| World’s Longest-Serving Ruler Must Reveal His Assets for an IMF Bailout Posted: 27 Dec 2019 05:28 PM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Equatorial Guinea's leader Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the world's longest-serving president, should declare his assets before the nation receives more financial support, according to the International Monetary Fund.The central African country needs an IMF bailout to deal with a crisis that shrank its economy by a third to $13 billion last year. Under a program agreed to last week, the state will be required to increase transparency, improve governance and implement reforms to fight corruption, Lisandro Abrego, the lender's mission chief for Equatorial Guinea, said in an interview."Authorities will implement an asset-declaration regime for senior public officials as part of the program's requirements," he said by phone from Washington. "It's our understanding that the law will apply to all senior government officials."Obiang, in power since August 1979, and his regime have been accused by prosecutors in the U.S. and France of squandering the tiny Central African's vast oil wealth. As recently as 2017, Equatorial Guinea was as rich in per-capita terms as its former colonial master Spain. Today, OPEC's smallest member is struggling to pay its debts after oil prices collapsed in 2014. The government has piled up arrears with construction firms that equate to almost 19% of its gross domestic product, according to the World Bank."The economy has been hit hard by the decline in oil and gas prices, which has affected export earnings and led to a virtual depletion of foreign assets," Lisandro said. "The economy has also been affected by longstanding governance and corruption problems."Audits by the government of state-owned oil and gas companies are already under way and should be completed by mid-2020, Lisandro said. All active oil and gas contracts are expected to be made public by March, he said.The IMF will also require Equatorial Guinea to join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which promotes good governance in the oil and mining industries. The country initially applied in 2008 and has since implemented several reforms to meet the membership requirements. Authorities filed a new application last month, Lisandro said.Calls and text messages to Finance Minister Cesar Mba Abogo seeking comment went unanswered. A Finance Ministry official didn't reply to questions sent by text message.Money-Laundering CaseThe IMF last week gave the green light to a $280 million loan to Equatorial Guinea, $40 million of which has already been dispersed. The loan roughly equates to what Obiang's oldest son and vice president, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, spent between 2000 and 2011 buying luxury properties on four continents and assets including Michael Jackson memorabilia, documents filed in a 2013 U.S. Department of Justice money-laundering case show. The case was settled the following year.The president's son received a three-year suspended jail term and a $35 million fine from a French court in 2017 for spending tens of millions of dollars in public funds on a mansion, sports cars and jewelry. In September, Swiss authorities raised $27 million in an auction of exclusive cars they'd seized from him, including a limited-edition Lamborghini Veneno roadster that sold for $8.4 million. He's denied any wrongdoing.Human-rights and anti-corruption advocates have questioned why the IMF is lending its credibility to "a regime with no previous record of serious reform," Sarah Saadoun, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, said in an interview."With no external pressure, besides the IMF, there's a risk that the loan will fund the same lifestyle that the oil wealth has upheld for 25 years," Saadoun said by phone from New York.Oil was discovered in Equatorial Guinea in the 1990s. Revenues from offshore oil fields supported investments in large infrastructure programs but left little room for social projects. Less than half of the 1.3 million population has access to clean drinking water and 20% of children die before the age of five, according to United Nations data.(Corrects headline and first paragraph to say Obiang is the world's longest-serving president.)\--With assistance from Mike Cohen.To contact the reporters on this story: Katarina Hoije in Abidjan at khoije@bloomberg.net;Alonso Soto in Abuja at asoto54@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Gordon Bell at gbell16@bloomberg.net, Paul Richardson, John BowkerFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| UN backs Russia on internet convention, alarming rights advocates Posted: 27 Dec 2019 05:13 PM PST  The United Nations on Friday approved a Russian-led bid that aims to create a new convention on cybercrime, alarming rights groups and Western powers that fear a bid to restrict online freedom. The General Assembly approved the resolution sponsored by Russia and backed by China, which would set up a committee of international experts in 2020. The panel will work to set up "a comprehensive international convention on countering the use of information and communications technologies for criminal purposes," the resolution said.
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| UN condemns human rights abuses against Myanmar's Rohingya Posted: 27 Dec 2019 05:01 PM PST  The U.N. General Assembly approved a resolution Friday strongly condemning human rights abuses against Myanmar's Rohingya Muslims and other minorities, including arbitrary arrests, torture, rape and deaths in detention. The 193-member world body voted 134-9 with 28 abstentions in favor of the resolution which also calls on Myanmar's government to take urgent measures to combat incitement of hatred against the Rohingya and other minorities in Rakhine, Kachin and Shan states. General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding but they do reflect world opinion.
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| Pompeo accuses Iran of suppressing protest memorials Posted: 27 Dec 2019 04:44 PM PST  US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday slammed Iran for using "violence" and censorship to prevent memorials for those killed during the suppression of recent protests. Protests broke out on November 15 across Iran, whose economy has suffered under sweeping sanctions from the United States, after the government abruptly hiked fuel prices. "The Iranian people have the right to mourn 1,500 victims slaughtered by @khamenei_ir during #IranProtests," Pompeo tweeted, directly accusing Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
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| U.S. Contractor Is Killed in Rocket Attack on an Iraqi Base Posted: 27 Dec 2019 04:08 PM PST ![U.S. Contractor Is Killed in Rocket Attack on an Iraqi Base]( "U.S. Contractor Is Killed in Rocket Attack on an Iraqi Base") (Bloomberg) -- A rocket attack on an Iraqi military base killed an American contractor and wounded several U.S. and Iraqi military personnel, the Defense Department said on Friday evening.Iraqi security forces were "leading the response and investigation" following the Friday night assault on the base in Kirkuk, where coalition forces are based, the Pentagon said in a statement.The names of the contractor and the wounded Americans were not immediately released, and the statement did not provide any further details.Rocket assaults on or near Iraqi installations that host American troops and personnel have occurred since the fall, and Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Mark Esper, have expressed increasing concern about Iranian involvement.Those attacks occurred as widespread anti-government protests intensified, eventually leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi.Tensions have been rising across the region, with Iran violently putting down its own protests, and Turkey invading Kurdish territory in northern Syria after President Donald Trump announced a pullout of American forces there.Early this month, rockets were fired at two Iraqi air bases where American forces are stationed. Seven rockets struck the perimeter of the Al Asad base, and five projectiles landed inside Balad. At Al Asad, the Iraqi army later found a truck rigged to fire rockets with seven empty tubes and eight unfired projectiles.No one was hurt in those attacks, which were believed to be the work of militants with ties to Iran, according to a U.S. official.On Thursday, Iraqi President Barham Saleh offered to resign as weeks of deadly protests showed no sign of easing. Mahdi remains in office until a successor is found. Protesters rejected one nominee, and Saleh rejected the candidacy of a second.Some 500 people have died in clashes between security forces and protesters since Oct. 1, according to Iraq's independent High Commission for Human Rights. Iraqis, mostly from the Shiite majority population, are protesting against corruption, poor services, and Iran's sweeping influence in the country.\--With assistance from Khalid Al-Ansary and Tony Capaccio.To contact the reporter on this story: John Harney in Washington at jharney2@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert, John HarneyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Trump is reportedly on the hunt for Mike Pompeo's replacement Posted: 27 Dec 2019 03:41 PM PST  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said he isn't going anywhere. President Trump is still reportedly looking for his successor.Pompeo has avoided the private and public criticism that Trump doles out to most of his administration, and has denied the idea of running for the seat Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) will be vacating in 2020. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is still reportedly pushing Pompeo to run, leaving a handful of administration officials and outsiders looking to become Trump's next secretary of state, The Washington Post reports.While Pompeo has said he'd at least stay in the State Department until next spring, recent reports have said he hasn't made up his mind yet. But former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is in the race, and after he lost to a Democrat in the state's gubernatorial contest last year, GOP leaders don't trust him to try again.That uncertainty has left national security adviser Robert O'Brien the most likely candidate to replace Pompeo should he decide to run. Trump and Pompeo both like O'Brien, and he "works well with all the various administration factions — which is rare," the Post says. But Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is also close with Trump, and "some officials believe Mnuchin is angling for the job," the Post continues. Trump has also reportedly weighed the idea of slotting Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell into the role, as well as State Department envoy to Iran Brian Hook, who is close with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.Read more at The Washington Post.More stories from theweek.com A more honest evangelical defense of Trump 5 scathingly funny cartoons about Trump's holiday season Democratic leadership should be afraid of McKayla Wilkes
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| US contractor killed in Iraq rocket attack, troops wounded Posted: 27 Dec 2019 02:47 PM PST ![US contractor killed in Iraq rocket attack, troops wounded]( "US contractor killed in Iraq rocket attack, troops wounded") A U.S. defense contractor was killed and several American and Iraqi troops were wounded Friday in a rocket attack in northern Iraq, U.S. officials said. According to officials, the attack involved as many as 30 rockets fired at the Iraqi military compound near Kirkuk, where U.S. service members are also based.
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| Russia’s new hypersonic missile ‘can travel 27 times faster than the speed of sound’ Posted: 27 Dec 2019 01:55 PM PST  Russia has deployed its first nuclear-capable missile that military officials claim can fly at 27 times the speed of sound, winning a race against the US to develop hypersonic weapons.President Vladimir Putin boasted that the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle means Russia now leads the world in engineering an entire new class of weapons.
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| Navy SEALs call Edward Gallagher 'evil' in leaked videos Posted: 27 Dec 2019 01:44 PM PST  Navy SEALs described their platoon leader, retired Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, as "evil," "toxic" and "perfectly OK with killing anybody that was moving," in video footage of interviews obtained by The New York Times. Gallagher's war crimes case earlier this year gained national attention after President Donald Trump intervened on his behalf despite strong objections from Pentagon leaders who said the president's move could damage the integrity of the military judicial system. The case also led to the Navy secretary's firing.
