Russia is succeeding in imposing a highly effective internet censorship regime across thousands of disparate, privately owned providers in an effort also aimed at making government snooping pervasive, according to a study released Wednesday.

The study by University of Michigan researchers says the model can be easily exported to other nations, and it challenges the notion that decentralized internet service can prevent large-scale censorship of the types imposed by Iran and China.

“What this study shows is that Russia has created a blueprint for censoring the internet on top of a network of internet service providers that is very much like the networks found in Western democracies,” said J. Alex Halderman, a leading computer scientist at the university who was not involved in the study. “As other governments decide to crack down on the free flow of information online, they may follow Russia’s game plan.”

Seven years of data used by researchers

Seven years of publicly available data reviewed by the researchers, who call their lab Censored Planet, attests to the Russian government’s increasing success at getting privately owned internet providers to block online addresses used by critics of President Vladimir Putin and independent news outlets.

Previously, Censored Planet’s discovery of efforts by Kazakhstan’s government to surveil internet traffic led Mozilla, Apple and Google to add protections to their browsers. Its latest study comes as a new Russian law formalizes Kremlin censorship and seeks to further tighten information control.

Under the law, devices known as “middleboxes” that surgically filter web content are required, and the state will buy the deep-packet inspection technology and provide it to the internet service providers, effectively assuming direct control over internet traffic. The boxes must be configured so that the Kremlin can access and manage internet traffic.

“When the government controls this filtering equipment they can do anything, and civil society can’t scrutinize it. In China and Iran people don’t know what’s being blocked,” said Alexander Isavnin, who lives in Moscow and works with

New law may stifle dessent

Artyom Kozlyuk, founder of the Roskosvoboda online free speech group, said authorities could use the new law, which took effect Nov. 1, to stifle dissent.

“It gives the government new instruments that would allow it to limit internet traffic the authorities view as negative,” he said in remarks published in the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

Kozlyuk said the law gives Russia’s state communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, broad powers to control the internet.

“If mass protests erupt in some regions, we may see shutdowns of mobile internet, or even entire internet access,” Kozlyuk said.

Russian media have reported that it may take another year to install the deep-packet inspection equipment needed to implement the new “sovereign internet” law. Experts predict diminished internet quality in Russia.

The use of “middleboxes” has grown globally. Much of the equipment is sold by U.S. companies like Cisco Systems, Inc. and Procera Networks, Inc. Other providers include Russia’s EcoFilter and VAS Experts, China’s Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., and Israel’s Allot Communications, Ltd.

$8,000 for ‘middlebox’

Censored Planet founder Roya Ensafi, a University of Michigan computer scientist, said the boxes can be found for as little as $8,000. The technology is often used, especially in the United States, by telecoms and businesses for analyzing online customer behavior and protecting users from phishing attacks.

Deep-packet inspection is a dual-use technology that can be used beneficially for security purposes but also abused for population-scale information-access control, Halderman said.

Under Putin, the Russian state has been steadily tightening censorship against what the government calls “external threats.” It has tried to block the messaging service Telegram, which has refused to hand over users’ encrypted messages in defiance of a court order.

That effort caused unintended blockages, temporarily knocking offline unrelated apps — including Volvo car repair services — leading the Kremlin to pause that effort.

The study released Wednesday, aided by on-the-ground activists in Russia, reviewed seven years of content blocking by internet providers, who daily are given an updated copy of a centralized blocklist maintained by Roskomnadzor. By April 2019, the list had grown to 132,798 internet domains, roughly 63% in Russian and 28% in English.

Virtual private network technology that can hide users’ web activity from their internet provider is used globally to circumvent such blocking, though Russian law requires domestic VPNs to connect to the regulated network.

VPN apps provide work-around

Plenty of VPN apps continue to allow Russians to circumvent the censorship, according to Valentin Weber, an Oxford University researcher who recently authored a study on efforts by the Russian and Chinese states to control information online.

The website blocking is transparent. Internet providers even notify customers when a site is blocked by government order. In many cases, those pages now also carry ads, Ensafi said.

Weber said the deep-packet inspection technology used by the middleboxes “increases not only your ability to filter and do censorship but to do increased surveillance capabilities.”

Ensafi said she is worried about other countries — she named India, Indonesia, Portugal and Britain — with decentralized internet service adopting the same technology. Russian-sold filtering equipment is already deployed in former Soviet republics like Belarus and Ukraine and farther afield in Algeria, Cuba and Mexico, according to the Oxford study.

