Home » Entries posted by admin (Page 105)
The diplomat at the center of the impeachment inquiry looped in the secretary of state at key moments as American officials pushed for investigations sought by President Trump.
November 20, 2019Read More
Louisville running back Javian Hawkins went from two carries a season ago to setting freshman records for the Cardinals. His stats show how.
November 20, 2019Read More
1.Former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker testified Tuesday in a House impeachment hearing that he should have recognized that President Trump’s push for Ukraine to investigate energy company Burisma was connected to former Vice President Joe Biden, whose son was employed there. Republicans have suggested Biden pushed to fire a do-nothing Ukrainian prosecutor to protect Burisma, but Volker, whose testimony Republicans requested, called the allegation “self-serving and non-credible.” Former White House national security official Tim Morrison testified that he didn’t object to a call in which President Trump pushed Ukraine’s president to investigate Democrats, but that he later heard U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland tell a Ukrainian official Kyiv had to publicly promise the investigations in order to get U.S. military aid released. [The Washington Post, ABC News] 2.Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a national security aide, and Jennifer Williams, a top foreign policy aide to Vice President Mike Pence, testified Tuesday in the House impeachment inquiry, describing their firsthand knowledge of President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine and his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Both Williams and Vindman were on the call. Williams said she found the call “unusual” and “inappropriate” and that no national security officials supported withholding Ukrainian aid. Vindman testified Trump was supposed to address Ukrainian corruption with Zelensky on the call but didn’t, undermining Trump’s argument that his request for investigations into his political opponents was about rooting out corruption. [The New York Times, The Washington Post] 3.The House passed a short-term bill intended to keep the federal government funded and prevent a government shutdown when currently allocated money runs out on Thursday. The stopgap measure passed 231-192. It seeks to extend funding through Dec. 20, which means Congress will face another deadline just ahead of the winter holidays. The proposal now must be passed by the Senate and signed by President Trump to keep some government offices from being temporarily closed. “With a government shutdown deadline just days away, this continuing resolution is necessary to keep government open as we work towards completing the appropriations process,” House Appropriations Chairwoman Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. [CNN] 4.Two guards at a federal jail in New York City were arrested Tuesday in connection with Jeffrey Epstein’s death. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan charged Tova Noel and Michael Thomas each with five counts of false entries in official records and one count of conspiracy. The guards, who were supposed to make regular checks on inmates, allegedly slept and browsed the internet in the hours before Epstein hanged himself in New York City’s Metropolitan Correctional Center. Epstein, a wealthy financier, was in prison after decades of allegations of sexual abuse involving minors. Video footage apparently shows no one entering the area overnight. Both Noel and Thomas have allegedly admitted to skipping their rounds. If convicted, they could be sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. [Politico, CNBC] 5.Swedish prosecutors announced Tuesday that they were dropping their investigation into a 2010 rape allegation against Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. Assange dodged extradition to Sweden for seven years by taking refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London. Ecuador kicked him out in April, and he was then sentenced to 50 weeks in jail for skipping bail in the U.K. Swedish investigators suspended the case in 2017 because they couldn’t question Assange, but reopened it this year after he was evicted from Ecuador’s embassy. The Swedish Prosecution Authority said the decision to drop the investigation stemmed from the amount of time that has passed since the alleged crime. The decision marked a victory for Assange, who also faces possible extradition to the U.S. on espionage charges related to leaked secret documents. [BBC News, The Washington Post] 6.At least 106 protesters are feared dead in Iran, after the government gave security forces authority to use firearms, water cannons, tear gas, and batons against demonstrators, Amnesty International reports. The protests began on Nov. 15 in response to the government’s decision to raise fuel prices. Amnesty International says it has reviewed video and spoken with eyewitnesses and activists who say Iranian security forces are using excessive and lethal force against protesters. The demonstrations have largely been peaceful, although there are reports some fires have been set at banks and seminaries. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has called the protesters “villains.” [Amnesty International] 7.White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller fed attacks on then-presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to Breitbart News, according to a batch of emails between Miller and a then-Breitbart editor released Tuesday by Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch publication. Breitbart then followed Miller’s direction and criticized Rubio. The far-right populist website also parroted Miller’s hardline language in anti-immigration stories, even following Miller’s advice on where to put the stories on Breitbart’s homepage. In an earlier group of emails provided to Hatewatch by the same former editor, Katie McHugh, Miller pushed anti-immigrant stories and cited sources tied to white nationalists. [The Washington Post, Southern Poverty Law Center] 8.Time reported Tuesday that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has told three prominent Republicans recently that he plans to step down to run for a U.S. Senate seat in Kansas. A State Department spokesman told Axios: “I just spoke to the secretary and he said this story is completely false.” Time said its sources said Pompeo had planned to leave the Trump administration in the spring, but that he might move up the timetable because the House impeachment inquiry and other recent events threaten to strain his relationship with President Trump. The impeachment inquiry also threatens to damage Pompeo politically. He faces mounting criticism for failing to defend veteran diplomats and U.S. policy from politicization. Trump loyalists blame him for damning testimony by diplomats in the impeachment inquiry. [Time, Axios] 9.Public hearings in the House impeachment inquiry, now in their second week, continue Wednesday with testimony from Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union and a key figure in the Trump administration’s alleged effort to pressure Ukraine’s government to investigate Democrats. Impeachment investigators are expected to question Sondland about inconsistencies in closed-door testimony he gave last month, when he failed to mention a July 26 phone call he had with Trump. David Holmes, an American Embassy official in Kyiv, told lawmakers that during lunch at a Kyiv restaurant he overheard a call Sondland had on his cellphone with Trump in which he heard Trump ask whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “going to do the investigation,” and Sondland replied, “He’s going to do it.” [The New York Times] 10.The Senate on Tuesday passed a bill supporting Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters and warning China against violently cracking down on the protests in the Chinese-run, semi-autonomous city. China responded by repeating its threat to retaliate if the bill becomes law, although it did not provide details on how it would respond. China accused senators of meddling in Hong Kong’s affairs. China’s vice minister of foreign affairs in Beijing summoned a U.S. embassy official to express China’s objections. The fresh tensions between the world’s two largest economies came as they try to hammer out a deal to end their trade war. The Senate vote weighed down global stocks. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index dropped by as much as 1.1 percent on Wednesday after gaining 2.9 percent over two days. [Bloomberg]More stories from theweek.com The potential lie that could actually destroy Trump The coming death of just about every rock legend Everyone will eventually turn on Trump. Even Steve Doocy.
November 20, 2019Read More
Kentucky football star Lynn Bowden thinks he could help the basketball program while the Evansville loss might help the football team.
November 20, 2019Read More
Playoffs will resume Friday with four third-round games in all six of Kentucky’s classes
November 20, 2019Read More
There are eight local high school football playoff games Friday. The Prep Rally team picks who they think will advance to the state semifinals.