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| UN, ECOWAS urge Liberia to call off anti-govt protest Posted: 27 Dec 2019 01:33 PM PST  The United Nations and other West African countries urged Liberia on Friday to avoid a major protest rally planned for next week as the impoverished country grapples with a deep economic crisis. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the UN's office in West Africa and the Sahel (UNOWAS) sent a joint mission to Liberia this week to talk with President George Weah, who is under growing pressure over his handling of the crisis.
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| UN official: Past decade has seen human rights `backlash' Posted: 27 Dec 2019 01:29 PM PST  The past decade has seen a backlash against human rights on every front, especially the rights of women and the LGBT communities, according to a top U.N. human rights official. Andrew Gilmour, the outgoing assistant secretary-general for human rights, said the regression of the past 10 years hasn't equaled the advances that began in the late 1970s — but it is serious, widespread and regrettable. "I never thought that we would start hearing the terms 'concentration camps' again," Gilmour told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview.
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| Man who made 27,000 crosses for shooting victims is retiring Posted: 27 Dec 2019 01:03 PM PST  An Illinois man who made more than 27,000 crosses to commemorate victims of mass shootings across the country is retiring. Greg Zanis came to realize, after 23 years, his Crosses for Losses ministry was beginning to take a personal and financial toll on him, according to The Beacon-News. "I had a breaking point in El Paso," he said, referring to the mass shooting outside of a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.
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| McGrath files to challenge McConnell in Senate race Posted: 27 Dec 2019 12:46 PM PST  Calling her party's victory in the Kentucky governor's race a jolt of momentum for her own bid to unseat a Republican incumbent, Democrat Amy McGrath on Friday officially filed to challenge Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in what looms as a bruising, big-spending campaign next year. McGrath, a retired Marine combat pilot, touted many of the same issues — health care and good-paying jobs — that Andy Beshear highlighted in ousting Republican incumbent Matt Bevin in last month's election for governor. Beshear ran a "great campaign" that focused on issues that hit home for Kentuckians, McGrath said in a phone interview with The Associated Press.
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| Congress Wants to Force Trump's Hand on Human Rights in China and Beyond Posted: 27 Dec 2019 12:29 PM PST  WASHINGTON -- In a rare show of bipartisan unity, Republicans and Democrats are planning to try to force President Donald Trump to take a more active stand on human rights in China, preparing veto-proof legislation that would punish top Chinese officials for detaining more than 1 million Muslims in internment camps.The effort comes amid growing congressional frustration with Trump's unwillingness to challenge China over human rights abuses, despite vivid news reports this year outlining atrocities, or to confront such issues globally.To press Trump into action on China, lawmakers plan to move ahead with legislation that would punish Beijing for its repression of ethnic Uighur Muslims, with enough supporters to compel the president to sign or risk being overruled by Congress before the 2020 election. A version of the legislation, known as the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, passed both the House and Senate this year, but its path to the White House was stalled this month by a procedural process.Human rights causes draw rare bipartisan support in Congress, and many Republican lawmakers have broken from Trump on the matter, even as they move in lockstep with the president on nearly every other issue, including defending him against impeachment."There's been a sense by some that the administration hasn't prioritized human rights in its broader foreign policy," said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. "I don't think that's necessarily accurate -- but that sense has grown. There's been a sense that Congress needs to step up."Last month, Congress passed legislation by unanimous consent supporting the Hong Kong protests, forcing Trump to sign the bill. Trump, who had previously said he was "standing with" Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, risked being overruled by Congress and criticized as weak on China if he vetoed the measure. Still, when Trump signed the bill the night before Thanksgiving, he issued a statement saying he would "exercise executive discretion" in enforcing its provisions.Lawmakers this year also passed legislation recognizing the 1915 killings of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians as a genocide, over the objections of Trump. And it approved a resolution calling for the end of U.S. military support of the war in Yemen, in which a Saudi Arabia-led coalition is bombing civilians. Trump vetoed the measure.In October, after Trump withdrew U.S. forces just inside Syria's border, paving the way for a Turkish military operation against Kurdish forces, lawmakers voted to rebuke the administration for the decision and show support for the Kurds, a persecuted group in the Middle East that has fought with U.S. troops against the Islamic State.In the coming months, Congress is expected to try to pass legislation that would punish Turkey and Saudi Arabia for human rights abuses, though it is unclear whether those efforts would have a veto-proof majority. The effort includes a package of Turkey sanctions sponsored by Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. The legislation, which would penalize those who commit human rights abuses in Syria, was approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in December.Some human rights issues draw greater bipartisan support than others. China hawks have become ascendant across Congress and in the administration, and many Americans increasingly see China as a threat.Although Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have criticized China on the persecution of Muslims, Trump has said nothing. In July, Jewher Ilham, the daughter of Ilham Tohti, a Uighur professor whom China sentenced to life in prison in 2014, joined other victims of religious persecution to meet with Trump in the Oval Office. When she tried to explain the camps to Trump, he appeared ignorant of the situation and simply said, "That's tough stuff.""It's hard to find evidence of genuine personal interest," said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch. "On China, at a minimum, President Trump should stop describing an authoritarian, abusive leader as a 'terrific guy'; doing so gives Chinese authorities the opportunity to choose between that characterization and the far tougher ones offered up by other senior U.S. officials."Trump, who has criticized China over its economic practices, has refrained from imposing sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for the camps, for fear of jeopardizing the chances of reaching a trade deal. Many top aides and lawmakers from both parties have pushed for sanctions, but the Treasury Department has opposed the penalties. The Uighur act, which had Rubio and Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., as sponsors, would compel Trump to impose sanctions on Chen Quanguo, the top Communist Party official in Xinjiang, where the camps are.In October, the Trump administration placed a few Chinese businesses and security organizations on a commercial blacklist because of their suspected roles in Muslim abuses, but many analysts considered that a weak punishment.Other countries are more complicated. Saudi Arabia has been a traditional U.S. ally; and hawks in Congress, who are generally Republican, argue the Saudis provide a regional bulwark against Iran. And Trump's positive declarations about President Vladimir Putin of Russia have spurred a gradual shift from the anti-Russia views previously held by Republican politicians, conservative voters and right-wing news organizations.Trump expresses open admiration for many authoritarian leaders, even those condemned by senior officials in his own administration for some of the world's worst atrocities. They include Xi; Putin; Kim Jong Un, leader of North Korea; Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia; President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey; President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt; Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary; and President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil."He's celebrating the leaders who are the worst human rights abusers," Sen. Christopher Murphy, D-Conn., said in an interview. "It almost seems like the president's support for you is directly proportional to how brutal you are to your citizenry."This month, the Trump administration blocked a move by members of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the human rights situation in North Korea for the second year in a row. Trump has expressed warmth for Kim of North Korea and has engaged in personal diplomacy, meeting him at two summits to try, without success, to end North Korea's nuclear weapons program."The Trump administration has sent a clear message to Pyongyang and to the rest of the world that this administration doesn't consider starvation, torture, summary executions and a host of other crimes to be a priority," said Louis Charbonneau, U.N. director at Human Rights Watch.On other prominent issues this year, Trump used his executive power to reject measures that would have either punished countries for human rights abuses or simply affirmed the abuses were happening.Trump vetoed a bipartisan resolution that would have punished Saudi Arabia for its air war in Yemen and the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and permanent U.S. resident. Khashoggi's death last year -- a grisly killing that U.S. intelligence officials have said was ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed -- reignited a long-simmering effort among a small group of lawmakers to cut off U.S. support for Saudi-led bombings in Yemen that have helped create the world's worst man-made humanitarian crisis.Four of the six vetoes Trump has issued in his presidency overturned legislative attempts to penalize the kingdom. In May, Trump and Pompeo sparked bipartisan fury by declaring an emergency over Iran that allowed the United States to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, bypassing a congressional hold on the sales. This fall, in closed-door negotiations, the White House blocked similar language from making it into the final version of the annual defense policy bill, a must-pass package of legislation."I'm a big fan of the president on many fronts, but on this, someone has to stand up," Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. and a proponent of withdrawing the United States from wars, said in a floor speech in June before voting to cut off arm sales to the kingdom.In another recent instance that privately confounded Republican lawmakers, the White House recruited multiple Republican senators to block attempts to pass legislation formally recognizing the Armenian genocide. The administration argued the timing of the bill would upend diplomatic relations with Turkey, including when Trump received Erdogan at the White House in November. Trump insisted on holding that meeting over the objections of some Republicans who have criticized Turkey, a NATO ally, for attacking the Kurds in Syria.The legislation finally passed this month, days after the Senate advanced a package of sanctions related to Erdogan's invasion of northern Syria and his purchase of a sophisticated Russian surface-to-air missile system.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
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| Iran, Russia and China carry out naval drills in Indian Ocean Posted: 27 Dec 2019 11:40 AM PST  Iran, China and Russia started four days of joint naval drills in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman on Friday, the commander of Iran's flotilla announced. The exercise comes at a time of heightened tensions since the United States withdrew from a landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran in May last year. "The message of this exercise is peace, friendship and lasting security through cooperation and unity... and its effect will be to show that Iran cannot be isolated," Rear Admiral Gholamreza Tahani said on state television. RAdm Tahani added that the drills included rescuing ships on fire or vessels under attack by pirates and shooting exercises, with both Iran's navy and its Revolutionary Guards participating. State television showed what it said was a Russian warship arriving at Chabahar port in southern Iran and said the Chinese will join shortly, calling the three countries "the new triangle of power in the sea". The Portsmouth-based frigate HMS Iron Duke, pictured in foreground, operating with a NATO task group, began tracking the Admiral Grigorovich, background, through the Baltic Sea at the end of last week "The aim of this drill is to bolster security of international maritime commerce, combatting piracy and terrorism and sharing information... and experience," the flotilla commander said. "Us hosting these powers shows that our relations have reached a meaningful point and may have an international impact," he added. The United States reimposed crippling sanctions on Iran after quitting the nuclear deal last year, prompting Tehran to hit back with countermeasures by dropping nuclear commitments. Remaining parties to the badly weakened agreement include Britain, France and Germany as well as China and Russia. In June, Donald Trump, the US president, authorised a military strike after Iran shot down a US drone, only to call off the retaliation at the last moment. The crisis deepened with September 14 attacks on Saudi energy giant Aramco's Abqaiq processing plant and Khurais oilfield, which halved the kingdom's crude output. Yemen's Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for the attack but Washington accused Tehran, a charge it has strongly denied. Washington has responded with a military build-up in the Gulf and has launched an operation with its allies to protect navigation in Gulf waters.