Britain uses a similar “censorship architecture,” with the government asking internet providers to block child sexual abuse, which is primarily done using deep-packet inspection technology.

“It would only be a matter of programming to repurpose it to block other kinds of content,” Halderman said.

In the U.S., meanwhile, the repeal of net neutrality allows internet service providers to favor certain content over others — the same technical starting point for the use of deep-packet inspection in Russia and what has since allowed the jump to greater censorship there, the report says.

Isavnin said the trend in Russia should be a wake-up call for engineers, hardware and software developers at internet service providers who often prefer to stay in their geeky world and not get into politics.

“You cannot be just an engineer,” he said. “You have to understand the consequences of what you’re doing in the real world.”

A federal judge has thrown out a Trump administration rule that would have let health care providers refuse to perform abortions and other medical procedures on religious or moral grounds.

Judge Paul Engelmayer said Wednesday that the rule was unconstitutional, arbitrary and capricious. He said the rule would have led to some patients facing discrimination because hospitals and clinics that did not comply with it would lose federal dollars.

Critics said gay and transgender patients were particularly at risk of being denied care.

The rule was to have taken effect this month, but 23 states and cities along with Planned Parenthood and other health care providers sued to stop it.

A spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department said it was studying the judge’s ruling and would not comment.

The rule spun out of President Donald Trump’s promise to expand religious liberty protections under federal law.

In May, HHS published what it called 30 “conscience provisions” that health care providers had to comply with if they wanted to receive federal funds.

A day after the Trump administration announced its formal withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, more than 11,000 scientists declared a climate emergency.

On Tuesday, the journal BioScience published an

Authorities in New Delhi declared a public health emergency this month as air pollution levels hit hazardous levels — a problem the Indian capital wrestles with in winter when stagnant winds and cooler temperatures hold the toxic air over the city. Doctors say the dirty air is taking a serious toll on the health of the city’s 20 million residents. Anjana Pasricha reports.

The United States is taking in refugees once again, ending a pause in arrivals that lasted more than a month.

The State Department reports 199 people from 13 countries traveled to the U.S. on Tuesday.

“Refugee arrivals resumed Nov. 5. These travelers were in ‘Ready for Travel’ status as of Sept. 30 and are mentioned explicitly in the Presidential Determination,” a State Department spokesperson said in an email to VOA.

Some of the refugees had been scheduled to arrive in October, but were delayed while Washington ironed out a cap for refugee admittances for the 2020 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1.

At the end of September, the Trump administration proposed a ceiling of 18,000 refugees — the lowest in the program’s history. Last Friday, after consultations with Congress, the White House confirmed the cap in a presidential determination.

“America’s support for refugees and other displaced people extends well beyond our immigration system,” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said after the announcement. “Addressing the core problems that drive refugees away from their homes helps more people more rapidly than resettling them in the United States.”

But some U.S. lawmakers say the Trump administration ignored bipartisan input from Congress.

“During the consultation process with Secretary Pompeo, which occurred more than two weeks after the deadline set by law, there was bipartisan agreement in favor of increasing the proposed admission level. … Unfortunately, the Administration appears to have ignored this bipartisan agreement,” House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler and Immigration and Citizenship Subcommittee chairwoman Zoe Lofgren said in a statement.

The 199 refugees received Tuesday could be the high mark for daily arrivals in the coming months. 

The 18,000 refugee cap works out to an average of 55 per day if the cap is met.

Once the world’s largest country for refugee resettlement, the U.S. fell below Canada in 2018.
 

An American drug suspect and his Thai wife who went on the run after they shot and stabbed their way out of a courtroom were apprehended Wednesday, authorities said, with the man shooting his wife and then himself as police closed in.

The couple, along with an associate, had made their brazen and violent escape from a court holding room in the seedy southern city of Pattaya on Monday, wounding a police officer before fleeing in a pick-up truck.

But on Wednesday they were tracked down in Sa Kaeo province, which shares a border with Cambodia, with the American taking his wife hostage in the ensuing standoff with police.

“The foreign suspect shot his wife, and then himself,” Sattawat Hiranburana, assistant to the national police chief, told AFP, adding that the American had sustained “serious” injuries.

The wife was also wounded though in a less critical condition, Sattawat said.

The couple are facing death penalty charges for drug trafficking, although sentences are rarely carried out.

The third suspect was apprehended separately, police said, while two others suspected of helping the trio make their daring getaway were also detained.

