The Trump administration has invited Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia to a meeting in Washington on Nov. 6 to try to break the deadlock in negotiations over a giant hydropower dam on Ethiopia’s Blue Nile, Egypt’s foreign minister said on Tuesday.

Earlier this month, Cairo said it accepted a U.S. invitation to a meeting of foreign ministers over the project that is the source of an escalating spat between the two African countries.

It was not clear if the other two countries had agreed to attend.

“The U.S. administration invited the three countries to meet in the United States on Nov. 6 in the presence of representatives of the American administration to discuss breaking the deadlock in the ongoing negotiations,” Sameh Shoukry told a news conference with visiting German foreign minister Heiko Maas.

Egypt is worried that the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), under construction near Ethiopia’s border with Sudan, will restrict supplies of already scarce Nile waters on which it is almost entirely dependent.

In recent weeks, Egypt has called for an external mediator on the issue, saying three-way talks have been exhausted.

Addis Ababa has previously rejected the idea, accusing Egypt of trying to sidestep the process.

On Thursday, Egypt and Ethiopia’s leaders agreed to the immediate resumption of the work by a technical committee trying to agree on the operating terms of the Dam, an Egyptian presidency spokesman said.

There was no mention of a mediator in the statement.

Ethiopia is expected to start filling the reservoir behind the dam next year.

A woman died in U.S. Border Patrol custody over the weekend, following nearly two weeks in the hospital.

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Move over, Rocky, there’s a new stairway to climb.

A set of outdoor steps in the Bronx has become a tourist attraction in recent weeks since the release of the movie “Joker.”

The stairs are between two buildings on Shakespeare Avenue, about a half-mile from Yankee Stadium.

In the movie, lead actor Joaquin Phoenix dances as he goes down the steps, wearing a bright red suit and clown makeup.

These days, neighborhood residents using the steps are being joined by tourists trying to recreate the scene.

The visitors have been taking selfies, and some have even shown up in costume.

Coming to the stairs is “really immersive,” said Oliver Bonallack, visiting from Brighton, England.

“You never really get to experience a film first-hand,” he said. “I feel like it is so iconic.”

Not everyone is thrilled with the upsurge in popularity.

“We live in the neighborhood, it’s taking up all of our time, we’re all being inconvenienced,” said Bronx resident Cathyrine Spencer. “Every day when I come down the stairs, I have to go through a barrage of people.”

The stairway joins the ranks of well-known movie settings, like that of the steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art seen in “Rocky.”
 

A federal judge blocked an Alabama abortion ban Tuesday that would have made the procedure a felony at any stage of pregnancy in almost all cases.
 
U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson issued a preliminary injunction blocking Alabama from enforcing the law, which would have called for a sentence of 10 years to life in prison for the abortion provider with no exceptions for rape or incest.

Alabama legislators approved the measure this year, hoping to mount a court challenge to abortion rights. Abortion providers sued to stop the law from going into effect.
 
 Randall Marshall, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the decision was expected.
 
The law was set to take effect next month and is the most hardline of the anti-abortion measures enacted this year as states emboldened by the new conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court take aim at Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.

 

Authorities in Cameroon have deployed soldiers and rescue workers after a torrential downpour caused a landslide that killed at least 34 people overnight near the western town of Bafoussam.  Rescue workers spent Tuesday searching through the wreckage of destroyed homes.

Heavy rains Tuesday in a neighborhood called Carrefour Ngouache have not stopped rescue workers from digging through mounds of mud and debris.

The workers are hoping to find more survivors, but are mostly searching for bodies trapped in the landslide that occurred late on Monday night.

Augustine Awah Fonka, governor of the region, said he has called in four bulldozers to help clear away the crumbled houses.

“There are several corpses that are buried in here,” she said. “The rescue operations are still ongoing, so at the end of it we will be able to identify the number of persons that are actually dead. But of course it is clear that we have to ask the people who are residents in this area to leave the area, because the area is actually very dangerous.”

Thirty-four corpses have been pulled from the rubble so far and taken to the mortuary of the regional hospital in Bafoussam.  More than 30 people are still missing.

At least 70 people sustained injuries in the landslide.  Some were taken to hospitals, where six are in critical conditions. About 20 houses were completely destroyed.

Nzonkewe Tanyi, 61, says he is still in search of three of his children and uncle.