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| Russia and Ukraine drop mutual gas claims worth millions Posted: 27 Dec 2019 11:23 AM PST  The gas companies of Ukraine and Russia have agreed to drop all financial claims worth billions of pounds against each other in the latest rapprochement between the two nations bitterly divided by a separatist conflict. Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said in an interview broadcast on Russian state television on Friday that the two countries are withdrawing all of their lawsuits against each other after they agreed on a gas transit deal last week. Russian gas giant Gazprom, which relies on Ukraine as its single largest transit route to Europe, last week agreed to pay out $2.9 billion (£2.2 billion) to Ukraine stemming from a previous dispute over transit fees. The parties will now withdraw all financial claims that run up millions of pounds on both sides. Ukraine, for one, has managed to secure a freeze of Gazprom's assets in several countries such as Great Britain, Switzerland and the Netherland. Those assets will now be released. Mr Novak on Friday hailed the deal as "mutually beneficial" and said that courts would otherwise have taken years to rule on those claims. A Gazprom petrol station in Moscow "It's a good thing," he said in the interview. "It was important for us to start our relations with a clean slate on January 1." The two neighboring countries have been hostile to each other since 2014 when Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula and threw its weight behind separatists in eastern Ukraine. Moscow still claims the annexation of Crimea was legal and denies reports of sending troops and weapons to back the separatist rebels. Both countries have, however, been making small steps towards rapprochement since Ukraine elected its new president, former comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy in April. Mr Zelenskiy and Russian President Vladimir Putin negotiated a major prisoner exchange earlier this year and agreed at a summit meeting earlier this month to release more prisoners by the end of the year.
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| Refugees fear for lives amid fighting in western Libya Posted: 27 Dec 2019 10:45 AM PST ![Refugees fear for lives amid fighting in western Libya]( "Refugees fear for lives amid fighting in western Libya") An Eritrean refugee and an aid worker say that heavy fighting has put a Libyan detention center packed with refugees at risk as militias also use the center as an army barracks. The refugee sent audio and text messages from inside the Al-Nasr Martyrs detention center in the western city of Zawiya, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) from the capital Tripoli. The sound of heavy gunfire can be heard in the background.
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| US adds detail on how soldier died in Afghanistan this week Posted: 27 Dec 2019 10:09 AM PST  A U.S. Special Forces soldier who died in Afghanistan this week was seizing a Taliban weapons cache when he was killed, the U.S. military said Friday. Sgt. 1st Class Michael Goble was with his unit when its members discovered an undisclosed amount of Taliban weapons in Kunduz Province, said Eric Pahon, a spokesman for the U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Pahon said the Taliban wrongly claimed that the service members were in a convoy and targeted by a roadside bomb during a raid.
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| Replace Mike Pompeo with a champion of diplomacy Posted: 27 Dec 2019 10:00 AM PST  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo might be on his way out. An open race is on for a Senate seat in his home state of Kansas, and Republican leadership appears uncertain their current candidate can claim victory. If Pompeo has made up his mind, he hasn't said so publicly, but already speculation about his possible successor is afoot.It's a long shot, but as in any Cabinet-level turnover (and in this administration, they are legion), this is a chance to make things better. Our next secretary of state should — and, unlikely as it may be, could — be a champion of diplomacy.Pompeo never was. He has shown himself reckless and dishonest, an advocate of preventive war and forcible regime change. His "diplomacy" too often amounts to ham-handed coercion, sanctions layered on sanctions without regard for civilian suffering in pursuit of absolutist demands that seem designed to fail. This pattern is most egregious in Pompeo's dealings with Iran, where the administration's policy of "maximum pressure" has made productive talks impossible, emboldened hardliners in Tehran, incentivized Iranian provocations, added grave economic woes to ordinary Iranians' already difficult lot, and increased the likelihood of war.Though he has at times preached a commendable patience with North Korea, there too Pompeo has not taken the pragmatic, dogged approach to diplomacy we need, going along with the president's affection for photo-ops and press releases instead of insisting on normalized relations, working-level talks, and achievable goals, a category that for the foreseeable future does not include denuclearization.But Pompeo is hardly the sole author of America's diplomatic impotence. President Trump has had knives out for the State Department budget — already less than a tenth of the Pentagon's swollen coffers — since he arrived in Washington, and as much as he boasts of his deal-making prowess, he has proven a poor diplomat, too short-sighted and self-aggrandizing to negotiate well. A spate of departures and firings have left State's ranks depleted to a worrisome degree; one in five ambassadorships are unfilled.Yet State's weakness predates Trump, too. In theory, the secretary of state is the most important Cabinet member and the president's chief foreign policy adviser. Like the vice presidency today, the role was once considered a stepping stone to the presidency. But the last century has seen a shift of power away from State and toward the National Security Council and especially the military advisers among its members. Predictably, this change has coincided with the increased militarization of American foreign policy.Such "continued diminution of the State Department makes the country less safe because it makes peaceful resolution of diplomatic issues less likely," explains historian Mark Edwards at The Washington Post. A flagging State Department means more war, Edwards writes, costing "Americans money, time, stature, and lives."A secretary of state committed to the renewal of diplomacy as the crown jewel of U.S. foreign policy could begin to reverse that trend. It would be incredibly difficult — and that's if the secretary could avoid a prompt sacking by the president, which I rather doubt. Decades of loss of institutional wisdom and momentum in the American diplomatic corps cannot be undone overnight. Worse yet, as the University of Texas at Austin's Jeremi Suri notes at Foreign Policy, the "U.S. electoral system does not favor diplomats or the slow compromises they nurture in foreign policy. And the United States invests far more in military power than other less kinetic elements." Most of the weight of institutional Washington is leveraged against a move toward robust diplomacy. Sanctions and military intervention are the default. Few want to take the time to talk or chance accusations of "weakness" for working through the compromises diplomacy often requires.Still, that must be our aim. It would be so under any circumstances, but the increasing complexity of foreign relations — the effects of new technologies of transportation and communication; the rise of non-state adversaries and the risk of great power conflict; the global attention to climate change — compound that necessity. As the last two decades have made painfully evident, we cannot bomb our way through all the security threats of the 21st century.With Pompeo possibly gone, we desperately require a secretary of state capable of restoring the State Department's influence, organizational health, and budget. My hopes here are appropriately pre-dashed, but it is past time to take up again the gardening tools of diplomacy and lay down the bludgeon of war.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 A more honest evangelical defense of Trump 5 scathingly funny cartoons about Trump's holiday season Democratic leadership should be afraid of McKayla Wilkes
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| Egyptian Youtube star held for videos criticizing president Posted: 27 Dec 2019 08:47 AM PST ![Egyptian Youtube star held for videos criticizing president]( "Egyptian Youtube star held for videos criticizing president") Egyptian authorities have arrested an online comedian who criticized President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi in a Youtube video, according to a rights lawyer and local media. Shady Sorour was arrested at Cairo International Airport earlier this week upon his arrival from the United States. Mohamed Lotfy, executive director of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, said Friday that Sorour had declined legal counsel during his first round of questioning.
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| Major Southern California highways reopen after heavy snow Posted: 27 Dec 2019 08:41 AM PST  Major interstates reopened in Southern California on Friday after lengthy closures caused by a cold storm that drenched the region and blanketed mountains and desert areas with heavy snow. The notorious Grapevine section of Interstate 5 in towering Tejon Pass north of Los Angeles was finally opened after a 36-hour closure forced by dangerous conditions that set in Christmas night. Vehicles were being escorted in both directions by California Highway Patrol units.
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| Syrian opposition calls on the world to aid rebel-held Idlib Posted: 27 Dec 2019 08:23 AM PST  After weeks of intense bombardment, Syrian government forces launched a ground offensive on the southern and eastern parts of Idlib province in the northwest last week. Idlib, which is dominated by al-Qaida-linked militants, is also home to 3 million civilians. The United Nations has warned of the growing risk of a humanitarian catastrophe along the Turkish border.
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| France summons Iran's ambassador over detained researchers Posted: 27 Dec 2019 08:22 AM PST ![France summons Iran's ambassador over detained researchers]( "France summons Iran's ambassador over detained researchers") France's government has summoned Iran's ambassador to demand the release of two French researchers held in a notorious Tehran prison, and to express "extreme concern" about the health of one who is on a hunger strike. France considers the months-long detention of Fariba Adelkhah and Roland Marchal "unacceptable" and is seeking permission for consular officials to visit them, according to a foreign ministry statement. The ministry said the ambassador was summoned Thursday, and that France is demanding "total transparency" about what is happening with the researchers.
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| Court: 17-year term in attack on FBI agent 'shockingly low' Posted: 27 Dec 2019 08:02 AM PST ![Court: 17-year term in attack on FBI agent 'shockingly low']( "Court: 17-year term in attack on FBI agent 'shockingly low'") A 17-year sentence for a New York City man who sought to aid the Islamic State group by trying to kill an FBI agent is "shockingly low," a federal appeals court said Friday as it ordered a judge to re-sentence him.
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| NYC ups policing in Jewish areas after spate of attacks Posted: 27 Dec 2019 07:20 AM PST  New York City is increasing its police presence in some Brooklyn neighborhoods with large Jewish populations after a string of possibly anti-Semitic attacks during the Hanukkah holiday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said after the latest episode happened Friday. Around the city, police have gotten at least six reports this week — and eight since Dec. 13 — of attacks possibly propelled by anti-Jewish bias.
