| US carries out first strikes in a decade against Iran-backed Kataib Hizbollah in Iraq and Syria Posted: 29 Dec 2019 05:04 PM PST  The United States has launched its first airstrikes in nearly a decade against the Iran-backed militia forces in Iraq and Syria. The Pentagon said it hit five bases used by the Iraqi Hizbollah militant group following a rocket attack in Iraq that killed a US civilian contractor. Three of the bases were in Iraq, and two in Syria, where the militia has been trying to bolster the regime of President Assad. "US forces have conducted precision defensive strikes against five KH facilities in Iraq and Syria that will degrade KH's ability to conduct future attacks against OIR coalition forces," the Pentagon said. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the strikes send the message that the US will not tolerate actions by Iran that jeopardise American lives. The strike is the first direct confrontation between US and Iranian-backed forces in Iraq since 2011, when President Obama withdrew some of his forces. "I would note also that we will take additional actions as necessary to ensure that we act in our own self-defence and we deter further bad behavior from militia groups or from Iran," said Defence Secretary Mark Esper, who was accompanied by Mr Pompeo and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A combination of images depicts what the U.S. military says are bases of the Kataib Hezbollah militia group that were struck by U.S. forces, in the city of Al-Qa'im Credit: Reuters The delivered the brief statement to reporters in a ballroom at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club, where the president is on a more than two-week winter break. According to the Al Arabiya news network, the US evacuated dozens of staff from its embassy in Baghdad on Sunday night amid concerns of retaliation. The targets of the US bombs included weapons storage facilities and command locations used to plan and execute attacks, the statement added. On Friday, terrorists fired a barrage of 30 rockets at an Iraqi military base in Kirkuk, an oil-rich region north of Baghdad. A US civilian contractor died in the strike. Iraq's Joint Operations Command said in a statement that three U.S. airstrikes on Sunday evening Iraq time hit the headquarters of the Hezbollah Brigades at the Iraq-Syria border, killing four fighters. Iraq's Hezbollah Brigades, a separate force from the Lebanese group Hezbollah, operate under the umbrella of the state-sanctioned militias known collectively as the Popular Mobilization Forces. Many of them are supported by Iran. The Popular Mobilization Forces said Sunday that the U.S. strikes killed at least 19 of Kataeb Hezbollah's members. Kataeb Hezbollah is led by Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, one of Iraq's most powerful men. He once battled US troops and is now the deputy head of the Popular Mobilization Forces. Washington had recently promised "a decisive US response" to a growing number of unclaimed attacks on its interests in Iraq, which it blames on pro-Iran factions. US-Iran tension levels have soared since Washington pulled out of a landmark nuclear agreement with Tehran last year and imposed crippling sanctions.
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| US Rep John Lewis of Georgia says he has pancreatic cancer Posted: 29 Dec 2019 04:07 PM PST  Congressman John Lewis of Georgia announced Sunday that he has stage IV pancreatic cancer, vowing he will stay in office and fight the disease with the tenacity with which he fought racial discrimination and other inequalities dating to the civil rights era. Lewis, the youngest and last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists in a group once led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., said in a statement that the cancer was detected earlier this month during a routine medical visit.
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| Trump Retweet of Alleged Whistle-Blower’s Name is Back on Twitter Posted: 29 Dec 2019 03:48 PM PST  (Bloomberg) -- A retweet by President Donald Trump, naming the alleged whistle-blower whose complaint triggered the investigation that resulted in his impeachment, was restored to Twitter late Saturday.The post, originally from the handle @Surfermom77, was retweeted by Trump to his 68 million followers about midnight Friday and by Saturday morning was no longer visible in the president's Twitter feed. CNN first reported late Saturday that the temporary removal followed a Twitter glitch that affected certain accounts, not deliberate action to delete the tweet by Trump or someone with access to his account."Due to an outage with one of our systems, tweets on account profiles were visible to some, but not others," the social media site posted on its @TwitterSupport account.The tweet identifies an individual it says is the whistle-blower: the person who first raised the alarm about the president's conduct in his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.A mystery also surrounded the @Surfermom77 Twitter handle, which by Sunday night was wiped from the social media site. Trump's Friday retweet was being directed to a new handle, @4Shereene4, or "Leona." @Surfermom77 had described herself as living in California and a "100% Trump supporter" -- as did the @4Shereen4 handle.On Saturday afternoon the account, with its pro-Trump and anti-Democratic material, was shown as having been "temporarily restricted." It was visible again on Sunday morning but by late Sunday afternoon appeared to have been erased, with followers down to five from 78,000 and no biographical information.Confirming the identify of the account holder is next to impossible, but the original @Surfermom77 handle shared some traits common to fake accounts. Since its inception in 2013, the user's profession evolved from "historian-documentary writer" to "educator" to "image model," according to older versions of the account archived by the Wayback Machine. The name of the account holder also changed, from "Sophia" to "Evonne" and back to "Sophia."Surfermom77 also appeared more than 1,000 times in Twitter's own data set detailing accounts the company has removed and attributed to state-backed operations. The handle appeared in conversations Twitter deemed to be run by Russia and its Internet Research Agency, along with Iran and Venezuela. In late 2016 the account was linked to Gab, another social media platform popular among the extreme right wing.The White House didn't respond to a request for comment on Trump's Twitter activity.Trump has posted about the whistle-blower dozens of times over the months and also suggested in comments to reporters that he would like to unmask or face the individual."Like every American, I deserve to meet my accuser," Trump tweeted in September.On Thursday Trump also retweeted a link to a Dec. 3 article from the conservative Washington Examiner newspaper that carried the name of the alleged whistle-blower.Attorney Andrew Bakaj, who represents the whistle-blower, lamented in a tweet on Saturday that U.S. lawmakers, who in the past have championed the privacy rights of whistle-blowers, including Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, have shown "deafening" silence recently."This is a defining moment where legacies will either be solidified or destroyed," Bakaj said on Twitter.(Updates with details of Twitter activity from eight paragraph.)To contact the reporters on this story: Ros Krasny in Washington at rkrasny1@bloomberg.net;Kartikay Mehrotra in San Francisco at kmehrotra2@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: James Ludden at jludden@bloomberg.net, Ros Krasny, Steve GeimannFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| U.K. Labour’s Leadership Battle Hots Up as Long Bailey Mulls Bid Posted: 29 Dec 2019 03:30 PM PST ![U.K. Labour's Leadership Battle Hots Up as Long Bailey Mulls Bid]( "U.K. Labour's Leadership Battle Hots Up as Long Bailey Mulls Bid") (Bloomberg) -- Rebecca Long Bailey, the front-runner to succeed Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, said the U.K.'s main opposition party should be a champion for "progressive patriotism" as it seeks to recover from its worst electoral performance in more than 80 years.Laying out her vision for the party -- but stating only that she's considering a run for leader -- Long Bailey wrote in the Guardian newspaper that Labour's "compromise" position on Brexit was party to blame for the electoral rout this month, but said that lack of trust in Labour's program was also an issue among voters. Labour's business spokeswoman also said she would back Angela Rayner, the party's education spokeswoman, as deputy leader.Though the formal succession process isn't expected to begin until January, with an election likely in March, the jostling for support is well under way. Long Bailey, 40, is widely viewed as the current leadership's preferred choice, having stood in for Corbyn at Prime Minister's Questions in June. She also ticks many party members' boxes as a young and media-savvy woman from a northern constituency."We must rebuild trust, not only in our party but in the idea that change really is possible. This means we cannot return to the politics of the past," Long Bailey wrote in her Monday editorial, which retained some of the core themes of Corbyn's tenure. "Real wealth and power must be returned to the people of Britain, and their desire for control over their own lives and the future of their communities must be at the heart of our agenda."But the race to succeed Corbyn -- who said he will stand down after the catastrophic losses -- is exacerbating deep-rooted divisions in the party, and Long Bailey's intervention comes after former members of Parliament who lost seats this month demanded an "unflinching" review into why the leader's message had proved such a turnoff among voters.'Anti-Western'"We need to be honest about why our outgoing leadership's reflexive anti-Western world view was so unpopular, and address the reasons for that unpopularity," Labour politicians including Mary Creagh, Emma Reynolds and Anna Turley -- all from former Labour strongholds that voted Conservative in the election this month -- wrote in a letter to the Observer newspaper on Sunday. "Fundamental change at the top of our party is required."Read more: Life After Corbyn? The Politicians Vying to Become Labour LeaderCorbyn's allies are also divided over whether Long Bailey has the broad appeal needed to win over the Labour membership, according to a report in the Sunday Times. The newspaper also said Ian Lavery, the party's pro-Brexit chairman, is considering running for the top job himself, which could split the Corbyn vote and boost the prospects of Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer, who is significantly more pro-European than Corbyn's team.Starmer has so far said only that he is "seriously considering" a bid for the leadership, though he has also set out his stall as a middle-ground candidate between the centrist leaning of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has urged a complete overhaul of the party, and the socialist views of Corbyn. Starmer has also warned the party not to "oversteer" as a result of the election defeat, arguing that Labour should "build on" Corbyn's anti-austerity message and radical agenda.Only Emily Thornberry, the foreign policy spokeswoman, and Corbyn loyalist Clive Lewis have officially declared their candidacies. Another potential candidate is 38-year-old Jess Phillips, a strong critic of Corbyn despite sharing many of his left-leaning views. Mitcham and Morden MP Siobhain McDonagh wrote in the Sunday Times that Phillips has "got what it takes. She connects with people like no other."FlatmatesThe potential for Rayner, who was at the forefront of Labour's election campaign, to run as Long Bailey's deputy was also widely flagged. Known for her no-nonsense interview style, Rayner's backers think she will appeal to traditional supporters Labour has lost in recent years. The two are also friends and flatmates.The question for all the candidates will be how closely to stick to Corbyn's manifesto pledges, which included nationalization of key utilities and the provision of free broadband to all U.K. households. How to reshape the party's response to allegations of antisemitism that consistently undermined the party under Corbyn's leadership will also feature prominently."Our task is to rebuild the broad base of support that will get us into government and this work must begin immediately," Long Bailey wrote. "We must recognize that it's no good having the right solutions if people don't believe you can deliver them."To contact the reporter on this story: Stuart Biggs in London at sbiggs3@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Steve GeimannFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Jewish leaders urge action after another 'senseless' attack Posted: 29 Dec 2019 03:19 PM PST  When a suspect walked into the home of a rabbi celebrating Hanukkah and stabbed five celebrants it was the latest in a week of anti-Semitic attacks in the nation's most demographically diverse area — and an incident that reverberated across the country. "Again, here we are: mourning another act of senseless anti-Semitic violence committed against our community and praying for those who were the victims of this hate," Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement Sunday following the attack a day earlier in Monsey, New York.
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| Israel to withhold $43 million of Palestinian tax funds Posted: 29 Dec 2019 12:55 PM PST ![Israel to withhold $43 million of Palestinian tax funds]( "Israel to withhold $43 million of Palestinian tax funds") The Israeli Security Cabinet on Sunday voted to withhold $43 million of tax funds from the Palestinians, saying the money has been used to promote violence, Israeli media reported. The sum represents funds that Israel says the Palestinians have used to pay the families of Palestinians who have been jailed or killed as a result of attacking Israel, according to various reports. Israel says the so-called Martyrs' Fund rewards violence.
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| Putin thanks Trump for helping foil terrorist acts in Russia Posted: 29 Dec 2019 12:52 PM PST  Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke with President Donald Trump on Sunday to thank him for information that Putin said helped Russia foil terrorist attacks over the New Year's holiday, the Kremlin said. Putin thanked Trump "for information transmitted through the special services that helped prevent the completion of terrorist acts in Russia," the Kremlin said in a brief statement posted on its website.