November 20, 2019Read More
Israeli kingmaker Avigdor Lieberman has refused to endorse a candidate for prime minister, practically pushing the nation toward a new, third election this year. Lieberman’s comments on Wednesday were widely anticipated as a midnight deadline closes i…
November 20, 2019Read More
An employee of the UK consulate in Hong Kong who was tortured by Chinese authorities will be granted a visa to rebuild his life in Britain, it emerged on Wednesday as senior Conservatives urged Boris Johnson to extend similar freedoms to all UK nationals in the former colony. The move came as China on Wednesday warned London that continuing to interfere in Hong Kong and China’s internal affairs “will only harm the UK’s interests.” “China firmly objects to the UK’s comments related to the matter, and we express strong indignation toward the UK’s false actions and comments on all issues relating to Hong Kong,” Geng Shuang, a foreign ministry spokesman, said in Beijing. Earlier Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, summoned the Chinese ambassador in the UK “to express our outrage at the brutal and disgraceful treatment” of Simon Cheng, who was chained, beaten, and forced into stress positions during a two-week long ordeal. Ambassador Liu Xiaoming told the British government that Mr Cheng was detained for disturbing public order and that he “confessed all his offences and all his lawful rights and interests were guaranteed in accordance with the law,” according to an embassy spokesperson. Simon Cheng demonstrates the different poses state security officers forced him to stand in for hours each day as part of the torture he endured while being interrogated Credit: OLIVIER MARCENY Mr Cheng, a 29-year-old employee at the British consulate in Hong Kong, disappeared in China in August and was subjected to torture and interrogation sessions lasting as long as 48 hours, he told the Telegraph. One officer terrorised him by saying he’d never be released. Another called him an enemy of the state Chinese state security agents threatened to charge him with subversion and espionage if he failed to admit that the UK government was supporting the protests by providing funding and materials. While Chinese police say he confessed to soliciting prostitution, punishable by 15 days’ detention, Mr Cheng continues to deny the charge, telling the Telegraph he was coerced into saying so as a condition of release. Amnesty International said Mr Cheng’s account of his treatment fits with a “documented pattern of torture” in Chinese jails. Hong Kong | China’s allegations of a foreign ‘black hand’ Mr Cheng is one of about 800,000 Hong Kong residents who are British Nationals Overseas, which entitles them to a passport and consular assistance but no right to abode in the UK. The government has so far resisted calls to grant full citizenship to BNO passport holders, a move that would further aggravate China. The slogan “Never Surrender” is spray painted on a wall in the besieged Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) in Hong Kong, China Credit: REUTERS But in a joint letter to the prime minister on Wednesday Tory grandees including Lord Tebbit described the limited rights that come with BNO status as a “historic error” and said Britain had a responsibility to make it easier to move to the UK. “With the Chinese President Xi Jinping threatening to crackdown, and the Hong Kong Police Force acting with impunity, the one county, two systems settlement is on the brink.” “By increasing the rights of BNO passport holders, we can not only correct this historic error, but also we can provide the support that these British nationals in Hong Kong vitally need at this sensitive time,” they wrote. The Liberal Democrats on Wednesday said they would change the law to allow BNO passport holder to live in the UK and reopen the scheme to fresh applications if they won the election on December 12. Tom Tugenhadt, the Conservative MP who chairs the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, argued in this newspaper in June that BNO passport holders should be extended the same rights as full citizens. Others called on the government to follow the United States in imposing targeted sanctions on China. The US Senate unanimously passed two bills aimed at protecting human rights in Hong Kong on Tuesday. One piece of legislation would require Washington to certify annually whether Hong Kong’s autonomy was sufficient to continue special considerations that boosts its status as a global financial hub, and allow for sanctions against officials responsible for human rights violations. A second bill would ban the export of crowd-control gear to Hong Kong, such as tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and stun guns. A man is evacuated by medics past charred debris from the Polytechnic University in Hong Kong on Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2019 Credit: AP The UK banned exports of riot control gear to Hong Kong in June. China on Wednesday warned London to remain “prudent and stop interfering in Hong Kong affairs and China’s domestic affairs, because that will only harm the UK’s interests,” said foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang. Tensions between Britain and China have been mounting since massive pro-democracy demonstrations broke out in Hong Kong in June. The protests, which began in response to a controversial plan to allow the extradition of criminal suspects to mainland China, pose a major challenge to the authority of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Schools in Hong Kong reopened on Wednesday on a day of relative calm, after being closed for nearly a week amidst unprecedented violence as demonstrators threw petrol bombs and shot fire-dipped arrows, and police fired tear gas and rubber bullets in response. A multi-day siege at a university campus has stretched on, as a remaining group of protesters refuse to surrender to police.