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| Iowa swung fiercely to Trump. Will it swing back in 2020? Posted: 27 Dec 2019 06:14 AM PST  Few states have changed politically with the head-snapping speed of Iowa. In 2008, its voters propelled Barack Obama to the White House, as an overwhelmingly white state validated the candidacy of the first black president. A year later, Iowa's Supreme Court sanctioned same-sex marriage, adding a voice of Midwestern sensibility to a national shift in public sentiment.
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| Iran-backed groups accuse Iraqi president of caving to US Posted: 27 Dec 2019 05:44 AM PST  In refusing to appoint Fatah-backed candidate Asaad al-Eidani on Thursday, President Barham Salih said he was responding to broad opposition by anti-government protesters who have flooded the streets for nearly three months to demand the overthrow of Iraq's entire political class. O n Friday evening, thousands of them poured into Baghdad's Tahrir Square to express their support for Salih's decision.
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| $40 Trillion in Damage And Millions Dead: The Horror of a Second Korean War Posted: 27 Dec 2019 04:42 AM PST  Why there is no military solution to the North Korea challenge.
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| New Russian weapon can travel 27 times the speed of sound Posted: 27 Dec 2019 04:12 AM PST  A new intercontinental weapon that can fly 27 times the speed of sound became operational Friday, Russia's defense minister reported to President Vladimir Putin, bolstering the country's nuclear strike capability. Putin has described the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle as a technological breakthrough comparable to the 1957 Soviet launch of the first satellite. The new Russian weapon and a similar system being developed by China have troubled the United States, which has pondered defense strategies.
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| Hawaii tour copter with 7 aboard is missing, search underway Posted: 27 Dec 2019 04:05 AM PST  A tour helicopter with seven people aboard disappeared in Hawaii, and a search was underway in weather conditions described as challenging, the U.S. Coast Guard said. The owner of the helicopter contacted the Coast Guard about 45 minutes after the aircraft was due back from a tour of Kauai's Na Pali Coast on Thursday evening, a Coast Guard statement said. The Eurocopter AS350 helicopter took off from the town of Lihue, Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said Friday.
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| Bosnia court sentences ex-Islamic fighter to 4 years in jail Posted: 27 Dec 2019 04:00 AM PST ![Bosnia court sentences ex-Islamic fighter to 4 years in jail]( "Bosnia court sentences ex-Islamic fighter to 4 years in jail") SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — A court in Bosnia on Friday sentenced a Bosnian man to four years in prison for fighting with the Islamic State group in Syria. The Court of Bosnia-Herzegovina said that Ibro Cufurovic was guilty of organizing a terrorist group. The 24-year-old was deported to Bosnia in April after he was captured in Syria.
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| Why a corporate lawyer is sounding the alarm about these common chemicals Posted: 27 Dec 2019 03:20 AM PST  The inspiration for Mark Ruffalo's character in the film Dark Waters, Rob Bilott believes the battle to protect polluted communities is far from over A conversation with the lawyer Rob Bilott is like a slap across the face. It doesn't feel good. But it does get your attention.According to Bilott, we face a "unique health threat" from a class of industrial chemicals that most Americans have never heard of. These chemicals are widely used in everyday products such as non-stick cookware and stain-resistant fabrics, even though science shows they are linked to a range of deadly diseases, reproductive problems and other ailments. Powerful corporations are fighting to protect the use of these profitable chemical compounds, Bilott says, and US regulators are doing next to nothing to stop them.It's worth listening to what Bilott has to say. He has spent the last two decades advocating for people in West Virginia and Ohio whose water was contaminated with one of these toxins, a chemical called perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA.Bilott achieved a class-action settlement with DuPont in 2004, part of which paid for a six-year health study. That study found links between PFOA and kidney cancer, testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, high blood pressure, pregnancy-induced hypertension and thyroid disease. In a follow-up case in 2017, Bilott achieved a multimillion-dollar settlement of thousands of personal injury claims against DuPont. His two decades of work negotiated water filtration and treatment for affected communities, the establishment of a novel scientific panel for human health studies, and the introduction of a medical monitoring program for thousands of people exposed. His work led to DuPont and other manufacturers phasing out the use of PFOA in the US, though similar replacement chemicals have prompted fresh concerns.Bilott's battle against DuPont, documented in a memoir, has been made into the feature film Dark Waters, released to theaters across the country this month. Starring Mark Ruffalo, Dark Waters tells of Bilott's journey from a chemical industry defense attorney to a plaintiffs' champion who uncovered evidence that DuPont knowingly hid the dangers of PFOA, even as its manufacturing facility near Parkersburg, West Virginia, was spilling the toxin across the landscape.DuPont's own lawyers and scientists raised concerns about the local community's exposure to PFOA, Bilott told me. "Unfortunately what we saw was decisions made for business purposes to continue using the chemical, releasing it, and exposing people to it," Bilott says.("Safety, health and protecting the planet are core values at DuPont," the company told me in an email. "We are – and have always been – committed to upholding the highest standards for the wellbeing of our employees, our customers and the communities in which we operate.")Despite his legal victories and newfound fame, Bilott believes there is much more to be done. He is currently pursuing a new lawsuit against chemical manufacturers 3M, DuPont and DuPont spinoff Chemours. The action is seeking class-action status on behalf of everyone living in the United States who has been exposed to not only PFOA but related compounds known as PFAS, short for "per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances."Bilott says scientific research shows that PFAS chemicals accumulate in the human body and in the environment, creating a "ticking time bomb" in anyone exposed. He asserts that the companies "maliciously conspired" to conceal the dangers of PFAS while contaminating the bodies of people around the country.As is the case with PFOA, studies link PFAS exposure to a range of human health problems, including a suppression of the human immune system, liver dysfunction, and adverse birth outcomes. The chemicals have been used since the 1940s in a range of products such as non-stick cookware, stain-repellents, food packaging, firefighting foam and other products."This is a unique health threat in the sense of its scope and magnitude," Bilott says. "As for PFOA, we're talking about a chemical that has managed to find its way into the blood of almost everything on the planet and almost every person in the United States and is linked with multiple potential adverse health effects. "It is extremely unlikely to ever break down without us going out there and physically finding a way to get rid of it."Bilott is taking an unusual approach in the new litigation, which is pending in a federal court in Ohio. He is not asking for money damages for individuals, but rather for the establishment of an independent scientific panel to study and confirm the health effects of PFAS exposures so that people can be informed about the risks they face.Notably, he is insisting that the companies making the chemicals pay for the independent scientific work, not US taxpayers. The companies have denied liability and sought unsuccessfully to have the complaint dismissed.Separately, Bilott has also pushed the US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) into action. After Bilott threated to sue ATSDR for failing to look at PFAS exposures, the agency said it would start collecting data from at least eight sites around the United States.Bilott fears limited funding will not allow for the necessary scope, however. And the companies "ought to be paying", not taxpayers, he argues.Thanks in part to his work, and to journalists, scientists and activists who have brought attention to the PFAS problem, action to protect public health is spreading. Last year United Nations experts called for the phasing out of certain PFAS. And this week environmental officials in Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark announced a plan to restrict all PFAS compounds and phase out most uses by 2030.Bilott is heartened at the progress but frustrated it has taken so long. He finds the lack of regulatory action by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) particularly infuriating."We notified the EPA 18 years ago that PFOA in drinking water presented a public health threat, and in 2019 there are still no federal regulatory limits," Bilott told me. "If [affected] communities had been forced to sit back and wait for action they'd still be exposed every day. They would have no relief whatsoever."DuPont and manufacturing industry voices have sought to discredit Bilott and the Dark Waters film. The Ohio Manufacturers' Association, which has included DuPont executives among its leadership team in recent years, claims, in a website created specifically to discredit Dark Waters, that "activists" are "cherry-picking" information in an effort to "deceive the public, threaten our jobs, and destroy our way of life".This smear is only one small part of an ongoing effort to limit class-action environmental lawsuits, which are often the last line of defense for consumers. When regulators fail to regulate, and lawmakers align with corporate interests, consumers have nowhere else to go."In the movie there is a scene where my character makes the comment, 'We protect us, we do.' And that is unfortunately the reality right now," Bilott says.The fight is far from over."I feel like I have a unique responsibility to get this information out to people," Bilott tells me. "We all know about Flint, Michigan – one chemical, in one water supply. But I suspect most people across the United States are still unfamiliar with PFAS and don't realize the exposure that occurs. I'm going to continue doing what I can elevating that awareness." * Carey Gillam is a journalist and author and a public interest researcher for US Right to Know, a not-for-profit food industry research group. She is a Guardian US columnist
