| China reports major drop in new virus cases; 143 new deaths Posted: 14 Feb 2020 04:34 PM PST  China reported Saturday a figure of 2,641 new virus cases, a major drop from the higher numbers in recent days since a broader diagnostic method was implemented. The number of new deaths rose slightly to 143, bringing the total fatalities in mainland China to 1,523. The total number of confirmed cases in the country now stands at 66,492, according to a notice from China's National Health Commission.
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| A United Ireland? Sinn Fein’s Win Brings It Only One Step Closer Posted: 14 Feb 2020 04:30 PM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Following an unexpected election triumph, Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald wasted little time in calling for a united Ireland, demanding a referendum on reunification within five years.Meanwhile, one of her successful candidates regaled his celebrating supporters with the iconic "Up the RA" slogan, referring to the Irish Republican Army, the terror group which fought in the name of uniting Ireland. Another broke into a rousing rebel song commemorating the IRA's fight with British forces in Dublin.So nearly a century after its partition, is Ireland's wave of nationalist fervor leading inexorably to a movement to unite one of the last divided countries in Europe? Well, not quite.Despite the unification-themed celebrations, Sinn Fein ran as a populist, anti-establishment party. It won by building a coalition of nationalists, the socially liberal and those who simply wanted to smash the centrist system that's dominated government for most of the country's history. Its surge to take the popular vote in last weekend's election had more to do with a focus on housing than patriotism.'Momentum Is There'One thing that is clear is that Sinn Fein upended a political order that had seen power swapped between the two main parties -- Prime Minister Leo Varadkar's Fine Gael and Fianna Fail -- for much of Ireland's history since independence from Britain in the 1920s, when the island was divided into north and south.But Sinn Fein does bring Irish unity to the forefront of the political debate -- particularly in the wake of the U.K.'s historic, and potentially destabilizing, decision to leave the European Union."Brexit has changed the nature of the discussion around reunification fundamentally," said Colin Harvey, law professor at Queens University Belfast. "It's not going to happen tomorrow, but I'm convinced we are going to have referendums within a decade. The momentum is there."Ultimately, it's up to London to call a border poll, and there's little appetite for such a move anytime soon. But the sands are shifting. It's been almost a century since the country was split to placate a largely Protestant, unionist majority in the north in the face of increasingly militant demands from the Catholic-dominated south for independence from Britain. By the turn of the 1970s, tension morphed into violence between sectarian groups that left more than 3,500 people dead. Sinn Fein emerged out of that morass.As the political wing of the IRA, the party started to contest elections in the 1980s as part of a strategy known as the "Armalite and the Ballot Box," mixing violence and elections in pursuit of a united Ireland.The IRA's tactics horrified many in the Irish Republic. Few openly discussed ending partition for fear of being seen to lend tacit support to the organization, and Sinn Fein struggled to gain much of an electoral foothold in the south, until recent years.'Sense of Bitterness'Then came the 2016 Brexit vote and the tortured negotiations over how to keep the Irish border free of checkpoints after the U.K. left the EU. That "reawakened a sense of Irish nationalism, particularly in areas close to the border," said Edward Burke, assistant professor in international relations at Nottingham University, who has examined the effect of Brexit on the British-Irish security relationship."Brexit showed the British government's indifference, if not occasional contempt, for concerns around the border question," he said. "That fuels a sense of bitterness."In Northern Ireland, after last year's general election, nationalist lawmakers now outnumber unionists. In the wake of the Sinn Fein surge, former Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern described a border referendum as "inevitable." Yet, huge hurdles exist before the issue could be put on the ballot."The premise which is being put forward is that a united Ireland could be around the corner," said Martin Mansergh, a former Irish senator who was a government adviser during the negotiation of the Good Friday Agreement peace deal in 1998. "Well, most people outside Sinn Fein don't accept that proposition."Uneasy RelationsUnder the peace deal, the U.K. government can only call a reunification referendum when a vote would likely succeed. As yet, there's no clear polling showing that there's enough support in Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein's emergence could even make a vote on the issue less likely in the near term. The British government is already contending with an independence movement in Scotland, and the prospect of the party steering the emotionally charged process while in government in Dublin "makes it more dangerous and politically unstable," said Nottingham University's Burke.In Dublin, too, there's nervousness about the financial and political consequences. The U.K. subsidizes Northern Ireland to the tune of about 10 billion pounds ($13 billion) a year -- about 17% of Ireland's tax take in 2019. Taking on that kind of obligation could capsize the nation's finances.Outside Sinn Fein, there's no huge enthusiasm for the project. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, which together control close to half to seats in parliament, urge caution.Unionist leaders in Northern Ireland are particularly wary and refused even to attend an Irish government forum on the implications of Brexit in 2016, let alone discuss unity. "Sinn Fein might be just a step too far for many, many unionists in Northern Ireland," said Mary C. Murphy, a lecturer in politics at University College Cork. "Sinn Fein is the hard edge of Irish nationalism."\--With assistance from Morwenna Coniam.To contact the reporter on this story: Dara Doyle in Dublin at ddoyle1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Chad Thomas at cthomas16@bloomberg.net, Chris ReiterFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Out-of-context photos are a powerful low-tech form of misinformation Posted: 14 Feb 2020 02:22 PM PST  When you think of visual misinformation, maybe you think of deepfakes – videos that appear real but have actually been created using powerful video editing algorithms. The creators edit celebrities into pornographic movies, and they can put words into the mouths of people who never said them. But the majority of visual misinformation that people are exposed to involves much simpler forms of deception. One common technique involves recycling legitimate old photographs and videos and presenting them as evidence of recent events.For example, Turning Point USA, a conservative group with over 1.5 million followers on Facebook, posted a photo of a ransacked grocery store with the caption "YUP! SocialismSucks." In reality, the empty supermarket shelves have nothing to do with socialism; the photo was taken in Japan after a major earthquake in 2011.In another instance, after a global warming protest in London's Hyde Park in 2019, photos began circulating as proof that the protesters had left the area covered in trash. In reality, some of the photos were from Mumbai, India, and others came from a completely different event in the park.I'm a cognitive psychologist who studies how people learn correct and incorrect information from the world around them. Psychological research demonstrates that these out-of-context photographs can be a particularly potent form of misinformation. And unlike deepfakes, they are incredibly simple to create. Out of context and incorrectOut-of-context photos are very common source of misinformation.In the day after the January Iranian attack on U.S. military bases in Iraq, reporter Jane Lytvynenko at Buzzfeed documented numerous instances of old photos or videos being presented as evidence of the attack on social media. These included photos from a 2017 military strike by Iran in Syria, video of Russian training exercises from 2014 and even footage from a video game. In fact, out of the 22 false rumors documented in the article, 12 involve this kind of out-of-context photos or video.This form of misinformation can be particularly dangerous because images are a powerful tool for swaying popular opinion and promoting false beliefs. Psychological research has shown that people are more likely to believe true and false trivia statements, such as "turtles are deaf," when they're presented alongside an image. In addition, people are more likely to claim they've previously seen freshly made-up headlines when they're accompanied by a photograph. Photos also increase the numbers of likes and shares that a post receives in a simulated social media environment, along with people's beliefs that the post is true. And pictures can alter what people remember from the news. In an experiment, one group of people read a news article about a hurricane accompanied by a photograph of a village after the storm. They were more likely to falsely remember that there were deaths and serious injuries compared to people who instead saw a photo of the village before the hurricane strike. This suggests that the false pictures of the Jan. 2020 Iranian attack may have affected people's memory for details of the event. Why they're effectiveThere are a number of reasons photographs likely increase your belief in statements.First, you're used to photographs being used for photojournalism and serving as proof that an event happened.Second, seeing a photograph can help you more quickly retrieve related information from memory. People tend to use this ease of retrieval as a signal that information is true.Photographs also make it more easy to imagine an event happening, which can make it feel more true. Finally, pictures simply capture your attention. A 2015 study by Adobe found that posts that included images received more than three times the Facebook interactions than posts with just text. Adding info so you know what you're seeingJournalists, researchers and technologists have begun working on this problem.Recently, the News Provenance Project, a collaboration between The New York Times and IBM, released a proof-of-concept strategy for how images could be labeled to include more information about their age, location where taken and original publisher. This simple check could help prevent old images from being used to support false information about recent events.In addition, social media companies such as Facebook, Reddit and Twitter could begin to label photographs with information about when they were first published on the platform.Until these kinds of solutions are implemented, though, readers are left on their own. One of the best techniques to protect yourself from misinformation, especially during a breaking news event, is to use a reverse image search. From the Google Chrome browser, it's as simple as right-clicking on a photograph and choosing "Search Google for image." You'll then see a list of all the other places that photograph has appeared online. As consumers and users of social media, we have a responsibility for ensuring that information we share is accurate and informative. By keeping an eye out for out-of-context photographs, you can help keep misinformation in check.[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation's newsletter. ]This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.Read more: * Why you stink at fact-checking * Malicious bots and trolls spread vaccine misinformation – now social media companies are fighting backLisa Fazio has received funding from Facebook and the Knight Foundation for her research on misinformation.
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| AIPAC distances itself from group behind anti-Sanders ads Posted: 14 Feb 2020 01:39 PM PST  The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is distancing itself from a political action committee that has run ads against Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. The political action arm of Democratic Majority for Israel, formed last year to bolster the party's support for Israel as its conservative government faces growing criticism from American progressives, ran a six-figure ad campaign in Iowa last month that questioned Sanders' health and his ability to defeat President Donald Trump in November.
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| ISIS is bigger now than when it first formed, and Trump's conflict with Iran could give it a boost Posted: 14 Feb 2020 01:26 PM PST  Trump's conflict with Iran has taken attention away from ISIS while the terror organization shows strong signs of resilience.
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| Trump pushed U.S. and Iran 'close to the brink,' Iran's Zarif tells NBC News Posted: 14 Feb 2020 01:25 PM PST  Zarif also says Iran can't decipher the black box from a Ukraine plane shot down by Iran without help, but won't hand it over to the U.S. or others.
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| Asteroid Risks And Opportunities Global Theme Of Asteroid Day Leading Up To 30 June, 2020 Posted: 14 Feb 2020 12:52 PM PST  Asteroid Foundation announces that Asteroid Day, the official United Nations' day of global awareness created to educate the world about opportunities and risks asteroids present, will celebrate worldwide leading up to 30 June with thousands of independent Asteroid Day events and in Luxembourg.