November 20, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Want to receive this post in your inbox every day? Sign up for the Balance of Power newsletter, and follow Bloomberg Politics on Twitter and Facebook for more.Boris Johnson was handed the leadership of Britain’s ruling Conservative party…
November 20, 2019Read More
I got my first email containing the words “Black Friday” in April. “Black Friday was a bit of a disaster for us (unsure why we expected otherwise) and we said we’d make it up to you in the near future,” wrote the cult beauty brand Deciem, whose 2018 Black Friday sale entirely sold out before Thanksgiving Day was even over. The apologetic notice was being sent to customers in promotion of … another sale.I love a good deal just like anybody else, but the words “Black Friday” have become increasingly meaningless. Today is Nov. 20 — still over a week out from this year’s later-than-usual Black Friday — and I’m inundated with emails announcing sales. Fabletics, a popular subscription activewear retailer, has emailed me every day since Nov. 13 to promote their “Black Friday Month” savings.And it’s not just my inbox that is out of control. At some point Black Friday morphed into Gray November, and now it’s bleeding into the rest of the year as well.Since even before the invention of malls, shoppers have flocked to stores in the days immediately following Thanksgiving to cash in on big holiday savings. While there are a lot of misconceptions out there about the so-called holiday’s name, the phrase “Black Friday” derives neither from retailers getting “into the black,” nor has anything to do with slavery. Rather, it was originally a derogatory reference to the smog and exhaust that filled the streets of Philadelphia in the 1950s when people would pour into town to get a headstart on their shopping. The name stuck, even if the date wouldn’t.Still, for awhile anyway, Black Friday was confined to just that: Friday. It might not have been the biggest shopping day of the year (procrastinators have long ensured that the days just before Christmas remain the actual busiest for retail), but it was at least a one-and-done.Then along came the internet.The phrase “Cyber Monday” was officially coined in 2005. “[M]illions of productive Americans, fresh off a weekend at the mall, are expected to return to work and their high-speed internet connections on Nov. 28 and spend the day buying what they liked in all those stores,” The New York Times wrote of the new curisoity. By 2018, when Americans no longer needed to go into the office to poach internet, Cyber Monday sales hit $7.9 billion, marking the biggest U.S. e-commerce day ever. Still, the concept of Cyber Monday is almost quaintly outdated; in 2017, the National Retail Foundation said 58 million people shopped exclusively online on Black Friday anyway, over the 51 million people who shopped only in stores.But there is apparently just something irresistibly catchy to Americans about named shopping days. In 2010, “in the midst of the recession,” American Express launched (and branded) Small Business Saturday “to encourage people to Shop Small and bring more holiday shopping to small businesses.” Subsequently in 2012, 92nd Street Y in partnership with the United Nations Foundation proposed Giving Tuesday to counter consumerism and “build a more just and generous world.” Only a few years into this decade, and Black Friday had already fully blossomed from a one-day event into a whole weekend of mandated spending.While all this was going on, Black Friday itself was also winding its door-busting tentacles into the wee hours of Thanksgiving. In 2008, Macy’s, Walmart, and Target still opened during the predawn hours of Friday, but by 2010, a number of national retailers, including Sears, began to open on Thanksgiving proper, while Walmart and others opened at midnight. Then in 2011, Walmart crept even earlier, opening at 10 p.m. the night before Black Friday. Today, Macy’s, Walmart, and Target all open well before Black Friday even begins:The floodgates have opened. Black Friday is now a week-long event, with stores hawking deals leading up to the big day itself. In 2017, Racked published an investigation into how Target “tackles a ‘Black Friday’ that is 10 days long.” “It’s now Black November,” is how Marshal Cohen, the head retail analyst with the NPD Group, put it to The Boston Globe in 2017, the same year that a National Retail Foundation survey found 56 percent of respondents planned to start holiday shopping before Thanksgiving.But Black Friday is cannibalizing itself; in-store sales have actually dropped day-of in recent years. “We know that opening on Thanksgiving Day was merely pulling shopping visits from Black Friday, as opposed to creating an additional opportunity for shoppers to hit the stores,” Brian Field of the retail tracking firm ShopperTrak told CNBC. With so many deals online, there is less reason for sales to be confined to one specific day, anyway. Last year, a Houston resident