He says it was very difficult for them who were in relatively safer areas to assist those who were crying help because the incident occurred at about 10 p.m. on Monday night when places were dark and they did not have electricity. He says his prayer is to find his relatives alive.

Cameroon minister of decentralization George Elanga Obam visited the site and handed over a $50,000 donation from the government.  He said the money is help those who have lost all of their belongings and are hungry without food and water.

Obam suggested that survivors rebuild their houses elsewhere. 

He says it is rather unfortunate that so many families decided risk their lives by settling on the zone which is prone to flooding and landslides. He says the cause of the incident is the rains that have been pouring ceaselessly over the past two weeks.

Less than two weeks ago, heavy rains and floods also left at least 100,000 people homeless on both sides of the border between northern Cameroon and Chad.  

 

Sudan once had the largest railway network in Africa, with most of the train cars obtained from the United States.  But decades of negligence, economic troubles, and U.S. sanctions have made the railway reliant on Chinese-made trains and parts that it can hardly afford.  With the recent ouster of Omar al-Bashir, the railway’s supporters are hoping the United States will soon lift sanctions to help restore it to its former glory.

Sixty-five-year-old Mahdi Yassin has been working for the Sudan Railways Corporation since 1972.

Yassin remembers the railway’s glory days, when it was the largest in Africa, running 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) from the Egyptian Red Sea and crisscrossing Sudan to what is now South Sudan.

Yassin said Jebait school was graduating one hundred students per year – all qualified to work on the railway. It was a strong corporation. There was abundance in spare parts and locomotives.

But the railway fell apart through mismanagement and a fear of organized labor’s influence on the economy and politics.

Now, railway workshops in Sudan look like a graveyard, littered with dozens of vehicles, some of them idle for decades.

Sudan fired thousands of qualified rail workers, replacing some with political appointees put in place after former president Omar al-Bashir came to power.

Railway workers hope Bashir’s ouster in April will encourage the United States to lift sanctions it imposed on Sudan for human rights abuses and harboring terrorists.

Mahmoud Salih, director of engineers in the Khartoum train workshop, said if the sanctions are lifted, they can at least be updated with the technology of the trains. Salih added that Sudan is so late to update the current technology, it’s functioning with the past century’s technology, they need to update and then develop.

After the British colonial era, the state-run railway became reliant on U.S. trains and replacement parts. But because of sanctions, Khartoum has been unable to buy U.S. parts  leaving only 18 of the railway’s 106 U.S.-made trains in service.

Sudan Railways corporation director Mohamed Hamid said the railway turned to China to keep the trains running.

Hamid said when the U.S. embargo cut out everything; they had to import their spare parts and needs from other countries. He said that they resorted to China, they have the American locomotives and, of course, China cannot produce the American spare parts, especially the main machines from Caterpillar (Inc.), so what they were going to do?

Importing a few Chinese trains in 2014 allowed Sudan to launch two new passenger lines.  But poor track conditions means the trains can only go 60 kilometers per hour – half their maximum speed.

Before Yassin retires at the end of this year, he hopes to see U.S. sanctions lifted and more efforts by Sudan’s transitional government to get the country’s railways back on track.

 

Hong Kong’s embattled leader Carrie Lam said on Tuesday she expects the Asian financial hub to record negative economic growth for the full 2019 year, as the city grapples with five months of often violent anti-government protests.

Lam was speaking two days after Financial Secretary Paul Chan said Hong Kong has fallen into recession and was unlikely to achieve any growth this year.

The protests, which have evolved into calls for greater democracy, escalated in June, plunging the city into its biggest political crisis in decades and posing the gravest popular challenge to Chinese leader Xi Jinping since he came to power.

Beijing-backed Lam said the government would announce fresh measures to boost the economy once unrest in the Chinese-ruled city settles. She did not elaborate.

The government last week announced relief measures of HK$2 billion, following a HK$19.1 billion package in August to support the economy.

On Sunday, black-clad and masked demonstrators set fire to shops and hurled petrol bombs at police following a now-familiar pattern of protests, which show no sign of letting up.

Lam said the central government in Beijing was confident her administration could return the city to normal and had been supporting her in upholding law and order.

Protesters are angry about what they view as increasing interference by Beijing in Hong Kong, which returned to Chinese rule in 1997 under a “one country, two systems” formula intended to guarantee freedoms not seen on the mainland.

