Credit: CCTV/Hurriyet via AP A report by a United Nations investigator said that Saudi authorities participated in the destruction of evidence and deemed it an extrajudicial killing. "Bottom line: the hit-men are guilty, sentenced to death. The masterminds not only walk free. They have barely been touched by the investigation and the trial," the UN's Special Rapporteur Agnes Callamard wrote on Twitter. Three of the men on trial were released because of a lack of evidence. The five sentenced to death will likely be beheaded in public if their sentence is agreed by a higher court. All of the verdicts can be appealed. "The killing of Jamal Khashoggi was a terrible crime. Mr Khashoggi's family deserve to see justice done for his brutal murder," Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said. "Saudia Arabia must ensure all of those responsible are held to account and that such an atrocity can never happen again." Oxfam today calculated that the value of UK arms licensed to the Saudi-led coalition waging war on Yemen is up almost half in the five years since the Arms Trade Treaty came into place. Prince Mohammed has been pushing in recent years to present a modernised and more tolerant version of the conservative state with a spate of sweeping social reforms. On the weekend before the verdict was released, Riyadh held Saudi Arabia's first big-budget music festival, attracting pop stars including David Guetta and a range of Instagram influencers. However, foreign attendees were criticised for helping whitewash the Kingdom's reputation, with many paid to write glowing write-ups of the event online. Mr Khashoggi's editor at the Washington Post, Karen Attiah, wrote "the social changes in Saudi Arabia are indeed remarkable. Jamal Khashoggi was supportive of the changes. Until regime agents killed him. Now the regime has been working overtime… to rehabilitate its image, partly by using western influencers."
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| Trump Admin Fights Bill Punishing Turkey for Its Russian Deal Posted: 23 Dec 2019 01:56 AM PST  In a detailed memo to senators, the Trump administration is fighting a bill that would punish Turkey for buying Russian missiles, arguing it would drive the countries closer together. Of note, Team Trump opposes a provision in the bill that would help Syrian Kurdish refugees immigrate to the United States. The case is laid out in a seven-page document obtained by The Daily Beast. The memo was sent by the State Department to Capitol Hill ahead of the Senate mark-up of a bill co-sponsored by Sens. Jim Risch (R-ID) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ) titled "Promoting American National Security and Preventing the Resurgence of ISIS Act." That legislation, which passed out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee despite Team Trump's opposition, would sanction Turkey for buying Russian surface-to-air missiles and would bar the U.S. from selling Turkey F-16 or F-35 fighter jets, including parts, until the country has fully abandoned the S-400 missile defense system it purchased from Russia. Aykan Erdemir of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies argued that the administration's opposition to the bill is useful for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan."This would definitely encourage Erdogan to continue his transgressions," Erdemir said. Are Impeachment Hearings Focused on the Wrong Country?The bill to punish Turkey comes in the wake of a sanctions package that passed after Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections. The "Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act" (CAATSA) mandated sanctions on countries that make major new purchases of Russian weapons. But despite the fact that Turkey's deal with Russia fits the bill, the administration hasn't imposed sanctions—enraging members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. Aaron Stein of the Foreign Policy Research Institute said the document sheds new light on the Trump administration's opposition to the Hill's sanctions. "It's in far more detail than we've ever gotten," Stein said. "They are legitimate criticisms of the bill, but the bill is probably going to happen because Donald Trump won't take the deal. The art of the deal, the master of the deal is an effing moron. The thing to do is impose CAATSA and make this go away. It's just that simple." In the seven-page description of the Trump administration's views—published below—the administration detailed a host of problems with the legislation. The administration argued that the legislation would "effectively terminate U.S.-Turkey defense trade," which would increase Turkey's reliance on Russia or "other adversary arms providers" for weapons. The bill would also "treat Turkey as a pariah in NATO, feeding a narrative that the Russian Federation would likely seek to amplify and exploit." A State Department spokesperson said the U.S. government wants to keep the NATO relationship strong."NATO is stronger with Turkey as a member, and has been for nearly 70 years," the spokesperson said. "Turkey has been a significant contributor to NATO collective security for decades. One of Russia's key strategic goals is to drive a wedge between NATO members; we are working to maintain strong cooperation within the Alliance. We remain deeply concerned with Turkey's acquisition of the Russian S-400 missile system, and stress the S-400 and F-35 cannot coexist. We will