According to local TV, the authorities had acted on a tip-off from a villager in Sa Kaeo, who saw the couple acting suspiciously.

Thailand is both a producer and major transit hub for drugs.

Much regional drug manufacturing takes place in the Golden Triangle, a remote border region where Myanmar, Laos and Thailand all meet.

Apple is expanding its website on privacy with more explanations about its commitments, though its policies and practices aren’t changing.

The new site Wednesday is part of Apple’s ongoing push to distinguish itself from data-hungry, advertising-fueled rivals such as Google and Facebook.

Apple’s privacy website is mostly a users’ guide with papers on how to prevent apps and other third-party services from unnecessarily tracking users’ location and behaviors.  
 
The company’s actual privacy policy hasn’t changed.
 
Many of the new privacy enhancements were announced earlier as part of Apple’s iOS 13 software update for iPhones. Changes include the ability to sign in to third-party services with an Apple ID account rather than Facebook’s or Google’s, plus more notices and warnings about apps tapping location data.

The U.N. children’s fund reports more than 855,000 children in Cameroon’s Northwest and Southwest Anglophone regions are out of school, putting their future and the stability of the country at risk.

What began as a political crisis between Cameroon’s Anglophone and Francophone communities three years ago, has deteriorated into a full-blown humanitarian emergency.  And, children are the major losers in this political, linguistic conflict.

Separatists in North-West and South-West Cameroon have put a ban on education in the region to protest government discrimination against English speakers.   In the past three years, the U.N. children’s fund reports at least 70 schools have been destroyed and pupils and teachers have been kidnapped.

UNICEF spokeswoman, Marixie Mercado, says the separatists’ ongoing no-school policy is having a devastating impact on the children and their communities.

“Two months since the beginning of the new school year, around 90 percent of public primary schools, that is more than 4,100 schools and 77 percent of public secondary schools, that is 745 remain closed or non-operational… A very real fear of violence also keep parents from sending their children to school and teachers and staff from reporting to work,” she said. 

UNICEF says school keeps children safe; whereas, children who live in violent, unstable environments run many dangers when they do not go to school.  It says they face the risk of recruitment as child soldiers, of child marriage, early pregnancy and other forms of exploitation and abuse.  

Mercado says UNICEF is trying to minimize the harm to children wherever possible.  

“In some areas where schools have been closed, community-run learning activities have been initiated so that children do not miss out further on their education.  UNICEF is procuring schoolbooks and other learning materials for 37,000 school-age children, and we are training teachers, including on social cohesion and accelerated learning,” she said. 

UNICEF is calling on all communities, armed groups and government authorities to protect education in all its forms and not to use children as pawns in their political battles.

The agency reports it has received less than half of the $20 million it needs this year to provide Cameroon’s children with a safe and protective learning environment.  It is appealing to international donors to support this effort.

Imagine being paralyzed by a stroke for years. Some researchers at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine are trying to help in ways that traditional physical therapy cannot – by connecting the brain to the computer and using virtual reality. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details from Los Angeles.

Mexican President Andres Obrador has rejected U.S. President Donald Trump’s call to wage war on organized crime in his country. Trump offered U.S. help in an effort to wipe out drug cartels in Mexico in response to a massacre of nine U.S. family members on a road in northern Mexico. The Mexican president said Mexico would act with “independence and sovereignty” in pursuing the criminals behind the attack, but rejected the idea of going after them with arms. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports the increasingly aggressive behavior of Mexican drug lords raises questions about who controls the country.

President Donald Trump sent a low-ranking delegation to important summits with Southeast Asian leaders this week, triggering concerns about Washington’s commitment to the region as a strategic partner. White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara has the story.

Pakistan said Tuesday it will have fenced off its traditionally porous border with Afghanistan by the end of next year, leading to an improved security situation in the region.

The military-led massive construction program, launched in mid-2017, is installing a pair of nearly 3-meter-high chicken wire fences, with a 2-meter gap between each one, and topped with barbed wire, along the nearly 2,600-kilometer border. Additionally, hundreds of new outposts and forts have been built or are under construction. 

“We have achieved a lot of progress. I believe we will be able to complete the Pak-Afghan border fencing by the end of 2020,” Khusro Bakhtyar, the Pakistani minister for planning and development, said during a Tuesday night news conference in Islamabad.

The fence runs through rugged terrain and snow-capped mountains as high as 12,000 feet. The border security plan, officials estimate, will cost about $500 million. 