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| This Is What War Looks Like in 2029 Posted: 27 Dec 2019 01:45 AM PST  The U.S. House of Representatives on Dec. 11 passed its version of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, clearing the way for the U.S. Senate to approve the measure. If President Donald Trump signs the bill, it will channel a staggering $740 billion into the Pentagon's accounts. That's by far the biggest military budget of any country. The United States lavishes on its armed forces more than twice as much as No. 2 spender China does, and more than 10 times what No. 6 Russia does.But all that spending, and the huge quantities of high-tech weaponry it buys, are preparing the Pentagon to fight the wrong war, a panel of experts told The Daily Beast. America is entering the 2020s at a strategic disadvantage. And it could take something awful happening before American leaders change their thinking.Four years after disguised Russian forces conquered Ukraine's Crimea region from the inside out, 18 years after 9/11 kicked off two U.S.-led occupations and 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall heralded the end of the Cold War, the United States is still equipping itself to fight warplane-versus-warplane, ship-versus-ship and tank-versus-tank against an obliging rival power.The U.S. Army's Worst Tradition: Never Ready for the Next WarBut the countries the U.S. government identifies as its top threats, China and Russia, have made it very clear they have no intention of waging war that way. Instead, they conduct shadowy campaigns where money and information are the weapons and the internet is the battleground. America isn't ready to defend against those kinds of attacks. "We're getting ready for the wrong war," Sean McFate, a professor of strategy at Georgetown University and the author of The New Rules of War, told The Daily Beast.Despite China's explosive economic growth over the past two decades and Russia's own resurgence under Vladimir Putin, the United States still deploys vastly more military might than those countries do. The Pentagon operates more than 13,000 aircraft including hundreds of stealth fighters, versus Russia with its 4,000 aircraft (and zero operational stealth fighters) and China with 3,000 aircraft and just 15 stealth fighters.The U.S. fleet is the biggest in the world by tonnage, a useful metric for overall naval capability. American warships, including 20 big and small aircraft carriers, in total displace 4.6 million tons of water. The Chinese fleet, with two medium-size carriers, displaces 1.8 million tons. Russia's ships displace 1.6 million tons. Moscow's sole flattop, the aging and accident-prone Admiral Kuznetsov, caught fire while undergoing repairs in mid-December.For ground combat, the United States deploys the planet's most sophisticated armored vehicles and the biggest fleets of transport and attack helicopters. In space, America's roughly 900 satellites outnumber China's own spacecraft by a factor of three, and Russia's by a factor of six.But the U.S. advantage in planes, ships, tanks and satellites has never mattered less. That's because America's greatest foes have found ways of fighting that don't involve explosive clashes at sea, huge aerial dogfights or sprawling tank battles. Russia is perfecting the art of weakening an enemy politically before surreptitiously inserting incognito special forces, and finally deploying overt military force only when the opposition is already collapsing. That's how Russia carved out territory in the Republic of Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine beginning in 2014 and how it turned Syria into a client state starting in 2015.And it should go without saying that Russia has deployed elements of its new strategy in America and across Europe, pouring money and propaganda into elections in the United States and the United Kingdom, among other countries, all in a bid to sow political discord and weaken Western alliances opposing Russia's expansion. It's not for no reason that Trump, a major beneficiary of Russian influence operations, directs some of his nastiest rhetoric against NATO. Meanwhile, China is buying, bullying and arguing its way into greater influence. Beijing sent militiamen on fishing boats to claim disputed islands in the China Seas then dredged delicate coral reefs to build bases on these islands, all while arguing in international forums that the land-grabs were perfectly legal. At the same time, the Chinese Communist Party's multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road initiative, which sponsors roads, railways, ports and other infrastructure across Asia, Europe and Africa, is giving Beijing sway over governments on three continents. The U.S. government has no clear plan for countering these new approaches to conquest. It's all the rage right now in the Pentagon to talk about "great power conflict" between big countries with big armies. But officials are having those conversations "without recognizing the full complexity of today's strategic challenges, in which conflict and competition are occurring in new, often subtler ways, particularly in the realms of influence and ideology," Elsa Kania, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C., told The Daily Beast.One thing is clear. America's existing military power isn't up to the job. "Our superior military didn't deter Russia from going into Georgia, Ukraine or Syria," McFate pointed out. "China is winning the South China Sea with zero carrier groups."Some U.S. military leaders sense the need for reform. But even the most daring advocates of change at the Pentagon argue for modest internal tweaks, shifting money and people between existing accounts. Gen. David Berger, the new U.S. Marine Corps commandant, has a reputation as an iconoclast. But his big idea for winning future wars is to replace some of the Corps' manned vehicles and aircraft with drones. The Marines would still be preparing for a war that seems vanishingly unlikely to ever happen.Peter W. Singer, an analyst at New America in Washington, D.C. and the author of LikeWar, told The Daily Beast the military has been through this before, with disastrous results. U.S. Military Pushes Back Against China's Regional Bullying"The most apt parallel may be the 1930s, where many in the Navy thought they had embraced the new tech of airplanes, simply by putting a floatplane on the back of the battleship," Singer explained. "They were nibbling at the edges, while massive change was already evident." A few years later, Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor and sank much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet."We don't need to be buying more tanks, airplanes and submarines," McFate said. "What we need to do is find ways of blunting strategic malign information."For the Pentagon, that could mean a profound reorganization, with writers, coders, network specialists and electronic-warfare whizzes replacing pilots, infantry and ship's crews. But as one of the world's biggest bureaucracies, the U.S. military naturally resists this kind of rapid change."People fight to hold onto what is theirs, and the most skilled leaders and warriors in the world are in the U.S. armed forces," Susanna Blume, a Center for a New American Security strategy expert, told The Daily Beast. "There's a fundamental psychological conflict in asking them to fight wars by abandoning all the energy, teams, budget and effort they've put into building our current state and form of readiness. No one likes to be told they've been disrupted all the way out of a paycheck."It doesn't help that information warfare looks, well, boring. Fighter pilots make for great promotional videos. Hackers sitting in front of a keyboard … don't. And that makes this new era of defense readiness a hard sell to the American public and in Congress. "Cyberwarfare is badly defined, rarely Instagrammable and dull to watch unless you're the person who just lost control of a nuclear facility due to nation-state hackers," Tarah Wheeler, a New America cybersecurity expert, told The Daily Beast.Despite the clarion call from experts and Russia and China's continuing successes waging a new kind of warfare, don't expect much of a reaction in Washington, D.C. Not until some cataclysmic event shakes Americans from their belief that the United States wins wars because wars mean tanks shooting at tanks and Americans are good at that sort of thing. "Victorious nations are very hard to change their minds strategically," McFate said. Usually they have to lose a battle or an entire war to convince them that they're no longer the winners they thought they were. "They have to lose a lot of blood."Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. 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| A year of resistance: The global spread of civil disobedience Posted: 27 Dec 2019 01:29 AM PST  It was 5pm and the tarmac was strewn with broken paving slabs and burning street furniture when Eliacer Flores poked his head around the barricade to snatch a glimpse of the ranks of riot police massed a little further up the road. It was an ill-judged moment Mr Flores will regret for the rest of his life. As he poked his head out, his ears rang with the clap of gunfire and rubber bullet sank deep into his eye socket. "I felt cold in my body. I wanted to vomit. I've never felt such a physical pain in my life. I could only see black as soon as it hit my eye," he told The Telegraph. It was October 20 and Mr Flores, 30, was in Santiago, Chile protesting . But he could have been in any one of dozens of countries for 2019 was a year of street protest. How protests spread around the world The domino effect "I think what makes 2019 remarkable is the sheer quantity and circumstances of civil resistance," says Sir Adam Roberts, senior research fellow for politics and international relations at the University of Oxford. Demonstrations were already in full swing in France in January. The Yellow Vest movement was tearing through Paris having already created havoc on roads and roundabouts across the country. Triggered by an increase in fuel duties, it soon escalated into a much broader movement for the nation's disaffected. There demand: nothing less than root and branch reform of France's governance and the way in which wealth is distributed. The French are known for their street protests but in 2019 they were not alone. Similar movements have sprung up across the world over the last 12 months, often sparked by seeming minor changes like the fuel duties in France. Time and again seemingly these small domestic gripes were amplified by social media into national protests that became something far bigger. In Sudan a rise in the price of bread brought people out onto the streets in unprecedented numbers - eventually toppling a dictatorship. A demonstrator raises a fist while protesting during a national strike in Paris, France Credit: Christophe Morin /Bloomberg In March, a bill to change extradition rules in Hong Kong turned into a widespread anti-China and pro-Democracy protests that continues today. Then there were a slew of popular uprisings in Latin America. In Chile a small Metro price rise triggered a campaign for social justice in the region's most unequal country. The scrapping of fuel subsidies in Ecuador after fuel price rises led to a mass movement to end austerity, forcing the government to temporarily flee the capital. In the Middle East, Lebanon's proposed tax on WhatsApp triggered a mini revolution that brought the prime minister down. Hundreds died in spontaneous demonstrations against a fuel price rise in Iran. And in Iraq anti-corruption protests developed into a mass movement against the governing class. "This year people power really matters, in many countries there's a big gap or a vacuum between the political elite and the people. This is where the protesters come in, bridging the gap," says Srdja Popovic, a Serbian political activist and author prominent in the movement to bring down Slobodan Milosovic. Adding fire to that 'gap' were rising living costs and a growing sense of inequality, experts say. Demonstrators in Santiago protest against the brutal force used by the Chilean police Credit: NurPhoto/Getty 'We will make a Hong Kong here' Protests breed protests, creating a kind of domino effect, says Steve Crawshaw, author of Street Spirit: The Power of Protest and Mischief. He compares 2019 to the Arab Spring of 2011 and to 1989 when the Berlin wall came down. "I think the belief in the power of protests has grown gradually [this year]," he adds. Perhaps the most totemic movement of 2019 has come from Hong Kong, where legislation allowing extradition to mainland China has developed into daily running battles with riot police in the former British colony. The protesters' motto of "be water" - a quote from a Jackie Chan film - has helped develop and maintain a fluid, leaderless movement that can carry out large-scale civil disobedience with apparent spontaneity. Shutting down airports, bridges and tunnels has got the attention of Catalans resisting Spain's central government and fighting for independence. Police in riot gear move through a cloud of smoke as they detain a protester in Hong Kong Credit: Ng Han