continue to urge Turkey to ensure its defense investments adhere to the commitment all Allies made to pursue NATO interoperability."The document also said the administration "opposes" a provision of the bill that would help Kurdish allies come to the U.S. as refugees more quickly. "The President has been clear on this Administration's approach to refugees as reflected in the National Security Strategy of the United States," the document says. The State Department document also raises concerns about a provision of the bill that would give Kurds access to Special Immigrant Visas—normally used to authorize travel to the U.S. for Iraqi and Afghan translators who faced retaliation because they helped American soldiers. According to the letter, the nine-month processing time for those visas is too short "to accommodate vital national security screening." Kurdish fighters under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces—which Turkey considers a terrorist group—fought side-by-side with U.S. special operations forces against ISIS in Syria and helped retake vast swaths of the country from the jihadist caliphate, including its former capital in Raqqa. But in October, Turkish forces invaded SDF-held territory in northern Syria after Trump pulled U.S. troops away from that part of the country. Human rights groups alleged that Turkish troops and allied Syrian militias committed war crimes against Kurdish civilians, leaving lawmakers furious. The Senate bill also includes sanctions against Halkbank, a Turkish bank accused of participating in a multi-billion-dollar sanctions-evasion operation on behalf of the Iranian government. Though the Trump administration already has the authority to level sanctions against Halkbank, it hasn't done so—perplexing many observers of Trump's Iran policy. The Justice Department, however, has charged Halkbank with helping Iran illegally access billions of dollars. And the chief of the DOJ's National Security Division, John Demers, called it "one of the most serious Iran sanctions violations we have seen." In just about every other instance, the Trump administration has taken an aggressive approach to enforcing Iran sanctions and targeting Tehran. The administration even declared Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to be a terrorist group earlier this year, which fed into acute tensions simmering in the Gulf. So the administration's reticence on Halkbank is striking. Inside Trump's Brewing Turkey Scandal, Starring Rudy GiulianiThe president's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani has done legal work for Reza Zarrab, a gold trader who pleaded guilty to participating in the sanctions-dodging scheme that allegedly involved Halkbank. Giuliani worked hard to keep Zarrab from having to make that plea; he reportedly pushed the Trump administration to send Zarrab back to Turkey as part of a prisoner swap. The bid failed, and Zarrab's testimony about the sanctions-evasion scheme proved valuable to prosecutors.The Trump administration's comments to Congress only gave boilerplate language opposing Congressional sanctions on the controversial bank. "[T]he sanctions on Halkbank are unnecessary because the Department of Treasury already possesses the authority to designate Halkbank, if appropriate," the document said. "Purporting to require the President to impose sanctions on Halkbank, constrains the President's authority to conduct foreign relations." Erdemir, who helms the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' program on Turkey, said the administration's opposition to mandated sanctions on Halkbank sends a message that would please Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. "This is not just Erdogan and this one bank," he said. "Overall, this would undermine U.S. sanctions because other entities and other governments would say, 'OK, if Erdogan and Turkey and Halkbank can enjoy some level of impunity, maybe we can too.'" Overall, the document reflects the administration's accommodative attitude toward Turkey. "They bet on Trump," Stein said of the Erdogan government. "Their bet is paying off in the short term."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.
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| Saudis sentence 5 people to death for Khashoggi's killing Posted: 23 Dec 2019 01:54 AM PST  A court in Saudi Arabia sentenced five people to death Monday for the killing of Washington Post columnist and royal family critic Jamal Khashoggi, whose grisly slaying in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul drew international condemnation and cast a cloud of suspicion over Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Three other people were found guilty by Riyadh's criminal court of covering up the crime and were sentenced to a combined 24 years in prison, according to a statement read by the Saudi attorney general's office on state TV. In all, 11 people were put on trial in Saudi Arabia over the killing.
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| North Korea Leader Meets Top Military Officials Amid Rising Tensions Posted: 22 Dec 2019 11:44 PM PST ![North Korea Leader Meets Top Military Officials Amid Rising Tensions]( "North Korea Leader Meets Top Military Officials Amid Rising Tensions") Kim Jong Un met North Korea's top military officials to discuss strengthening the country's military capability amid rising US-North Korea tensions, according to The Nikkei . What Happened North Korean ...