Bakhtyar said that after securing the western Afghan border, the government will begin establishing a robust fence along the nearly 900-kilometer porous border with Iran in the southwest. 

“We will not have 100% control over Pakistan’s security situation as long as our borders remain porous,” he stressed. 

Pakistan officials insist the border fencing program will help prevent terrorist infiltration and the movements of smugglers in either direction, addressing mutual security concerns.

Afghan criticism

Authorities in Afghanistan have been critical of Islamabad’s unilateral border management project because Kabul disputes the former British-era demarcation it refers to as the Durand Line. Pakistan dismisses the objections and maintains the boundary with Afghanistan is an internationally recognized border between the two countries. 

The tensions have triggered border skirmishes between Pakistani and Afghan security forces. 

Kabul alleges leaders and fighters of the Afghan Taliban use Pakistani soil for planning and sustaining attacks inside Afghanistan. For its part, Islamabad says fugitive militants, after having fled Pakistan counterterrorism operations, have taken refuge in Afghan border areas and plot cross-border attacks from there. 
 

TikTok, a video app popular with teens, stressed its independence from China in a letter to U.S. lawmakers but failed to convince Senator Josh Hawley, who chaired a hearing on Tuesday on the security of U.S. citizens’ personal data.

TikTok, a unit of Chinese-based ByteDance Ltd., said in a letter to lawmakers, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, that it had hired a U.S.-based auditing firm to analyze TikTok data security practices.

“TikTok claims they don’t store American user data in China. That’s nice. But all it takes is one knock on the door of their parent company based in China from a Communist Party official for that data to be transferred to the Chinese government’s hands,” Hawley, a Republican, said at a hearing of a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Last week, Reuters reported that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, had launched a national security review of TikTok.

In the letter, dated Monday and signed by TikTok U.S.

General Manager Vanessa Pappas, the company said it stores all U.S. user data in the United States, with backup redundancy in Singapore. It also said it plans to form a committee of outside experts to advise on content moderation and transparency. It added that it will not accept political advertisements.

Hawley has demanded that executives from TikTok, which is just a few years old, testify before the committee under oath, and called the company a threat to national security. Executives from TikTok were not present at Tuesday’s hearing.

TikTok has been growing more popular among U.S. teenagers at a time of rising tensions between Washington and Beijing over trade and technology transfers. About 60% of TikTok’s 26.5 million monthly active users in the United States are between the ages of 16 and 24, the company said this year.

In its letter, TikTok said its investors were mainly big institutional investors and that the app was not available in China.

The national security review is focused on TikTok owner Beijing ByteDance Technology Co’s $1 billion acquisition of U.S. social media app Musical.ly.

While the $1 billion acquisition was completed two years ago, U.S. lawmakers have been calling in recent weeks for a national security probe into TikTok, concerned the Chinese company may be censoring politically sensitive content, and raising questions about how it stores personal data. 

When half a dozen trucks loaded with construction material screeched to a halt on their farms, Baryam Singh and fellow residents in the Indian village of Bobiya sensed they were soon going to lose more land to the military.

The farmers chased away the contractors and laborers with protests and threats of deflated tires, knowing it was only a temporary reprieve.

“The military infrastructure has been growing in our village and our farmlands are shrinking,” Singh told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, as other farmers sitting around him nodded.

“More than 50% of our agricultural land is under military lockdown,” he said of the village on the border with Pakistan.

Over the past 15 years, the Indian army and the country’s Border Security Force (BSF) have been acquiring land to fortify defenses in the border districts of Jammu and Kashmir, according to the Border Welfare Committee, a local organization campaigning for the rights of border residents.

Both India and Pakistan administer the disputed state of Kashmir in part while claiming it in full.

The fertile land where Jammu and Kashmir meets Pakistan has become dotted with barbed wire and landmines, leaving hundreds of farmers cut off from their farms, often with no warning or compensation, said Bobiya villagers.

“This is adding to the economic distress of farmers who don’t have alternative sources of livelihood,” said Singh.

After India revoked the autonomy of its portion of Kashmir in August, farmers in border areas now fear losing even more of their land to the military, according to ID Khajuria, an activist who heads up the Jammu and Kashmir Forum for Peace and Territorial Integrity.

With India bringing Jammu and Kashmir deeper into its fold, the central government will have greater power to seize territory in the border regions in the name of national security, he warned.

“The local elected political representatives will now have a very limited say in the functioning of the (Jammu and Kashmir) government,” Khajuria said.