China denies meddling. It has accused foreign governments, including the United States and Britain, of stirring up trouble.

Tourist numbers have plummeted, with visitor numbers down nearly 50 percent in October, record declines in retail sales, rising unemployment and bankruptcies.

Iraqi security forces killed at least 14 people overnight in an attack on protesters in the city of Karbala.

Security officials said hundreds more were wounded as the anti-government demonstrations went into a fifth consecutive day.

The protesters defied a new curfew after Iraqi authorities ordered people to stay off the streets between midnight and 6 a.m.

At least three people were killed and more than 100 hurt Monday in clashes between protesters and police.

A move in parliament to approve a bill to cancel privileges and bonuses for senior politicians, including the president, prime minister and Cabinet ministers, did little to calm the marchers.

Students and other protesters are angry at alleged corruption, a slow economy and poor government services, despite Iraq’s oil wealth.

Students are boycotting classes and demanding the government resign.

The latest wave of violent protests in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities has killed at least 86 people since Friday. That is on top of the nearly 150 killed during marches earlier this month.

More details from the daring U.S. military raid that took out Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Saturday. Once a powerful self-declared caliph, Baghdadi was found hiding in a tunnel. Cornered with no exit, he blew up himself and his three children.

The U.S. telecommunications regulator plans to vote in November to designate China’s Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp as national security risks, barring their U.S. rural carrier customers from tapping an $8.5 billion government fund to purchase equipment or services.

The Federal Communications Commission also plans to propose requiring those carriers to remove and replace equipment from such designated companies, FCC officials said on Monday.

At a meeting set for Nov. 19, the FCC said it plans to vote to ask carriers how much it would cost to remove and replace Huawei and ZTE from existing networks and to establish a reimbursement program to offset the costs of removing the equipment.

“When it comes to 5G and America’s security, we can’t afford to take a risk and hope for the best,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement.

“As the United States upgrades its networks to the next generation of wireless technologies — 5G — we cannot ignore the risk that the Chinese government will seek to exploit network vulnerabilities in order to engage in espionage, insert malware and viruses, and otherwise compromise our critical communications networks.”

This is the latest in a series of actions by the U.S. government aimed at barring U.S. companies from purchasing Huawei and ZTE equipment. Huawei and ZTE would have 30 days to contest the FCC’s national security risk designation and a final order compelling removal of equipment is not expected until next year at the earliest.

Huawei declined to comment and ZTE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Pai first proposed in March 2018 barring companies that posed a national security risk from receiving funds from the FCC’s Universal Service Fund, but did not name Huawei or ZTE.

The fund provides subsidies to provide service in rural or hard-to-reach areas, and to libraries and schools.

FCC Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel noted the action is coming after 18 months of review and the FCC should take additional actions.

“We need to be mindful that in a global economy, our networks will still connect to insecure equipment abroad. So we should start researching how we can build networks that can withstand connection to equipment vulnerabilities around the world,” Rosenworcel said.

The FCC argues the companies’ ties to the Chinese government and military apparatus, and Chinese laws requiring that such companies assist the Chinese government with intelligence activities, pose a U.S. national security risk.

Congress has been considering legislation to authorize up to $1 billion for small and rural wireless providers to replace network equipment from the Chinese companies. The FCC could tap the fund itself to pay for replacing equipment if Congress does not act.

About a dozen rural U.S. telecom carriers that depend on inexpensive Huawei and ZTE switches and equipment were in discussions with Ericsson and Nokia to replace their Chinese equipment, Reuters reported in June.

The United States has been pressing nations not to grant Huawei access to 5G networks and alleged Huawei’s equipment could be used by Beijing for spying, which the Chinese company has repeatedly denied.

Pai said in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece Monday that “China could compel Huawei to spy on American individuals and businesses. Imagine if a 5G network with Huawei equipment were operating near a U.S. military installation, critical infrastructure facility or other sensitive location.”

He also cited a report by cybersecurity firm Finite State that “found a majority of the Huawei firmware images it analyzed had at least one potential back door and that each Huawei device had an average of 102 known vulnerabilities.”

Several European countries in recent months have not agreed to bar Huawei, despite intense U.S. pressure.