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| They Documented the Coronavirus Crisis in Wuhan. Then They Vanished. Posted: 14 Feb 2020 12:05 PM PST  HONG KONG -- The beige van squatted outside of a Wuhan hospital, its side and back doors ajar. Fang Bin, a local clothing salesman, peered inside as he walked past. He groaned: "So many dead." He counted five, six, seven, eight body bags. "This is too many."That moment, in a 40-minute video about the coronavirus outbreak that has devastated China, propelled Fang to internet fame. Then, less than two weeks later, he disappeared.Days earlier, another prominent video blogger in Wuhan, Chen Qiushi, had also gone missing. Chen's friends and family said they believed he had been forcibly quarantined.Before their disappearances, Fang and Chen had recorded dozens of videos from Wuhan, streaming unfiltered and often heartbreaking images from the center of the outbreak. Long lines outside hospitals. Feeble patients. Agonized relatives.The footage would have been striking anywhere. But it was especially so coming from inside China, where even mild criticism of the authorities is quickly scrubbed from the online record, and those responsible for it often punished.The appetite for the videos reflects, in part, the shortage of independent news sources in China, where professional newspapers are tightly controlled by the authorities. Earlier this month, the state propaganda department deployed hundreds of journalists to reshape the narrative of the outbreak.But the videos also reflected the growing call for free speech in China in recent weeks, as the coronavirus crisis has prompted criticism and introspection from unexpected corners across the country.Several professional news organizations have produced incisive reports on the outbreak. A revolt against government censorship broke out on Chinese social media last week after the death of Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who had tried to warn of the virus before officials had acknowledged an outbreak.Fang's and Chen's videos were another manifestation of the dissatisfaction that the government's handling of the outbreak has unleashed among ordinary Chinese citizens."When suddenly there's a crisis, they want to have access to a wider array of content and reporting," said Sarah Cook, who studies Chinese media at Freedom House, a pro-democracy research group based in the United States.The disappearance of the two men also underscores that the ruling Communist Party has no intention of loosening its grip on free speech.China's leader, Xi Jinping, said last month that officials needed to "strengthen the guidance of public opinion." While Chinese social media has overflowed with fear and grief, state propaganda outlets have emphasized Xi's steady hand, framed the fight against the outbreak as a form of patriotism and shared upbeat videos of medical workers dancing.More than 350 people across China have been punished for "spreading rumors" about the outbreak, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group.Chen, a fast-talking, fresh-faced lawyer from eastern China, was already well-known online before the outbreak. He traveled to Hong Kong during the pro-democracy protests last year and disputed the Chinese authorities' depiction of the demonstrators as a riotous mob.The Beijing authorities summoned him back to the mainland and deleted his social media accounts, Chen told his followers later.But when the coronavirus led officials to seal off Wuhan last month, he raced to the city of 11 million, citing his duty as a self-declared citizen journalist. "What sort of a journalist are you if you don't dare rush to the front line?" he said.In his videos, which drew millions of views on YouTube, Chen interviewed locals who had lost loved ones, filmed a woman breaking down as she waited for care and visited an exhibition center that had been converted into a quarantine center.He was blocked from WeChat, a major Chinese social media app, for spreading rumors. But he was adamant that he shared only what he himself had seen or heard.As time went on, Chen, usually energetic, began to show strain. "I am scared," he said on Jan. 30. "In front of me is the virus. Behind me is China's legal and administrative power."The authorities had contacted his parents to ask for his whereabouts, he said. He teared up suddenly. Then, his finger pointing at the camera, he blurted: "I'm not even scared of death. You think I'm scared of you, Communist Party?"On Feb. 6, Chen's friends lost contact with him. Xu Xiaodong, a prominent mixed martial arts practitioner and a friend of Chen, posted a video on Feb. 7 saying that Chen's parents had been told that their son had been quarantined, though he had not shown symptoms of illness.Unlike Chen, Fang, the clothing salesman, was fairly anonymous before the coronavirus outbreak. Much of his YouTube activity had involved producing enthusiastic videos about traditional Chinese clothing.But as the outbreak escalated, he began sharing videos of Wuhan's empty streets and crowded hospitals. They lacked the slickness of Chen's dispatches, which were often subtitled and tightly edited. But, as with Chen's videos, they showed a man growing increasingly desperate -- and defiant.On Feb. 2, Fang described how officials had confiscated his laptop and interrogated him about his footage of the body bags. On Feb. 4, he filmed a group of people outside his home, who said they were there to ask him questions. He turned them away, daring them to break down his door.In his final videos, Fang turned explicitly political in a way rarely heard inside China, at least in public. Filming from inside his home -- he said he was surrounded by plainclothes policemen -- he railed against "greed for power" and "tyranny."His last video, on Feb. 9, was just 12 seconds long. It featured a scroll of paper with the words, "All citizens resist, hand power back to the people."Despite the worldwide audience for Fang's and Chen's videos, it is hard to know how much reach they had domestically, said Fang Kecheng, an assistant professor of journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Both men relied heavily on YouTube and Twitter, which are blocked in China.But unlike the torrent of grief and anger online in response to the death of Li, the doctor, news of Chen's and Fang's disappearances has been swiftly stamped out on Chinese social media. Their names returned almost no results on Weibo, China's Twitter-like platform, on Friday.Still, Cook said the power of Chen's and Fang's videos, as well as the reporting done by professional journalists in Wuhan, should not be underestimated.She pointed to the Chinese authorities' decision this week to loosen diagnostic requirements for coronavirus cases, leading to a significant jump in reported infections, as evidence of their impact.That decision might not have come "if you didn't have all these people in Wuhan sending out reports that what you're hearing is an underestimate," Cook said. "These very courageous individuals can, in unusual circumstances, push back and force the state's hand."Fang, in one of his last videos, seemed struck by a similar sentiment. He thanked his viewers, who he said had been calling him nonstop to send support."A person, just an ordinary person, a silly person," he said of himself, "who lifted the lid for a second."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| A Growing Presence on the Farm: Robots Posted: 14 Feb 2020 12:02 PM PST  FARMER CITY, Ill. -- In a research field off Highway 54 last autumn, corn stalks shimmered in rows 40 feet deep. Girish Chowdhary, an agricultural engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, bent to place a small white robot at the edge of a row marked 103. The robot, named TerraSentia, resembled a souped up version of a lawn mower, with all-terrain wheels and a high-resolution camera on each side.In much the same way that self-driving cars "see" their surroundings, TerraSentia navigates a field by sending out thousands of laser pulses to scan its environment. A few clicks on a tablet were all that were needed to orient the robot at the start of the row before it took off, squeaking slightly as it drove over ruts in the field."It's going to measure the height of each plant," Chowdhary said.It would do that and more. The robot is designed to generate the most detailed portrait possible of a field, from the size and health of the plants to the number and quality of ears each corn plant will produce by the end of the season, so that agronomists can breed even better crops. In addition to plant height, TerraSentia can measure stem diameter, leaf-area index and "stand count" -- the number of live grain- or fruit-producing plants -- or all of those traits at once. And Chowdhary is working on adding even more traits, or phenotypes, to the list with the help of colleagues at EarthSense, a spinoff company that he created to manufacture more robots.Traditionally, plant breeders have measured these phenotypes by hand and used them to select plants with the very best characteristics for creating hybrids. The advent of DNA sequencing has helped, enabling breeders to isolate genes for some desirable traits, but it still takes a human to assess whether the genes isolated from the previous generation actually led to improvements in the next one.A blossoming of bots"The idea is that robots can automate the phenotyping process and make these measurements more reliable," Chowdhary said. In doing so, the TerraSentia and others like it can help optimize the yield of farms far beyond what humans alone have been able to accomplish.Automation has always been a big part of agriculture, from the first seed drills to modern combine harvesters. Farm equipment is now regularly outfitted with sensors that use machine learning and robotics to identify weeds and calculate the amount of herbicide that needs to sprayed, for instance, or to learn to detect and pick strawberries.Lately, smaller, more dexterous robots have emerged in droves. In 2014, the French company Naio released 10 prototypes of a robot named Oz that is just 3 feet long and weighs roughly 300 pounds. It assembles phenotypes of vegetable crops even as it gobbles up weeds. EcoRobotix, based in Switzerland, makes a solar-powered robot that rapidly identifies crops and weeds; the device resembles an end table on wheels. The household appliance-maker Bosch has also tested a robot called BoniRob for analyzing soil and plants."All of a sudden, people are starting to realize that data collection and analysis tools developed during the '90s technology boom can be applied to agriculture," said George Kantor, a senior systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, who is using his own research to develop tools for estimating crop yields.The TerraSentia is among the smallest of the farmbots available today. At 12.5 inches wide and roughly the same height, the 30-pound robot fits well between rows of various crops. It also focuses on gathering data from much earlier in the agricultural pipeline: the research plots where plant breeders select the varieties that ultimately make it to market.The data collected by the TerraSentia is changing breeding from a reactionary process into a more predictive one. Using the robot's advanced machine-learning skills, scientists can collate the influence of hundreds, even thousands, of factors on a plant's future traits, much like doctors utilize genetic tests to understand the likelihood of a patient developing breast cancer or Type 2 diabetes."Using phenotyping robots, we can identify the best-yielding plants before they even shed pollen," said Mike Gore, a plant biologist at Cornell University. He added that doing so can potentially cut in half the time needed to breed a new cultivar -- a plant variety produced by selective breeding -- from roughly eight years to just four.Sowing a nicheThe demands on agriculture are rising globally. The human population is expected to climb to 9.8 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100, according to the United Nations. To feed the world -- with less land, fewer resources and a changing climate -- farmers will need to augment their technological intelligence.The agricultural giants are interested. Corteva, which spun off from the merger of Dow Chemical and DuPont in 2016, has been testing the TerraSentia in fields across the United States."There's definitely a niche for this kind of robot," said Neil Hausmann, who oversees research and development at Corteva. "It provides standardized, objective data that we use to make a lot of our decisions. We use it in breeding and product advancement, in deciding which product is the best, which ones to move forward and which ones will have the right characteristics for growers in different parts of the country."Chowdhary and his colleagues hope that partnerships with big agribusinesses and academic institutions will help subsidize the robots for smallholder farmers. "Our goal is to eventually get the cost of the robots under $1,000," he said.Farmers don't need special expertise to operate the TerraSentia, either, Chowdhary said. The robot is almost fully autonomous. Growers with thousands of acres can have several units survey their crops, but a farmer in a developing country with only 5 acres could use one just as easily. The TerraSentia has already been tested in a wide variety of fields, including corn, soybean, sorghum, cotton, wheat, tomatoes, strawberries, citrus crops, apple orchards, almond farms and vineyards.But some experts question whether such robots will ever truly be targeted to small farms or be a sufficiently affordable option. "For the kind of agriculture that smallholders tend to engage in, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and parts of Latin America, there are a lot of barriers to the adoption of new technologies," said Kyle Murphy, a policy and agricultural development analyst at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT. He added that robots like the TerraSentia may be more likely to help smallholder farmers indirectly by promoting the development of better or more suitable crops.The road to improvementBefore the TerraSentia can advance crop breeding for a wide swath of farmers, it must perfect a few more skills. Occasionally, it trips over branches and debris, or its wheels get stuck in muddy soil, requiring the user to walk behind the rover and right its course as needed. "Hopefully, by next year we'll be able to train the TerraSentia so even more users won't have to be anywhere in the field," Chowdhary said.For the moment, the TerraSentia keeps a leisurely pace, less than 1 mph. This allows its cameras to capture slight changes in pixels to measure the plants' leaf-area index and recognize signs of disease. Chowdhary and his colleagues at EarthSense are hoping that advancements in camera technology will eventually add to the robot's speed.The team is also building a maintenance barn, where the TerraSentia can dock after a long day. There, its battery can be swapped with a fully charged one, and its wheels and sensors can be sprayed clean. But for now, a farmer simply dumps the robot in the back of a truck, takes it home and uploads its data to the cloud for analysis.The main office of EarthSense, in Urbana, Illinois, is full of early versions of robotic technology that didn't quite pan out. Initial prototypes of TerraSentia lacked a proper suspension system, so the robot jumped into the air and disrupted the video streams whenever researchers set it loose in a deeply rutted field. Another design kept melting from the heat of the robot's motors, until researchers switched plastics and added metal shielding.Those early, cracked chassis are now stacked on a shelf, like a museum display: a reminder of the need for improvement but also of the excitement that the robot has generated."A lot people who tried the early prototypes still came back to us, even after having robots that essentially broke on them all the time," Chowdhary said. "That's how badly they needed these things."