Guan /AP Tsunami Democratic, a group of activists inside the Catalan independence movement, marched towards Barcelona's El Prat airport on October 14 chanting "we're going to do a Hong Kong!" A few weeks later they shut down one of the main road crossings between Spain and France. Mainstream news and the viral nature of social media has helped spread mood and tactics from country to country. Video clips of even the smallest acts of resistance are instantly uploaded and shared globally. "As in Hong Kong we see how disciplined they were to protest. It's helped us to learn how to turn off the tear [gas] pumps yourself, and about the laser pointers," says Marcelo Herrera, an engineer who was also shot in the eye by a police pellet gun during a protest in Chile. The laser pointers he refers to were adopted by Hong Kong protesters as a method to confuse police and prevent pictures being taken to identify those taking part in demonstrations. Video clips of how to defuse a tear gas canister using a traffic cone and water bottle were also spread from Hong Kong to protest movements across the world. Catalan independence protesters wave the 'Esteladas' flag during clashes with police as thousands take part in one of the 'Marches for Freedom' in Barcelona, Credit: QUIQUE GARCIA/EPA-EFE/REX A social revolution Protest movements have also lent each other the means to organise discreetly. While the Arab Spring protests of 2011 were spread using open social media channels like Facebook, this round has been dominated by more secure and often encrypted communication. Apps like Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp and Viber allow protesters to create secure groups to mobilise huge marches in a matter of hours. Meanwhile Hong Kong protesters again started a trend of sharing meeting places using Airdrop on busy Metros. The anonymity from secure networks helps breed what appear to be leaderless movements. "The protest structure is similar," says Sarah Yerkes, a Middle East fellow at think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It's happening all over Europe and in many African countries, people even talk about the second wave of the Arab Spring. It's not just people power for democracy." Social media spawns mini-movements as key campaigns or moments are amplified by hashtags and memes. Riot police remove an anti-government protester demonstrating on a main highway in Beirut, Lebanon Credit: Hussein Malla /AP In Chile, an off-shoot of the main protests known as Las Tesis has seen its feminist flashmob dance and song – "The rapist is you" – go viral, spreading around the world. Meanwhile, Baby Shark, the viral hit children's song, has been given an unlikely second lease of life in Lebanon and Baghdad. When protesting crowds in Beirut brought traffic to a halt a toddler in the backseat of a car was left terrified. Seeing the fear on the young child's face, the protesters broke into a spontaneous rendition of Baby Shark. Days later, chants of Baby Shark were ringing out on the streets of Baghdad - taken on as a kind of demonstration of the peaceful motives of the demonstrators. But dig deeper and social media can be seen as a cause of discontent as well as a tool of protest. Many protests this year have seen calls to close the gap between rich and poor, rallying against the economic system and the elites that control it. But a report by the UN in December pointed out that we are in fact seeing growing inequality of power and opportunity, not necessarily wealth. "With a growing middle class better connected through the internet, even those in the most remote places today can see how others live," Achim Steiner, from the United Nations Development Programme, says. "As gaps like these grow so, too, does discontent." A pro-democracy protester is arrested by police at a gathering in a shopping mall in Hong Kong, China Credit: Chris McGrath /Getty Empires strike back Despite the singing protesters' best efforts, Iraq's crackdown on demonstrators has been on one of the bloodiest. Not only are they losing eyes, but hundreds of protesters are losing their lives too, felled by snipers and shadowy motorcycle gangs linked to Iran. "There is much less coverage of Baghdad than of Western protest – yet it is much more violent and many more people have died there," says Brian Castner, Amnesty International Weapons Investigator. "In terms of violence, the 2011 Arab Spring was probably still worse and it's not just the Arab world that is protesting this time," he adds. He said that rubber bullets used by authorities were only 20 per cent rubber. A study by the Universidad de Chile, commissioned by Santiago's Salvador Eye Hospital, found the remainder comprised silica, barium sulfate and lead. Meanwhile, almost daily news coverage of the Hong Kong crisis has also skewed people's views on world protests. "There is a perception (of the violence) that doesn't always match the reality. More tear gas was used in Paris in one day of the protests than has been used this past nine months in Hong Kong," he says. A man wearing roller blades jumps over a burning barricade during protests against Chile's government Credit: IVAN ALVARADO /Reuters Ms Yerkes, the Middle East analyst, says that regimes have learned from the mistakes of the Arab Spring. She says that Iran swiftly shut down the internet to stop protest messages spreading when a fuel price rise triggered widespread discord in November. "Regimes are intervening in a more heavy handed way, this seems to be part of a broader trend of tightening up on civil society in general… Even in democratic contexts governments have become more controlling." But governments are also learning from each other on how to defuse demonstrations in some cases, Ms Yerkes says, citing Emmanuel Macron's reforms in France, Chile's offer of a referendum and scrapping price rises in places like Ecuador. Some governments are deploying an age-old blame game to distance themselves from any responsibility over the protests, professor Sir Adam at the University of Oxford, says. China has blamed the "black hand" of western countries for the Hong Kong demonstrations and Iran has predictably blamed the US for fomenting unrest. Meanwhile, Chile has blamed Leftists from Venezuela for supporting protesters trashing the city, and Bolivia has blamed the Right for demonstrations that helped dislodge Leftists Evo Morales for power following fraudulent elections. An indigenous woman wears a protective face mask during a protest in Quito, Ecuador Credit: David Diaz Arcos /Bloomberg What happens next? This year appears to have seen the end of the Yellow Vest movement, which Macron met head on with a series of debates around the country. Sudan's protests have also come and gone, with the murderous regime of Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir finally toppled. But demonstrations still rage across the Middle East. And perhaps most significantly, the unrest in Hong Kong, the poster child of this year's round of civil disobedience, is far from over. "Hong Kong is a very interesting one, we're definitely not seeing the end of the Hong Kong protests yet, but we have seen the Beijing authorities, let alone the Hong Kong authorities, on the back foot in a way that they have not been before really," says Mr Crawshaw, author of Street Spirit: The Power of Protest and Mischief. He compared the movement there to Solidarity in Poland. "I visited through the 80s and many many people said oh it's kind of silly, this idea of solidarity something which could somehow challenge the communist one party regime was a bit naive cause obviously they were going to lose but they were completely wrong. Eight years later it came back and basically paved the way for the fall of the Berlin Wall," he said. He added that the Iranian protests - although stamped out swiftly and brutally - would have a "very significant historic impact". "Even if that is repressed in the short term, that sort of becomes the historic moment if you like," he added. Protesters in Santiago take part in the 'Los Ojos del Pueblo' march, in solidarity with the people who lost their sight during the protests against the Chilean government Credit: Alexandro Auler/Redux /Eyevine Eye for an eye In Chile, a rally in late December for those who have lost eyes proves that it is not over yet. Mr Flores, a corner shop worker who lives in Santiago with his partner and two sons, does not rue the day he joined protests - and lost the vision in his right eye. "I lived this and I said to myself if there was an opportunity to change things," he says referring to the metro protests that have become a demand to end growing inequality. He adds: "I'm prepared to have lost the eye to show the world what is happening. I hope to tell my kid when he grows up that yes, I lost an eye, but now we have a more dignified life, we have justice. "Protests are happening across the world after years of injustice, years of being robbed. We have lived our lives feeling fear, not speaking out, but this moment is happening and people are waking up." Additional reporting: Joe Hayward, Naomi Larsson and Eleanor Sly
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| Israel's Netanyahu shores up base but obstacles remain Posted: 27 Dec 2019 12:39 AM PST  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shored up his base with a landslide primary victory announced early Friday, but he will need a big win in national elections in March if he hopes to stay in office and gain immunity from prosecution on corruption charges. Netanyahu handily defeated Gideon Saar, a former aide and Cabinet minister, in a Likud party primary held Thursday, winning 72% of the vote. "This is the time to unite, to bring a sweeping victory to the Likud and the right in the Knesset elections," Netanyahu told reporters Friday.
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| Ireland Issues Record Number of Passports as Brexit Date Nears Posted: 27 Dec 2019 12:36 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Ireland issued a record number of passports in 2019 as applications from its citizens in the U.K. surged amid Brexit uncertainty.More than 900,000 Irish passports were handed out this year, the foreign ministry said in an emailed statement. That was an increase of 7% on a year earlier.Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said that "2019 was another bumper year for the passport service."Ireland has seen a jump in passport applications from people in the U.K. since the Brexit vote. People with an Irish grandparent or those born in Northern Ireland are also entitled to an Irish passport, making it the choice for many U.K. citizens seeking to retain an EU passport.There were about 94,000 first-time applicants from people born in the U.K. The busiest months for U.K. applications were February and March, ahead of the original March 31 deadline for the U.K. to leave the EU. There was another increase in U.K. applications in October, the foreign ministry said, before the revised Brexit date of October 31, which has since been extended until the end of January 2020.To contact the reporter on this story: Peter Flanagan in Dublin at pflanagan23@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Ambereen Choudhury at achoudhury@bloomberg.net, Raymond Colitt, Andrew BlackmanFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Pakistan arrests 5 al-Qaida operatives in nighttime raid Posted: 27 Dec 2019 12:29 AM PST ![Pakistan arrests 5 al-Qaida operatives in nighttime raid]( "Pakistan arrests 5 al-Qaida operatives in nighttime raid") Five al-Qaida operatives were arrested in a raid overnight in eastern Pakistan, an official with the country's counterterrorism department said Friday. According to the official, Muhammad Imran, the raid in Punjab province was carried out in collaboration with the country's top intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence. The suspects arrested late Thursday belong to the al-Qaida branch active in the region and known as Al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent, he said, adding that the men ran a media cell for the terror network and coordinated its militant operations in the region.