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| Buttigieg critiques Biden's 'judgment' on Iraq War vote Posted: 29 Dec 2019 12:45 PM PST  Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg on Sunday called former Vice President Joe Biden's vote to authorize the Iraq War part of the nation's "worst foreign policy decision" of the millennial mayor's lifetime. Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was responding to a question about how his foreign policy experience measured up to others' in the Democratic race, specifically Biden, who was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when the U.S. went to war. "This is an example of why years in Washington is not always the same thing as judgment," Buttigieg said while recording the program "Iowa Press" on Iowa Public Television, according to a transcript.
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| Polish PM accuses Putin of lying about outbreak of WWII Posted: 29 Dec 2019 12:25 PM PST  Poland's prime minister said Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been lying in remarks blaming Poland for the outbreak of World War II, and argued that Putin is doing it to deflect from recent Russian political failures. Putin has said on several recent occasions that Poland bears responsibility for the outbreak of the war, deepening tensions between the two Slavic nations. On Friday the Russian ambassador to Poland was summoned to the Polish Foreign Ministry in protest.
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| Police: Parishioners kill man who fatally shoots 2 at church Posted: 29 Dec 2019 10:55 AM PST  Congregants returned fire and fatally shot a gunman who killed two people in a church near Fort Worth, Texas, on Sunday, police said. The death of the second person was confirmed Sunday evening by FBI spokesman Jason Wandel. The assailant fired at least once before the "heroic actions" of the congregants cut his assault short, White Settlement Police Department Chief J.P. Bevering said during a news conference Sunday afternoon.
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| Putin thanks Trump for US intelligence which thwarted New Year terror attack Posted: 29 Dec 2019 10:47 AM PST  Vladimir Putin has thanked Donald Trump for intelligence that helped avert "acts of terrorism" in Russia, the Kremlin has said.The Russian president spoke to his US counterpart on the phone on Sunday, and thanked Mr Trump for the information which came via US intelligence services.
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| Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to go on hunger strike in solidarity with other detained dual nationals Posted: 29 Dec 2019 10:33 AM PST  Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is to go on hunger strike in her jail cell to show solidarity with another dual citizen detained in Iran, as the regime urged Western countries to stay out of its legal affairs. Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian woman who was jailed in 2016 on spurious charges of spying, will join Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a British-Australian academic, in refusing food. Ms Moore-Gilbert is serving a ten-year prison sentence on spying charges. She has demanded at minimum to be moved out of solitary confinement, according to the Guardian. "Five days on dry hunger strike is becoming critical, and our thoughts go out to Kylie and her family for all this ordeal," said Richard Ratcliffe, her husband. He added: "It gives some sense of just how desperate 16 months in solitary makes you. At some point you really feel you have nothing left to get noticed, nothing left to lose." Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was visiting her family in Iran in April 2016 when she was arrested, accused of a plot to topple the Iranian government and then sentenced to five years in jail. It came as Iran accused France of "interference" in the case of another detained dual citizen, a French-Iranian academic who is facing spying charges. Last week, France summoned Iran's ambassador to protest the imprisonment of Fariba Adelkhah and another academic, Roland Marchal, describing their detention as "intolerable". Their imprisonment has added to distrust between Tehran and Paris at a time when French President Emmanuel Macron is seeking to play a leading role in defusing tensions between Iran and its arch-foe, the United States. "The statement by France's foreign ministry regarding an Iranian national is an act of interference and we see their request to have no legal basis," Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said in a statement. "The individual in question [Adelkhah] is an Iranian national and has been arrested over 'acts of espionage'," he said, adding that her lawyer had knowledge about the details of the case which is being investigated.
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| US strikes hit Iraqi militia blamed in contractor's death Posted: 29 Dec 2019 10:30 AM PST  The U.S. has carried out military strikes in Iraq and Syria targeting a militia blamed for a rocket attack that killed an American contractor, a Defense Department spokesman said Sunday. U.S. forces conducted "precision defensive strikes" against five sites of Kataeb Hezbollah, or Hezbollah Brigades, an Iran-backed Iraqi militia, spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said in a statement. The U.S. blames the militia for a rocket barrage Friday that killed a U.S. defense contractor at a military compound near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq.
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| North Korea may have reconsidered 'Christmas gift': Trump national security adviser Robert O'Brien Posted: 29 Dec 2019 09:38 AM PST  President Donald Trump's national security adviser said that the president's engagement in "high-level" diplomacy "over the years" with Kim Jong Un has improved relations and suggested on ABC's "This Week" that maybe North Korea's leader may have reconsidered his threat of a "Christmas gift" to the U.S.
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| Ukraine and pro-Russian separatists exchange 200 in all-for-all prisoner swap Posted: 29 Dec 2019 09:30 AM PST  Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine on Sunday exchanged 200 prisoners in a move aimed at ending their five-year war. The swap at a checkpoint near the rebel-held city of Horlivka was part of an agreement brokered this month at a summit of the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France. According to figures from officials of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's republics _ the two separatist governments in the rebel area _ Ukraine turned over 124 people and the separatists freed 76. Those released by Ukraine included five former members of the now-disbanded special police force Berkut who were charged in the killing of protesters in Kyiv in 2014, Ukrainian news site Hromadske quoted their lawyer, Igor Varfolomeyev, as saying. The Security Service of Ukraine said the 76 freed by the rebels included 12 servicemen, two of whom had been held since 2015 after being ambushed while escorting a convoy of wounded out of the battle of Debaltseve, which destroyed much of the city. Pro-Russian rebels - who were made prisoners - are seen before a prisoner exchange between Ukraine and pro-Russian rebels Credit: YEVGEN HONCHARENKO/POOL/AFP via Getty Images U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said two of its contributors, Stanislav Aseyev and Oleh Halaziuk, were among the released; they were taken captive in 2017. Other civilians released by the separatists included a pet shop owner who was detained last year on unknown charges and a woman from government-controlled territory who was seized while visiting her mother in a rebel area. A representative of the Luhansk rebels, Olga Kovtseva, was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying those released to her side included five Russian citizens and one from Brazil. The last major prisoner swap between separatist rebels and Ukrainian forces took place in December 2017, with 233 rebels exchanged for 73 Ukrainians. The conflict in eastern Ukraine has killed more than 14,000 people since 2014. It began about two months after Ukraine's Russia-friendly president fled the country amid massive protests in Kyiv. Russia's annexation of the Crimean Peninsula soon followed. The move is part of an agreement brokered earlier this month at a summit of the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France Credit: AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka Hopes for ending the fighting have risen since the election of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who has been more amenable to negotiations with Russia on ending the war. But prospects for peace are troubled by questions over allowing local elections that would ensure the rebel regions more autonomy and about Ukraine regaining control of its border with Russia in the rebel areas. Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed satisfaction about the exchange in a Sunday telephone call, the Kremlin said. Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron viewed the exchange as "a long hoped-for humanitarian gesture that should contribute to the restoration of trust between the two sides," according to a German government statement.
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| Alligators, pricey bananas and naked people: 2019 in Florida Posted: 29 Dec 2019 08:48 AM PST  In 2019, Florida Banana managed to eclipse Florida Man. From alligator antics to naked people doing wacky things, Florida did not disappoint in the weird news department this year. In December, a Miami couple spent more than $100,000 on the "unicorn of the art world" — a banana duct-taped to a wall — during Art Basel. Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan sold three editions of "Comedian," each in the $120,000 to $150,000 range.
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| In China's Crackdown on Muslims, Children Have Not Been Spared Posted: 29 Dec 2019 08:37 AM PST  HOTAN, China -- The first-grader was a good student and beloved by her classmates, but she was inconsolable, and it was no mystery to her teacher why."The most heartbreaking thing is that the girl is often slumped over on the table alone and crying," he wrote on his blog. "When I asked around, I learned that it was because she missed her mother."The mother, he noted, had been sent to a detention camp for Muslim ethnic minorities. The girl's father had passed away, he added. But instead of letting other relatives raise her, authorities put her in a state-run boarding school -- one of hundreds of such facilities that have opened in China's far western Xinjiang region.As many as 1 million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others have been sent to internment camps and prisons in Xinjiang over the past three years, an indiscriminate clampdown aimed at weakening the population's devotion to Islam. Even as these mass detentions have provoked global outrage, though, the Chinese government is pressing ahead with a parallel effort targeting the region's children.Nearly a half-million children have been separated from their families and placed in boarding schools so far, according to a planning document published on a government website, and the ruling Communist Party has set a goal of operating one to two such schools in each of Xinjiang's 800-plus townships by the end of next year.The party has presented the schools as a way to fight poverty, arguing that they make it easier for children to attend classes if their parents live or work in remote areas or are unable to care for them. And it is true that many rural families are eager to send their children to these schools, especially when they are older.But the schools are also designed to assimilate and indoctrinate children at an early age, away from the influence of their families, according to the planning document, published in 2017. Students are often forced to enroll because authorities have detained their parents and other relatives, ordered them to take jobs far from home or judged them unfit guardians.The schools are off-limits to outsiders and tightly guarded, and it is difficult to interview residents in Xinjiang without putting them at risk of arrest. But a troubling picture of these institutions emerges from interviews with Uighur parents living in exile and a review of documents published online, including procurement records, government notices, state media reports and the blogs of teachers in the schools.State media and official documents describe education as a key component of President Xi Jinping's campaign to wipe out extremist violence in Xinjiang, a ruthless and far-reaching effort that also includes mass internment camps and sweeping surveillance measures. The idea is to use the boarding schools as incubators of a new generation of Uighurs who are secular and more loyal to both the party and the nation."The long-term strategy is to conquer, to captivate, to win over the young generation from the beginning," said Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington who has studied Chinese policies that break up Uighur families.To carry out the assimilation campaign, authorities in Xinjiang have recruited tens of thousands of teachers from across China, often Han Chinese, the nation's dominant ethnic group. At the same time, prominent Uighur educators have been imprisoned, and teachers have been warned they will be sent to the camps if they resist.Thrust into a regimented environment and immersed in an unfamiliar culture, children in the boarding schools are only allowed visits with family once every week or two -- a restriction intended to "break the impact of the religious atmosphere on children at home," in the words of the 2017 policy document.The campaign echoes past policies in Canada, the United States and Australia that took indigenous children from their families and placed them in residential schools to forcibly assimilate them."The big difference in China is the scale and how systematic it is," said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado who studies Uighur culture and society.Public discussion in China of the trauma inflicted on Uighur children by separating them from their families is rare. References on social media are usually quickly censored. Instead, the state-controlled news media focuses on the party's goals in the region, where predominantly Muslim minorities make up more than half the population of 25 million.Visiting a kindergarten near the frontier city of Kashgar this month, Chen Quanguo, the party's top official in Xinjiang, urged teachers to ensure children learn to "love the party, love the motherland and love the people."Science vs. ScriptureAbdurahman Tohti left Xinjiang and immigrated to Turkey in 2013, leaving behind cotton farming to sell used cars in Istanbul. But when his wife and two young children returned to China for a visit a few years ago, they disappeared.He heard that his wife was sent to prison, like many Uighurs who have traveled abroad and returned to China. His parents were detained too. The fate of his children, though, was a mystery.Then in January, he spotted his 4-year-old son in a video on Chinese social media that had apparently been recorded by a teacher. The boy seemed to be