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| China's Doctors, Fighting the Coronavirus, Beg for Masks Posted: 14 Feb 2020 12:02 PM PST  WUHAN, China -- In the hospital where Yu Yajie works, nurses, doctors and other medical professionals fighting the new coronavirus have also been fighting dire shortages. They have used tape to patch up battered protective masks, repeatedly reused goggles meant for one-time use and wrapped their shoes in plastic bags for lack of specialized coverings.Yu is now lying at home, feverish and fearful that she has been infected with the virus. She and other employees at the hospital said a lack of protective wear had left medical workers like her vulnerable in Wuhan, the central Chinese city at the heart of the epidemic that has engulfed this region."There are risks -- there simply aren't enough resources," Yu, an administrator at Wuhan Central Hospital, said in a brief telephone interview, adding that she was too weak to speak at length.Chinese medical workers at the forefront of the fight against the coronavirus epidemic are often becoming its victims, partly because of government missteps and logistical hurdles.After the virus emerged in Wuhan late last year, city leaders played down its risks, so doctors didn't take precautions. When the outbreak could no longer be ignored, officials imposed a lockdown on Wuhan that expanded across the surrounding Hubei province and then swaths of China. The vast travel cordons may have slowed the epidemic, but they have also slowed deliveries into Hubei, leaving medical workers short of protective wear.On Friday, the Chinese government for the first time disclosed the toll the outbreak was taking on hospital employees: 1,716 medical workers had contracted the virus, including 1,502 in Wuhan, and six had died.The strength -- or vulnerability -- of China's medical workers could shape how well the Communist Party weathers its worst political crisis in years. Li Wenliang, a doctor, died from the coronavirus last week after he had been punished by police for warning friends of the outbreak. His death ignited fury in China, where he was lionized as a medical martyr to officials who put political control before health."Of course I'm nervous about getting infected," said Cai Yi, head of the division of pain management at Wuhan Central Hospital, the same hospital where Li had worked. "But if we let ourselves be nervous, then what would happen to the people?"China's president and Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping, has praised hospital workers in Hubei as heroes and mobilized the country in a "people's war" against the coronavirus. But hospital workers in Wuhan said they often felt frustrated and alone.Some have scrambled to buy protective gear with their own money, begged from friends or relied on donations from other parts of China and abroad. Others have avoided eating and drinking for long stretches because going to the toilet meant discarding safety gowns that they would not be able to replace. Younger staff are assigned to the more critical cases, with the expectation that if they get sick they would be more likely to recover.Even as Chinese officials disclosed how many medical workers had been sickened and killed by the virus, key questions remain, experts said, including how the workers became infected and whether the rate of transmission was slowing. Such omissions could make it more difficult for other countries to assess and reduce their own risks."Clearly it would have been useful for other parts of China who are beginning to struggle with this outbreak as well for the rest of the world to have these types of data as soon as possible," said Malik Peiris, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong.Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said it is seeking more information about the time period and circumstances surrounding the infections of health care workers."This is a critical piece of information because health workers are the glue that holds the health system and outbreak response together," Tedros said.Doctors and other hospital workers have also come under pressure not to speak out. But many do, out of desperation."For the first time, I felt helpless confronting the system," Chang Le, a doctor at Hankou Hospital in Wuhan, said in an online message pleading for more medical masks. His plea was deleted by censors. "It's only today that I've grasped just how hard it is for us front line medical workers."The Chinese government has acknowledged problems in medical supplies for Hubei and repeatedly promised to accelerate deliveries.Strains in medical supplies may have been unavoidable as the virus spread at a pace that seemed to catch the government off guard. But the sweeping restrictions across China to contain the virus also slowed production and delivery of much-needed medical equipment, said doctors, factory managers and aid workers.Pervasive road checks and travel restrictions have held up shipments. Factories have faced difficulty increasing production because workers and raw materials have been blocked by lockdowns. Local governments have hoarded supplies. China's state-controlled Red Cross has dominated distribution of donations, creating a bottleneck that infuriated hospital employees.With medical supplies so scarce, many health care workers in Wuhan also said they had to accept substandard gowns, gloves and masks. Outside the Wuhan Fourth Hospital, medical workers waited near a truck as a delivery man in a full-body medical suit handed down boxes of masks and gowns. One hospital worker explained that the gowns were not of a high enough grade to withstand a viral contagion."But this is all we could get," she said. She declined to give her name. "We just have to accept what they send us."Life has become a scramble, many said: treating patients for much of the day, hunting for protective gear for the rest. The shortage has forced employees, like Chang, from the city's hospitals to appeal for donations of N95 masks -- a type of respirator best suited to guarding against viruses -- and other personal protective equipment on Chinese social media sites.Dr. Peng Zhiyong, 53, head of the department of critical care medicine at Wuhan University's Zhongnan Hospital, said in an interview this week that his team was running dangerously low on full-body medical suits and masks. "We can only get one break during the entire day," he said. "Just one, to drink water and eat. Because if you leave, you don't have any new suits to get back into."The first time authorities publicly acknowledged a problem with medical worker infections was Jan. 20, when an official expert revealed that 14 had been infected by a single patient. Until the government released details Friday, details were scattershot, emerging in studies and news reports.Peng and other researchers wrote that 40 health care professionals at his hospital had been infected in January, one-third of the cases included in a study published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.A 61-year-old doctor died nine days after contracting the virus from a patient, according to a report by the newspaper China Philanthropy Times.Another doctor had started to show symptoms early last month, before medical professionals knew to take extra precautions, according to the state-run Health Times newspaper. He died this past Monday.During the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, outbreak of 2002-03, infections of medical workers became a source of anger after the government suppressed information for months. These workers made up 15% of confirmed cases, according to an expert, Xu Dezhong, quoted by Xinhua, China's official news agency. About 1% of the medical workers infected with SARS died.The pleas from hospitals across Hubei have inspired an outpouring of donations from Chinese businesses, workers and charities. But the surge in demand for medical equipment has been hard for suppliers to meet, especially under the lockdown.Officials in the city of Xiantao in Hubei at first told some companies making protective medical clothing and masks that their factories could not reopen until Feb. 14. An outcry followed, and the city's officials relented Monday, saying that 73 of the companies could resume operations.The roads to Hubei are also full of hurdles. In theory, the government has created "green channels" to speed through trucks carrying masks, gowns and equipment. In practice, local officials and police can hold up journeys.One truck driver recounted being stopped 14 times for body temperature checks when he set out from Wuhan to pick up medical supplies, The Beijing News, a state-run Chinese newspaper, reported.Guo Fei, a 27-year-old entrepreneur who has been helping to buy and deliver supplies to hospitals in Xiaogan, a city in Hubei, said his team was held by police for around eight hours in a neighboring province, Jiangxi, when they went there to pick up an order of hygienic gloves. Police seemed to be acting for local officials who wanted to retain the supplies for their area, he said."I can accept government controls," he said, "but not local protectionism."Doctors also criticized bureaucracy for clogging up distribution. Many donations of medical supplies must be funneled through the Red Cross, and the organization -- understaffed and overwhelmed -- has struggled.In a furious social media post, Chang, the doctor at Hankou Hospital, described his experience trying to get 10,000 N95 respirator masks from the Red Cross. He was eventually given more than 9,000 masks of inferior quality, he said."I just wanted to cry," he said at the end of his video message.Premier Li Keqiang of China, who oversees a policy team for the crisis, said in early February that "unified national management" would help overcome equipment shortages.Just a week later, China's Politburo Standing Committee, the Communist Party's top most council, said problems with insufficient beds, medical personnel and other medical resources persisted across Hubei. According to official data from the province, deliveries of high-quality masks and other items have accelerated in recent days.The country's health facilities are not only facing an acute shortage of personal protective equipment -- they may also be using the wrong gear.Health workers in China generally have been following the WHO's guidelines to use "standard precautions," which include surgical masks, rather than more expensive N95 masks, to cover their mouths and noses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on the other hand, has instructed health care providers to use N95s, which block out much smaller particles than surgical masks do.Until conditions markedly improve, medical workers will still be forced to make hard adjustments. Cai, from Wuhan Central Hospital, said he has assigned younger medical workers to treat coronavirus patients to avoid endangering more seasoned employees. "To be honest, if older doctors get infected, their immune system is much weaker," he said.Peng of Zhongnan Hospital said more attention had to be paid to the fate of medical workers. "Because when the country doesn't have any more medical workers, then what hope is there left?"This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| Iran: US killing of general was a miscalculation Posted: 14 Feb 2020 11:03 AM PST  The U.S. killing of a top Iranian general was a miscalculation that has had the effect of bolstering support in Iraq for the removal of American troops, a longtime goal of Tehran, Iran's foreign minister said Friday. The U.S. killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a Jan. 3 drone strike as the commander of Iran's expeditionary Quds Force was leaving Baghdad's airport, saying he was planning attacks on Americans. Speaking to a group of reporters on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said "the U.S. miscalculated," noting that since the killing, thousands of Iraqis have taken to the streets to protest against the presence of foreign troops in the country.
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| Egypt confirms first case of new virus Posted: 14 Feb 2020 10:43 AM PST |
| US bans Sri Lanka army chief over war crimes Posted: 14 Feb 2020 10:28 AM PST  The United States said Friday it would refuse entry to Sri Lanka's army chief over what it called credible evidence of human rights violations in the 2009 finale to the civil war. Lieutenant General Shavendra Silva, whose appointment last year drew widespread international criticism, will be ineligible to visit the United States, as will his immediate family, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said. "The allegations of gross human rights violations against Shavendra Silva, documented by the United Nations and other organizations, are serious and credible," Pompeo said in a statement.
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| Official says US, Taliban reach Afghanistan truce agreement Posted: 14 Feb 2020 09:59 AM PST  A senior U.S. official said Friday the United States and the Taliban have reached a truce agreement that will take effect "very soon" and could lead to withdrawals of American troops from Afghanistan. The official said the agreement for a seven-day "reduction in violence" to be followed by the start of all-Afghan peace talks within 10 days is "very specific" and covers the entire country, including Afghan government forces. The official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Taliban had committed to a halt in roadside and suicide bombings as well as rocket attacks.
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| Go West: 2020 Democrats seek their fortunes in Nevada Posted: 14 Feb 2020 09:59 AM PST  As the Democratic presidential race hurtles toward Nevada, candidates in the still-crowded field are jumping into their first test in a racially diverse state with solid union muscle and shaky plans for a presidential caucus. Nevada has no obvious front-runner, though Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders heads into the contest on strong footing. The state has received only a sliver of the attention of the first two states on the primary calendar, Iowa and New Hampshire.
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| Amid coronavirus fears, a second wave of flu hits US kids Posted: 14 Feb 2020 09:48 AM PST  A second wave of flu is hitting the U.S., turning this into one of the nastiest seasons for children in a decade. The number of child deaths and the hospitalization rate for youngsters are the highest seen at this point in any season since the severe flu outbreak of 2009-10, health officials said Friday. Experts say it is potentially a bad time for an extended flu season, given concerns about the new coronavirus out of China, which can cause symptoms that can be difficult to distinguish from flu without testing.
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| US won't charge ex-FBI official McCabe, a Trump target Posted: 14 Feb 2020 09:21 AM PST  Federal prosecutors have declined to charge former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, closing an investigation into whether the longtime target of President Donald Trump's ire lied to federal officials about his involvement in a news media disclosure, McCabe's legal team said Friday. The decision, coming at the end of a tumultuous week between the Justice Department and the White House, is likely to further agitate a president who has loudly complained that federal prosecutors have pursued cases against his allies but not against his perceived political enemies.
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| Austria's Kurz: German conservatives right to shun far-right Posted: 14 Feb 2020 09:01 AM PST  Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who led a coalition with a far-right party in his first term, on Friday endorsed his German conservative counterparts' refusal to cooperate with the far-right Alternative for Germany. German politics has been thrown into turmoil by the election last week of a pro-business state governor with the support of both Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Union and Alternative for Germany, or AfD. Regional CDU lawmakers defied advance appeals from the party's national leader, who this week announced that she would step down, and broke what is widely regarded as a taboo in post-war German politics around cooperating with extremist parties.
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| Father Josh: A married Catholic priest in a celibate world Posted: 14 Feb 2020 08:08 AM PST  In a Catholic world where debates over clerical celibacy have flared from Brazil to the Vatican, Joshua Whitfield is that rarest of things: A married Catholic priest. The Roman Catholic church has demanded celibacy of its priests since the Middle Ages, calling it a "spiritual gift" that enables men to devote themselves fully to the church. On Wednesday, Pope Francis sidestepped the latest debate on celibacy, releasing an eagerly awaited document that avoided any mention of recommendations by Latin American bishops to consider ordaining married men in the Amazon, where believers can go months without seeing a priest.
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| Trump ignores AG Barr's request to stop tweeting about DOJ Posted: 14 Feb 2020 07:22 AM PST  Trump's Friday morning tweet came just hours after Attorney General William Barr said in a striking interview with ABC News that the president's tweets were making it "impossible" to do his job, especially following the department's bungled handling of the sentencing recommendation for Trump ally and confidant Roger Stone. Trump, in his tweet, also left open the possibility that he would ask Barr for something in a criminal matter in the future. While technically as the president, Trump has the right to compel the Justice Department to investigate as an executive branch agency.
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| Valentine's Day brings love and some worry in Iraq holy city Posted: 14 Feb 2020 07:17 AM PST  Hasanain al-Rufaye was busy in his flower shop wrapping bouquets, stuffing dolls into gift boxes and sprinkling petals into others labeled with "LOVE," while simultaneously fielding orders. Valentine's Days past could be fraught with tensions. In recent years, Valentine's Day in the southern city of Najaf has emerged as a battleground.