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| India's main opposition party stages protest against new law Posted: 22 Dec 2019 11:13 PM PST  Tens of thousands of protesters have taken to India's streets to call for the revocation of the law, which critics say is the latest effort by Modi's government to marginalize the country's 200 million Muslims. The law allows Hindus, Christians and other religious minorities who are in India illegally to become citizens if they can show they were persecuted because of their religion in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
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| The City of London Starts to Crack Over Brexit Posted: 22 Dec 2019 11:00 PM PST ![The City of London Starts to Crack Over Brexit]( "The City of London Starts to Crack Over Brexit") (Bloomberg Opinion) -- Boris Johnson's triumphant U.K. election victory makes Brexit a near certainty next month. For the City of London, Britain's split from its biggest trading partner is a huge leap into the unknown; one that will test its cohesion like never before.Banks, insurers and asset managers have spent billions preparing for their departure from the European Union and have moved as much as 1 trillion pounds ($1.3 trillion) in assets overseas since the Brexit referendum in 2016. The threat of a disorderly departure from the bloc encouraged the U.K. finance industry to speak largely with one voice to try to avoid — or at least prepare for — that cataclysmic outcome.But now the no-deal Brexit threat has abated there are signs that this unity is cracking. Some in the City would like Britain to take advantage of the split and forge its own regulatory path; others want it to hew closer to the EU to make the transition as smooth as possible. With the Brexit process entering its most critical phase, the U.K.-EU trade deal, it's far from ideal that divisions are starting to appear.About one-quarter of U.K. financial services' 200 billion pounds of yearly revenue comes from EU-related business, according to government reports. So there's a vast amount at stake here.At the core of the debate is whether the U.K. will continue to conform to EU standards. Under Johnson's current agreement with Brussels, British financiers will in 2021 lose their so-called EU "passporting" rights (which allow them to work anywhere in the bloc). The U.K. and the EU have agreed instead on the principle of "equivalence," which will give the City access to the EU for many financial services as long as Britain adheres to Brussels rules.The problem for some British financiers is that the EU can revoke equivalence any time, leaving it with the whip hand. It has used this as a weapon to try to bring Switzerland into line on broader agreements around immigration and the like. Given the systemic importance of London's financial markets, Brussels will demand even closer regulatory alignment than it asks of other trading partners. That's why many in the City would prefer to break entirely from the continent's regulation, severing almost five decades of integration, a move that would see a low-tax, low-regulation Britain become a competitor to the single market. They point to London's global strength as a reason not to fear an EU rupture: In one example, the U.K.'s share of foreign-exchange trading — which turns over $6.6 trillion a day — has risen by 6 percentage points to 43% in three years, data compiled by the Bank for International Settlements show. And that's despite Brexit.The Investment Association, representing the U.K.'s 7.7 trillion-pound asset management industry, including hedge funds, favors an overhaul of the regulatory framework to prioritize the competitiveness of the U.K. over keeping the EU onside. But not all of the industry's leaders agree. Many British insurers would also rather jettison EU-friendly capital rules, which they say penalize their businesses. Meanwhile, Wall Street banks such as JPMorgan Chase & Co and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. provide lucrative services to the continent and have so far championed regulatory alignment. But if they have to operate two hubs in the U.K. and EU after Brexit anyway, then they too might be persuaded of the advantages of an unchained City of London.While Johnson finally has a government team that's united on Brexit, the same cannot be said for the City. Some disagreements on which way to go are happening within firms too. The danger is that this splintering means London might come away from the crucial trade negotiations with much less than it bargained for.(This column was updated to clarify the representation of the Investment Association.)To contact the author of this story: Elisa Martinuzzi at emartinuzzi@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: James Boxell at jboxell@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Elisa Martinuzzi is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering finance. She is a former managing editor for European finance at Bloomberg News.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| China, South Korea look to improve ties with Beijing summit Posted: 22 Dec 2019 10:18 PM PST  The leaders of South Korea and China said Monday that they look forward to improved ties following a protracted disagreement over the deployment of a U.S. anti-missile system that Beijing considers a threat. South Korean President Moon Jae-in told Chinese leader Xi Jinping that while the sides may have felt "disappointed toward each other for a while," their shared culture and history prevented them from becoming completely estranged. "It is hoped that South Korea's dream becomes helpful for China as China's dream becomes an opportunity for South Korea," Moon said in opening remarks before reporters were ushered from the room.