at a state-run boarding school and was speaking Chinese, a language his family did not use.Tohti, 30, said he was excited to see the child and relieved he was safe -- but also gripped by desperation."What I fear the most," he said, "is that the Chinese government is teaching him to hate his parents and Uighur culture."Beijing has sought for decades to suppress Uighur resistance to Chinese rule in Xinjiang, in part by using schools in the region to indoctrinate Uighur children. Until recently, though, the government had allowed most classes to be taught in the Uighur language, partly because of a shortage of Chinese-speaking teachers.Then, after a surge of anti-government and anti-Chinese violence, including ethnic riots in 2009 in Urumqi, the regional capital, and deadly attacks by Uighur militants in 2014, Xi ordered the party to take a harder line in Xinjiang, according to internal documents leaked to The New York Times earlier this year.In December 2016, the party announced that the work of the region's education bureau was entering a new phase. Schools were to become an extension of the security drive in Xinjiang, with a new emphasis on the Chinese language, patriotism and loyalty to the party.In the 2017 policy document, posted on the education ministry's website, officials from Xinjiang outlined their new priorities and ranked expansion of the boarding schools at the top.Without specifying Islam by name, the document characterized religion as a pernicious influence on children and said having students live at school would "reduce the shock of going back and forth between learning science in the classroom and listening to scripture at home."By early 2017, the document said, nearly 40% of all middle-school and elementary-school age children in Xinjiang -- or about 497,800 students -- were boarding in schools. At the time, the government was ramping up efforts to open boarding schools and add dorms to schools, and more recent reports suggest the push is continuing.Chinese is also replacing Uighur as the main language of instruction in Xinjiang. Most elementary and middle school students are now taught in Chinese, up from just 38% three years ago. And thousands of new rural preschools have been built to expose minority children to Chinese at an earlier age, state media reported.The government argues that teaching Chinese is critical to improving the economic prospects of minority children, and many Uighurs agree. But Uighur activists said the overall campaign amounts to an effort to erase what remains of their culture.Several Uighurs living abroad said the government had put their children in boarding schools without their consent.Mahmutjan Niyaz, 33, a Uighur businessman who moved to Istanbul in 2016, said his 5-year-old daughter was sent to one after his brother and sister-in-law, the girl's guardians, were confined in an internment camp.Other relatives could have cared for her, but authorities refused to let them. Now, Niyaz said, the school has changed the girl."Before, my daughter was playful and outgoing," he said. "But after she went to the school, she looked very sad in the photos."'Kindness Students'In a dusty village near the ancient Silk Road city of Hotan in southern Xinjiang, nestled among fields of barren walnut trees and simple concrete homes, the elementary school stood out.It was surrounded by a tall brick wall with two layers of barbed wire on top. Cameras were mounted on every corner. And at the entrance, a guard wearing a black helmet and a protective vest stood beside a metal detector.It wasn't always like this. Last year, officials converted the school in Kasipi village into a full-time boarding school.Kang Jide, a Chinese language teacher at the school, described the frenzied process on his public blog on the Chinese social media platform WeChat: In just a few days, all the day students were transferred. Classrooms were rearranged. Bunk beds were set up. Then, 270 new children arrived, leaving the school with 430 boarders, each in the sixth grade or below.Officials called them "kindness students," referring to the party's generosity in making special arrangements for their education.The government said children in Xinjiang's boarding schools are taught better hygiene and etiquette as well as Chinese and science skills that will help them succeed in modern China."My heart suddenly melted after seeing the splendid heartfelt smiles on the faces of these left-behind children," said a retired official visiting a boarding elementary school in Lop County near Hotan, according to a state media report. He added that the party had given them "an environment to be carefree, study happily, and grow healthy and strong."But Kang wrote that being separated from their families took a toll on the children. Some never received visits from relatives, or remained on campus during the holidays, even after most teachers left. And his pupils often begged to use his phone to call their parents."Sometimes, when they hear the voice on the other end of the call, the children will start crying, and they hide in the corner because they don't want me to see," he wrote."It's not just the children," he added. "The parents on the other end also miss their children, of course, so much so that it breaks their hearts and they're trembling."The internment camps, which the government describes as job training centers, have cast a shadow even on students who are not boarders. Before the conversion of the school, Kang posted a photo of a letter that an 8-year-old girl had written to her father, who had been sent to a camp."Daddy, where are you?" the girl wrote in an uneven scrawl. "Daddy, why don't you come back?""I'm sorry, Daddy," she continued. "You must study hard too."Nevertheless, Kang was generally supportive of the schools. On his blog, he described teaching Uighur students as an opportunity to "water the flowers of the motherland.""Kindness students" receive more attention and resources than day students. Boarding schools are required to offer psychological counseling, for example, and in Kasipi, children were given a set of supplies that included textbooks, clothes and a red Young Pioneer scarf.Learning Chinese was the priority, Kang wrote, though students were also immersed in traditional Chinese culture, including classical poetry, and taught songs praising the party.On a recent visit to the school, children in red and blue uniforms could be seen playing in a yard beside buildings marked "cafeteria" and "student dormitory." At the entrance, school officials refused to answer questions.Tighter security has become the norm at schools in Xinjiang. In Hotan alone, more than $1 million has been allocated in the past three years to buy surveillance and security equipment for schools, including helmets, shields and spiked batons, according to procurement records. At the entrance to one elementary school, a facial recognition system had been installed.Kang recently wrote on his blog that he had moved on to a new job teaching in northern Xinjiang. Reached by telephone there, he declined to be interviewed. But before hanging up, he said his students in Kasipi had made rapid progress in learning Chinese."Every day I feel very fulfilled," he said.'Engineers of the Human Soul'To carry out its campaign, the party needed not only new schools but also an army of teachers, an overhaul of the curriculum -- and political discipline. Teachers suspected of dissent were punished, and textbooks were rewritten to weed out material deemed subversive."Teachers are the engineers of the human soul," the education bureau of Urumqi recently wrote in an open letter, deploying a phrase first used by Stalin to describe writers and other cultural workers.The party launched an intensive effort to recruit teachers for Xinjiang from across China. Last year, nearly 90,000 were brought in, chosen partly for their political reliability, officials said at a news conference this year. The influx amounted to about one-fifth of Xinjiang's teachers last year, according to government data.The new recruits, often ethnic Han, and the teachers they joined, mostly Uighurs, were both warned to toe the line. Those who opposed the Chinese-language policy or resisted the new curriculum were labeled "two-faced" and punished.The deputy secretary-general of the oasis town of Turpan, writing earlier this year, described such teachers as "scum of the Chinese people" and accused them of being "bewitched by extremist religious ideology."Teachers were urged to express their loyalty, and the public was urged to keep an eye on them. A sign outside a kindergarten in Hotan invited parents to report teachers who made "irresponsible remarks" or participated in unauthorized religious worship.Officials in Xinjiang also spent two years inspecting and revising hundreds of textbooks and other teaching material, according to the 2017 policy document.Some who helped the party write and edit the old textbooks ended up in prison, including Yalqun Rozi, a prominent scholar and literary critic who helped compile a set of textbooks on Uighur literature that was used for more than a decade.Rozi was charged with attempted subversion and sentenced to 15 years in prison last year, according to his son, Kamalturk Yalqun. Several other members of the committee that compiled the textbooks were arrested too, he said."Instead of welcoming the cultural diversity of Uighurs, China labeled it a malignant tumor," said Yalqun, who lives in Philadelphia.There is evidence that some Uighur children have been sent to boarding schools far from their homes.Kalbinur Tursun, 36, entrusted five of her children to relatives when she left Xinjiang to give birth in Istanbul but has been unable to contact them for several years.Last year, she saw her daughter Ayshe Tursun, then 6, in a video circulating on Chinese social media. It had been posted by a user who appeared to be a teacher at a school in Hotan -- more than 300 miles away from their home in Kashgar."My children are so young; they just need their mother and father," Tursun said, expressing concern about how authorities were raising them. "I fear they will think that I'm the enemy -- that they won't accept me and will hate me."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
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| White House warns N. Korea over 'Christmas gift' threat Posted: 29 Dec 2019 08:35 AM PST  The White House said Sunday it would consider "other tools" beyond personal diplomacy if North Korea went ahead with a threatened "Christmas gift" that could reignite global tensions over its nuclear program. Experts have interpreted the message delivered earlier this month by Pyongyang as a warning that a long-range missile test was imminent if the US did not give ground by the end of the year in negotiations to denuclearize the Korean peninsula. Asked by ABC about possible consequences of such a test, White House national security advisor Robert O'Brien said he did not want to speculate.
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| Science Under Attack: How Trump Is Sidelining Researchers and Their Work Posted: 29 Dec 2019 08:30 AM PST  WASHINGTON -- In just three years, the Trump administration has diminished the role of science in federal policymaking while halting or disrupting research projects nationwide, marking a transformation of the federal government whose effects, experts said, could reverberate for years.Political appointees have shut down government studies, reduced the influence of scientists over regulatory decisions and in some cases pressured researchers not to speak publicly. The administration has particularly challenged scientific findings related to the environment and public health opposed by industries such as oil drilling and coal mining. It has also impeded research around human-caused climate change, which President Donald Trump has dismissed despite a global scientific consensus.But the erosion of science reaches well beyond the environment and climate: In San Francisco, a study of the effects of chemicals on pregnant women has stalled after federal funding abruptly ended. In Washington, D.C., a scientific committee that provided expertise in defending against invasive insects has been disbanded. In Kansas City, Missouri, the hasty relocation of two agricultural agencies that fund crop science and study the economics of farming has led to an exodus of employees and delayed hundreds of millions of dollars in research."The disregard for expertise in the federal government is worse than it's ever been," said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, which has tracked more than 200 reports of Trump administration efforts to restrict or misuse science since 2017. "It's pervasive."Hundreds of scientists, many of whom said they are dismayed at seeing their work undone, are departing.Among them is Matthew Davis, a biologist whose research on the health risks of mercury to children underpinned the first rules cutting mercury emissions from coal power plants. But last year, with a new baby of his own, he was asked to help support a rollback of those same rules. "I am now part of defending this darker, dirtier future," he said.This year, after a decade at the Environmental Protection Agency, Davis left."Regulations come and go, but the thinning out of scientific capacity in the government will take a long time to get back," said Joel Clement, a former top climate policy expert at the Interior Department who quit in 2017 after being reassigned to a job collecting oil and gas royalties. He is now at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group.Trump has consistently said that government regulations have stifled businesses and thwarted some of the administration's core goals, such as increasing fossil fuel production. Many of the starkest confrontations with federal scientists have involved issues like environmental oversight and energy extraction -- areas where industry groups have argued that regulators have gone too far in the past."Businesses are finally being freed of Washington's overreach, and the American economy is flourishing as a result," a White House statement said last year. Asked about the role of science in policymaking, officials from the White House declined to comment on the record.The administration's efforts to cut certain research projects also reflect a long-standing conservative position that some scientific work can be performed cost-effectively by the private sector, and taxpayers shouldn't be asked to foot the bill. "Eliminating wasteful spending, some of which has nothing to do with studying the science at all, is smart management, not an attack on science," two analysts at the conservative Heritage Foundation wrote in 2017 of the administration's proposals to cut various climate change and clean energy programs.Industry groups have expressed support for some of the moves, including a contentious EPA proposal to put new constraints on the use of scientific studies in the name of transparency. The American Chemistry Council, a chemical trade group, praised the proposal by saying, "The goal of providing more transparency in government and using the best available science in the regulatory process should be ideals we all embrace."In some cases, the administration's efforts to roll back government science have been thwarted. Each year, Trump has proposed sweeping budget cuts at a variety of federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. But Congress has the final say over budget levels, and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have rejected the cuts.For instance, in supporting funding for the Department of Energy's national laboratories, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., recently said, "It allows us to take advantage of the United States' secret weapon, our extraordinary capacity for basic research."As a result, many science programs continue to thrive, including space exploration at NASA and medical research at the National Institutes of Health, where the budget has increased more than 12% since Trump took office and where researchers continue to make advances in areas like molecular biology and genetics.Nevertheless, in other areas, the administration has managed to chip away at federal science.At the EPA, for instance, staffing has fallen to its lowest levels in at least a decade. More than two-thirds of respondents to a survey of federal scientists across 16 agencies said that hiring freezes and departures made it harder to conduct scientific work. And in June, the White House ordered agencies to cut by one-third the number of federal advisory boards that provide technical advice.The White House said it aimed to eliminate committees that were no longer necessary. Panels cut so far had focused on issues including invasive species and electric grid innovation.At a time when the United States is pulling back from world leadership in other areas like human rights or diplomatic accords, experts warn that the retreat from science is no less significant. Many of the achievements of the past century that helped make the United States an envied global power -- including gains in life expectancy, lowered air pollution and increased farm productivity -- are the result of the kinds of government research now under pressure."When we decapitate the government's ability to use science in a professional way, that increases the risk that we start making bad decisions, that we start missing new public health risks," said Wendy Wagner, a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the use of science by policymakers.Skirmishes over the use of science in making policy occur in all administrations: Industries routinely push back against health studies that could justify stricter pollution rules, for example. And scientists often gripe about inadequate budgets for their work. But many experts said that current efforts to challenge research findings go well beyond what has been done previously.In an article published in the journal Science last year, Wagner wrote that some of the Trump administration's moves, like a policy to restrict certain academics from the EPA's Science Advisory Board or the proposal to limit the types of research that can be considered by environmental regulators, "mark a sharp departure with the past." Rather than isolated battles between political officials and career experts, she said, these moves are an attempt to legally constrain how federal agencies use science in the first place.Some clashes with scientists have sparked public backlash, as when Trump officials pressured the nation's weather forecasting agency to support the president's erroneous assertion this year that Hurricane Dorian threatened Alabama.But others have garnered little notice despite their significance.This year, for instance, the National Park Service's principal climate change scientist, Patrick Gonzalez, received a "cease and desist" letter from supervisors after testifying to Congress about the risks that global warming posed to national parks."I saw it as attempted intimidation," said Gonzalez, who added that he was speaking in his capacity as an associate adjunct professor at the University California, Berkeley, a position he also holds. "It's interference with science and hinders our work."Cutting Scientific ProgramsEven though Congress hasn't gone along with Trump's proposals for budget cuts at scientific agencies, the administration has still found ways to advance its goals.One strategy: eliminate individual research projects not explicitly protected by Congress.For example, just months after Trump's election, the Commerce Department disbanded a 15-person scientific committee that had explored how to make National Climate Assessments, the congressionally mandated studies of the risks of climate change, more useful to local officials. It also closed its Office of the Chief Economist, which for decades had conducted wide-ranging research on topics like the economic effects of natural disasters. Similarly, the Interior Department has withdrawn funding for its Landscape Conservation Cooperatives, 22 regional research centers that tackled issues like habitat loss and wildfire management. While California and Alaska used state money to keep their centers open, 16 of 22 remain in limbo.A Commerce Department official said the climate committee it discontinued had not produced a report, and highlighted other efforts to promote science, such as a major upgrade of the nation's weather models.An Interior Department official said the agency's decisions "are solely based on the facts and grounded in the law" and that the agency would continue to pursue other partnerships to advance conservation science.Research that potentially posed an obstacle to Trump's promise to expand fossil fuel production was halted, too. In 2017, Interior officials canceled a $1 million study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the health risks of "mountaintop removal" coal mining in places like West Virginia.Mountaintop removal is as dramatic as it sounds -- a hillside is blasted with explosives, and the remains are excavated -- but the health consequences still aren't fully understood. The process can kick up coal dust and send heavy metals into waterways, and a number of studies have suggested links to health problems like kidney disease and birth defects."The industry was pushing back on these studies," said Joseph Pizarchik, an Obama-era mining regulator who commissioned the now-defunct study. "We didn't know what the answer would be," he said, "but we needed to know: Was the government permitting coal mining that was poisoning people, or not?"While coal mining has declined in recent years, satellite data shows that at least 60 square miles in Appalachia have been newly mined since 2016. "The study is still as important today as it was five years ago," Pizarchik said.The Cost of Lost ResearchThe cuts can add up to significant research setbacks.For years, the EPA and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences had jointly funded 13 children's health centers nationwide that studied, among other things, the effects of pollution on children's development. This year, the EPA ended its funding.At the University of California, San Francisco, one such center has been studying how industrial chemicals such as flame retardants in furniture could affect placenta and fetal development. Key aspects of the research have now stopped."The longer we go without funding, the harder it is to start that research back up," said Tracey Woodruff, who directs the center.In a statement, the EPA said it anticipated future opportunities to fund children's health research.At the Department of Agriculture, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced in June he would relocate two key research agencies to Kansas City, Missouri, from Washington: The National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a scientific agency that funds university research on topics like how to breed cattle and corn that can better tolerate drought conditions, and the Economic Research Service, whose economists produce studies for policymakers on farming trends, trade and rural America.Nearly 600 employees had less than four months to decide whether to uproot and move. Most couldn't or wouldn't, and two-thirds of those facing transfer left their jobs.In August, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, appeared to celebrate the departures."It's nearly impossible to fire a federal worker," he said in videotaped remarks at a Republican Party gala in South Carolina. "But by simply saying to people, 'You know what, we're going to take you outside the bubble, outside the Beltway, outside this liberal haven of Washington, D.C., and move you out in the real part of the country,' and they quit. What a wonderful way to sort of streamline government and do what we haven't been able to do for a long time."The White House declined to comment on Mulvaney's speech.The exodus has led to upheaval.At the Economic Research Service, dozens of planned studies into topics like dairy industry consolidation and pesticide use have been delayed or disrupted. "You can name any topic in agriculture, and we've lost an expert," said Laura Dodson, an economist and acting vice president of the union representing agency employees.The National Institute of Food and Agriculture manages $1.7 billion in grants that fund research on issues like food safety or techniques that help farmers improve their productivity. The staff loss, employees said, has held up hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, such as planned research into pests and diseases afflicting grapes, sweet potatoes and fruit trees.Former employees say they remain skeptical that the agencies could be repaired quickly. "It will take 5 to 10 years to rebuild," said Sonny Ramaswamy, who until 2018 directed the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.Perdue said the moves would save money and put the offices closer to farmers. "We did not undertake these relocations lightly," he said in a statement. A Department of Agriculture official added that both agencies were pushing to continue their work but acknowledged that some grants could be delayed by months.Questioning the Science ItselfIn addition to shutting down some programs, there have been notable instances where the administration has challenged established scientific research. Early on, as it started rolling back regulations on industry, administration officials began questioning research findings underpinning those regulations.In 2017, aides to Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator at the time, told the agency's economists to redo an analysis of wetlands protections that had been used to help defend an Obama-era clean-water rule. Instead of concluding that the protections would provide more than $500 million in economic benefits, they were told to list the benefits as unquantifiable, according to Elizabeth Southerland, who retired in 2017 from a 30-year career at the EPA, finishing as a senior official in its water office."It's not unusual for a new administration to come in and change policy direction," Southerland said. "But typically you would look for new studies and carefully redo the analysis. Instead they were sending a message that all the economists, scientists, career staff in the agency were irrelevant."Internal documents show that political officials at the EPA have overruled the agency's career experts on several occasions, including in a move to regulate asbestos more lightly, in a decision not to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos and in a determination that parts of Wisconsin were in compliance with smog standards. The Interior Department sidelined its own legal and environmental analyses in advancing a proposal to raise the Shasta Dam in California.Michael Abboud, an EPA spokesman, disputed Southerland's account in an email, saying, "It is not true."The EPA is now finalizing a narrower version of the Obama-era water rule, which in its earlier form had prompted outrage from thousands of farmers and ranchers across the country who saw it as overly restrictive."EPA under President Trump has worked to put forward the strongest regulations to protect human health and the environment," Abboud said, noting that several Obama administration rules had been held up in court and needed revision. "As required by law, EPA has always and will continue to use the best available science when developing rules, regardless of the claims of a few federal employees."Past administrations have, to varying degrees, disregarded scientific findings that conflicted with their priorities. In 2011, President Barack Obama's top health official overruled experts at the Food and Drug Administration who had concluded that over-the-counter emergency contraceptives were safe for minors.But in the Trump administration, the scope is wider. Many top government positions, including at the EPA and the Interior Department, are now occupied by former lobbyists connected to the industries that those agencies oversee.Scientists and health experts have singled out two moves they find particularly concerning. Since 2017, the EPA has moved to restrict certain academics from sitting on its Science Advisory Board, which provides scrutiny of agency science, and has instead increased the number of appointees connected with industry.And, in a potentially far-reaching move, the EPA has proposed a rule to limit regulators from using scientific research unless the underlying raw data can be made public. Industry groups like the Chamber of Commerce have argued that some agency rules are based on science that can't be fully scrutinized by outsiders. But dozens of scientific organizations have warned that the proposal in its current form could prevent the EPA from considering a vast array of research on issues like the dangers of air pollution if, for instance, they are based on confidential health data."The problem is that rather than allowing agency scientists to use their judgment and weigh the best available evidence, this could put political constraints on how science enters the decision-making process in the first place," said Wagner, the University of Texas law professor.The EPA said its proposed rule is intended to make the science that underpins potentially costly regulations more transparent. "By requiring transparency," said Abboud, the agency spokesman, "scientists will be required to publish hypothesis and experimental data for other scientists to review and discuss, requiring the science to withstand skepticism and peer review."An Exodus of Expertise"In the past, when we had an administration that was not very pro-environment, we could still just lay low and do our work," said Betsy Smith, a climate scientist with more than 20 years of experience at the EPA who in 2017 saw her long-running study of the effects of climate change on major ports get canceled."Now we feel like the EPA is being run by the fossil fuel industry," she said. "It feels like a wholesale attack."After her project was killed, Smith resigned.The loss of experienced scientists can erase years or decades of "institutional memory," said Robert Kavlock, a toxicologist who retired in October 2017 after working at the EPA for 40 years, most recently as acting assistant administrator for the agency's Office of Research and Development.His former office, which researches topics like air pollution and chemical testing, has lost 250 scientists and technical staff members since Trump came to office, while hiring 124. Those who have remained in the office of roughly 1,500 people continue to do their work, Kavlock said, but are not going out of their way to promote findings on lightning-rod topics like climate change."You can see that they're trying not to ruffle any feathers," Kavlock said.The same can't be said of Gonzalez, the National Park Service climate change scientist, whose work involves helping national parks protect against damage from rising temperatures.In February, Gonzalez testified before Congress about the risks of global warming, saying he was speaking in his capacity as an associate adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also using his Berkeley affiliation to participate as a co-author on a coming report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that synthesizes climate science for world leaders.But in March, shortly after testifying, Gonzalez's supervisor at the National Park Service sent the cease-and-desist letter warning him that his Berkeley affiliation was not separate from his government work and that his actions were violating agency policy. Gonzalez said he viewed the letter as an attempt to deter him from speaking out.The Interior Department said the letter did not indicate an intent to sanction Gonzalez and that he was free to speak as a private citizen.Gonzalez, with the support of Berkeley, continues to warn about the dangers of climate change and work with the U.N. climate change panel using his vacation time, and he spoke again to Congress in June. "I'd like to provide a positive example for other scientists," he said.Still, he noted that not everyone may be in a position to be similarly outspoken. "How many others are not speaking up?" Gonzalez said.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