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| A $1.2 Trillion Valentine’s Day Proposal Sets Stage for EU Clash Posted: 14 Feb 2020 07:02 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- European Union governments were presented on Friday with a compromise over the bloc's budget for the next seven years, which is unlikely to satisfy any of the warring camps and sets the stage for a clash between poorer and richer member states on Feb. 20.EU Council President Charles Michel proposed that governments commit 1.095 trillion euros ($1.2 trillion) to a joint pot for the period between 2021 and 2027, which corresponds to 1.074% of the bloc's annual economic output. Michel will chair an emergency meeting of EU leaders on Thursday amid demands by richer governments for a lower cap. Poorer countries are likely to see the figure as insufficient.The budget is a cornerstone of EU policy that lets farmers compete against imports from the developing world, helps poorer states catch up with the rich ones and underpins projects that bind the union together. But agreeing on the amount of cash and how to spend it is a regular source of tension between the net contributors and those who get more than they put in.Just minutes after the compromise was circulated in Brussels, diplomats from both groups said they were unhappy about it and said that a deal at the upcoming summit is unlikely as a lot of work is still needed to bring positions closer together.Earlier on Friday, Spiegel magazine reported that German Chancellor Angela Merkel would be willing to increase her country's contribution to the EU budget to more than 1% of gross domestic product if the other member states agree to set new financial priorities. In return, Merkel wants the EU to spend less money on agriculture and instead invest in projects that benefit all countries, the magazine said without citing the source of the information.Conditionality ClauseMichel's compromise proposal ties disbursements to respect of the rule of law, a key request by several richer nations concerned about sliding democratic standards in countries such as Poland and Hungary. Any financial penalty, however, would need the support of a super-majority of member states, according to the draft seen by Bloomberg -- a clause that is likely to satisfy Warsaw and Budapest.The previous proposal was much stricter, requiring a super-majority of member states to block -- as opposed to approve -- penalties imposed by the EU's executive arm on rule-of-law grounds. The new wording on the rule of law is likely to draw sharp criticism from countries who argued for such conditionality and see the compromise as watered-down.A separate budget for euro-area member states is set at 12.9 billion euros, with an additional 5.5 billion euros earmarked for poorer members of the currency bloc and another 767 million euros to support reforms. The total amount -- to be spread among 19 eurozone countries over seven years -- falls far short of the ambitious plans that French President Emmanuel Macron had envisaged.(Updates with Merkel comments in the fourth paragraph)\--With assistance from Ian Wishart and Viktoria Dendrinou.To contact the reporter on this story: Nikos Chrysoloras in Brussels at nchrysoloras@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Chad Thomas at cthomas16@bloomberg.net, Richard Bravo, Nikos ChrysolorasFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Jewish leaders seek better policing of online hate speech Posted: 14 Feb 2020 06:40 AM PST  Jewish leaders called Friday for better policing of hate speech on social media platforms over concerns prompted by recent attacks that people on the margins of society are being incited online to violence. Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis and chief rabbi of Moscow, said online radicalization was giving rise not only to more anti-Semitic incidents, but also hate crimes directed at Muslims and others. "The strength and power given by social media to people on the margins of society is causing chaos," he said, citing attacks in New Zealand, Germany and the United States.
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| German president criticizes US stance at security conference Posted: 14 Feb 2020 06:34 AM PST  President Frank-Walter Steinmeier's comments were made in an opening speech at the Munich Security Conference, an international gathering of foreign and security policy leaders attended this year by the U.S. secretaries of state and defense. Steinmeier, a former foreign minister, is independent of Chancellor Angela Merkel's government but the German president is viewed as a moral authority even though his role is largely ceremonial. "We are getting further year by year from the aim of international cooperation to create a more peaceful world," he said.
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| Graft-Busting Goes Into Reverse in Central America Posted: 14 Feb 2020 06:22 AM PST |
| Graft-Busting Goes Into Reverse in Central America Posted: 14 Feb 2020 06:22 AM PST |
| Freezing weather compounds crisis for displaced in Syria Posted: 14 Feb 2020 06:10 AM PST  A military offensive on an opposition-controlled region of northwestern Syria has created one of the worst catastrophes for civilians in the country's long-running war, sending hundreds of thousands of people fleeing, many of them sleeping in open fields and under trees in freezing temperatures. The military campaign in Idlib province and the nearby Aleppo countryside has also killed hundreds of civilians, and a bitter winter has compounded the pain. The weather has contributed to at least 10 deaths, including four who suffered hypothermia, a family of four that died of suffocation in their tent and two who burned to death when their tent caught fire, according to Mohammed Hallaj, a coordinator for the area's Response Coordination Group.
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| Embattled CDU Leader in Thuringia to Quit to Bring Party ‘Peace’ Posted: 14 Feb 2020 06:03 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- A senior Christian Democrat lawmaker who played a key role in this month's shock vote in the eastern German state of Thuringia is stepping down from his post.Mike Mohring will soon give up his position as the leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU in Thuringia, he said Friday on Twitter. His local chapter triggered the demise of Merkel's embattled heir, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, by voting in line with the far-right Alternative for Germany, defying her orders."Our party needs peace and we have to find a common way," Mohring said in a series of posts on the social network. "I want to make my contribution to this and will not run again at the party congress."To contact the reporter on this story: Stefan Nicola in Berlin at snicola2@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Daniel Schaefer at dschaefer36@bloomberg.net, Andrew BlackmanFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Could Iran Take Down This Plane in a War with Trump? Posted: 14 Feb 2020 06:03 AM PST  Iran maintains numerous SAM systems imported from the United States and Europe half a century ago, but lacks access to spare parts and new missiles.
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| Rising in Polls, Bloomberg Will Soon Find Out If Support Is Real Posted: 14 Feb 2020 05:56 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Michael Bloomberg entered the Democratic presidential race late and tore up the traditional playbook on the theory that he would emerge as the centrist alternative if Joe Biden faltered and a progressive was surging.So far, that plan is holding up.Biden is down, Bernie Sanders is up and Bloomberg has emerged as a moderate alternative, riding slight gains in national polls and among black voters, a crucial constituency to win the Democratic nomination."You can doubt whether he can get from here to there, but so far where he's gotten to, he'd have to be pleased at this moment," said James Carville, a top strategist for Bill Clinton, who has complained that Democrats are moving too far left with their support of Sanders. "The theory of their case is playing out."(Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)The next few weeks will prove whether Bloomberg and his self-funded campaign can keep up that momentum or will face a harsher verdict as voters finally see his name on ballots starting on March 3, Super Tuesday.For Bloomberg to win, he would have to convince a party filled with young people, women and minorities that their best choice is a 78-year-old former Republican with ties to Wall Street right at the moment that he is facing increased scrutiny of his past record.This week opponents found old comments by Bloomberg defending his stop-and-frisk policy as New York mayor, seeming to blame the drop in redlining -- the practice of denying loans to minorities -- for the 2008 financial crisis, and likening Russian President Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea to the U.S. annexation of California in 1850.A debate that reveals a prickly Bloomberg under fire from other Democrats for past comments or for "buying" the election could cause him to stumble and lose momentum, said Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who wrote a book about the presidential nominating process.There's also no guarantee that support that falls away from other candidates naturally goes to Bloomberg, she said.And with Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar surging from the second tier with strong performances in Iowa and New Hampshire, voters looking for an alternative to Biden may find the younger candidates more attractive, said veteran Democratic strategist Joe Trippi.Bloomberg would need to win over voters looking for a candidate best positioned to beat Donald Trump -- the No. 1 factor for many Democrats -- at a time when many in the party are supporting Sanders, a candidate who in many ways seems to be the least electable."Money is not everything or historically it has not been everything. So there's no guarantee that this will work," Kamarck said. "If another moderate emerges, they could certainly give him a run for his money -- even given all the money he has."If Bloomberg is on stage for the next debate on Feb. 19 in Las Vegas, Nevada, it would be a bit of a mixed blessing for a candidate not known for his warmth as a campaigner who hasn't run for anything since his last mayoral re-election campaign in 2009. He needs just one more national poll showing him with at least 10% support to make the stage.Biden said Thursday that he expects Bloomberg's record will be examined, and hinted he's eager to address those issues on a debate stage with Bloomberg. He also suggested that Bloomberg's record needs more vetting by the media and by voters."It's amazing – every single thing I've said for the last 40 years has come up and I've answered them all," he said on ABC's "The View" when asked about Bloomberg. "We're just now getting to the place where we're looking at people's records."Bloomberg has said he's looking forward to debating his rivals and is preparing in the event he qualifies."I'd love to do it. Why would I not want to do it? I think I'd come out a big winner." Bloomberg said Feb. 3.Senior Adviser Howard Wolfson told staff in a conference call this week that their internal tracking data showed that Bloomberg had pulled "very narrowly" into a lead in Super Tuesday states. But the campaign has not shared specifics.Bloomberg decided against entering the race when most of the others did. He announced his candidacy Nov. 24 when he said he didn't think anyone in the field would beat Trump. He's skipping the four nominating contests in February and focusing on states voting in March when more than 60% of delegates needed for the nomination are awarded.Biden, who finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, insists he will recover with the diverse electorates in Nevada, which holds a caucus on Feb. 22, and South Carolina, whose primary is Feb. 29.But only Sanders, Bloomberg and fellow billionaire Tom Steyer will have the money to really compete across the Super Tuesday states, Trippi said. Buttigieg and Klobuchar have momentum, but not likely enough to allow them to compete in many states, he said.After Iowa, Bloomberg doubled his advertising and said he would increase his campaign staff.Bloomberg's campaign said it has also opened more than 150 offices with 2,000 staffers in 43 U.S. states and territories, plus 400 workers at its headquarters.Strategist Charlie Cook said under normal circumstances, he wouldn't expect Democrats to nominate a candidate like Bloomberg who is out of step with many in his party. But this is not a normal year, he said."He may not be warm and fuzzy, but Democrats are not looking to fall in love this time," Cook said of Bloomberg. "They're looking for someone who won't lose."\--With assistance from Ryan Teague Beckwith, Bill Allison and Jennifer Epstein.To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Niquette in Columbus at mniquette@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Craig GordonFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Yemen's Huthis drop 'tax' threat that jeopardised aid Posted: 14 Feb 2020 05:50 AM PST  Yemen's Huthi rebels said Friday they have dropped a threat to impose a tax on aid, in a significant step towards resolving a crisis that has jeopardised the world's biggest humanitarian operation. United Nations leaders and aid groups held crunch talks in Brussels on Thursday to consider scaling back or suspending the delivery of vital supplies to million of people at risk of starvation. Humanitarian agencies have complained of a deteriorating situation in the Huthi-controlled north, with aid workers facing arrest and intimidation, as well as obstruction and bureaucracy that hampered their work.