In May, Trump signed a long-awaited executive order declaring a national emergency and barring U.S. companies from using telecommunications equipment made by companies posing a national security risk. The order directed the Commerce Department, working with other government agencies, to draw up an enforcement plan by mid-October. The Commerce Department has yet to publish a plan.

The U.S. government added Huawei to its economic blacklist in May, saying the Chinese company was involved in activities contrary to U.S. national security.

The Air Force’s mystery space plane is back on Earth, following a record-breaking two-year mission.
 
The X-37B landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Sunday. The Air Force is mum about what the plane did in orbit after launching aboard a SpaceX rocket in 2017. The 780-day mission sets a new endurance record for the reusable test vehicle.

It looks like a space shuttle but is one-fourth the size at 29 feet.

Officials say this latest mission successfully completed its objectives. Experiments from the Air Force Research Laboratory were aboard.
 
This was the fifth spaceflight by a vehicle of this sort. No. 6 is planned next year with another launch from Cape Canaveral. According to Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett, “Each successive mission advances our nation’s space capabilities.”
 

The boos were loud. And for President Donald Trump, they may have felt unfamiliar.

Trump was showered with jeers, boos and chants (as well as some cheers) when he attended a World Series game at Nationals Park in Washington on Sunday. It was a rare moment of in-your-face disapproval for a president whose White House goes out of the way to shield him from protests and demonstrators.

Since taking office, Trump has rarely ventured out to places in his deeply Democratic adopted home city or elsewhere that might feature high-volume hostility or a cold shoulder.

When the boos began as Trump’s image flashed on the ballpark’s giant video screen, the president seemed momentarily taken aback. He mouthed something to his wife, Melania Trump, while gamely trying to clap along. But his smile froze and then faded as the boos continued and some in the crowd launched into a brief chant of “Lock him up,” a version of the phrase chanted against Hillary Clinton at dozens of Trump rallies during the 2016 campaign.

White House officials tried to play down the negative feedback, which erupted when Trump’s image appeared on the giant video screen during a tribute to the military.

“I know that there were some people cheering as well. But, listen, it’s Washington D.C. It’s a pretty liberal town,” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said Monday.

Though White House officials were prepared for jeers in a ballpark located in a city where only 4 percent of residents voted for Trump, some thought the president’s announcement hours earlier about the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi might temper some of the boos. That proved not to be the case, despite efforts to limit the heckling.

The presidential motorcade pulled into Nats Park a little after 8 p.m. allowing the president to slip inside the stadium while fans were focused on the start of the game and the ceremonial first pitch thrown by restaurateur and humanitarian Jose Andres, a noted Trump critic. Trump took his seat in a luxury box with a sea of friendly faces, including Republican legislators.

It was Trump’s first baseball game since taking office and he attracted little attention from the crowd for the first few innings.

But at the end of third inning, as part of a salute to veterans, the Nationals honored some service members sitting near the president. Loud applause rang out until the camera panned over to Trump. On a dime, the cheers instantly turned to loud boos. And once the camera moved on to show more veterans, the cheers resumed.

Allies said the president should embrace the boos.

“I’d wear getting booed in the swamp as a badge of honor,” tweeted his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr. “If you’re pissing them off you’re doing something right!”

Unlike some of his predecessors, Trump has made little effort to join the Washington scene, with the singular exception of his visiting his hotel, a Republican-friendly oasis a few blocks from the White House. He has not eaten at a Washington restaurant beyond those in the hotel and has passed on attending some traditional social events such as the Kennedy Center Honors and White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

The White House has, at times, gone to significant lengths to keep Trump away from protesters, sometimes citing security concerns or a reluctance to snarl traffic as reasons to keep Trump away from hostile crowds.

During the presidential transition in late 2016, there was talk of Trump frequently returning to his home in Trump Tower while in office. But those plans were scrapped after it became apparent that Trump would face large, angry crowds in Manhattan.

In London this summer, Trump took repeated helicopter rides of just a few miles that kept him away from throngs of demonstrators, including a balloon that depicted the president as a baby .

And on Monday, Trump was shielded from the hundreds of protesters gathered near his speech at a police chiefs’ conference in Chicago and a fundraiser at the Trump International Hotel & Tower in downtown Chicago.

Trump’s motorcade took a route that went nowhere near demonstrators and police kept the protesters blocks away from the conference site. Similarly, Trump’s motorcade slipped into the docking area of his hotel, while hundreds of protesters gathered just across the Chicago River.