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| Singapore Goes on Global Offensive to Defend ‘Fake News’ Law Posted: 26 Dec 2019 11:45 PM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Singaporean diplomats are taking the lead in defending a two-month-old fake news law, challenging international media outlets it says are publishing misleading claims on the contentious legislation.Since the law was enacted in October, authorities in the Southeast Asian city-state have invoked it four times against critics and once against Facebook Inc., which was required to attach a government-issued "correction" to content deemed to contain falsehoods. Government officials have also countered critical media coverage of the law, known as the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act.Foo Chi Hsia, Singapore's High Commissioner to the U.K., stated the Economist had misrepresented the law, writing in a Dec. 21 letter to the editor that it "should be looked at in the same context as our belief in the right of reply, which in our view enhances rather than reduces the quality of public discourse.""Readers can see both and decide for themselves which is the truth," she wrote. "How does twinning factual replies to falsehoods limit free speech?"Earlier in December, Singapore's ambassador to the U.S., Ashok Kumar Mirpuri, disputed a Washington Post story that cited critics saying the law could have a "chilling effect on online free expression." In the letter, obtained by Bloomberg, he also criticized Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Asia division, who was quoted as an expert in the story. Days later, Bernard Toh, director of the Ministry of Communications and Information's information policy division, accused Fred Ryan, the newspaper's publisher, of "perpetuating false allegations," local media reported.Free SpeechThe battle for public opinion comes as social-media companies weigh the impact of the law on their businesses. Opposition Singaporean politicians are also worried the law will suppress dissent ahead of elections that must be held by April 2021. They expect the ruling People's Action Party, which has governed Singapore since independence in 1965, to win despite a slowing economy.Singapore's government has said the new law is not aimed at stifling free speech and is enforced independently of the election cycle. "This is equally true with laws regulating the exercise of the rights of free speech and assembly, and with any other law," the Ministry of Law wrote in an emailed response to questions, noting that content impacted by the law remains intact alongside the ordered correction, which links to a full justification. "They can read both and decide for themselves on the truth. This encourages greater transparency," the ministry said.Singapore is the latest Asian country seeking to counteract the flood of fake news in an era when messages delivered to smartphones over platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp have become as trusted as articles from traditional media sources. In elections earlier this year, both India and Indonesia sought to monitor the spread of fake news and counter the dissemination of rumors.Some provisions in the law are unique to Singapore, which has increased risks for global tech companies. In addition to requiring companies to post "corrections" to user posts, the law may also require them to ensure the correction is seen by every user in Singapore who has read the offending post. Penalties for failing to comply can be as high as S$1 million ($738,500) per post and a further S$100,000 per day for non-compliance following a conviction.'Correction Direction'In one case last month, Minister of Home Affairs K Shanmugam instructed a "correction direction" to be issued to Sydney-based Alex Tan Zhi Xiang for posting alleged falsehoods against the ruling party to the Facebook page of his political blog "States Times Review." In a Facebook post on Nov. 27, Tan said he hadn't received a request from Australian authorities to take down any article, and said both he and the publication "will not comply with any order from a foreign government like North Korea or Singapore."Tan said later by phone that he never received such a notice from Singapore, and updated his post within 24 hours in an effort to be compliant with the law after learning of the offense from a friend.One day after the government statement was issued, the minister for home affairs said Tan didn't comply with the order and commenced investigation proceedings against him. It said that a correction direction "requires the recipient to publish a correction notice, providing access to the correct facts." The order also instructed Facebook to post a correction, and the company complied."As it is early days of the law coming into effect, we hope the Singapore government's assurances that it will not impact free expression will lead to a measured and transparent approach to implementation," a Facebook spokesperson said by email.Critics say the recent cases are just the latest in a string of attacks on dissent. Singapore's crackdown on critical voices has "intensified" in the past year, according to a report published last month by U.S.-based Freedom House, which cited government moves to temporarily block two local outlets and the prosecution of activists and journalists."These examples underscore how the government is weaponizing what is the genuine issue of disinformation in order to suppress information online and the rights to free expression and access to information," said Allie Funk, a research analyst for the group's "Freedom on the Net" program.Opposition FearsSingapore's political parties have also expressed concern. In a letter leaked by the opposition Singapore Democratic Party on Dec. 3, Google informed party chairman Paul Tambyah the company would not be accepting political advertising regulated by the new law, citing similar decisions made in Canada and Taiwan."This was not an easy decision to make as Google is committed to delivering useful and relevant election-related information to users around the world," Ted Osius, Google's vice president for government affairs and public policy in Asia Pacific, wrote in the letter, which was verified by Bloomberg.Tambyah questioned the decision in an emailed reply, calling the ban on political ads a threat to democracy and saying "evil is often perpetrated by people and organizations who, wittingly or otherwise, ban freedom of speech."Twitter Inc. has indicated it is ready to comply with the law and has set up a dedicated team to review government requests."We remain concerned about the potential impacts of this regulation on our service, and the people and institutions that use Twitter," a Twitter spokesman wrote in an email, urging the government to enforce the law judiciously.Facebook said in September it has taken steps to reduce the spread of misinformation, adding that it would start enforcing a global policy in Singapore introducing tighter regulations for political advertisements that require identity and location disclosures. The statement didn't specifically mention Singapore's new law.Singapore's government is also considering a separate bill targeting foreign interference that would give authorities "powers to make targeted, surgical interventions" to investigate hostile information campaigns from abroad, Law Minister K Shanmugam said during a speech in September."There are always 'reasons' to take more and more power and this is just another," said Brad Bowyer, a member of the opposition party Progress Singapore, who himself was the target of the law's first correction direction. "It is a dark and dangerous path they are on."(Updates with Tan's Facebook post on compliance in 10th paragraph. An earlier version corrected the currency conversion in eighth paragraph, corrected the characterization of Tan's compliance with the directive in ninth paragraph and added additional information.)To contact the reporters on this story: Philip J. Heijmans in Singapore at pheijmans1@bloomberg.net;Yoolim Lee in Singapore at yoolim@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Ruth Pollard at rpollard2@bloomberg.net, Daniel Ten KateFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| British-Australian academic held in Iran goes on hunger strike after losing appeal Posted: 26 Dec 2019 11:35 PM PST  A British-Australian academic detained held in Iran's most notorious prison has gone on a hunger strike after losing an appeal against her 10-year sentence. Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a Cambridge University graduate and specialist in Middle East politics at the University of Melbourne, said in a letter dated December 24 that she had begun refusing food and water at the Evin prison in Tehran. She was reportedly taking a course in Islamic studies in the holy city of Qom last year when she was arrested by Iranian authorities. The charges are not publicly known, but it is believed they relate to espionage as 10-year sentences are regularly handed down for spying in Iran. Wednesday marked the second Christmas spent in prison for Ms Moore-Gilbert, who has been held at Evin for 15 months. In the open letter, co-signed by fellow her prisoner Fariba Adelkhah, a Franco-Iranian researcher, and sent to the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), she appealed to Australia's prime minister Scott Morrison to help secure her release. "Please I beg of you to do whatever it takes to get me out," she wrote. "I know that you are a religious man, and I ask that until that much longed for day of freedom arrives, you remember me and my family in your prayers." Ms Moore-Gilbert has been denied contact with her family for nine months except for a three-minute phone call to her father, the Australian Herald Sun reported. The dual national has spent much of her sentence in solitary confinement and alleged in the letter to have been subjected to "psychological torture and numerous violations of our basic human rights". "(The phone call) was only granted after I took desperate measures which put my own life at risk," she said. "I beg of you, Prime Minister Morrison, to take immediate action, as my physical and mental health continues to deteriorate." She is being held next to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian charity worker who was charged with espionage while on holiday in Tehran visiting family with her daughter Gabriella. Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe's family said the Thomson Reuters Foundation worker, who has herself been on hunger strike multiple times, has offered support to Ms Moore-Gilbert. "Nazanin called yesterday - she saw Kylie Moore-Gilbert at the health clinic who was being checked after 48hrs of being on hunger strike," the family said in a statement. "Before the guards pulled them apart Nazanin was able to tell Kylie that the world is watching her story and it will be ok." They said a number of other prisoners have joined the hunger strike in solidarity. "If Kylie has not been transferred out of solitary by New Years Eve, they will go on hunger strike again," the Ratliffe family said.
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| India clamps down on marches, internet after deadly protests Posted: 26 Dec 2019 10:56 PM PST  A group of protesters in New Delhi was beaten and shoved into buses by police on Friday as they attempted to demonstrate against a new citizenship law that has triggered nationwide protests in recent weeks. About two dozen people gathered near an Uttar Pradesh state government building in the capital to protest deaths and allegations of police brutality during protests in the north Indian state. Paramilitary and police forces were deployed and the internet was shut down in Muslim-majority districts in Uttar Pradesh, where more than a dozen people have been killed and more than 1,000 people arrested in the protests since the law was passed by Parliament earlier this month.
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| Report: Iran kicks off joint naval drills with Russia, China Posted: 26 Dec 2019 10:10 PM PST  Iran's navy on Friday kicked off the first joint naval drill with Russia and China in the northern part of the Indian Ocean, Iranian state TV reported. The four-day exercise, launched from the southeastern port city of Chahbahar in the Gulf of Oman and near the border with Pakistan, is aimed at boosting security of the region's waterways, the report quoted Iran's navy chief Adm. Hossein Khanzadi as saying. On Thursday, Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Wu Qian said the drill would "deepen exchange and cooperation between the navies of the three countries." He said Chinese navy's guided missile destroyer "Xining" was taking part in the exercise.
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| Bali bombers' brother, bomb widow become friends, seek peace Posted: 26 Dec 2019 09:35 PM PST  The young Balinese widow stared across the courthouse at the man who had murdered her husband and 201 others, and longed to see him suffer. Ever since that horrible night, when she realized amid the blackened body parts and smoldering debris that the father of her two little boys was dead, Ni Luh Erniati's rage at the men behind the bombing had remained locked deep inside. What would happen a decade later between her and Amrozi's brother — the man who had taught Amrozi how to make bombs — was unthinkable in that moment.