described his continued visits to brick-and-mortar stores on Black Friday as being driven primarily by “nostalgia.”Not even October is safe from Black Friday anymore. In 2017, holiday deals started around Nov. 8; by 2018, they had jumped a week earlier to Nov. 1, Wirecutter reported this fall. Walmart this year posted its Black Friday deals before Halloween. Additionally, in order to compete with Amazon’s annual Prime Day sale in the summer, a number of major retailers have unforgivably begun to promote “Black Friday in July” deals as well. The result has sucked the urgency out of Black Friday proper: “It’s ubiquitous,” Barbara Bickart of Boston University’s Questrom School of Business told the Globe. “You can buy any time, and that makes Black Friday less of an experience.”Black Friday has become so enormous and out-of-control that the new trend is for retailers to reject it entirely. Citing the transformation of the holidays into a capitalist extravaganza that encroaches on people’s time with their families, a number of retailers remain closed on Thanksgiving as a thanks to their employees and to avoid luring shoppers away from drinking eggnog with that cousin they don’t really like but only see once a year. Outdoor retailer REI in particular has led the way, launching its OptOutside initiative in 2015 and giving all its employees Black Friday off to enjoy the natural world.Deciem, surprisingly, is also among those to boycott Black Friday this year, with the brand’s website and stores going dark on Nov. 29. “Feeling that Black Friday is no longer a consumer or Earth-friendly event, Deciem has found an alternative way to bring savings to its audience,” the company reassured. Instead, this year Deciem will encourage customers to embrace “shopping slowly.” Its sale is running for the entire month of November.Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week’s “Today’s best articles” newsletter here.More stories from theweek.com The potential lie that could actually destroy Trump The coming death of just about every rock legend Everyone will eventually turn on Trump. Even Steve Doocy.
November 20, 2019Read More
The impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives may or may not ultimately shift public opinion against President Trump. But the parade of somber, earnest, and sometimes geeky foreign service officers and National Security Council staffers has surely strained the credibility of the longstanding Republican hallucination that a cabal of rabid Democrats and Never Trumpers in the “deep state” is committed to doing anything possible to bring down the president.The latest public servant to appear totally harmless, a little bit nerdy, and utterly unlikely to be plotting a coup was Tuesday’s star witness, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a Harvard-educated National Security Council aide whose family fled to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union when he was a child. Only the truly coldhearted could fail to be moved by Vindman’s story of arriving as a refugee and then working his way up to scholarly and martial glory in his adopted homeland. One does not need to be a devotee of mindless military worship to see that this man’s credentials are unassailable.Vindman confirmed the outlines of the story that nearly everyone following the impeachment saga knows by now. He was one of many officials alarmed in the spring of 2019 by the bizarre subcontracting of America’s Ukraine policy to the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and the subversion of longstanding policy goals to Trump’s personal agenda of sabotaging the 2020 election. Vindman also calmly exploded the theory that Trump’s real interest all along was corruption in Ukraine. He noted that he helped prepare corruption-related talking points prior to Trump’s first call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, only to hear the president totally ignore the issue in the actual call.He described attending the July 10th meeting with National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill, Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, National Security Adviser John Bolton, and Ukrainian National Security Adviser Oleksandr Danylyuk, and confirmed previous testimony that Bolton cut the meeting short when Sondland said that a White House meeting with Zelensky was dependent on certain investigations being opened by the Ukrainian government. Vindman and Hill reported their concerns about this meeting to the NSC’s lead counsel.And finally, Vindman’s account of Trump’s July 25th phone call with Zelensky confirmed the key details first provided by the whistleblower. “It is improper,” Vindman said in his opening statement, “for the president of the United States to demand a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen and political opponent.” He found the president’s words so problematic that he contacted the NSC’s counsel a second time.Much chatter about Tuesday’s hearings will likely focus on Vindman’s exchanges with GOP Reps. Devin Nunes (Calif.