They were visible to hotel guests and condo residents on the south side of the hotel, but it was unclear if Trump had any view of them from his fundraiser.

 

Actress Geena Davis urged Hollywood filmmakers to take new steps to address an ongoing gender imbalance in media as she accepted an honorary Oscar on Sunday for her work to promote more women on screen.

While equality for women lags throughout U.S. society, it is even worse in film and television, said Davis, the “Thelma and Louise” star who founded a nonprofit research group called the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2004.

“However abysmal the numbers are in real life, it’s far worse in fiction – where you make it up!” said Davis as she accepted the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. “We make it worse.”

The actress spoke to an audience of hundreds of Hollywood power players at the Governors Awards, an annual black-tie event hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the group that hands out the Oscars.

Davis, who won a supporting actress Oscar in 1989 for “The Accidental Tourist,” said gender inequality on screen “can be fixed absolutely overnight.”

She urged everyone in the audience to take the scripts they were currently working on and “cross out a bunch of first names, of ensemble characters and supporting characters, and make them female.”

“With one stroke, you have created some non-stereotyped characters that might turn out to be even more interesting now that they have a gender swap,” she said.

“Let’s make this change happen,” she added.

Other honorees were Wes Studi, who was recognized for his commitment to authentic portrayals of Native Americans in films from “Dances with Wolves” to “The Last of the Mohicans,” and “Blue Velvet” filmmaker David Lynch.

Italian writer-director Lina Wertmuller also received a lifetime achievement award from the film academy. Wertmuller was the first of just five women ever to be nominated for best director. That was in 1977 for her film “Seven Beauties.”

Like Davis, Wertmuller called out Hollywood for tending to favor men, according to actress Isabella Rossellini, who translated Wermuller’s acceptance speech from Italian to English.

“She would like to change the name Oscar to Anna,” Rossellini said.

 

Suspected jihadists killed 16 villagers in northern Burkina Faso on Monday in an incident highlighting the increased presence of Sahel-based Islamists in the area, local and security sources said.

The gunmen came to Pobe-Mengao, about 200 km (160 miles) north of the capital Ouagadougou, threatening to take away children and telling villagers to help them buy weapons, a security source told Reuters.

When they refused, they were shot dead, the sources said. A security source told Reuters that the death toll had reached 16.

An Islamist insurgency with links to Islamic State and al-Qaida has crossed into Burkina Faso this year from neighboring Mali, igniting ethnic and religious tensions, especially in northern regions.

Attacks by Islamist militants as well as clashes between herding and farming communities have surged since, killing hundreds of civilians and soldiers in a country that used to be a pocket of relative calm in the Sahel.

The government did not immediately comment on the killings.
 

Cubans flocked to a dozen shops that opened in Havana on Monday selling home appliances and spare parts for cars in dollars, as the cash-strapped government struggles to rake in tradable currency to purchase imports and pay its debts.

Washing machines, refrigerators, freezers, air conditioners, TVs, electric motorcycles, car batteries, tires and other goods were priced well below similar offers at other state stores, when available for sale in the government’s local dollar equivalent, the convertible peso.

Cuba’s inefficient state-run economy is going through a liquidity crisis due to the implosion of ally Venezuela’s economy and the tightening of the decades-old U.S. trade embargo under President Donald Trump.

The country is dependent on fuel, food and other imports it must purchase for tradable international currencies it earns from exports of goods and services such as sugar, tourism and technical assistance, which are all in decline.

Shortages of everything from fuel to food and medicines have plagued the country this year.

Joel Palomino, an education professor who rents out a room in his home to tourists, said he had been waiting in line at a store in the Vedado district since dawn to buy an air conditioner.

“Cubans very much need to purchase these products at a reasonable price. The government should have done this a long time ago,” Palmino said.

“The prices are lower than in convertible pesos for the same products and better than those Cubans bring back from Mexico and Panama to sell on the black market,” he said.

The dollar circulated freely in Cuba alongside the peso after the demise of former benefactor the Soviet Union in the early 1990s sparked a crisis in the Communist-run country. The dollar was taken out of circulation in 2004 and replaced by the convertible peso.

Two currencies, the peso and the convertible peso, which is valued at 24 pesos, circulate in Cuba. Possession of the dollar and other tradable currencies is legal, but they have previously not been deemed legal tender for purchases.