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| 2019: the year US foreign policy fell apart Posted: 26 Dec 2019 09:30 PM PST  Donald Trump's approach to the world is little more than a tangle of personal interests, narcissism and Twitter outburstsThe new decade is about to start under many shadows, but none is more ominous than North Korea's threat to return to nuclear and long-range missile tests after a two-year lull.Pyongyang's pendulum swing from enthusiastic summit diplomacy back to name-calling and threats comes as Donald Trump is increasingly focused on his re-election campaign.That may be a good thing, as the US president will be wary of provoking a crisis to spoil his narrative of peace and prosperity.Or it could be a very bad thing: Kim Jong-un could seek to exploit a moment of maximum leverage and miscalculate.The last time there was a standoff, Trump and Kim took to brandishing their nuclear buttons (the US president boasted his was bigger and more functional). According to a new account of events during the crisis in 2017, Trump stunned his aides by calling for the entire 25-million population of Seoul to be moved further away from the border with the North so they would not be held hostage to Pyongyang's fearsome artillery.He also ordered US military families to be evacuated from South Korea – despite being told that such a move would probably be seen by the North Koreans as the precursor for an attack.The order was quietly killed by the then defence secretary, James Mattis. But Mattis resigned a year ago, stripping the administration of an important restraining influence. It is less likely his successor, Mark Esper, would ignore such a direct order.With the departure of the supposed "adults in the room" Trump is less constrained in his conduct towards the world, dispensing with advice altogether and trusting his gut. The once-lumbering process by which national security decisions were debated and agreed in the past has been hollowed out.Decisions tend to come direct from the president's thumbs through Twitter – often as a surprise to his own top officials.Over the course of 2019, Trump's foreign policy has become ever more personalised and consequently both transactional and erratic, swerving wildly with the president's mood swings, foreign influence and second thoughts.In their second summit in Hanoi in February, Trump tried jolting Kim into disarmament with a surprise proposal. US and North Korean diplomats had been discussing a phased agreement in which each step towards Pyongyang's disarmament would be met by a proportional lifting of sanctions. At the summit, Trump presented the North Korean leader with an all-for-all deal – total disarmament.It was the sort of gambit that may have thrown competitors off balance in the real estate market, but not a paranoid dictator in possession of a nuclear arsenal. The talks collapsed and relations have been sliding downward ever since. The US national security staff are spending the holiday braced for the "Christmas gift" Pyongyang has threatened to send, with a long-range missile test thought the most likely seasonal surprise. SyriaIn Syria, the president's abrupt change of mind caused whiplash for soldiers on the ground. Following a 6 October phone conversation with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in which the Turkish president appears to have convinced him to let Ankara take the lead in the military campaign against Isis, Trump ordered all US troops out of the country, without consulting the Pentagon or US allies.Within a day, special forces were ordered to vacate their outposts on the Turkish-Syrian border, abandoning the Kurdish allies who had taken the brunt of the fight with Isis, at the cost of 11,000 deaths in their ranks. Two weeks later, however, Trump was trying to rein Turkey back, firing off one of the stranger presidential missives in history in which he implored Erdoğan: "Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool."At the same time, US troops were ordered back into Syria, with the mission – in Trump's words – to "secure the oil".Extracting the resources of another country would be a potential war crime, and Pentagon officials sought to interpret the president's diktat in a more benign manner, as part of a counter-terrorist campaign to prevent oil installations falling under Isis control, and as a mandate for US commanders to continue their collaboration with the Syrian Kurds.There are no guarantees on how long this new equilibrium will remain. Erdoğan sees the Kurds as direct threat, and will use any leverage he has on Trump to get him to cut them loose. AfghanistanIn Afghanistan, there were two U-turns. The US envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, spent nearly a year leading direct talks with the Taliban, much to the unease of the government in Kabul. But in early September, when an agreement looked imminent, Trump suddenly declared the negotiations "dead", canceling what he had intended as a surprise Camp David meeting with the Taliban, in the wake of an attack in the Afghan capital. The decision took all concerned by surprise, as both sides had fought and talked at the same time at different phases of the 18-year war.But less than three months on, on the occasion of Trump's first visit to the country, he declared the talks back on. It was unclear what, if anything, had changed his views.In possibly the most dramatic about-face of all, Trump gave a green light to airstrikes against Iran following the downing of a US drone in June but changed his mind with 10 minutes to spare, when warplanes were already in the air, declaring he had been motivated by a desire to avoid casualties, though he had been briefed on the estimated death tolls before ordering the attacks in the first place.In this and other war-or-peace decisions, the underlying thought process is obscure or perhaps not there at all. The term "foreign policy" may no longer be a useful way of describing what is going on, suggesting as it does a sustained coordinated effort towards a national security goal. BusinessSome policy endures in the muscle memory of the state department and the Pentagon, but there are no guarantees it will ultimately determine what the US does. When established policy clashes with the interests of the president, his family and their business concerns, it usually loses.Such a conflict is, after all, what is at the core of the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump's 18 December impeachment. The formal goal of US foreign policy was to support the new government in Kyiv in its fight to push back Russian military encroachment, but Trump jammed his foot on the brake, turning US official support into leverage for extracting kompromat on his domestic political rivals.The White House has also intervened to try to stop punitive measures against Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey for reasons that were left obscure. The business empires of Trump's extended family have dealings with all those countries, as well as Israel and China. The president's son-in-law Jared Kushner, was supposed to be devising an Israel-Palestinian deal at the same time the Kushner family firm was borrowing money from Israeli financial institutions. Beijing has meanwhile been assiduous in issuing patents to Ivanka Trump, at a time it was negotiating a trade deal with Washington.Personal vanity has been as much a wild card as vested financial interests, and arguably more so. It appears to have been the driving force behind Trump's determination to destroy the legacy of his predecessors and replace it with his own, for its own sake.Vast amounts of administration and congressional effort were devoted to ripping up the Nafta free trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, to replace it with the very similar USMCA deal that Trump claims as a personal triumph.Other agreements have been destroyed with no replacement. In the 19 months since the US abrogation of the multilateral nuclear deal with Iran, Barack Obama's signature foreign policy achievement, the campaign of "maximum pressure" on Tehran has yielded no new negotiations with Tehran, let alone a successor agreement. Arms controlIn February Trump pulled the US out of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Russia that has kept missiles out of Europe since the cold war. There was general agreement in Nato that Moscow had cheated, but it was far from clear what advantage the US had gained by ripping up the treaty altogether. It tested some medium-range missiles but as yet there is nowhere to deploy them, in the absence of willing hosts in Europe or Asia.The death of the INF leaves the world with a single surviving arms control agreement, New Start, which imposes caps on the US- and Russian-deployed strategic arsenals at 1,550 warheads each. It is due to expire in February 2021, but can be extended for up to five years by signatures from US and Russian leaders. Trump has declared himself a supporter of arms control but his administration has so far blocked an extension of New Start, another Obama legacy.Officially, the administration wants a new treaty that includes China, but Beijing has refused to get drawn in. Its estimated arsenal is less than a 20th of the US or Russia's, and its strategic warheads are not deployed on missiles. Insisting on Chinese inclusion is equivalent to condemning New Start to oblivion. A clue to that intention is the fact that the US has yet to put forward a concrete proposal, and staffing numbers have been cut in the office responsible for negotiating arms control.The New Start treaty appears doomed by its provenance (the Obama administration) – and for that whimsical reason the last limits on world's two biggest nuclear arsenals are due to disappear in a little over 13 months. An extensive regime of mutual inspections and exchanges of data will disappear with it, with the result that the US and Russia will lose a vital window into each other's nuclear capabilities and intentions.In the absence of coherent policy, there are certain themes that run through Trump's actions on the world stage. The problem is they often conflict with one another. On the whole, Trump has sought to cut short the country's long-running military entanglements, and to bring US troops home. His decision to call back the bombers aimed for Iran in June reflected that. But his withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran and his subsequent attempt to strangle Iran economically has significantly raised the potential for conflict in the Gulf. While reducing the US presence in Syria by a few hundred, the administration deployed 1,800 troops to Saudi Arabia, supposedly to deter Iran. DictatorsAnother Trump theme is the seemingly instinctive preference for foreign dictators over democratically elected allies. The former offer him at least an illusory promise of cutting a big deal to would cement a legacy, and he clearly believes that personal flattery of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping is the path to such a deal. Allies he sees as freeloaders, living rent free under an expensive US security umbrella.Hence Trump's deeply sceptical view of Nato. He has refused to commit the US to come to the defence of its European allies in the event of a Russian attack, ignoring the obligation of collective defence that is at the core of the alliance's founding treaty. If Trump wins re-election, the alliance's future will be under a question mark.The pendulum swings are likely to become more pronounced as Trump enters his fourth year in office and dedicates himself to a re-election campaign. Impeachment has clearly not restrained his instinct to mine foreign relations for electoral advantage. Rudy Giuliani is still flying to Ukraine to dig for dirt on Trump's rivals. In the coming months, with the North Korean nuclear threat returning to centre stage, and Iran having less and less to lose in its standoff with the US, the stakes could be far higher.
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| Japan OKs divisive plan to send naval troops to Mideast Posted: 26 Dec 2019 08:55 PM PST  Japan on Friday approved a contentious plan to send its naval troops to the Middle East to ensure the safety of Japanese ships transporting oil to the energy-poor country that heavily depends on imports from the region. The Cabinet's decision reflects tensions that have escalated between Iran and the U.S. since President Donald Trump withdrew from Iran's 2015 nuclear deal. "Taking into consideration the escalating tension in the Middle East, it is necessary to strengthen our information gathering effort," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide suga told a news conference.
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| Quake strikes near Iran nuclear power plant Posted: 26 Dec 2019 08:55 PM PST  An earthquake struck Iran on Friday less than 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the country's only nuclear power plant in the southwest, monitors said. The US Geological Survey said the 5.1 magnitude quake struck 44 kilometres (27 miles) southeast of Borazjan city and at a depth of 38 kilometres. Its reported epicentre is 45 kilometres east of the Bushehr nuclear power plant.
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| 12 killed, dozens hurt after jetliner crashes in Kazakhstan Posted: 26 Dec 2019 08:00 PM PST  A jetliner with 98 people aboard struggled to get airborne and crashed shortly after takeoff Friday in Kazakhstan, killing at least 12 people, authorities said. The Bek Air jet, identified as a 23-year-old Fokker 100, hit a concrete wall and a two-story building soon after departing from Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city and former capital, airport officials said. The aircraft's tail also struck the runway twice during takeoff, indicating that it struggled to get off the ground, Deputy Prime Minister Roman Sklyar said.
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