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| Well, impeachment didn't work – how else can Congress keep President Trump in check? Posted: 14 Feb 2020 05:44 AM PST  Donald Trump's removal of impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman from the White House and intervention in his friend Roger Stone's sentencing have prompted concern that the president's acquittal in his recent impeachment trial may embolden him to further expand executive power while avoiding accountability.But the conclusion of the trial in the Senate should by no means end congressional oversight of the executive branch. As a legal scholar and political scientist, I know that a healthy, stable democracy depends on people knowing what their government is doing so they can hold elected officials accountable through elections. Our constitutional system ensures transparency and accountability by authorizing legislative branch oversight of the executive.This is more important now in the aftermath of the first ever presidential impeachment trial to take place without witness testimony or a full investigation of the facts. Oversight is one way to ensure government transparency. The Constitution authorizes Congress to exercise oversight as part of the carefully crafted balance of powers among the three branches of government.Impeachment is an important check on presidential power. However, it is the most rarely used of the multiple tools Congress has to review, monitor and supervise the executive branch and its implementation of public policy.Congress can also exercise oversight through the power of the purse, which allows it to withhold or limit funding. And it can use its power to organize the executive branch, which it uses to create and abolish federal agencies.In addition, Congress makes laws, confirms officials and conducts investigations. Shining a lightThe tool Congress is most likely to use – investigations – is also the most likely to be affected by the impeachment trial. Investigations can be an effective mechanism for ensuring governmental transparency because they publicize what government agencies have, or have not, been doing. Both the House and the Senate have broad investigative powers implied in the Constitution that have been used to probe the executive branch and private sector over the years. Each chamber has wide powers in setting out the parameters and expected outcomes of an inquiry. Either the House or the Senate can direct staff to obtain documents and interview potential witnesses. These efforts usually culminate in committee hearings and a report made available to the public. Congressional investigations have effectively shined light on questionable executive branch conduct in the past. They exposed the Reagan administration's diversion of funds from sales of arms to Iran to aid the Nicaraguan Contras, George W. Bush administration's misrepresentation of intelligence to justify the Iraq War, and President Nixon's attempts to cover up the Watergate scandal.They have also revealed waste and abuse by federal agencies, including corruption related to the FBI's use of confidential informants and mismanagement by leadership in the Department of Justice's Environmental Crimes Program.In addition to fostering transparency and governmental accountability, investigations alert Congress to gaps in the law. For example, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations' inquiry into the 2008 financial crisis led to greater consumer protection and regulation of the banking sector in the Dodd-Frank Act. Existing oversight investigations into Trump's policies and him personally will continue. The House Subcommittee on Oversight and Reform has at least two pending investigations. One is looking into the Department of Education's policies on federal student loans, campus sexual harassment and protections for students at for-profit colleges. Another is investigating the Trump administration's decision to add a citizenship question to the census. Meanwhile, investigations into Trump's borrowing and banking practices prior to becoming president will continue. So will efforts to compel the Treasury Department to release Trump's tax returns. Impeachment's shadow?But as the impeachment trial shows, the president can stonewall efforts to hand over information. Currently, federal courts are hearing multiple court cases in which House committees have sought information from or about the president.More disputes between Congress and the executive branch are likely. Recently, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform threatened to subpoena Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos after she refused to attend a public hearing. And Attorney General William Barr agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about the Department of Justice's reversal of its sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone. Trump's acquittal may embolden him to persist in his arguments for absolute immunity and reassert them if, for example, DeVos is subpoenaed or Barr testifies. But ultimately, the courts may have more impact on future oversight than the impeachment trial as they have the power to order disclosure of information. Left in the darkCongress is not limited to investigations when it comes to holding the president accountable. Congress persists in its attempts to use its war powers to restrict Trump's actions in Iran. The House recently passed a measure requiring congressional pre-approval before any money was spent on attacking Iran and voted to repeal the 17-year-old authorization for the Iraq War, which the Trump Administration used to justify the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. And the Senate passed a resolution to limit President Trump's ability to use force against Iran.Congress has several other mechanisms for exercising oversight. It can defund, redirect, or even eliminate federal agencies and refuse to confirm presidential appointments. But it remains to be seen whether it will continue to pursue vigorous oversight. The impending election could distract or deter Democrats, who want to refocus their line of attack on Trump by disputing his record on the economy. Meanwhile Republicans, who fear electoral repercussions if they alienate the president's base, are unlikely to seek more oversight.Without oversight, people are left in the dark about what their government is doing. And a misled or uninformed public weakens the only other mechanism available to hold the executive branch accountable: elections.[You're smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation's authors and editors. You can get our highlights each weekend.]This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.Read more: * After the trial of Donald Trump, impeachment has lost some of its gravitas * This is how ancient Rome's republic died – a classicist sees troubling parallels at Trump's impeachment trialKirsten Carlson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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| Orphaned albino elephant recovers from poacher's snare Posted: 14 Feb 2020 05:41 AM PST  Khanysia did not see the trap set by a poacher in South Africa's Kruger National Park. It was days before the four-month-old albino elephant was found badly dehydrated but alive, and taken to the Hoedspruit Elephant Rehabilitation and Development center, three hours away. "She is a little albino elephant, so it is a bit different than your normal elephant just in caring, especially when the sun is kind of severe," said Adine Roode, founder of the center, in the heart of Kapama game reserve.
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| 2020 Election Is a Choice Between Democracy and Putinism Posted: 14 Feb 2020 05:30 AM PST  (Bloomberg Opinion) -- Some crimes take only minutes, even seconds, to execute. Now imagine how many seconds Donald Trump has between this moment and Election Day.For Democrats, too, November is far away. But what Trump does in the months ahead will be at least as important to the presidential contest as what Democrats do. There are plenty of crimes to come.The Democratic primary is messy. Results in New Hampshire were no more decisive than results in Iowa. As the multi-headed candidate beast makes its way to Nevada, South Carolina and beyond, uncertainty may linger. While Democrats seem favorably disposed toward most of their candidates, they seem unlikely to settle on one soon.Yet against the sordid backdrop of Trump's presidency, a long Democratic ordeal may not matter much in the end. By November the presidential campaign will come down to one overarching issue — and it won't be Bernie's revolution or Mayor Pete's crisis of belonging or Elizabeth Warren's big structural change.It will come down to rule of law. In November, Americans will decide whether they will fight for the foundation of liberal democracy and democratic capitalism or whether they will accede to Putinism.Rule of law has been good to the U.S. It has made free speech a reality. It has given confidence to entrepreneurs who launch businesses with the faith that their enterprises won't be stolen if they prove successful. It has, in the modern era until Trump became president, kept grifting within recognized boundaries and restricted outright graft mostly to the fringes of public life.True, many innocent, mostly poor, people have gone to jail. But explicitly political convictions are relatively rare. And the ideal of law as an agent of justice has often forced the legal system to correct itself.Trump has spent his presidency attacking rule of law from every imaginable direction. Grift has sprawled, with his children pocketing favors from dictators, the federal government pouring money into Trump's pockets, and Trump exercising foreign policy for his exclusive benefit. Graft is in the open as lobbyists, spies and sundry money-grubbers pay the president while seeking favors from him at his for-profit clubs. And the law is increasingly deployed, under Attorney General William Barr's reign, to protect the president and his friends while threatening his enemies — especially law enforcement agents, such as James Comey and Andrew McCabe, who sought to expose the president's wrongdoing.Yes, the presidential election will decide other issues, such as access to health care in America. But everything that Democrats hope to do now or in the future, whether defined as democratic socialism or regulated capitalism, depends on rules-based, lawful and uncorrupted systems of government and justice.Such systems are what Trump seeks to destroy.He has a stunning array of help. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable continue to fund the party that is undermining rule of law. Tens of millions of Americans appear to be under the impression that abuses will be limited to people they dislike. In the GOP there is a growing pro-Putin faction. And aside from Senator Mitt Romney and newly independent Representative Justin Amash, the congressional GOP leads cheers for corruption and lawlessness. If Trump is re-elected, Republicans will grant his every desire, with the blessing of a debased and Trumpified Department of Justice.Regardless of how the Democratic primary evolves, or who the nominee is, Putinism with Trumpian characteristics will be the most important issue in November. If Trump wins, it's true you can forget about Medicare, whether for some or all. More important, however, you can forget about the rule of law. It won't just be battered, as it is today. It will be gone. Only the thugs won't miss it.(Disclaimer: Michael Bloomberg is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)To contact the author of this story: Francis Wilkinson at fwilkinson1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Tracy Walsh at twalsh67@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S. domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was executive editor of the Week. He was previously a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| 2020 Election Is a Choice Between Democracy and Putinism Posted: 14 Feb 2020 05:30 AM PST  (Bloomberg Opinion) -- Some crimes take only minutes, even seconds, to execute. Now imagine how many seconds Donald Trump has between this moment and Election Day.For Democrats, too, November is far away. But what Trump does in the months ahead will be at least as important to the presidential contest as what Democrats do. There are plenty of crimes to come.The Democratic primary is messy. Results in New Hampshire were no more decisive than results in Iowa. As the multi-headed candidate beast makes its way to Nevada, South Carolina and beyond, uncertainty may linger. While Democrats seem favorably disposed toward most of their candidates, they seem unlikely to settle on one soon.Yet against the sordid backdrop of Trump's presidency, a long Democratic ordeal may not matter much in the end. By November the presidential campaign will come down to one overarching issue — and it won't be Bernie's revolution or Mayor Pete's crisis of belonging or Elizabeth Warren's big structural change.It will come down to rule of law. In November, Americans will decide whether they will fight for the foundation of liberal democracy and democratic capitalism or whether they will accede to Putinism.Rule of law has been good to the U.S. It has made free speech a reality. It has given confidence to entrepreneurs who launch businesses with the faith that their enterprises won't be stolen if they prove successful. It has, in the modern era until Trump became president, kept grifting within recognized boundaries and restricted outright graft mostly to the fringes of public life.True, many innocent, mostly poor, people have gone to jail. But explicitly political convictions are relatively rare. And the ideal of law as an agent of justice has often forced the legal system to correct itself.Trump has spent his presidency attacking rule of law from every imaginable direction. Grift has sprawled, with his children pocketing favors from dictators, the federal government pouring money into Trump's pockets, and Trump exercising foreign policy for his exclusive benefit. Graft is in the open as lobbyists, spies and sundry money-grubbers pay the president while seeking favors from him at his for-profit clubs. And the law is increasingly deployed, under Attorney General William Barr's reign, to protect the president and his friends while threatening his enemies — especially law enforcement agents, such as James Comey and Andrew McCabe, who sought to expose the president's wrongdoing.Yes, the presidential election will decide other issues, such as access to health care in America. But everything that Democrats hope to do now or in the future, whether defined as democratic socialism or regulated capitalism, depends on rules-based, lawful and uncorrupted systems of government and justice.Such systems are what Trump seeks to destroy.He has a stunning array of help. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable continue to fund the party that is undermining rule of law. Tens of millions of Americans appear to be under the impression that abuses will be limited to people they dislike. In the GOP there is a growing pro-Putin faction. And aside from Senator Mitt Romney and newly independent Representative Justin Amash, the congressional GOP leads cheers for corruption and lawlessness. If Trump is re-elected, Republicans will grant his every desire, with the blessing of a debased and Trumpified Department of Justice.Regardless of how the Democratic primary evolves, or who the nominee is, Putinism with Trumpian characteristics will be the most important issue in November. If Trump wins, it's true you can forget about Medicare, whether for some or all. More important, however, you can forget about the rule of law. It won't just be battered, as it is today. It will be gone. Only the thugs won't miss it.