The government claims the convertible peso is equal to the dollar, but imported appliances and other goods, when available, have huge mark-ups as they must be purchased in tradable currencies while the peso and convertible peso have no value abroad.

The state has a monopoly on foreign trade and retail sales, but Cubans travel to places such as Haiti, Mexico, Panama and Russia, where they collectively spend hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase goods that they then resell in the Caribbean nation.

Local economist Omar Everleny said the stores would benefit the state and consumers alike.

“The prices are competitive with the international market as they have been reduced as much as 50% and the state is capturing internationally exchangeable money that was circulating in Cuba but then flowing abroad to purchase goods at lower prices,” he said.

Everleny, like many other economists, said the stores were an admission that the convertible peso was worth less than a dollar and forecast that they marked the beginning of its end.

“We are going back to before 2004 when there was only the peso and certain products were priced in dollars,” he said.

Cubans who buy from the specialist stores need a dollar-denominated bank card from an account opened with tradable currencies, such as the dollar or euro. People may obtain those tradable currencies through offshore remittances or by other means such as exchanging pesos on the street, the government said.

The government said a total of 77 outlets would open across the country in the coming days, but as of Monday just one had opened outside the capital, in eastern Santiago de Cuba.

Turkey’s state-run news agency says police have detained 20 foreign nationals suspected of links to the Islamic State group.

Anadolu Agency said Monday the suspects were detained in the capital Ankara by anti-terrorism police. There was no immediate information on their nationalities.

The sweep came a day after the United States announced that IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a U.S. raid in Syria.

Turkey was also hit by a wave of attacks in 2015 and 2016 blamed on the Islamic State group and Kurdish militants that killed around 300 people.

In the last major attack, 39 people were killed when a gunman opened fire at an Istanbul nightclub during New Year celebrations in the early hours of 2017. The attack was claimed by IS.

 

Argentina’s Peronists on Monday celebrated their return to power after conservative incumbent President Mauricio Macri conceded defeat in a dramatic election that swung the country back to the center-left, saw the return of a divisive former president and threatened to rattle financial markets.

As investors nervously eyed Monday’s market opening, thousands of jubilant supporters of Alberto Fernandez and his vice presidential running mate, ex-President Cristina Fernandez, waved  sky-blue and white Argentine flags and chanted “We’re coming back! We’re coming back!”

“Today, Alberto is the president of all Argentines,” Cristina Fernandez told supporters, some of whom brandished tattoos with her image and the image of her late husband and predecessor as president, Nestor Kirchner.

Electoral authorities said Alberto Fernandez had 48.1% of the votes compared to 40.4% for Macri, with almost 97% percent of the votes counted. He needed a poll-topping 45% of the vote to avoid a runoff.

The election was dominated by the country’s economic woes and rising poverty, with voters rejecting austerity measures that Macri insisted were needed.

“The only thing that concerns us is that Argentines stop suffering once and for all,” Alberto Fernandez told the crowd.

The 60-year-old lawyer said he would need the support of Macri’s administration to reconstruct what he called the inherited “ashes” of Argentina.

Earlier in the evening, Macri told disappointed supporters that he had called Alberto Fernandez to congratulate him and invited him for a breakfast chat Monday at the presidential palace.

“We need an orderly transition that will bring tranquility to all Argentines, because the most important thing is the well-being of all Argentines,” Macri said.

Some worried that the Peronist victory would scare off investors and bring the return of interventionist policies that would only increase Argentina’s economic woes.

Inflation

Argentina’s inflation rate already is one of the highest in the world, nearly one third of Argentines are poor and its currency has plunged under Macri, who came into power in 2015 with promises to boost South America’s second-largest economy and one of the world’s top grains suppliers.

Stocks plummeted when Fernandez topped party primaries in August and the peso depreciated on investor fears of a return to the populist economic policies of Cristina Fernandez, who governed from 2007 to 2015.

Argentina Central Bank president Guido Sandleris promised Monday to protect the bank’s foreign reserves.

Immediately after the results came in, the Central Bank announced it would sharply limit the amount of dollars that people can buy.

“During the final days of last week we observed a significant increase in the demand for dollars, mainly by individuals,” Sandleris said. “In the face of the risk of this phenomenon being maintained this week, we decided to escalate the (currency) controls.”