Jammu divisional commissioner Sanjeev Verma said that all farmers in Jammu province would eventually be paid for their land.

“Whatever new agricultural land is being acquired, the farmers will get financial compensation,” he said in a phone interview.

Some have already been compensated, he added, though he declined to specify how many.

‘I am landless now’

The defense system includes a fence of about 900 km (560 miles) in length that sits several kilometers into India from the border, slicing through villages and leaving vast tracts of farmland on the other side of the fence towards Pakistan.

India’s government is also working on a “Wall of Defense” along the border between India and Pakistan, according to the Border Security Force.

The project consists of a 10-meter-high (32-foot) mud embankment to protect residents of India’s border villages from frequent cease-fire violations that both sides blame on each other.

There are also plans to install high-tech surveillance systems to plug gaps where physical surveillance is not possible, India’s ministry of home affairs announced last year.

Members of the Border Welfare Committee — which is based in the city of Kathua — said that thousands of hectares of Indian farmland now sit untouched on the other side of the fence.

Technically, farmers can still get to their land, but the checkpoints in the fence are opened only during specific times of day and farmers have to walk for hours to reach their fields, explained Bharat Bhushan Sharma, the committee’s vice president.

Even if they do manage to successfully cultivate their crops, “there is always a threat of cross-border fire,” said Sharma, who is also head of Bobiya village. “And then (they) can’t protect their crops from wild animals.”

Committee president Nanak Chand, 87, said he lost almost eight hectares of land to the fence when it was first built in 2004.

“Three months ago, the military acquired the remaining two hectares of farmland as well,” he said. “I am landless now.”

Chand was given 3 million rupees ($42,000) as compensation, which he says is not enough to buy himself an equivalent piece of land in a peaceful part of the country.

Khajuria agreed, saying that “with developers and businessmen from other states rushing to Jammu and Kashmir, land prices are likely to soar and it would make it difficult for poor border residents to buy land in peaceful areas.”

In December 2018, Chand filed a petition with the Jammu and Kashmir High Court on behalf of farmers living in the border areas of the affected districts.

The petition called for the government to pay rent for farmland on the Pakistan side of the fence and provide farmers with compensation for each crop season during which their land remains uncultivated.

The Ministry of Home Affairs, the BSF and the local administration have not yet filed their responses, according to lawyers representing the farmers.

Jugal Kishore Sharma, a member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party who represents the Jammu-Poonch parliamentary constituency, could not specify how much of the land along the border currently being used by the military is farmland.

But he said officials in the border districts are in the process of measuring that amount.

“Thereafter, the government will start paying rent to farmers,” he said in a phone interview.

Waiting for peace

Often times, when the border fence cuts through a farm, it also isolates the village in which the farm is located, said Mohammad Arif Khan, 67, head of Behrooti village in Poonch district.

As a result, “the villages (are) deprived of even the basic facilities and infrastructure,” he explained.

The huge razor-wire fence has turned Behrooti into what locals have described as an open prison.

“Our village doesn’t have roads and health care facilities. There is no internet or mobile phone connectivity,” said Mohammad Nisar Khan, 30, another resident. “A zoo is visited by people every day, but here the outsiders are not allowed. Socially, we are completely isolated.”

The knowledge that the military plans to add high-tech surveillance equipment to the fence is disheartening, said Khan, who like many Indians living on the border is holding out hope that the fence will one day be moved onto the border itself.

“We’ll become permanent prisoners if the fence gets upgraded at its current location,” he said. 

While the residents of Behrooti feel trapped in their village by the fence, others fear it will force them to leave their homes for good. 

“There’s little chance that our next generation will be in a position to continue living here (at the border),” said Meer Chand, a rice farmer in Nanga village, 30 kilometers (18 miles) from Bobiya. “We’ve lost hope that there will ever be peace between India and Pakistan. We have neither security of life nor livelihood.”
 

Recent headlines have highlighted ways in which foreign donations can enter America’s political system, but advocacy groups say stopping the flow of foreign money has been hampered by legal loopholes, illicit financial maneuvers and ultimately a lack of political resolve.  VOA’s Brian Padden reports that Republicans and Democrats both strongly oppose foreign interference in American elections, but both parties have also reportedly received foreign donations.

In his last months on the run, Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was agitated, fearful of traitors, sometimes disguised as a shepherd, sometimes hiding underground, always dependent on a shrinking circle of confidants.