(Disclaimer: Michael Bloomberg is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)To contact the author of this story: Francis Wilkinson at fwilkinson1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Tracy Walsh at twalsh67@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S. domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was executive editor of the Week. He was previously a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| How Months of Miscalculation Led the U.S. and Iran to the Brink of War Posted: 14 Feb 2020 04:59 AM PST  WASHINGTON -- In late September, a plane carrying senior Iranian officials touched down in Abu Dhabi, the gleaming capital of the United Arab Emirates.The Middle East had witnessed a summer of violence, and a meeting with the Iranians was part of a quiet strategy by Emirati leaders to defuse the tension. The small but powerful Persian Gulf nation wanted to broker a separate peace -- avoiding violence that could shatter its decades-long effort to present itself as a modern, stable oasis in a volatile region.But the meeting set off alarms inside the White House, where officials learned about it only after reading reports from U.S. spy agencies. The Emirati government, a stalwart ally that had long pushed for a hawkish American approach toward Iran, was in secret talks with Iranian officials. National Security Council officials met to discuss the implications: A united front against Iran -- carefully built by the Trump administration over more than two years -- seemed to be crumbling.The episode came in the midst of a nine-month period that shook up the United States' already combustible relationship with Iran -- beginning with the Trump administration's escalation of sanctions and culminating with the two powers in a direct military confrontation on the brink of wider and bloodier conflict.The chess match continues, with little evidence that either has a sense of the other's next move, but with the prospect of an American president newly constrained on Iran policy. The Senate passed a resolution Thursday requiring congressional sign-off for future military actions against Iran -- a move President Donald Trump has said he would veto.What happened over the past several months, based on interviews with officials from the United States, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries as well as outside analysts, is a story of miscalculations by both sides and of violence that spilled into nations across the Middle East -- from Syria to Saudi Arabia to Iraq.The Trump administration escalated a campaign of financial warfare -- so-called maximum pressure -- to suffocate Iran's economy in hopes of forcing its government back into negotiations over its nuclear program and its military operations throughout the region. Instead, Iran lashed out with brazen attacks on oil installations in the Saudi Arabian desert, tankers docked off the Emirati coast and American forces in Iraq.The decision by Trump to authorize the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iran's most powerful military commander, might ultimately deter future Iranian aggression. Yet a recent CIA analysis concluded that Iran, while struggling to continue funding its military activities under American sanctions, appears no closer to entering direct talks over its nuclear program, according to U.S. officials familiar with the assessment.Israeli intelligence officials have also determined that the escalating tensions have made Iran only more determined to gain a nuclear weapon, and to take concrete steps toward amassing enough nuclear fuel to build one.U.S. officials continue to defend the "maximum pressure" campaign, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did last month during a combative interview with NPR. He said that the United States had "raised the cost" for Iran's military actions around the Middle East."This is beginning to place real choices in front of the Iranian regime," he said.But the fissures in the American-led anti-Iran coalition, exemplified by the secretive Emirati-Iranian talks, have dimmed a vision of a realignment in the Middle East long advocated not only by Trump, but also by the leaders of the Arab states in the Persian Gulf and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. In that vision, Israel and certain Sunni countries gain supremacy over Iran, the world's largest Shiite-majority state.Iranian officials also miscalculated, believing that after a series of escalatory military operations -- the tanker attacks, the shooting down of an American drone, the Saudi oil strikes, rocket attacks on bases in Iraq by Iranian-backed militias -- Trump would refrain from responding consequentially. Instead, he made the startling decision to authorize the killing of Soleimani."There were dueling perceptions both in Tehran and in Washington that the other side was a paper tiger," said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.A String of AttacksThe explosions happened in rapid succession.In the predawn darkness on May 12, mines placed by naval operatives suspected to be members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard blew holes in four oil tankers anchored in the Gulf of Oman, not far from the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which 20% of the world's oil flows.Some Persian Gulf nations were hesitant to publicly finger Iran in the attacks, and Tehran denied playing a role, but the United States, Israel and European nations eventually said they had evidence proving Iran's culpability.The attacks came just days after the Trump administration implemented draconian new economic sanctions, which prohibited the five largest buyers of Iranian oil from future imports. When he announced the new sanctions, Pompeo said the goal was to choke off Iran's oil exports. "We're going to zero across the board," he said.Some inside the Trump administration pushed for even more punishing sanctions, even as the president's national security adviser at the time, John Bolton, remained firm in his view that nothing short of "regime change" in Iran was an adequate outcome for security in the region.Not long after, Israel's Mossad intelligence service delivered a stark warning to officials in Washington about potential attacks by Iran or Shia militia groups it supports, both on U.S. forces in Iraq and against Arab states hostile to Iran, namely Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. The aim of the latter attacks, according to one person familiar with the Israeli intelligence, was to hike up the price of oil to exert pressure on the United States to ease its economic sanctions on Iran.According to analysts and Western intelligence officials, Iran's attacks carried an unmistakable message: If we cannot export oil, then we will not let you do it either. Iran's response to the Trump administration's "maximum pressure" campaign was to enact a pressure campaign of its own.Another prong of the military campaign was an escalation of cyberattacks against the United States and its allies in the Middle East. Beginning in May -- just after the United States announced the new oil sanctions -- and continuing through the end of the year, Iran cyberattacks on American entities doubled in comparison to earlier in 2019, according to Lotem Finkelstein, head of cyberthreat intelligence at Check Point, an Israeli cybersecurity company.Iran had devised a strategy with two tracks, though it publicly acknowledged only one: a diplomatic outreach led by its foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who had gained world attention as the lead Iranian negotiator in the 2015 nuclear deal. The second, led by Soleimani, used Iranian and proxy forces to foment violence across the Middle East and try to exact a cost on supporters of the Trump administration's Iran policy.The two men met once a week for breakfast to coordinate, Zarif said during a recent interview with Iranian state television. Before and after every trip to a capital of strategic importance like Moscow, Zarif said, he would meet with the general -- first to get advice, and later to debrief him."Iran's policy toward U.S. has been a combination of hardball military policy" mixed with a strategy of "softball through the foreign ministry," said Ahmad Dastmalchian, an Iranian diplomat who was the country's ambassador to Lebanon and Jordan.Other attacks followed, including a missile fired by Revolutionary Guard air force units downing an American spy drone patrolling the Strait of Hormuz in June. Trump's advisers pushed him to order a retaliatory strike which he did -- but then reversed himself just hours before the strike.Despite the attacks, Trump administration officials still believed that the sanctions were constraining the Iranian economy strongly enough to force a change of thinking in Tehran.Plummeting oil revenues appeared to be prompting Iranian leaders to dial back funding for military operations around the Middle East. Many inside the White House believed that the economic pain was so great that Iran would, by year's end, be willing to negotiate over its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.Some close U.S. allies disagreed, including the British government, which maintains an embassy in Iran and has long held that economic pressure alone would not bring Iran into negotiations over its nuclear program. Several times last year, Britain's ambassador to Iran, Robert Macaire -- a public critic of the American policy -- traveled to Washington to meet with U.S. intelligence officials and diplomats to give an assessment of the views of leaders in Iran.Even some former Trump administration officials said that the White House's position betrayed a misunderstanding of Iran's leadership -- born from a paucity of intelligence and direct contact with Tehran."We don't have a lot of knowledge of Iran's decision-making," said Kirsten Fontenrose, who worked on Middle East policy at the National Security Council at the beginning of the Trump administration. "The expectation that they would come to the table was not what people who actually talk to Iranians were saying."A Secret MeetingIn August, Eshaq Jahangiri, first vice president of Iran, gathered advisers in his office to discuss a new strategy for dealing with the Americans, according to one person who attended the meeting and another with knowledge of it.If Trump was seeking a more comprehensive deal than the nuclear agreement he left in May 2018, the Iranians concluded, they might consider entering discussions as long as Iran extracted a firm guarantee of sanctions relief from the United States.But even as Iran weighed renewed diplomacy, its military provocations persisted. In mid-September, Iran hit Saudi Arabia, a powerful U.S. ally, in a coordinated attack of drones and cruise missiles that set two oil-processing facilities ablaze. Both Iran's decision to attack Saudi Arabia -- and the military capabilities on display during the attack -- surprised Western intelligence officials."It's talking about talks but then stepping back and then putting pressures at different levels," said Ariane M. Tabatabai, an Iran expert at RAND Corp. "They are trying to get the U.S. to see the high cost of pressuring Iran, both economically and militarily."In the Saudi attacks, many experts saw a careful Iranian strategy of escalation based on a conclusion that Trump had no stomach for potentially deepening U.S. involvement in the Middle East.The strikes briefly sent oil prices skyrocketing, and once again Iran hard-liners in the White House urged Trump to retaliate militarily. Instead, he chose to deploy thousands more troops to Saudi Arabia and bolster the U.S. military presence elsewhere in the region.The moves were part of a pressure campaign "to deprive the Iranian regime of the money that it needs to destabilize the Middle East" and to "bring Iran to the negotiating table," Brian H. Hook, the State Department's special representative for Iran, said at the time.Wary AlliesSuch rhetoric was losing its impact in the Middle East, where several allies came to question the Trump administration's commitment to defending them against Iran.The Emiratis began their secret talks with Iran after concluding they could play a unique role lowering temperatures and that they had little confidence in the Trump administration's approach to Iran, according to American and other Western officials. They were also dismayed by the firing of Bolton, a longtime Iran hawk.The Saudis also explored a diplomatic breakthrough with Iran using Iraqi and Pakistani intermediaries. According to several Iranian diplomats and members of the Revolutionary Guard, Soleimani played a behind-the-scenes role setting up discussions in both gulf kingdoms.The anti-Iran alliance that the Trump administration had tried to build was faltering.During a trip to Israel in October, Pompeo went by motorcade to a fortress in north Tel Aviv, the headquarters of the Mossad. There, he received a briefing from Yossi Cohen, the Mossad chief, about the Israeli assessment of the Revolutionary Guard's recent military activities.Cohen said that Iran was achieving its primary goal: to break up the anti-Iran alliance, according to one intelligence official in the Middle East.By then, Israel had spent months escalating strikes against Iranian forces and their proxies throughout the Middle East and trying to keep the Trump administration from going wobbly on Iran.In an interview with The Times last year, Netanyahu defended the Israeli operations and expressed no regrets for pressing Trump to back the Israeli escalation."If it is possible to recruit the most powerful country in the world onto our side, why should we fight alone?" he asked. "If I can harness a world power against Iran -- which aims to annihilate us -- why not?"The Brink of WarThe new year brought a confrontational exchange on Twitter -- Trump's favorite way to communicate.Violence in Iraq had been building for days, leading to the death of an American contractor and fears that Iran-backed protesters would storm the U.S. embassy compound in Baghdad."Iran will be held fully responsible for lives lost, or damage incurred, at any of our facilities. They will pay a very BIG PRICE! This is not a Warning, it is a Threat," Trump tweeted on New Year's Eve. "Happy New Year!"Hours into 2020, Iran's supreme leader responded with a taunt."You can't do anything," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wrote on his English-language Twitter account. He added: "If you were logical -- which you're not -- you'd see that your crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan … have made nations hate you."Two days later, Soleimani was dead -- killed in a drone strike ordered by Trump.Nine months of escalation, misjudgments and heated rhetoric had led to the president's decision, which stunned both his own military advisers as well as top officials in Tehran."It was clear that Iran didn't expect Trump to retaliate in any meaningful way," said Sadjadpour, the Iran expert.The killing prompted Iran to take a step it had long avoided: a direct and overt strike against the U.S. military. Four days after Soleimani was killed, Iran fired more than a dozen missiles at two American bases in Iraq. More than 100 U.S. soldiers were injured, but no one was killed, and Trump and his advisers believed the United States had gotten the better of the exchange.In the weeks since, they have insisted that their strategy is working, that the steady squeeze of "maximum pressure" will force Iran to yield to their demands. But, at least publicly, Iran remains defiant and wedded to brinkmanship tactics over its nuclear program and regional military influence.Hours after Iranian missiles landed on the U.S. bases in Iraq, Khamenei vowed that "harsh revenge" was just beginning. "The United States' corruptive presence in the region must come to an end," he told a large crowd in Iran's holy city of Qom, adding that Iran would not rest until it accomplished that goal.