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| Angela Merkel becomes second-longest serving German chancellor as she faces challenge to beat Helmut Kohl Posted: 22 Dec 2019 10:00 PM PST  Angela Merkel today became the second longest serving Chancellor in modern Germany, overtaking one of the greatest figures in post-war European history. Mrs Merkel's 5,144th day in the Chancellery pulled her in front of Konrad Adenauer, the founder of her Christian Democrat party (CDU) and the man who rebuilt West Germany's international reputation after the war in his tenure that stretched from 1949 to 1963. Now Mrs Merkel, who was sworn in on November 22 2005, only trails another giant of the CDU, Helmut Kohl. But her chances of overtaking the man who groomed her for power seem slim. She would have to stay in office for a further 726 days to beat his 5,869-day rule - a feat which would see her still calling the shots on December 17th 2021, some three months after the next scheduled election. The 65-year-old confirmed last year that she will retire from politics at the next election, saying "this fourth term is my last as Chancellor of Germany. I will not run again as CDU candidate for Chancellor in the 2021 elections, nor as an MP." Profile | Angela Merkel The only scenario under which she would overtake Mr Kohl were if she had to stay on in a caretaker capacity while the parties in Germany's fragmented political system hammer out a coalition deal over several months. Stability is key in German politics - Mrs Merkel is just the eighth Chancellor of the post-war period. Few would have predicted 15 years ago that the East German pastor's daughter would become one of Germany's strongest leaders. She has benefited from the hard work her predecessor Gerhard Schroeder put in modernising the welfare system, and her own talent for building big-tent coalitions combining Left-wing social reforms with conservative economic policies. When she does finally leave office, Mrs Merkel's time in power will likely be remembered as a time of unprecedented economic stability, as well as the era in which a far-Right party - the Alternative for Germany - became a serious force in German politics for the first time since the war.
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| Pentagon says New Jersey soldier killed in Afghanistan Posted: 22 Dec 2019 09:17 PM PST  A 33-year-old American soldier was killed in combat Monday in Afghanistan, the U.S. military said. The Taliban claimed they were behind a fatal roadside bombing in northern Kunduz province. In a statement Monday night, the Pentagon identified the casualty as Sgt. 1st Class Michael J. Goble of Washington Township, New Jersey.
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| John Bolton Speaks Out on Trump, Lamenting ‘Failure’ on North Korea Posted: 22 Dec 2019 09:08 PM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton told news service Axios that President Donald Trump's administration should admit its approach to end North Korea's nuclear arms program has "failed."Bolton suggested the Trump administration is bluffing about stopping North Korea's nuclear ambitions and it would be "very unusual" for his former employer to say that they got it wrong, he said in an exclusive interview released on Monday.Bolton said the U.S. could be doing more to tighten sanctions choking North Korea's economy, which would force the hand of leader Kim Jong Un. "The idea that we are somehow exerting maximum pressure on North Korea is just unfortunately not true," he told Axios.The former White House official, who sat with the U.S. president across the table from Kim at summits in Singapore and Hanoi, doubted the administration "really means it" when Trump and top officials pledged to stop North Korea from having deliverable nuclear weapons — "or it would be pursuing a different course," Axios reported him as saying.Trump ousted the hawkish Bolton in September after seemingly cutting him out of the decision-making process on many major issues. Bolton has long been one of the biggest skeptics of Pyongyang, becoming so reviled that North Korea's state-run media regularly singled him out for criticism and called him a "nasty troublemaker."Bolton's comments come just days before the year-end deadline Kim has given Trump to bring a new offer to the table or risk Pyongyang taking a new path that could rattle regional security."We've tried. The policy's failed. We're going to go back now and make it clear that in a variety of steps, together with our allies, when we say it's unacceptable, we're going to demonstrate we will not accept it," he said.U.S. Keeping 'High Levels of Readiness' in Korea, Milley SaysBolton also mocked Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun for saying North Korea's missile launches and belligerent statements were not helping bring peace on the Korean Peninsula, calling the comments a "clear winner in the Understatement of the Year Award contest."As nuclear talks have sputtered, North Korea has been building its weapons arsenal, Bolton told Axios."We're now nearly three years into the administration with no visible progress toward getting North Korea to make the strategic decision to stop pursuing deliverable nuclear weapons," Bolton said.To contact the reporter on this story: Jihye Lee in Seoul at jlee2352@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Niluksi Koswanage at nkoswanage@bloomberg.net, Jon Herskovitz, Muneeza NaqviFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Gender gap opens among Hispanics who could be key in 2020 Posted: 22 Dec 2019 09:08 PM PST  Yolanda Avila and Andres Pico are friends who sit next to each other on the Colorado Springs' city council. Overall, Latinos are far more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, but Hispanic men are more likely than Hispanic women to vote Republican.
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