The bank said dollar purchases will be restricted to $200 a month from bank accounts and $100 cash until December. The previous amount allowed was $10,000 a month.

“The last two years have been brutal in Argentina,” said Benjamin Gedan, an Argentina expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “Voters have suffered a painful recession, unimaginably high inflation and a debt crisis. No incumbent could survive in these conditions.”

Gedan said Fernandez is “an untested leader” whose proposed solutions to Argentina’s daunting challenges remain a mystery and who inherits a ruinous economy and unfavorable international conditions.

Sunday’s result also marks a dramatic return to high office for Cristina Fernandez, no relation to the president-elect.

Alberto Fernandez served as chief of staff from 2003 to 2007 for President Nestor Kirchner, Cristina Fernandez’s husband, and remained in the post during part of her term as president.

For many voters, placing the former aide at the top of the ticket made it more palatable. Cristina Fernandez, who represents the more radical wing of the Peronist party, is both wildly popular among many and widely despised. She also faces a string of corruption investigations.

Michael Shifter, head of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank, said she has hard-core support of about 30% of Argentines.

“The crucial question is what the dynamic will be between the pragmatic president and more ideological and polarizing vice president,” Shifter said. “The nature of that power struggle will determine the direction of Argentina’s economic, social and foreign policy in coming years.”

Shifter said that despite some fears, a return of the populist policies under Cristina Fernandez is highly unlikely.

“Today Argentina simply does not have the economic conditions for unchecked spending,” he said. “This will not be a replay of her presidency.”

The result comes at a moment when both left and right have been struggling in South America. Market-friendly governments have won recently in Colombia, Brazil and Chile, but all have faced unrest – including last week’s massive protests in Chile over inequality and slowing growth.

Macri retained wide support among the key farming sector in one of the world’s top suppliers of grains. But overall frustration over the economy eroded the popularity of the pro-business former mayor of Buenos Aires and ex-president of the popular Boca Juniors soccer club.

Tough challenges

Argentina faces tough challenges ahead: Commodities exports – the backbone of its economy – are vulnerable globally and it has a huge foreign debt. The World Bank forecasts that Argentina’s economy will shrink 3.1% this year. More than a third of the country is poor, unemployment is at 10.6%, and inflation is expected to hit 55% this year.

On the election trail, Fernandez criticized Macri’s decision to seek a record $56 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund, an institution many Argentines blame for creating the conditions that led to the country’s worst economic meltdown in 2001.

“Argentina will be on even more uncertain ground as negotiations with the IMF could go either way,” said Monica de Bolle, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

On the campaign trail, Macri pleaded for more time to reverse fortunes and reminded voters of the corruption cases facing Cristina Fernandez, who has denied any wrongdoing.

“It’s important so we don’t go back to the time of the Kirchners, when there was so much robbery, so much embezzlement. That wouldn’t be good for the country,” said Bernarda Nidia Guichandut, who helped her elderly parents into a car to go to vote.
 

A former White House national security aide balked Monday at testifying in the ongoing Democratic-led impeachment inquiry targeting President Donald Trump.

Charles Kupperman, who served as a deputy to former national security adviser John Bolton, had been subpoenaed by Democratic lawmakers in the House of Representatives to answer questions behind closed doors about any knowledge he has about how Trump pressured Ukraine to open investigations to help him politically. Kupperman listened in on the July 25 call in which Trump pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for “a favor” – to investigate any involvement the country had in the effort to defeat him in the 2016 election and to investigate one of Trump’s chief Democratic rivals in the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden’s lucrative job as a one-time board member for Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company.

The call, which Trump has described as “perfect,” is at the center of the impeachment inquiry.

When the White House ordered Kupperman to ignore the House subpoena, he filed a lawsuit Friday asking a judge to decide whose demand he should honor – the congressional subpoena or the White House order that he not testify. His lawyer said he would comply with the subpoena if the court rules in favor of Congress.

House Democrats sent Kupperman’s lawyer, Charles Cooper, a letter over the weekend contending that the lawsuit lacked merit and had been coordinated with the White House. Cooper said the suit had not been “even discussed” with the White House.

“It would not be appropriate for a private citizen, like Dr. Kupperman, to unilaterally resolve this momentous constitutional dispute between the two political branches of our government,” Cooper, who is also representing Bolton, responded to the Democrats.