Associates paint a picture of a man obsessed with his security and well-being and trying to find safety in towns and deserts in eastern Syria near the Iraqi border as the extremists’ domains crumbled. In the end, the brutal leader once hailed as “caliph” left former IS areas completely, slipping into hostile territory in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province run by the radical group’s al-Qaida-linked rivals. There, he blew himself up during an Oct. 26 raid by U.S. special forces on his heavily fortified safe house.

For months, he kept a Yazidi teen as a slave, and she told The Associated Press how he brought her along as he moved, traveling with a core group of up to seven close associates. Months ago, he delegated most of his powers to a senior deputy who is likely the man announced by the group as his successor.

The Yazidi girl, who was freed in a U.S.-led raid in May, said al-Baghdadi first tried to flee to Idlib in late 2017. She said one night she was loaded into a three-vehicle convoy that included the IS leader, his wife and his security entourage, headed for the province. The convoy reached a main road but then turned around, apparently fearing it would come under attack, said the girl, who was 17 at the time.

For about a week they stayed in the southeastern Syrian town of Hajin, near the Iraqi border. Then they moved north to Dashisha, another border town in Syria within IS-held territory.

There, the Yazidi teen stayed for four months at the home of al-Baghdadi’s father-in-law, a close aide named Abu Abdullah al-Zubaie. Al-Baghdadi would visit her there frequently and rape her and at times beat her, the teen said. He would only move at night, wearing sneakers and covering his face, always with around five security men who addressed him as “hajji” or “sheikh,” she said. The AP does not identify victims of sexual assault.

“When I asked him anything, he would not give me an answer for security reasons. Not everyone knew where he was,” she said.

In the spring of 2018, she was given to another man, who took her out of Dashisha. That was the last time she saw al-Baghdadi, though he sent her a piece of jewelry as a gift, the teen said.

It appears al-Baghdadi then moved from place to place in eastern Syria for the next year as one IS stronghold after another fell to U.S.-backed Kurdish-led forces, before heading to Idlib sometime in the spring. 

During that time, al-Baghdadi was a “nervous wreck,” pacing up and down and complaining of treason and infiltrations among his “walis,” or governors of the group’s self-declared provinces, his brother-in-law, Mohamad Ali Sajit, said in an interview with Al-Arabiya TV aired last week.

“This is all treason,” Sajit recalled al-Baghdadi shouting.

Sajit, an Iraqi who was married to another of al-Zubaie’s daughters, was arrested by Iraqi authorities in June. He said he saw al-Baghdadi several times over 18 months, starting in Hajin in late 2017. The last time was in the desert regions along the Syrian-Iraqi border not long before Sajit’s own capture. He said al-Baghdadi entrusted him with delivering messages on flash drives to lieutenants inside Iraq.

Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish officials have said they separately cultivated sources that led to the IS leader, and Sajit is believed to be one of them.  A U.S. official said it seemed the Syrian Kurds managed to get a “guest” inside al-Baghdadi’s inner circle whose information was key in the hunt.

Sajit said al-Baghdadi’s movements were heavily restricted, more so as greater IS territory was lost. He walked around with a suicide belt, even slept with one near him, and made his aides also carry belts. He never used a cellphone; only his aide Abu Hassan al-Muhajer did, using a Galaxy 7, said Sajit, who remains in Iraqi custody.

The stress worsened the IS leader’s diabetes, and he had to constantly monitor his blood sugar and take insulin. He didn’t fast during the holy month of Ramadan and forced his aides not to fast as well, Sajit said.

At times, al-Baghdadi was disguised as a shepherd, he said. When al-Baghdadi’s security chief, Abu Sabah, got wind of a possible raid on the desert Syrian-Iraqi border area where they were hiding they took down their tents and hid al-Baghdadi and al-Muhajer inside a pit covered with dirt, Sajit said. They let sheep roam around on top of the pit to further disguise it. Once the threat of the raid was over, they returned and put the tents back up, he said.

Al-Baghdadi moved with a circle of five to seven people, including al-Muhajer, al-Zubaie and Abu Sabah; and the group’s former governor for Iraq, known as Tayseer or Abu al-Hakim. Al-Muhajer was killed on the same day as al-Baghdadi, in a separate U.S.-led military operation, following a Syrian Kurdish tip, in Jarablus, also in northwestern Syria; al-Zubaie was killed in a raid in March. On Monday, Turkish officials said they arrested al-Baghdadi’s older sister in northwestern Syria’s Azaz region. All are areas outside of government control.