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| Belarus Leader Decries Russia’s ‘Hints’ at Merger for Cheap Oil Posted: 14 Feb 2020 04:29 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko said Russia's leaders are "hinting" that he should accept a merger of their two countries in return for getting cheaper oil and gas, amid a squeeze on energy supplies from his giant neighbor.Lukashenko said he's certain neither Belarusians nor Russians "want to go this way," during a visit to factory workers on Friday, according to his website. He described talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi last week as "peculiar."While Putin has unveiled planned constitutional changes that may allow him to keep power in Russia beyond the end of his presidential term in 2024, when he must step down, he has also pressed Lukashenko to agree to a merger between the former Soviet republics, according to two Kremlin officials. Absorbing Belarus would offer Putin another option to sidestep term limits by becoming the head of a new "Union State."Amid a dispute over the price of Russian oil supplies to Belarus, Lukashenko said Putin questioned why he would seek crude from other countries if it was more expensive. "So that we don't have to be on our knees on Dec. 31 every year," Lukashenko said he replied, in reference to annual contracts negotiated with Russia.The Kremlin didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Lukashenko, who's ruled since 1994 and faces re-election later this year, signed a treaty with Russia under then President Boris Yeltsin to establish a "Union State" in principle in 1999, but has resisted recent Kremlin pressure to bind the countries more tightly together.Russia, which used to meet almost all Belarus's oil and gas requirements, cut supplies of crude by three-fourths in January over the pricing dispute. Officials in Moscow warned flows may stop completely if Belarus doesn't agree to market prices. Lukashenko has retaliated by declaring he wants to reduce dependency on Russian oil to about 40% and get the rest from other countries.While there's "nothing wrong" with working on greater integration with Russia, this will cover "purely economic" questions and won't involve the creation of any supranational bodies, Lukashenko told the factory workers.To contact the reporter on this story: Aliaksandr Kudrytski in Minsk, Belarus at akudrytski@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Balazs Penz at bpenz@bloomberg.net, Tony Halpin, Michael WinfreyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| An Unrestrained Trump May End Up Trapping Himself Posted: 14 Feb 2020 04:12 AM PST  (Bloomberg Opinion) -- Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe.I'm not sure what the conventional wisdom is about the current health of Donald Trump's presidency, but at least one version we're hearing is a triumphant one: He has defeated impeachment and is now stronger than ever.Well … maybe not.Oh, Trump is certainly trying with some success to take revenge on various real or perceived enemies. And he absolutely has a go-ahead from Republicans in Congress to politicize the Justice Department. The odds seem higher than ever that the Democratic presidential nominee, whoever that turns out to be, will be the subject of a formal investigation, however little evidence of wrongdoing there might be. But beyond that?Just this week, the Senate gave Trump another black eye: Eight Republicans joined Democrats to support a war-powers resolution that would constrain the president's options in Iran. Granted, that number is far short of what would be needed to override an expected veto. But it's hardly a show of support: Eight senators who just last week voted to acquit him in the impeachment trial now voted to reduce his ability to do whatever he wants in foreign policy — something that Trump's lawyers argued was an inherent power of the presidency. Meanwhile, it appears likely that yet another Trump nominee for the Federal Reserve Board is going to be defeated. Judy Shelton is facing more than a little skepticism from Senate Republicans in addition to solid opposition from Democrats. The president has had a series of Fed nominees or potential nominees spiked because they couldn't get confirmed. Yes, President Barack Obama had Fed nominees defeated, but only by Republican filibuster. (This was back when executive-branch nominations could be defeated that way; now they only need a simple majority to be confirmed.)And in the House, the Democratic majority has only just begun to exploit Trump's unending scandals, such as how much his private businesses have been pocketing in taxpayer money. It's not just Congress that presents a challenge to the president. He's so worried about people in the executive branch — within the White House — who are out to get him that he's systematically undermining his own ability to do his job.Consider foreign policy and national security. Trump was already stripping his National Security Council of expert staff. Now, as Justin Sink of Bloomberg News reports, he's considering banning the standard practice of having professional staff monitor his calls to foreign leaders.This is an excellent plan if he's planning to commit crimes in future calls, and not a terrible idea if he embarrasses himself and doesn't want it to be known within the government or leaked to the media. But if he wants to use those calls to actually govern, it's a disaster.Not only will it make it easy for foreign nations to invent their own version of what was said without fear of being corrected; it will also make it almost impossible for the U.S. to follow through on Trump's decisions. After all, in many cases the people who have to carry out the policies won't know what commitments the president has made. He may think that he speaks and things happen all by themselves, but that's not how the U.S. government works.There are numerous signs already of failed policy coordination, most recently the possibility that the Philippines may scrap the Philippines-U.S. Visiting Forces Agreement. The more Trump rids himself of staff he doesn't trust and tries to govern with a handful of family and loyalists, the more the government will be an unwieldy, uncoordinated mess of fiefs run by those skilled at flattering Trump and then going off and doing what they want. So far this hasn't derailed the economy or provoked any foreign-policy disasters significant enough to affect public opinion. But it's no way to run a government — or to maintain a functioning democracy.1\. Norm Ornstein on waiting to get the election count right. Good to see several people pounding on this point publicly. Now, we need more folks on TV to repeat it.2\. Seth Masket has his latest survey of Democratic early-state activists.3\. Lauren Wright at the Monkey Cage on celebrity politicians.4\. Megan Messerly on how Nevada Democrats are planning to report caucus results. Remember: The national Democratic Party changed a lot about how to conduct caucuses for this election cycle; that's why Iowa Democrats came up with new procedures, which, of course, failed miserably. We'll see how Nevada Democrats do — they haven't always smoothly administered these caucuses. 5\. Dean Baker on Pete Buttigieg and the deficit.6\. Alex Ward on Buttigieg and foreign-policy questions.7\. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Conor Sen is bullish on economic growth.Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close.To contact the author of this story: Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Katy Roberts at kroberts29@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| An Unrestrained Trump May End Up Trapping Himself Posted: 14 Feb 2020 04:12 AM PST  (Bloomberg Opinion) -- Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe.I'm not sure what the conventional wisdom is about the current health of Donald Trump's presidency, but at least one version we're hearing is a triumphant one: He has defeated impeachment and is now stronger than ever.Well … maybe not.Oh, Trump is certainly trying with some success to take revenge on various real or perceived enemies. And he absolutely has a go-ahead from Republicans in Congress to politicize the Justice Department. The odds seem higher than ever that the Democratic presidential nominee, whoever that turns out to be, will be the subject of a formal investigation, however little evidence of wrongdoing there might be. But beyond that?Just this week, the Senate gave Trump another black eye: Eight Republicans joined Democrats to support a war-powers resolution that would constrain the president's options in Iran. Granted, that number is far short of what would be needed to override an expected veto. But it's hardly a show of support: Eight senators who just last week voted to acquit him in the impeachment trial now voted to reduce his ability to do whatever he wants in foreign policy — something that Trump's lawyers argued was an inherent power of the presidency. Meanwhile, it appears likely that yet another Trump nominee for the Federal Reserve Board is going to be defeated. Judy Shelton is facing more than a little skepticism from Senate Republicans in addition to solid opposition from Democrats. The president has had a series of Fed nominees or potential nominees spiked because they couldn't get confirmed. Yes, President Barack Obama had Fed nominees defeated, but only by Republican filibuster. (This was back when executive-branch nominations could be defeated that way; now they only need a simple majority to be confirmed.)And in the House, the Democratic majority has only just begun to exploit Trump's unending scandals, such as how much his private businesses have been pocketing in taxpayer money. It's not just Congress that presents a challenge to the president. He's so worried about people in the executive branch — within the White House — who are out to get him that he's systematically undermining his own ability to do his job.Consider foreign policy and national security. Trump was already stripping his National Security Council of expert staff. Now, as Justin Sink of Bloomberg News reports, he's considering banning the standard practice of having professional staff monitor his calls to foreign leaders.This is an excellent plan if he's planning to commit crimes in future calls, and not a terrible idea if he embarrasses himself and doesn't want it to be known within the government or leaked to the media. But if he wants to use those calls to actually govern, it's a disaster.Not only will it make it easy for foreign nations to invent their own version of what was said without fear of being corrected; it will also make it almost impossible for the U.S. to follow through on Trump's decisions. After all, in many cases the people who have to carry out the policies won't know what commitments the president has made. He may think that he speaks and things happen all by themselves, but that's not how the U.S. government works.There are numerous signs already of failed policy coordination, most recently the possibility that the Philippines may scrap the Philippines-U.S. Visiting Forces Agreement. The more Trump rids himself of staff he doesn't trust and tries to govern with a handful of family and loyalists, the more the government will be an unwieldy, uncoordinated mess of fiefs run by those skilled at flattering Trump and then going off and doing what they want. So far this hasn't derailed the economy or provoked any foreign-policy disasters significant enough to affect public opinion. But it's no way to run a government — or to maintain a functioning democracy.1\. Norm Ornstein on waiting to get the election count right. Good to see several people pounding on this point publicly. Now, we need more folks on TV to repeat it.2\. Seth Masket has his latest survey of Democratic early-state activists.3\. Lauren Wright at the Monkey Cage on celebrity politicians.4\. Megan Messerly on how Nevada Democrats are planning to report caucus results. Remember: The national Democratic Party changed a lot about how to conduct caucuses for this election cycle; that's why Iowa Democrats came up with new procedures, which, of course, failed miserably. We'll see how Nevada Democrats do — they haven't always smoothly administered these caucuses. 5\. Dean Baker on Pete Buttigieg and the deficit.6\. Alex Ward on Buttigieg and foreign-policy questions.7\. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Conor Sen is bullish on economic growth.Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close.To contact the author of this story: Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Katy Roberts at kroberts29@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| 10 things you need to know today: February 14, 2020 Posted: 14 Feb 2020 03:49 AM PST |
| EU officials push for bloc to enforce Libya arms embargo Posted: 14 Feb 2020 03:33 AM PST  European Union officials are seeking support from member states to have naval ships enforce the U.N. arms embargo against Libya, according to a confidential memo obtained Friday by The Associated Press. The memo, circulated ahead of a meeting Monday of EU foreign ministers on Libya, urges member states to agree on whether gathering information on, and upholding, the U.N. embargo should become the naval mission's "core task." Monitoring people smuggling would be relegated to a "supporting task" carried out from the air.
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| An Old Problem Festers as the U.S. Pulls Back Posted: 14 Feb 2020 03:04 AM PST |
| Cleaning Up the Wreckage Left by Innovation Posted: 14 Feb 2020 02:45 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Sign up to receive the Green Daily newsletter in your inbox every weekday.Humanity has a long history of engaging—both knowingly and unknowingly—in self-destructive behavior. The history of trying to undo said behavior is decidedly shorter. And while we're pretty good at inventing new ways to simultaneously advance and endanger our society and ourselves (chemicals, the combustion engine, nuclear fission), we're not particularly good at reversing the downsides of technology. On the small end of this sliding scale, we find our modern food system. It is, of course, an unalloyed good that most on the planet have enough to eat thanks to the wonders of modern agriculture and food processing. The unintended consequence, however, has been a soaring level of environmentally devastating food waste. A full 10% of developed nations' greenhouse gas emissions are derived from its disposal, according to the United Nations. A new analysis this week found the problem may be more than twice as bad as previously thought. And you may find it shocking that the wealthy are the worst offenders. On the big end of our aforementioned scale, we come to BP, which first began drilling for oil in Persia in 1901. Today, it is Europe's second-biggest oil company. The energy giant admitted this week that it's expanding the team working on carbon capture and storage projects as part of its goal to zero out net greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.Now, this isn't the first time that the oil company largely responsible for the Deepwater Horizon disaster a decade ago (which was 30% bigger than advertised) has made a splashy announcement about green technology aimed at washing away its carbon sins. In the early 2000s, BP lost as much as $50 million studying the feasibility of the world's first natural-gas power plant with carbon capture technology. Moreover, critics point out the London-based company has no intention of shutting down its oil and gas business, and has been vague about the scale and timeline of its investment in renewables.The U.K. government, meanwhile, keeps advancing its deadline for banning the sale of new fossil-fueled vehicles. Prime Minister Boris Johnson's government this week announced a new goal of 2032, three years earlier than the target he announced last week, and eight years earlier than the goal set two-and-a-half years ago. No such exuberance exists in the U.S., though. Ambitious climate plans there remain firmly in unicorns-and-rainbows territory. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy barely finished presenting his party's plan (one trillion trees!) to stave off the worst of climate change before coming under withering fire from the Big Oil lobby and others on the right. The blowback illustrates the challenges facing those trying to slowly shed the Republican Party's central role in promoting climate science denial. And finally, a longtime employee of Yale's endowment fund, Dean Takahashi, moved into a new role at the university, heading up its Carbon Containment Lab. The long-term goal is to offset at least 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions by the end of the century. For now, it aims to create solutions capable of balancing out more than 10 million tons of emissions by 2030.Josh Petri writes the Week in Green newsletter recapping the best reads and key news in climate change and green solutions. Sign up to receive the Green Daily newsletter in your inbox every weekday.To contact the author of this story: Josh Petri in Portland at jpetri4@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: David Rovella at drovella@bloomberg.netFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| U.S.-China Bickering Threatens to Hobble World’s Virus Fight Posted: 14 Feb 2020 02:33 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. says China won't let its health workers help fight the virus. Beijing says they're welcome to come. The World Health Organization says nothing has been decided.The confusion surrounding a planned WHO mission of experts to China shows how lingering mistrust between the world's biggest economies could hamper efforts to combat a pathogen quickly spreading across the globe. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the world's preeminent public health agency, has often played a key role coordinating and funding global efforts to contain past outbreaks, including of Ebola.U.S. epidemiologists, virologists and medical doctors could assist China in measuring the effectiveness of their response, said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. They could also help prepare for a broader outbreak, provide technical advice, improve the bio-safety of Chinese labs and even improve treatment protocols and medicine combinations for patients, he said."My hunch is that all of this is politicized," said Huang, who also directs the Seton Hall University's Center for Global Health Studies. "That's made pure public health cooperation difficult."The failure to cooperate on a pressing global health issue that has killed almost 1,400 people and infected more than 64,000 others shows just how much the relationship between the U.S. and China has deteriorated over the past few years. While President Donald Trump often touts his relationship with China's Xi Jinping, the strategic competition between the countries has only deepened since they signed their "phase-one" trade deal last month.The U.S. this week charged members of China's military over one of the biggest data thefts in American history. On Thursday, Washington also increased the charges against Huawei Technologies Co. Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou -- who is currently fighting extradition to the U.S. from Canada -- to include racketeering conspiracy charges, which claim the Chinese company engaged in decades of intellectual property theft.Members of the Trump administration also hit out at China over its response to the virus, even while the president himself has offered praise."We thought there was going to be more transparency, but we're a bit disappointed," Larry Kudlow, director of the U.S. National Economic Council, said Thursday. "We're more than willing to work with the UN WHO on this, and they won't let us. I don't know what their motives are. I do know that apparently more and more people are suffering over there, and that's not a good thing."On Friday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said China had worked with the international community in "an open, transparent and highly responsible manner." He added that Chinese officials have been in regular contact with American counterparts to exchange information about the epidemic."We welcome foreign experts' participation in the China-WHO Joint Mission, including those from the U.S.," Geng said in Beijing.Still, the WHO said Friday that nothing had been resolved. "We are still awaiting confirmation on the composition and program for the joint mission of experts," Teena Nery, a representative for the WHO in China, said by email.After initial praise for China's efforts, evidence that provincial officials censored early reports of the outbreak -- allowing the virus to spread unchecked -- fueled criticism around the world, as well as within China. Authorities in Beijing are now also trying to balance containment measures with efforts to maintain political stability and minimize the economic fallout."Beijing remains deeply concerned about the potential for foreign criticism of its containment efforts," said Carl Minzner, a law professor at Fordham Law School, who wrote a recent book on how China's authoritarianism is undermining its rise. "They fear that negative analysis by authoritative foreign experts -- whether justified or not -- might feed domestic popular distrust or discontent with how Chinese officials have handled the epidemic."Part of the worry is economic: Vice Premier Hu Chunhua has "called for all-out efforts to ensure stable employment amid the novel coronavirus outbreak," according to the official Xinhua News Agency. Chinese officials have repeatedly slammed the U.S. for imposing harsh travel restrictions, while praising traditional developing country allies in Asia -- including Pakistan and Cambodia -- for expressing support, keeping flights routes open and even declining to evacuate their citizens.Battling against the global coronavirus outbreak together could've been an opportunity to forge closer U.S.-China ties, according to Susan Shirk, a former deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for U.S. policy toward China, Taiwan and Mongolia."The epidemic is a lost opportunity to rebuild some goodwill between China and America and other countries," said Shirk, who is now a professor and chair of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego.She said China hasn't provided any channel or outlet for people around the world who want to help, and has undermined foreign and local non-government organizations that typically provide relief during disasters. But she added that part of the blame lies with U.S. political leaders, who have not expressed much sympathy for Chinese citizens "enduring a terrifying experience in quarantines."In the U.S., the Congressional Executive Commission on China -- a group headed by U.S. lawmakers to monitor human rights -- has blasted Beijing for silencing Li Wenliang, the doctor who raised the alarm about the virus and later died from it, and for detaining citizen journalists documenting the response."Transparency is key to addressing a global health crisis, not censorship or repression," the commission said on Twitter.'Totally Wrong'Secretary of State Michael Pompeo further irked China with a speech this week in which he warned U.S. state governors that their pension funds could be investing in companies that help China's military and repress Muslims in its western Xinjiang region, which China's ambassador to the U.S., Cui Tiankai, said was "totally wrong.""Competition with China is happening inside of your state and it affects our capacity to perform America's vital national-security functions," Pompeo told the governors. "Competition with China is not just a federal issue."On Friday, China's Geng spent about as much time criticizing Pompeo as addressing concerns about the virus response."A sound and stable bilateral relationship serves the interests of both countries and is what the international community wants to see," Geng said. "We advise certain people in the U.S. step out of their Cold War mindset and ideological stereotypes, stop discrediting China's political system, and stop undermining bilateral exchange and cooperation."To contact the reporters on this story: Iain Marlow in Hong Kong at imarlow1@bloomberg.net;Dandan Li in Beijing at dli395@bloomberg.net;Peter Martin in Beijing at pmartin138@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Scott at bscott66@bloomberg.net, Daniel Ten KateFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Canada: protests go mainstream as support for Wet'suwet'en pipeline fight widens Posted: 14 Feb 2020 02:30 AM PST  Protesters have blocked railways and barricaded ports in wave of dissent – and the pressure on Justin Trudeau has increasedAs armed Canadian police officers advanced through snow towards their camp, the group of Indigenous women was absorbed in a drumming ceremony to honour the spirits of missing and murdered Indigenous women across the country.Rows of red dresses hung from a fishing line slung across the road, and from pine and spruce trees in the surrounding forest – each one a memorial to the thousands of Indigenous women killed or disappeared in recent years..A pair of helicopters buzzed overhead, but on the ground, the women's voices and drums drowned out the officers as they warned them to leave or face arrest."We remained in ceremony – even as the tactical officers surrounded us and began pick off individuals," said one of the women, Dr Karla Tait.Set amid dense evergreen forests near the bank of the Wedzin Kwah, or Morice River, the remote cabins at Unist'ot'en camp have become a place of healing for Indigenous youth, who take lessons on trapping and traditional medicines.But the camp in north-western British Columbia is also the last line of defence in the Wet'suwet'en nation's fight against a controversial natural gas pipeline.The long-simmering conflict came to a head this week, as Canada's national police force deployed helicopters, armed officers and dogs to enforce a court injunction and clear Indigenous activists who had been blocking work crews from the route of the C$6.6bn (US$5bn) Coastal GasLink project.Twenty-eight people were arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, including three Wet'suwet'en matriarchs – Tait, Freda Huson and Brenda Michell."I felt overwhelmed with sadness, and pain over the fact that we were being removed from our territory," said Tait, remembering the moment she was escorted past the fluttering red dresses towards a police vehicle. She made sure to touch each dress as she left.But she and the other "land defenders" remain defiant. Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs, who oversee 22,000 sq km of territory, have stubbornly opposed the project and remain locked in a battle with the courts, the pipeline company – and the government of Justin Trudeau.And in recent days, their fight has been taken up by other groups across the country.For more than a week, members of the Tyendinaga Mohawk have blocked freight and commuter rail traffic in Ontario, in support of the Wet'suwet'en. Elsewhere, protestors have blocked roads, barricaded access to shipping ports and occupied the offices of elected officials in a wave of dissent.Late on Thursday, Canadian National Railway, the country's largest freight operator, said it was shutting down its operations in the east of the country due to the continuing blockade, and warned of temporary layoffs. Soon after, Via Rail, which operates much of Canada's passenger rail service, said its entire service would be suspended until further notice.Climate action groups have also taken up the cause of the Wet'suwet'en, seeing their fight as part of a broader one against resource extraction projects in the country.The demonstrations have piled pressure on Canada's prime minister, who has vaunted his commitment to diversity and tackling the deep-rooted inequities facing Indigenous peoples."Trudeau has gone to the United Nations to shed tears about the history of Canada's relationship with indigenous people," said Tait. "And on the other hand, he's essentially authorizing the use of force against our unarmed people for upholding our rights."This week, Trudeau has expressed his support for peaceful protest – but also criticised the rail blockades.Amid pleas from business leaders for a swift end to the crisis, other politicians have been even more outspoken in their condemnation.In Alberta – a province whose economy relies on oil and gas – the conservative premier, Jason Kenney, has warned that the current unrest is a "dress rehearsal" for future opposition to fossil-fuel based projects."This is not about Indigenous people. It's not about carbon emissions. It's about a hard-left ideology that is, frankly, opposed to the entire modern industrial economy," said Kenney. "It's about time that our police services demonstrated that this is a country that respects the rule of law."And after protesters barricaded the entrance to British Columbia's legislative assembly, the province's premier, John Horgan, called the demonstrations a "shift from traditional protest – to something quite different".Molly Wickham, a spokesperson for the Wet'suwet'en who also has the hereditary name Sleydo', agreed. "Indigenous people see what's happening to us and see what's happening to our territory and our pristine waters – and to our people on the ground, having semiautomatic weapons aimed at us," she said. "People are responding to that in appropriate ways."More than just a row over a pipeline, the Wet'suwet'en protests also reflect Canada's often fraught relationship with First Nations."Ever since colonization, the aim has been to dispossess our people from our lands. To impoverish us. To assimilate us. To eliminate us," said Tait. "We know that our self-determination, our sovereignty, our very identity, is based on us having control over our lands."In November, British Columbia became the first province in Canada to pass legislation promising to uphold the United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples. But such promises seem empty in the wake of recent police actions, said Wickham."There were tactical teams walking around with semi-automatic weapons in my territory. Industry was allowed to come and go freely. White settlers were allowed to come and go freely," she said. "But if you were a Wet'suwet'en person, you are not permitted on your own territory."The Wet'suwet'en nation have lived on their territories in what is now British Columbia for thousands of years. They have never signed treaties or sold their land to Canada. With a population of about 5,000, the Wet'suwet'en are composed of five clans (Gilseyhu, Likhts'amisyu, Laksilyu, Tsayu and Gidimt'en), which are further divided into 13 house groups, each with its own distinct territories. The Unist'ot'en, the People of the Headwaters, belong to the Gilseyhu clan. Hereditary chiefs are responsible for the health and sustainability of their house group territories, and Wet'suwet'en law prohibits trespass on the territory of other the house groups. Wet'suwet'en people have retained their legal traditions and continue to govern themselves through the Bahtlats (feast hall), where decisions are ratified and clan business is conducted.Controversy around the Coastal GasLink project has been compounded by questions over who has the right to speak for the Wet'suwet'en.Coastal GasLink has signed benefit agreements with the 20 elected First Nations councils along the route, including five of the six elected band councils in the Wet'suwet'en nation. But Wet'suwet'en chiefs say the authority of these groups only applies to reservations – not traditional territory where the pipeline is proposed.Unlike in much of Canada – where relationships between First Nations and the state are governed by treaties – few aboriginal nations in British Columbia ever signed deals with colonial authorities, meaning the federal government still operates in a vacuum of authority on their lands.In 1997, the Wet'suwet'en and Gitxsan nations won a landmark case in which the supreme court ruled that their aboriginal title had not been extinguished when Canada became a country. But the case did not establish the boundaries of that title and the court suggested subsequent cases would be needed to settle the issue."Aboriginal title claims of the Wet'suwet'en people have yet to be resolved either by negotiation or litigation," wrote the justice Marguerite Church in her decision to grant Coastal GasLink the injunction. "While Wet'suwet'en customary laws clearly exist on their own independent footing, they are not recognized as being an effectual part of Canadian law."Legal experts believe the Wet'suwet'en would probably have a strong case to establish title to the land in the courts, enabling them to better fight the project. But such cases can take decades to adjudicate and cost millions of dollars, a prospect Tait called "insufficient" given the pipeline's imminent construction.For those on the front lines of the fight, the nationwide support is a vindication that the long-simmering frustrations over land claims and a fraught Indigenous relationship with the state are facing a long-overdue reckoning."This is far from over," said Wickham. "We've had day after day of invasion and we're still here. We're still not giving up."
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| Scottish Conservatives Name Jackson Carlaw as New Leader Posted: 14 Feb 2020 02:23 AM PST |
| Xi’s Pick to Save China From Virus Is Loyalist Who Lured Tesla Posted: 14 Feb 2020 02:19 AM PST |
| Merkel Challenger Assails the Chancellor With Her Own Words Posted: 14 Feb 2020 02:11 AM PST |
| Leader of Merkel's conservatives to propose a successor on Feb. 24 - report Posted: 14 Feb 2020 02:08 AM PST |
| Putin’s Constitution Dream Team Has Those Who Never Read It Posted: 14 Feb 2020 01:59 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- When President Vladimir Putin announced he planned to amend Russia's constitution he named a 75-strong working group to consider the changes including prominent figures such as two-time Olympic pole-vault champion Yelena Isinbayeva.On Thursday, Isanbayeva told Putin that she was grateful for the opportunity to take part because it meant "I read the Constitution of our country" during a meeting of the group to discuss progress in the work."There was no reason or need to do this earlier," she continued. "I understand now that this is a very important book."The proposals, which may be put to a national public vote as early as April, are widely seen as an effort by the Kremlin to allow Putin to continue to rule beyond the end of his presidential term in 2024, when he must stand down under the existing law. It's the first major revision of the Russia's post-Soviet constitution since 1993.Lawmakers in the lower house of parliament gave initial approval to the amendments last month, days after Putin first unveiled them in a Jan. 15 speech.The measures would curb the powers of the next president, extend the authority of parliament and strengthen the State Council, now a largely ceremonial body that Putin heads, offering him a potential platform to retain control.Putin appointed the working group on the day he announced the plans, saying consideration of the changes "requires the highest legal and judicial skills."While "ideally" people should read the constitution, most Russians haven't done so and "they don't need to," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call Friday. "What's important for citizens is that their fundamental rights are guaranteed."Suggestions offered by the advisory team at Thursday's meeting included asserting Russia's status as a victor in World War II, declaring that families are an alliance only between a man and a woman, and stating that Russia will always be a nuclear power.One contributor wanted to ensure the constitution never permits the head of state to give away any territory, such as the Kuril Islands that are at the center of a decades-long dispute with Japan.Putin said he liked the ideas. Still, he didn't commit to include any of them in his new constitution.(Updates with Kremlin comment in eighth paragraph.)To contact the reporter on this story: Ilya Arkhipov in Moscow at iarkhipov@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Gregory L. White at gwhite64@bloomberg.net, Tony Halpin, Torrey ClarkFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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