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| Bank's Secret Campaign to Win Entry to U.S. for Shah of Iran Posted: 29 Dec 2019 08:29 AM PST  One late fall evening 40 years ago, a worn-out white Gulfstream II jet descended over Fort Lauderdale, Florida, carrying a regal but sickly passenger almost no one was expecting.Crowded aboard were a Republican political operative, a retinue of Iranian military officers, four smelly and hyperactive dogs and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the newly deposed shah of Iran.Yet as the jet touched down, the only one waiting to receive the deposed monarch was a senior executive of Chase Manhattan Bank, which had not only lobbied the White House to admit the former shah but had arranged visas for his entourage, searched out private schools and mansions for his family and helped arrange the Gulfstream to deliver him."The Eagle has landed," Joseph V. Reed Jr., chief of staff to the bank's chairman, David Rockefeller, declared in a celebratory meeting at the bank the next morning.Less than two weeks later, on Nov. 4, 1979, vowing revenge for the admission of the shah to the United States, revolutionary Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and then held more than 50 Americans -- and Washington -- hostage for 444 days.The shah, Washington's closest ally in the Persian Gulf, had fled Tehran in January 1979 in the face of a burgeoning uprising against his 38 years of iron-fisted rule. Liberals, leftists and religious conservatives were rallying against him. Strikes and demonstrations had shut down Tehran, and his security forces were losing control.The shah sought refuge in America. But President Jimmy Carter, hoping to forge ties to the new government rising out of the chaos and concerned about the security of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, refused him entry for the first 10 months of his exile. Even then, the White House only begrudgingly let him in for medical treatment.Now, a newly disclosed secret history from the offices of Rockefeller shows in vivid detail how Chase Manhattan Bank and its well-connected chairman worked behind the scenes to persuade the Carter administration to admit the shah, one of the bank's most profitable clients.For Carter, for the U.S. and for the Middle East it was an incendiary decision.The ensuing hostage crisis enabled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to consolidate his theocratic rule, started a four-decade conflict between Washington and Tehran that is still roiling the region and helped Ronald Reagan take the White House. To American policymakers, Iran became a parable about the political perils in the fall of a friendly strongman.Although Carter complained publicly at the time about the pressure campaign, the full, behind-the-scenes story -- laid out in the recently disclosed documents -- has never been told.Rockefeller's team called the campaign Project Eagle, after the code name used for the shah. Exploiting clubby networks of power stretching deep into the White House, Rockefeller mobilized a phalanx of elder statesmen.They included Henry A. Kissinger, a former secretary of state and chairman of a Chase advisory board; John J. McCloy, former commissioner of occupied Germany after World War II and an adviser to eight presidents as well as a future Chase chairman; a Chase executive and former CIA agent, Archibald B. Roosevelt Jr., whose cousin, CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt Jr., had orchestrated a 1953 coup to keep the shah in power; and Richard M. Helms, a former director of the CIA and former ambassador to Iran.Charles Francis, a veteran of corporate public affairs who worked for Chase at the time, brought the documents to the attention of The Times."Today's corporate campaigns are demolition derbies compared to this operation," he said. "It was smooth, smooth, smooth and almost entirely invisible."Records of Project Eagle were donated to Yale by Reed, the campaign's director. But he deemed the material so potentially embarrassing to his patron that Reed, who died in 2016, stipulated that the records remain sealed until Rockefeller's death. Rockefeller died in 2017 at the age of 101.Some of the information may embarrass others as well. Hawkish critics have often faulted Carter as worrying too much about human rights and thus failing to prop up the shah.But the papers reveal that the president's special envoy to Iran had actually urged the country's generals to use as much deadly force as needed to suppress the revolt, advising them about how to carry out a military takeover to keep the shah in power.A spokeswoman for Carter did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for Carter at the time of the crisis was not immediately available.After the hostages were taken, the Carter administration worked desperately to try to free the captives, and on April 24, 1980, authorized a rescue mission that collapsed in disaster: A helicopter crash in the desert killed eight service members, whose charred bodies were gleefully exhibited by Iranian officials.The hostage crisis doomed Carter's presidency. And the team around Rockefeller, a lifelong Republican with a dim view of Carter's dovish foreign policy, collaborated closely with the Reagan campaign in its efforts to preempt and discourage what it derisively labeled an "October surprise" -- a preelection release of the American hostages, the papers show.The Chase team helped the Reagan campaign gather and spread rumors about possible payoffs to win the release, a propaganda effort that Carter administration officials have said impeded talks to free the captives."I had given my all" to thwarting any effort by the Carter officials "to pull off the long-suspected 'October surprise,'" Reed wrote in a letter to his family after the election, apparently referring to the Chase effort to track and discourage a hostage release deal. He was later named Reagan's ambassador to Morocco.Rockefeller then personally lobbied the incoming administration to ensure that its Iran policies protected the bank's financial interests. The records indicate that Rockefeller hoped for the restoration of a version of the deposed government.At the start of the Iranian upheaval, the papers show, Kissinger advised Rockefeller that the probable conclusion would be "a sort of Bonapartist counterrevolution that rallies the pro-Western elements together with what was left of the army."Kissinger, in a recent email, acknowledged that the prediction "reflects my thinking at the time" but said "it was a judgment, not a policy proposal."But Rockefeller evidently continued to advocate for some form of restoration long after the shah fled Tehran.As late as December 1980, Rockefeller personally urged the incoming Reagan administration to encourage a counterrevolution by stopping "rug merchant type bargaining" for the hostages and instead taking military action to punish Iran if the hostages were not released. He suggested occupying three Iranian-controlled islands in the Persian Gulf."The most likely outcome of this situation is an eventual replacement of the present fanatic Shiite Muslim government, either by a military one or a combination of the military with the civilian democratic leaders," Rockefeller argued, according to his talking points for meetings with the Reagan transition team.An heir to his family's oil fortune, Rockefeller styled himself a corporate statesman and personally knew many White House officials, including Carter. He had known the shah since 1962, socializing with him in New York, Tehran and St. Moritz, Switzerland.As Tehran's coffers swelled with oil revenues in the 1970s, Chase formed a joint venture with an Iranian state bank and earned big fees advising the national oil company.By 1979, the bank had syndicated more than $1.7 billion in loans for Iranian public projects (the equivalent of about $5.8 billion today). The Chase balance sheet held more than $360 million in loans to Iran and more than $500 million in Iranian deposits.Rockefeller often insisted that his concern for the shah was purely about Washington's "prestige and credibility." It was about "the abandonment of a friend when he needed us most," he wrote in his memoirs.His only advocacy for the shah, Rockefeller wrote, had been in a brief aside to Carter during an unrelated White House meeting in April 1979."I did nothing more, publicly or privately, to influence the administration's thinking."Yet the Project Eagle papers show that Rockefeller received detailed updates on the risks to Chase's holdings, and that even his aside to Carter in April had been planned out the previous day with Reed, McCloy and Kissinger.Over lunch at the Knickerbocker Club in New York, Carter's special envoy to Tehran, Gen. Robert E. Huyser, told the Project Eagle team that he had urged Iran's top military leaders to kill as many demonstrators as necessary to keep the shah in power.If shooting over the heads of demonstrators failed to disperse them, "move to focusing on the chests," Huyser said he told the Iranian generals, according to minutes of the lunch. "I got stern and noisy with the military," he added, but in the end, the top general was "gutless."Rockefeller had his own special envoy to try to help the shah: Robert F. Armao, a Republican operative and public relations consultant who had worked for Rockefeller's brother Nelson, a former governor of New York and former vice president.Armao became one of the shah's closest advisers, and after Nelson Rockefeller died at the start of 1979, he reported to the Project Eagle team at Chase nearly every day for more than two years."Everybody had the hope that there would be a repeat of the 1953 events," Armao recalled recently, referring to the U.S.an-backed coup that restored the shah the first time he fled.When the shah's rule became untenable at the start of 1979, the State Department first turned to David Rockefeller for help relocating the Iranian monarch in the U.S."Not large enough for my very special client," Reed wrote to a Greenwich, Connecticut, broker who had offered two estates priced at around $2 million each -- about $7.4 million today.But while the shah tarried in Egypt and Morocco, an Iranian mob briefly seized the U.S. Embassy in February. Diplomats warned that admitting the shah risked another assault, and Carter changed his mind about offering haven.Rockefeller refused to deliver this bad news to the shah, afraid that it would hurt the bank by alienating a prized client."The risks were too high relating to the CMB position in Iran," he responded, referring to Chase Manhattan Bank, according to the records.Instead, Rockefeller scrambled to find accommodations elsewhere -- first in the Bahamas, and then in Mexico -- while strategizing with Kissinger, McCloy and others about how to persuade the White House to let in the shah.During a three-day push in April, Kissinger made a personal appeal to the national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and a follow-up phone call to Carter. Rockefeller buttonholed the president at the White House.And in a speech, Kissinger publicly accused the Carter administration of forcing a loyal ally to sail the world in search of refuge, "like a flying Dutchman looking for a port of call" -- the seed of what became a "who lost Iran" campaign theme for the Republicans.McCloy flooded the White House with lengthy letters to senior officials, often arguing about the danger of demoralizing other "friendly sovereigns." "Dear Zbig," he addressed his old friend Brzezinski.Finally, in October, Reed sent his personal doctor to Cuernavaca, Mexico, "to take a 'look-see'" at the shah.He had been hiding a cancer diagnosis. The doctor, Benjamin H. Kean, determined that the shah needed sophisticated treatment within a few weeks -- in Mexico, if necessary, Kean later said he had concluded.But when Reed put the doctor in touch with State Department officials, they came away with a different prognosis: that the shah was "at the point of death" and that only a New York hospital "was capable of possibly saving his life," as Carter described it at the time to The Times.With that opening, the Chase team began preparing the flight to Fort Lauderdale."When I told the customs man who the principal was, he almost fainted," the waiting executive, Eugene Swanzey, reported the next morning.The plane's bathroom was malfunctioning. The shah and his wife hunted in vain for a missing videocassette to finish a movie. And their four dogs -- a poodle, a collie, a cocker spaniel and a Great Dane -- jumped on everyone. The Great Dane "hadn't been washed in weeks," Swanzey said. "The aroma was just terrible."When Reed met the plane on its final arrival in New York, he recalled the next day, the shah seemed to be thinking, "'At last I am getting into competent hands.'"But as he checked the shah into New York Hospital, Reed was circumspect."I am the unidentified American," he told the inquisitive staff.Reed, Rockefeller and Kissinger met again three days after the hostages were taken."Noted was the feeling of indignation as being high and nothing useful to say," read the minutes.The White House said the shah had to depart as soon as possible, but Project Eagle continued."The ideal place for the Eagle to land," Reed wrote to Armao on Nov. 9, forwarding a brochure for a 350-acre Hudson Valley estate.A week later, Rockefeller personally urged Carter in a phone call to direct the secretary of state to meet with the shah about "the current situation." Carter did not and the shah soon departed, for Panama, then Egypt.Only after the death of the shah, on July 27, 1980, nine months after his landing in Fort Lauderdale, did the Project Eagle team shift to new objectives. One was protecting Rockefeller from blame for the crisis.Over roast loin of veal and vintage wine at the exclusive River Club in New York, Rockefeller and nine others on the team gathered on Aug. 19. Amid discussion of a laudatory biography of the shah by a Berkeley professor that the team had commissioned, some warned that a Rockefeller link to the embassy seizure would be hard to escape.Why was the shah admitted? "Medical treatment/DR recommended," one said, using Rockefeller's initials, according to minutes of the dinner. "This association cannot be ignored."But Kissinger was reassuring. Congress would never hold an investigation during an election campaign."I don't think we are in trouble any more, David," Kissinger told him.The hostages were released on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 1981, and a few days later Carter's departing White House counsel called Rockefeller to inquire about how the release deal affected Chase bank."Worked out very well," Rockefeller told him, according to his records. "Far better than we had feared."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