The IS leader was also in contact with his top deputy, Hajji Abdullah, Sajit said. Iraqi officials say al-Baghdadi put him in charge of most of the group’s administrative and financial affairs. Sajit said he believes Hajji Abdullah is actually the man that IS named as al-Baghdadi’s successor before his killing, identified by the nom de guerre Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi Al-Qurayshi.

U.S. officials said they did not know when al-Baghdadi arrived in Idlib but said he chose the location because it was the last territory outside of Syrian government control. U.S-allied Syrian Kurdish officials said they pinned down his movements in May but suspected he left to there after the fall of the last IS territory in late March.

There, he hid in a compound in the village of Barisha, about 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the border with Turkey. Like many of Idlib’s border towns, it is packed with people displaced from across Syria and is administered by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a militant group affiliated with al-Qaida and a rival to IS.

The compound belonged to a man named Abu Mohammed al-Halabi, who was a sheep trader but had little contact with his neighbors, several residents told the AP. They spoke on condition of anonymity fearing they would be endangered by talking about the site. Iraqi officials said al-Baghdadi’s “technician”-a man who took care of logistics- was killed with him in the raid.

One resident said that nearly a dozen helicopters hovered over their village before 11 p.m. the night of the Oct. 26 U.S.-led raid.

“We went out in the balcony to see and they started shooting, with automatic rifles. So we went inside and hid,” the resident said. Then there was an airborne operation west of the village, in the direction of al-Halabi’s house. Later, the Americans warned residents to move away from the house because they were going to blow it up.

“No one really expected al-Baghdadi to be here,” another resident said.

The White House is signaling it’s not interested in a government shutdown when a temporary government-wide spending bill expires Nov. 21.

White House congressional liaison Eric Ueland told reporters that President Donald Trump would sign another short-term stopgap spending bill to prevent a shutdown, so long as Democrats don’t try to tie Trump’s hands on funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

Trump had refused to rule out a shutdown when asked about it Sunday, but there’s no appetite for one among his allies on Capitol Hill. There has been speculation about a potential shutdown but no evidence that one is actually brewing.

Ueland said Trump wants “the spending process to continue to unfold and the government to continue to be funded.”
 

Nigerian firefighters were trying to extinguish a major fire at the Balogun market in central Lagos on Tuesday.

Thick black smoke and flames were shooting up from five-story buildings surrounding the market as firetrucks attempt to get access to the fire. Residents were throwing what belongings they could from the buildings and some people on the rooftops were using small buckets of water to try to stop the fire.

A fire truck was also spraying water onto the flames.

The fire started in the morning and became a major blaze by midday. Officials haven’t yet said if any people were injured in the fire or commented on the cause of the blaze.

The Balogun market sprawls across many blocks on Lagos Island. It is well known as one of the best places in Lagos to buy colorful Nigerian fabrics, apparel and shoes.

The U.S. trade deficit fell by the most in eight months in September as imports of autos, mobile phones and other electronics retreated after the pre-tariff surge in August, according to government data Tuesday.

Total exports also fell as the world’s appetite for key American products, including politically-sensitive soy beans, continued to slacken and Boeing’s travails dragged on, the Commerce Department reported.

The U.S. trade gap, the shortfall between what Americans buy from abroad and what they sell in foreign markets, fell 4.7 percent to $52.5 billion, which matched economists’ expectations but was the biggest tumble since January.

U.S. President Donald Trump in September piled even more tariffs on China, jacking up duties on more than $100 billion in Chinese goods, likely prompting an surge in buying in the previous month to lock-in lower prices — which widened the trade gap in August.

Recent media reports indicate U.S. and Chinese officials are considering a roll-back of some tariffs as they work to finalize a partial deal to end the trade war Trump began last year.

U.S. exports fell 0.9 percent in September to $206 billion as international sales of soy beans, passenger cars and trucks together fell $2.5 billion.

This was slightly offset by higher exports of aircraft and aircraft engines.

Imports fell 1.7 percent to $258.4 billion, the report said. Ahead of the holiday shopping period, purchases of toys, games, artwork and collectibles fell, as did foreign purchases of trucks, buses, semiconductors, autos and parts.

American oil producers also notched their first petroleum trade surplus since current records began more than 40 years ago.

The narrowing deficit should support GDP growth calculations for the July-September quarter.

However, in the year to date, the trade gap is up 5.4 percent from the first nine months of 2018 to $481.3 billion.

In a continuation of recent trends in large part driven by Trump’s trade war with Beijing, U.S. imports from China declined further as purchases from Mexico surged again.