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio). But that sparring was less important than the cumulative damage the testimony of people like Vindman and State Department staffer Jennifer Williams have inflicted upon the idea that Trump is being hounded and destroyed by the deep state.Vindman, Taylor, and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch the are part of an elite foreign policy apparatus — what Obama aide Ben Rhodes once derisively called “The Blob.” But the real superpower of The Blob is not betraying the country or fabricating evidence to destroy a president, but rather to propel American foreign policy along a certain trajectory and to fight efforts to change course. Most foreign policy professionals went to the same five finishing schools, imbibed the prevailing dogma about the American-led liberal world order, and believe in it fervently.That’s why so many of the people who have appeared in the hearings so far, or given closed-door testimony, served without issue in the Republican administration of President George W. Bush, who was responsible for, among other things, committing the most catastrophic foreign policy mistake since Vietnam by invading Iraq. Bush also made a series of controversial decisions, like withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with Russia in 2002, declining to join the International Criminal Court, and cavalierly destroying the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea.Yet throughout his disastrous time in office, Bush himself was not the target of any such “deep state” attacks, for the very simple reason that he did not run around ordering his underlings to break American laws (ok, at least not very often), or twist America’s foreign policy with particular countries to aid in his re-election effort, or churn endlessly through top advisers desperately trying to keep him from accidentally starting a nuclear war. Bush’s rule was, in many ways, just as destructive to the post-WWII order as anything Trump has done in office. And most foreign policy professionals were either fine with it, or resigned to it.This I can confirm from personal experience. When I met dozens of members of the intelligence community at a month-long, DNI-sponsored retreat in the summer of 2007, I expected to be plunged into a den of hawks who would laugh off my views about a less militarized Middle East policy. Instead, many of the CIA and NSA analysts and other public servants I talked with disagreed vociferously with Bush’s policies in Iraq and elsewhere. Yet none of them ended up conspiring against him. They were more interested in staying up late at the hotel bar with the academics and discussing the finer points of Battlestar Galactica.Trump has run into trouble with these kinds of civil servants not because of his uniquely disruptive foreign policy views, but because his unhinged behavior has frequently called into question his mental fitness to serve in the office he holds, suspicions confirmed by multiple departed advisers who have described him as a dangerous, uninformed lunatic. His Ukraine dealings have led to impeachment not because it is or should be illegal for the president to shift gears or reverse existing policy, but because he did so to benefit himself, committing in the process one of the only two crimes specifically mentioned in the Constitution as grounds for impeachment.I don’t doubt that the president regards military aid to countries like Ukraine as a total waste of time and money. And if Trump had wanted to cut off aid to Ukraine and walk away from America’s support for the country, he could have done so long ago, just as he decided to abandon America’s Syrian Kurdish allies to the Turks earlier this year. There would have been howls from the press, and resignations and sniping from people like Vindman. This is how elements of The Blob tried to stop the Iran Deal: by launching a concerted effort, coordinated with Beltway think tanks, to dominate the broadcast and print media with voices critical of the proposed policy change.But no one would be impeaching Trump if he hadn’t gone far beyond policy reversal, and bent the apparatus of the American state to the task of smearing his likely 2020 opponent and opening up phony investigations. That has nothing to do with the deep state, and everything to do with Trump’s contempt for the rule of law and his belief that the American government is his play thing. And the more Americans get a close look at the professionals trying desperately to stop American foreign policy from being rolled into the president’s sordid crime syndicate, the more sympathetic they become.Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week’s “Today’s best articles” newsletter here.More stories from theweek.com The potential lie that could actually destroy Trump The coming death of just about every rock legend Everyone will eventually turn on Trump. Even Steve Doocy.
November 20, 2019Read More
Recent Comments