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| U.S. braces for North Korea announcement as Pyongyang gathers for major political conference Posted: 29 Dec 2019 08:04 AM PST  North Korea has Washington on edge these days. That feeling was amplified Sunday when North Korean state media announced that Pyongyang's ruling Workers' Party launched a major political conference.The meeting comes ahead of a year-end deadline the country set for the United States to offer concessions amid stalled denuclearization negotiations. While the state news network utilized typically vague language to describe the event, it's clear that the party will focus on how the country plans to address the "harsh trials and difficulties" it faces, including national defense.The Associated Press reports observers are keeping a close eye on how things unfold as some suspect Pyongyang may finally announce its plans to abandon diplomacy with the U.S. during the conference and begin major weapons tests again after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un agreed to suspend activity in April 2018.If Pyongyang does resume those tests, White House National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien said the U.S. "has a lot of tools in our toolkit" when asked about how the Trump administration would respond, though he refused to go into detail. Read more at The Hill and The Associated Press. > .@jonkarl: "What will be the consequences if North Korea resumes either long range missile tests or nuclear tests?" > > WH national security adviser Robert O'Brien: "I don't want to speculate about what will happen but we have a lot of tools in our tool kit." https://t.co/TJDqq4ekoG pic.twitter.com/HwKoacecNw> > -- ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) December 29, 2019More stories from theweek.com The best health advice from 2019 The 2010s were an economic disaster The secret to perfect pancakes
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| Ukraine, Rebels Complete Prisoner Swap Under Deal With Putin Posted: 29 Dec 2019 07:56 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Ukraine and two breakaway regions supported by the Kremlin exchanged prisoners on Sunday under an agreement reached with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this month as the former allies seek an end to more than five years of war in the Donbas area.Ukraine received 76 captives from the Russian-backed rebels, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's office said Sunday when announcing the completion of the swap. Ukraine returned 127 captives to the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics, Ukrainian Hromadske TV reported, citing Serhiy Sivokho, adviser to the head of the National Security and Defense Council.Zelenskiy and Putin met with the leaders of France and Germany in the first week of December in an effort to resume the peace process, which has become a main point of division between Russia and the West. The U.S. and European Union accuse the Kremlin of stoking the conflict and responded with economic sanctions that are still in place.Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel "gave a positive assessment" of the swap, the Kremlin said Sunday after the leaders spoke by phone. Ukraine's Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko said on his Twitter feed that the "all for all" formula for exchanging verified prisoners will discussed as a priority at the next Normandy format meeting with Germany, France and Russia.The deadly conflict in Ukraine's east erupted soon after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014. Fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists has claimed more than 13,000 lives since it began, and negotiators have struggled to make a ceasefire stick along the 500-kilometer (310-mile) contact line.In September, Ukraine and Russia had exchanged 35 prisoners each The Ukrainians who were freed included a filmmaker and 24 sailors while the authorities in Kyiv handed over militants captured during the fighting in Donbas.(Updates with the number of prisoners in the 2nd paragraph, reaction from Putin, Merkel, Ukraine Foreign Minister in fourth.)To contact the reporter on this story: Volodymyr Verbyany in Kiev at vverbyany1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Torrey Clark at tclark8@bloomberg.net, Andrew ReiersonFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| States charge more for electric cars as new laws take effect Posted: 29 Dec 2019 07:31 AM PST  The new year will bring new charges for some owners of electric vehicles, as an increasing number of states seek to plug in to fresh revenue sources to offset forgone gas taxes. New or higher registration fees go into effect Wednesday for electric vehicle owners in at least eight states. "I think states are still trying to determine what is a fair or equitable fee on these electric vehicle owners," said Kristy Hartman, energy program director at the National Conference of State Legislatures.
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| Suspected North Korean boat with headless dead bodies found off Japan coast Posted: 29 Dec 2019 07:28 AM PST  A boat suspected of being from North Korea with several bodies was found on a small island in northern Japan, the Japanese Coast Guard said Sunday. The wrecked boat that had the decomposing bodies on board was found on Sado Island in Niigata prefecture on Friday, and the bodies were found Saturday, a coast guard official in Sado said on condition of anonymity. Found on the boats were three bodies with heads, two heads without bodies and two bodies without heads. It's officially counted as seven bodies because it is unclear whether the bodies and heads came from the same people, the official said. The five bodies for which gender could be confirmed were all male, he said. Other details were not immediately available, but Japanese media reports said an investigation had started on whether the boat was from North Korea, as Korean language items were found on the boat. The boat is suspected of being from North Korea Credit: Sado Coast Guard Station via AP The area where the boat was found faces North Korea and is the region where such boats, dubbed "ghost ships" by the Japanese media, have been found in recent years, numbering about a hundred each year. North Korean shipping boats, which are usually poorly equipped, are believed to be under pressure to catch more fish for the nation's food supply and are wandering farther out to sea. Sometimes North Koreans are found alive on such boats and have been deported. Japan and North Korea have no diplomatic ties. Japan has stepped up patrols in coastal areas to guard against poaching.
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| Slippery salvation: Could seaweed as cow feed help climate? Posted: 29 Dec 2019 07:28 AM PST  Coastal Maine has a lot of seaweed , and a fair number of cows. The researchers — from a marine science lab, an agriculture center and universities in northern New England — are working on a plan to feed seaweed to cows to gauge whether that can help reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. The concept of feeding seaweed to cows has gained traction in recent years because of some studies that have shown its potential to cut back on methane.
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| Suspected North Korean boat with bodies found in Japan Posted: 29 Dec 2019 06:30 AM PST  A boat suspected of being from North Korea with several bodies was found on a small island in northern Japan, the Japanese Coast Guard said Sunday. The wrecked boat that had the decomposing bodies was found on Sado Island in Niigata prefecture on Friday, and the bodies were found Saturday, a coast guard official in Sado said on customary condition of anonymity. Other details were not immediately available, but Japanese media reports said an investigation had started on whether the boat was from North Korea, as Korean language items were found on the boat.
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| Trump faces raft of foreign policy challenges in new year Posted: 29 Dec 2019 05:07 AM PST  President Donald Trump starts the new year knee-deep in daunting foreign policy challenges at the same time he'll have to deal with a likely impeachment trial in the Senate and the demands of a reelection campaign. American troops are still engaged in America's longest war in Afghanistan. Add to that simmering tensions with Iran, fallout from Trump's decision to pull troops from Syria, ongoing unease with Russia and Turkey, and erratic ties with European and other longtime Western allies.
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| Saudi court sentences Yemeni to death for attacking dancers Posted: 29 Dec 2019 05:01 AM PST ![Saudi court sentences Yemeni to death for attacking dancers]( "Saudi court sentences Yemeni to death for attacking dancers") A court in Saudi Arabia has ruled that a Yemeni man be executed for attacking and wounding dancers and a security guard during a performance on stage at a park in Riyadh, state media reported Sunday. The Specialized Criminal Court found the man guilty of attacking a security guard and members of a dance troupe, the state-owned Al-Ekhbariya news channel reported. The court also found the man guilty of acting on the orders of a senior al-Qaida leader in Yemen.
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| Somalia blast kills one sister, badly injures the other Posted: 29 Dec 2019 04:52 AM PST  The two Somali sisters were studying to be doctors. Now, 22-year-old Amina Mohamud is in critical condition. University students, the future of a country rebuilding from decades of conflict, made up most of the 79 people killed.
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| Iran blasts France for 'interference' over jailed academic Posted: 29 Dec 2019 04:49 AM PST  Tehran accused Paris on Sunday of "interference" in the case of an Iranian-French academic held in the Islamic republic, saying she is considered an Iranian national and faces security charges. France said on Friday it summoned Iran's ambassador to protest the imprisonment of Fariba Adelkhah and another academic, Roland Marchal of France, saying their detention was "intolerable". Their imprisonment has added to distrust between Tehran and Paris at a time when French President Emmanuel Macron is seeking to play a leading role in defusing tensions between Iran and its arch-foe the United States. "The statement by France's foreign ministry regarding an Iranian national is an act of interference and we see their request to have no legal basis," Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said in a statement. "The individual in question (Adelkhah) is an Iranian national and has been arrested over 'acts of espionage'," he said, adding that her lawyer had knowledge about the details of the case which is being investigated. Iran does not recognise dual nationality and has repeatedly rebuffed calls from foreign governments for consular access to those it has detained during legal proceedings. France's President Emmanuel Macron is seeking to play a leading role in defusing tensions between Iran and the US Credit: LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP In its statement on Friday, the French foreign ministry reiterated its call for the release of Adelkhah and Marshal. It also reaffirmed France's demand for consular access. In response, Mousavi said Marshal was detained for "conspiring against national security", that he has had "consular access multiple times" and that his lawyer was in touch with the judiciary. A specialist in Shiite Islam and a research director at Sciences Po University in Paris, Adelkhah's arrest for suspected "espionage" was confirmed in July. Her colleague Marchal was arrested while visiting Adelkhah, according to his lawyer. A judge had decided to release the two on bail this month, as they had been entitled to it after six months in detention, their lawyer said. But this was opposed by the prosecution, and as a result the case was referred to Iran's Revolutionary Court to settle the dispute, Iran's semi-official news agency ISNA reported. The Revolutionary Court typically handles high-profile cases in Iran, including those involving espionage. The university and supporters said this week that Adelkhah and another detained academic, British-Australian Kylie Moore-Gilbert, had started an indefinite hunger strike just before Christmas. British-Australian national, Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert, has gone on indefinite hunger strike in Iranian prison Credit: Nicholas Razzell The French statement said the ministry had made clear to the ambassador "our grave concern over the situation of Mrs Fariba Adelkhah, who has stopped taking food". "Creating hype cannot stop Iran's judiciary from handling the case, especially considering the security charges the two face," Mousavi said. Mousavi had previously dismissed similar calls from France, saying it should remember that "Iran is sovereign and independent" and interference in its affairs is "unacceptable". The latest tensions come after Xiyue Wang, an American scholar who had been serving 10 years on espionage charges, was released by Iran this month in exchange for Massoud Soleimani, an Iranian who had been held in the US for allegedly breaching sanctions. Iran has said it is open to more such prisoner swaps with the United States. Tehran is still holding several other foreign nationals in high profile cases, including British-Iranian mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Iranian-American businessman Siamak Namazi and his father Mohammad Bagher Namazi. US-Iran tensions have soared since Washington pulled out of a landmark nuclear agreement with Tehran last year and reimposed crippling sanctions.
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| 5 stabbed at Hanukkah celebration north of NYC Posted: 29 Dec 2019 04:41 AM PST  A man attacked a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi's home north of New York City late Saturday, stabbing and wounding five people before fleeing in a vehicle, police said. The attack appeared to be the latest in a string targeting Jews in the region, including a massacre at a kosher grocery store in New Jersey earlier this month. Police said the stabbings happened at around 10 p.m. in Monsey, one of several Hudson Valley towns that have seen an influx in large numbers of Hasidic Jews in recent years.