The deficit with China has dived 13.1 percent so far this year to $266.4 billion but the gap with Mexico over the same period has skyrocketed by 29.4 percent, underscoring the rebalancing of trade relations under Trump’s trade offensive.

A strong U.S. dollar likely also encouraged tourism, sending U.S. imports of services to $49.9 billion, their highest level on record.

It started with a warning to watch her back, that people were “looking to hurt” her. From there, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch told House investigators, it escalated into a chilling campaign to fire her as President Donald Trump and his allies angled in Eastern Europe for political advantage at home.

Testimony from Yovanovitch, released on Monday, offered a first word-for-word look at the closed-door House impeachment hearings. Inside, Democrats and Republicans are waging a pitched battle over what to make of Trump’s efforts to get Ukraine’s leaders to investigate political rival Joe Biden, Biden’s son and Democratic activities in the 2016 election.

The transcript came out on the same day that four Trump administration officials defied subpoenas to testify, acting on orders from a White House that is fighting the impeachment investigation with all its might. Among those refusing to testify: John Eisenberg, the lead lawyer at the National Security Council and, by some accounts, the man who ordered a rough transcript of Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s leader moved to a highly restricted computer system.

During nine hours of sometimes emotional testimony, Yovanovitch detailed efforts led by Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies to push her out of her post. The career diplomat, who was recalled from her job in May on Trump’s orders, testified that a senior Ukrainian official told her that “I really needed to watch my back.”

While the major thrust of Yovanovitch’s testimony was revealed in her opening statement, Monday’s 317-page transcript provided new details.

Yovanovitch offered significant threads of information including the possibility that Trump was directly involved in a phone call with Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, and the Ukrainians dating back to January 2018. And she pushed back on Republican suggestions that she harbored opposition to Trump.

She had been recalled from Kyiv before the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that’s at the center of the impeachment inquiry. Later, she was “surprised and dismayed” by what she saw in the transcript of the call — including that Trump had called her “bad news.” He also said that “she’s going to go through some things.”

“I was shocked,” Yovanovitch said, to see “that the president would speak about me or any ambassador in that way to a foreign counterpart.”

Asked about her as he left on a campaign trip on Monday, Trump had a more equivocal comment: “I’m sure she’s a very fine woman. I just don’t know much about her.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said transcripts from the hearings are being released so “the American public will begin to see for themselves.” Two were released Monday, and more are coming.

Republicans have accused Democrats of conducting a one-sided process behind closed doors.

But the transcripts show GOP lawmakers were given time for questioning, which they used to poke at different aspects of the impeachment inquiry. Some Republicans criticized the process as unfair, while others tried to redirect witnesses to their own questions about Biden’s work on Ukraine corruption issues while he was vice president.

In public, some Republicans say the president’s actions toward Ukraine, though not ideal, are certainly not impeachable.

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the Oversight committee, defended Yovanovitch’s ouster as clearly within the president’s prerogative.

“President Trump has the authority to name who he wants in any ambassador position. That’s a call solely for the president of the United States as the commander in chief,” Jordan said.

The former envoy stressed to investigators that she was not disloyal to the president. She answered “no” when asked point blank if she’d ever “badmouthed” Trump in Ukraine, and said she felt U.S. policy in Ukraine “actually got stronger” because of Trump’s decision to provide lethal assistance to the country — military aid that later was held up by the White House as it pushed for investigations into Trump’s political foes.

Long hours into her testimony, Yovanovitch was asked why she was such “a thorn in their side” that Giuliani and others wanted her fired.

“Honestly,” she said, “it’s a mystery to me.”

Yovanovitch, still employed by the State Department, is in a fellowship at Georgetown University.

She told the investigators that the campaign against her, which included an article that was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr., undermined her ability to serve as a credible ambassador and she wanted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to issue a statement defending her. But no statement was issued.

The impeachment panels also released testimony Monday from Michael McKinley, a former senior adviser to Pompeo.

McKinley, a 37-year career diplomat, testified that he decided to resign from his post as a senior adviser to Pompeo after his repeated efforts to get the State Department to issue a statement of support for Yovanovitch after the transcript of the Trump-Zelenskiy phone call was released. “To see the impugning of somebody I know to be a serious, committed colleague in the manner that it was done raised alarm bells for me,” he said.

McKinley said he was already concerned about politicization at the State Department, and that the refusal to publicly back Yovanovitch convinced him it was time to leave.