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| North Korea could be planning 'Christmas gift' of a space rocket launch Posted: 29 Dec 2019 04:33 AM PST  North Korea appears to be laying the groundwork for the launch of a rocket to put a satellite into orbit, with state media in recent days reporting on other nations' space projects and reiterating Pyongyang's right to the peaceful development of outer space. The South Korean government has confirmed that it is monitoring the North's media coverage and activities at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station out of concern that the launch of a rocket carrying a satellite will be the "Christmas gift" that Kim Jong-un's regime promised in early December. Under the terms of United Nations Security Council resolutions, North Korea is not permitted to use rockets to put a satellite into orbit on the grounds that a rocket launch is virtually identical to the test firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un speaks during a ruling party meeting Credit: KCNA North Korea has defied international pressure and attempted to put satellites into orbit on five occasions since 1998, with the two most recent launches - in December 2012 and February 2016 - successful. The Rodong Sinmun newspaper on Friday carried a report on the launch of a satellite by Russia earlier in the week. A few days previously, the official newspaper of the Workers' Party of North Korea devoted a story to the efforts of a number of countries to explore and exploit outer space. A spokesman for South Korea's Unification Ministry told the Yonhap news agency that it is "closely watching related reports". On Sunday, Kim presided over the second day of a meeting in Pyongyang of the Workers' Party called to discuss "important policy issues for new victory in our revolution", state media reported. The details of the regime's leadership have not been reported, although the Korean Central News Agency have confirmed that the talks are focusing on the "building of the state and national defence" and reiterated the "development of the revolution with a transparent, anti-imperialist, independent stance and firm will". The meeting of party leaders comes shortly after Kim summoned his military leaders and ordered them to step up the nation's military capabilities, including its nuclear deterrent. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watches the test-fire of two short-range ballistic missiles Credit: KCNA Conclaves of the North's political and military commanders have increased concerns that Kim is going to carry out some form of provocative move designed to encourage US President Donald Trump to relax sanctions imposed by the international community in an attempt to force Pyongyang to scrap its nuclear arsenal. Kim set a deadline of the end of the year for Washington to drop its "hostile policy" towards Pyongyang and warned the US to prepare for a "Christmas gift". US and South Korean troops have been at a heightened state of alert in recent days and a number of surveillance aircraft are patrolling close to North Korean airspace in anticipation of a missile launch. Pyongyang has conducted two tests of rocket engines at the Sohae launch facility in December and satellite imagery has confirmed that more work us under way at the site. The placement of a shelter over part of the site makes it impossible to determine the precise nature of that work.
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| Ousted UK lawmakers blame Labour's response to anti-Semitism Posted: 29 Dec 2019 04:30 AM PST  A group of politicians from Britain's opposition Labour Party have called for "fundamental change" within their party's leadership. The comments follow a parliamentary election earlier this month that gave Labour its worst election defeat since 1935 and made pro-Brexit Prime Minister Boris Johnson the most electorally successful leader of the Conservative Party since Margaret Thatcher. In a letter that was published in The Observer newspaper on Sunday, the 11-strong group of former Labour legislators and candidates called for an "unflinching" review of the party's failed campaign.
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| 5 stabbed at Hanukkah celebration in latest attack on Jews Posted: 29 Dec 2019 03:29 AM PST  A knife-wielding man stormed into a rabbi's home and stabbed five people as they celebrated Hanukkah in an Orthodox Jewish community north of New York City, an ambush the governor said Sunday was an act of domestic terrorism fueled by intolerance and a "cancer" of growing hatred in America. Police tracked a fleeing suspect to Manhattan and made an arrest within two hours of the attack Saturday night in Monsey. Grafton E. Thomas had blood all over his clothing, smelled of bleach but said "almost nothing" when officers stopped him, officials said.
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| Iraq beefs up security around air base in country's west Posted: 29 Dec 2019 03:09 AM PST ![Iraq beefs up security around air base in country's west]( "Iraq beefs up security around air base in country's west") AL-ASAD AIR BASE, Iraq (AP) — An Iraqi general said Sunday that security has been beefed up around the Ain al-Asad air base, a sprawling complex in the western Anbar desert that hosts U.S. forces, following a series of attacks. Maj. Gen. Raad Mahmoud told The Associated Press that investigations were still underway to determine who was behind the unclaimed attacks on bases across Iraq, including one earlier this month in which five rockets landed inside Ain al-Asad. A U.S. defense contractor was killed Friday in a rocket attack at a different Iraqi military compound near Kirkuk where U.S. service members are based.
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| Missile attack kills 10 at military parade in Yemen's south Posted: 29 Dec 2019 02:43 AM PST  A ballistic missile ripped through a military parade for a Yemeni southern separatist group that's backed by the United Arab Emirates, killing at least six troops and four children, a spokesman said Sunday. Maged al-Shoebi, a spokesman for the group, blamed Houthi rebels for the attack. The explosion took place while the separatists, known as the Resistance Forces, were finishing a parade for new recruits at a soccer field in the capital of Dhale province, al-Shoebi told The Associated Press.
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| War and Corruption Made Ukraine a Terrorist Twilight Zone Posted: 29 Dec 2019 02:03 AM PST  KYIV—Ukraine arrested one of the world's most dangerous international terrorists last month in a special operation conducted by local, Georgian and American special services. Al-Bara Shishani, the former commander of the so-called Islamic State and deputy head of its intelligence operations, was detained on the outskirts of Kyiv. Shishani had been presumed dead for more than a year, but was hiding here and plotting international terrorist attacks, according to Ukrainian authorities. The Secret Life of an ISIS WarlordIn fact, this country torn by a Russian-backed separatist war has become a kind of Twilight Zone for terrorists of many stripes who have found ways to cross its borders and take advantage of a deeply divided society where law and order have been undermined by official corruption and public confusion.The terrorist's real name is Cezar Tokhosashvili, from the Pankisi Gorge region of the Republic of Georgia. The largely impoverished population of those rough mountains includes many Muslims of Chechen extraction who have embraced radical Salafi teachings and, in several cases, became enthusiastic recruits for violent jihadist organizations.Al-Bar Shishani reportedly was a deputy for the former "minister of war" of the so-called Islamic State, Abu Omar al-Shishani, real name Tarkhan Batirashvili, reported killed by an American airstrike in Syria in 2016.Katerina Sergatskova, a researcher specializing in Ukraine-based Islamic State fighters, told The Daily Beast, "What Ukrainian authorities do not explain to us is which hole in the border Tokhosashvili used to get in, who he bribed, what passport he used here, and which particular terrorist attacks he helped to organize while living in Ukraine." According to Sergatskova there are holes in the borders of Ukraine in the Kharkiv, Odessa, and Lviv regions as well as the seceding provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. The biggest "hole," as she put it, comes from the fact "the entire border patrol system is affected by corruption." At least 200 other suspected ISIS fighters have been arrested in Ukraine, said Sergatskova, and dozens are still free. More than two years ago, The Daily Beast reported on the problem of Chechen fighters who had crossed into Ukraine since 2014. Some came legally, some illegally, in the early months of the war in Donbas. Dozens of Chechen militia from the Islamic State Caucasus Emirate, recognized as a "specially designated global terrorist group" by the U.S. State Department, have crossed Ukraine's border with their families. Many of them joined Ukrainian volunteer troops fighting in Donbas, including the Right Sector militia, fighting against the Russian-supported separatists. "Our authorities have very poor or no knowledge of radical Islam," said Sergatskova, who notes that ISIS cadres have not carried out any attacks inside Ukraine, apparently preferring to use it as a "haven."* * *A JOURNEY TO THE GRAY ZONE* * *Earlier this month we traveled to Ukraine's most problematic border, first taking the night train from Kyiv to the town of Pokrovsk, in the government-controlled part of the Donetsk region, then a car from there to the Marinka checkpoint where people cross into and out of the separatist's self-declared Donetsk People's Republic. The first thing sleepy train passengers hear upon arrival in Pokrovsk is the taxi drivers shouting, "Who needs a lift to Marinka checkpoint, get in!" And many do. They carry bags heavy with all kinds of goods, even milk, which is commonly believed to be better in government-controlled parts of Ukraine than in the separatist zone. The battered road to Marinka took us through thick fog for about 30 miles until we reached a line of cars that had been growing since hours before dawn. The wait to get to the actual checkpoint can last longer than three hours, but you can speed it up as long as you have enough cash in your pocket to cheat the system before the checkpoint closes at 5 p.m.Adults in Donbas talk matter-of-factly in front of children about death and destruction and about bribes they pay to go in and out of the separatist part of Ukraine, as if discussing a weather forecast. There is a general feeling that the war here has become a permanent, dreary, sometimes deadly status quo. It has gone on now for almost six years and killed more than 12,000 people. Those who remain in these precincts live without central heating, without gas, with brown water coming out of the faucets.When the war began in 2014, the front separated Liza, a 30-year-old Kyiv-based social worker, from her parents and grand-parents living in Donetsk. To see them, she has to return to the separatist region at least once a year and witnesses every time the kind of corruption, big and small, that opens up the country to crime and, yes, terrorists seeking safe havens. "There are sleazy people who come to the checkpoint at 3 a.m. to get in line, then sell you the spot for 200 UAH ($8.50) and if you have no state pass, you can still cross by paying thousands more UAH to the guards on both sides of the checkpoint."Smugglers of meat or weapons pay much bigger bribes, " Liza said. "All sorts of criminals get into Ukraine but unfortunately our government is not catching big thugs who deal in big business, committing serious crimes."In the fog and cold of the checkpoint, she said what many people waiting in line believed, "Because of this profitable corruption, the war is never going to end." Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky faced each other in person for the first time in Paris on Dec. 9, along with the leaders of France and Germany, to try and find a way to end the war and save human lives. But just as many had predicted in war-torn Donbas, no peace deal was signed."We have not found the magic wand, but we have relaunched talks," French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters afterward. Meanwhile, it's a measure of the hardened posture on both sides that Ukrainian law enforcement agencies are investigating former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko amid allegations that he committed treason in 2015, when he signed the original peace accord with Putin in Minsk, a 13-point road map for resolving the war in Donbas which experts consider hopeless.During the meeting in Paris, Putin and Zelensky agreed to continue to enlarge disengagement zones, de-mine Donbas fields and roads and exchange all prisoners before the end of the year. But there was no agreement reached about the "dividing line." The frontier that people have to cross in and out of the "gray zone" is still lost in the twilight.The latest public surveys show that up to 24 percent of the Donbas population struggle to protect their property from criminals, 17 percent suffer from bribes and threats by officials on both sides of the "dividing line," and 20 percent have no communication with relatives. "My brother is in Donetsk, less than 20 km away from me, I have not seen him since the war started," Andrey Shapochka, manager at Krasnohorivka power station told The Daily Beast. "Separatists do not let him out and I am banned on his side, so our mother is growing very old without seeing my brother." A group of women were waiting in line for their pensions outside of the Oshad bank in Marinka in the afternoon. Most of them had crossed the front line that morning from separatist Donetsk, where Russia pays them pensions. Indeed, most pensioners in the rebellious Donetsk and Luhansk regions get paid by both sides.With the Children on the Ukraine War's Front Lines Praying for PeaceWith the Children on the Ukraine War's Front Lines Praying for PeaceYevdokiya Fedorova, a fragile 77-year-old woman in a worn woolen hat who is a resident of Donetsk, said it took her three hours to get across, and the return trip will take her from five to 12 hours more, but she says it is worth it: "My daughter and grand-daughter pay hundreds of hryvnias to skip the line. I cannot afford that, I am helping my unemployed son." She said he entered Donetsk last year to see her, but has been prevented from leaving by the self-proclaimed government there. "We'll always remain a gray zone, like one more Abkhazia," she said, referring to a Russian-backed separatist region of Georgia. But when asked who she blames for it, she turned her tear-filled eyes away: "You expect me to say I blame Putin, but I blame my horrible fate."Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Taliban council agrees to cease-fire in Afghanistan Posted: 29 Dec 2019 01:50 AM PST  The Taliban's ruling council agreed Sunday to a temporary cease-fire in Afghanistan, providing a window in which a peace agreement with the United States can be signed, officials from the insurgent group said. A cease-fire had been demanded by Washington before any peace agreement could be signed. A peace deal would allow the U.S. to bring home its troops from Afghanistan and end its 18-year military engagement there, America's longest.
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| Iran blasts France for 'interference' over jailed academic Posted: 29 Dec 2019 01:41 AM PST  Tehran accused Paris on Sunday of "interference" in the case of an Iranian-French academic held in the Islamic republic, saying she is considered an Iranian national and faces security charges. France said Friday it summoned Iran's ambassador to protest the imprisonment of Fariba Adelkhah and another academic, Roland Marchal of France, saying their detention was "intolerable".
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| Ukraine, eastern rebels swap prisoners in move to end war Posted: 29 Dec 2019 01:30 AM PST  Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine on Sunday exchanged 200 prisoners in a move aimed at ending their five-year war. The swap at a checkpoint near the rebel-held city of Horlivka was part of an agreement brokered this month at a summit of the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France. According to figures from officials of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's republics — the two separatist governments in the rebel area — Ukraine turned over 124 people and the separatists freed 76.
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| 10 ways North Korea uses technology to keep its citizens in the dark about the outside world Posted: 29 Dec 2019 01:01 AM PST  North Korea jams radio signals and creates smartphone games to keep its people in the dark and cut them off from the outside world.
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| Turkey says it won't evacuate NW Syria observation posts Posted: 29 Dec 2019 12:54 AM PST ![Turkey says it won't evacuate NW Syria observation posts]( "Turkey says it won't evacuate NW Syria observation posts") Turkey's defense chief said Sunday that his country's troops won't evacuate their 12 observation posts in rebel-held northwestern Syria. Turkey — a strong backer of some of the rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces — has a dozen observation posts in Idlib province, as part of an agreement reached last year with Russia, a main supporter of Assad.
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| The decade in review: Europe, and the reawakening of the Russian bear Posted: 29 Dec 2019 12:41 AM PST  During the past 10 years Vladimir Putin was re-elected twice, and will be in office until 2024, at least – and the world outside the Kremlin walls is a different place because of him
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| 2 ex-prime ministers vie for Guinea-Bissau presidency Posted: 28 Dec 2019 11:47 PM PST  BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau (AP) — Two former prime ministers of Guinea-Bissau faced a runoff presidential election Sunday after the incumbent failed to reach the second round in the tumultuous West African country once described by the United Nations as a narco-state. President Jose Mario Vaz, in power since 2014, has vowed to respect the results in a rare gesture of political stability. Vaz is the first democratically elected president to complete a full term without being deposed or assassinated since the country's independence from Portugal in 1974.
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| Iraqi artists pay tribute to dead protesters with sculptures Posted: 28 Dec 2019 11:01 PM PST  The sculptures carved by seven art trainees were lined up outside a makeshift workshop in Baghdad's Tahrir Square. With them were posters depicting protesters who have been killed in anti-government demonstrations in the past three months. One sculpture showed a protester with a tear gas canister in his eye.
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| We've spent the decade letting our tech define us. It's out of control Posted: 28 Dec 2019 10:00 PM PST  Technology has grown from some devices and platforms we use to an entire environment in which we function We may come to remember this decade as the one when human beings finally realized we are up against something. We're just not quite sure what it is.More of us have come to understand that our digital technologies are not always bringing out our best natures. People woke up to the fact that our digital platforms are being coded by people who don't have our best interests at heart. This is the decade when, finally, the "tech backlash" began.But it's a little late.Shoshana Zuboff recently published her comprehensive Surveillance Capitalism to deserved acclaim, but the book is really about some decisions that Google was making twenty years ago to harvest our data and sell it to advertisers. The Center for Humane Technology has called attention to the way that the manipulative techniques of behavioral finance have been embedded in our apps – bringing us all up to speed on the science of captology and addiction, circa 1999.These are necessary critiques, but they're too focused on the good old days, when the business plans of a few bad actors and the designs of some manipulative technologies could be identified as the "cause" of our collective woes.That's really only half, or less than half, of the story. It's blaming the developers, the CEOs, the shareholders, or even individual apps, programs and platforms for our predicament, when most of these players have either long since left the building, or are themselves oblivious to their impact on our collective wellbeing. Just because the public is finally ready to hear about these tech industry shenanigans doesn't mean they are still relevant. We can't even blame capitalism, anymore. The quest for exponential returns may have fueled the development of extractive and addictive technologies, but the cultural phenomena they gave birth to now have a life of their own. Different worldsWhat this decade's critiques miss is that over the past 10 years, our tech has grown from some devices and platforms we use to an entire environment in which we function. We don't "go online" by turning on a computer and dialing up through a modem; we live online 24/7, creating data as we move through our lives, accessible to everyone and everything. Our smartphones are not devices that sit in our pockets; they create new worlds with new rules about our availability, intimacies, appearance and privacy. Apple, Twitter and Google are not just technology services we use, but staples in our retirement portfolios, on whose continued success our financial futures depend.At this point, the digital environment is no more the result of a series of choices made by technology developers, as it is the underlying cause of those choices. What happened to us in the 2010s wasn't just that we were being surveilled, but that all that data was being used to customize everything we saw and did online. We were being shaped into who the data said we were. The net you see and the one I see are different. Your Google search results are different than mine, your news feeds are different and your picture of the world is different.As the decade began and social media took over society, many people tried to call attention to digital technology's more environmental effects. In Programmed or Be Programmed, I argued that we have to understand the platforms on which we're working and living, or we're more likely to be used by technology than to be the users controlling it. But those of us arguing for new media literacies may have been making our case a bit too literally.The people and organizations responding to our plea launched the "learn to code" movement. Schools initiated Stem curriculums, and kids learned code in order to prepare themselves for jobs in the digital economy. It was as if the answer to a world where the most powerful entities speak in code was to learn code, ourselves, and then look for employment servicing the machines. If you can't beat them, join them.But that wasn't the point. Or shouldn't have been. What we really needed this decade was to learn code as a liberal art – not so much as software engineers, but as human beings living in a new sort of environment. It's an environment that remembers and records everything we have done online, every data point we leave in our wake, in order to adapt itself to our individual predilections – all in order to generate whatever responses or behaviors the platforms want from us. The digital media environment uses what it knows about each of our pasts to direct each one of our futures.We can no longer come to agreement on what we're seeing, because we're looking at different pictures of the world. It's not just that we have different perspectives on the same events and stories; we're being shown fundamentally different realities, by algorithms looking to trigger our engagement by any means necessary. The more conflicting the ideas and imagery to which are exposed, the more likely we are to fight over whose is real and whose is fake. We are living in increasingly different and irreconcilable worlds. We have no chance of making sense together. The only thing we have in common is our mutual disorientation and alienation.We've spent the last 10 years as participants in a feedback loop between surveillance technology, predictive algorithms, behavioral manipulation and human activity. And it has spun out of anyone's control. 'Russian bots, meme campaigns and Cambridge Analytica'This is a tough landscape for anyone to navigate coherently. We may be benefiting from the internet's ability to help us find others with whom we share rare diseases, hobbies, or beliefs, but this sorting and grouping is abstract and over great distances. We are not connecting with people in the real world, but gathered by our eyeballs in disembodied virtual spaces, without the benefit of any of our painstakingly evolved social mechanisms for moderation, rapport, or empathy.The digital media environment is a space that is configuring itself in real time based on how the algorithms think we will react. They are sorting us into caricatured, machine-language oversimplifications of ourselves. This is why we saw so much extremism emerge over the past decade. We are increasingly encouraged to identify ourselves by our algorithmically determined ideological profiles alone, and to accept a platform's arbitrary, profit-driven segmentation as a reflection of our deepest, tribal affiliations.Since 2016, we have summoned demons to embody and represent these artificially generated worldviews – Russian bots and meme campaigns and Cambridge Analytica. But though these may have amplified and accelerated the effect of the digital environment, that environment would have generated standing waves of cultural angst in primary colors no matter what.Then, all it takes is an ideologue or ideology to jump in and claim that standing wave as their own. Trump is not the originator of his demagoguery so much as the vessel. Ideologically speaking, he's less a tweeter than a re-tweeter. Likewise, Brexit is not a policy design for an independent England so much as a projection of one group's collective angst. And these are not even the most monstrous of the phantoms we are generating.Incapable of recreating a consensus reality together through digital media, we are trying to conjure a television-style hallucination. Television was a global medium, broadcasting universally shared realities to a world of spectators. The Olympics, moon landings and the felling of the Berlin Wall were all globally broadcast, collective spectacles. We all occupied the same dream space, which is why globalism characterized that age.But now we are resurrecting obsolete visions of nationalism, false memories of a glorious past, and the anything-goes values of reality TV. We are promoting a spectator democracy on digital platforms, and, in the process, we are giving life to paranoid nightmares of doom and gloom, invasion and catastrophe, replacement and extinction. And artificial intelligence hasn't even arrived yet. Reconnecting to realityThere is a way out, but it will mean abandoning our fear and contempt for those we have become convinced are our enemies. No one is in charge of this, and no amount of social science or monetary policy can correct for what is ultimately a spiritual deficit. We have surrendered to digital platforms that look at human individuality and variance as "noise" to be corrected, rather than signal to be cherished. Our leading technologists increasingly see human beings as a problem, and technology as the solution – and they use our behavior on their platforms as evidence of our essentially flawed nature.> We must stop looking to our screens and their memes for a sense of connection to something greater than ourselvesBut the digital media environment could be helping us reconnect to local reality and terra firma. This is one of its potential breaks from media environments of the past. In the digital environment, we have the opportunity to remember who we really are and how to take responsibility for our world. Here, we are not just passive consumers; we are active citizens and more. That's the real power of a distributed network: it is not centrally controlled, but locally generated.The digital environment is also built, quite literally, on memory. Everything a computer does happens in one form of RAM or another – just moving things from one section of its memory to another. The digital media environment functions like a big blockchain, recording and storing everything we say or do for later retrieval. It could be helping us retrieve real facts, track real metrics and recall something about the essence of who we were and how we related before we were untethered from ourselves and alienated from one another.The next decade will determine whether we human beings have what it takes to rise to the occasion of our own, imposed obsolescence. We must stop looking to our screens and their memes for a sense of connection to something greater than ourselves. We must stop building digital technologies that optimize us for atomization and impulsiveness, and create ones aimed at promoting sense-making and recall instead. We must seize the more truly digital, distributed opportunity to remember the values that we share, and reacquaint ourselves with the local worlds in which we actually live. For there, unlike the partitioned servers of cyberspace, we have a whole lot more in common with one another than we may suspect.Happy holidays. * Douglas Rushkoff, a fellow of the Center for Digital Life, is the author of Team Human and the host of the Team Human podcast
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| Sydney New Year's fireworks to go ahead despite wildfires Posted: 28 Dec 2019 08:06 PM PST  Sydney's iconic New Year's Eve fireworks will go ahead despite the wildfire crisis to show the world Australia's resiliency, the prime minister said, while authorities on Sunday braced for conditions to deteriorate with high temperatures. Prime Minister Scott Morrison also announced financial support for some volunteer firefighters in New South Wales, the state worst hit by wildfires ravaging the nation. "The world looks at Sydney every single year and they look at our vibrancy, they look at our passion, they look at our success," he said.
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| N Korea begins key meeting before year-end deadline for US Posted: 28 Dec 2019 05:36 PM PST  North Korea has opened a high-profile political conference to discuss how to overcome "harsh trials and difficulties," state media reported Sunday, days before a year-end deadline set by Pyongyang for Washington to make concessions in nuclear negotiations. The ruling Workers' Party meeting is a focus of keen attention as some observers predict North Korea might use the conference to announce it would abandon faltering diplomacy with the U.S. and lift its moratorium on major weapons test. The Korean Central News Agency reported that leader Kim Jong Un presided over a plenary meeting of the party's Central Committee convened in Pyongyang on Saturday.
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