Three House committee chairs leading the impeachment inquiry – Adam Schiff of the Intelligence panel, Eliot Engel of Foreign Affairs and Carolyn Maloney of Oversight – called the lawsuit “an obvious and desperate tactic by the president to delay and obstruct the lawful constitutional functions of Congress and conceal evidence about his conduct from the impeachment inquiry.”

When Kupperman failed to appear Monday, Schiff derided White House efforts to block his testimony and said it was another example of Trump’s obstruction of justice in the impeachment probe, one possible linchpin in the Democrats’ effort to write articles of impeachment against the Republican president.

Democrats are planning to hold public impeachment hearings, possibly starting in November. Even if the Democratic-controlled House votes for Trump’s impeachment, his conviction by the Republican-majority Senate and removal from office remains unlikely.

Trump, as left the White House for a trip to Chicago, assailed the impeachment investigation.

“We had a very good conversation with the Ukrainian president,” Trump said. “The conversation was perfect. They don’t ever talk about the conversation. It started with the whistleblower, and now they don’t want the whistleblower. Then they had a second whistleblower; now they don’t want the second whistleblower. The reason is that when the whistleblower – when they saw what the whistleblower wrote, and then when I released the conversation, which bore no relationship to what the whistleblower saw, they said their case was out the window. And I think it’s a disgrace.”

While the identity of the whistleblower that touched off the impeachment probe has not been disclosed and he may not testify before the impeachment panel, his account of Trump pressuring Zelenskiy has largely been corroborated by other witnesses, despite what Trump claims.

Trump described Zelenskiy – although he called him a Russian – as “a good man” who had said, “There was no anything. There was no pressure put on him. No anything.”

Government agencies controlled by the Trump administration have rejected Democratic lawmakers’ efforts to subpoena numerous documents related to the impeachment inquiry. But several government diplomatic and national security officials, including some still on the government payroll, have defied White House efforts to block their testimony.

Last week, William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, told impeachment investigators that release of $391 million in U.S. military aid to Ukraine was directly linked to the eastern European country’s willingness to open the U.S.-related political investigations Trump wanted.

Both Bidens have denied any wrongdoing, while Trump has denied there was a quid pro quo – the military assistance in exchange for the Ukraine investigations.

After a delay, he released the aid to Kyiv for its efforts to fight Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

A right-wing coalition scored a net victory in a local election in the central Italian region of Umbria, official data from the Interior Ministry showed on Monday, giving a boost to Matteo Salvini’s League party. 

The vote in tiny Umbria, a traditional center-left stronghold with less than 900,000 inhabitants, restores impetus to Salvini after a political blunder led to his party losing a spot in the country’s national government this summer.

The hard-right leader walked out of the ruling coalition his party had formed with the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement in August, expecting to trigger a national election that polls predicted he would win.

Instead, 5-Star hooked up with the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), shunting Salvini into opposition. Donatella Tesei, a senator for the League, who was also backed by the far-right Brothers of Italy and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, won the top seat as governor with 57.6% of the votes.

The new 5-Star/PD alliance failed its first electoral test as Vincenzo Bianconi, leader of the civic alliance backed by the two parties, garnered 37.5% of the ballots.

Claudio Ricci, a right-wing independent candidate, got only 2.65% of the votes, cast by 65% of the region’s citizens. Salvini defined the victory – the eighth in a row for the center-right in regional ballots since the last national election in March 2018 – as a “chapter in history.”

The chief of the League had criss-crossed landlocked Umbria for weeks, promoting his national pledge to introduce a flat-tax rate many economists say Italy cannot afford, but which the League insists is needed to revive the sluggish economy. His message found fertile ground in Umbria, where output slumped 15.6% in the decade after the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, compared with a 5.2% slide across Italy, according to Bank of Italy data.

Tesei told a news conference there would be “a lot of work” and that she would relaunch the economy, tackle unemployment and dedicate resources to reconstruction in the region after an earthquake struck three years ago.

“We must reverse the trend… revise expenses and free up resources that must be invested to improve the quality of services for citizens and companies,” Tesei said in an interview with daily Il Messaggero published on Monday.

After the results came in, Salvini defined the current government as “unauthorized” and added its time was running out. But premier Giuseppe Conte was quoted as saying that it would be a mistake for his government to stop for the results in a region which represented only 2 percent of the national population. More important tests lie ahead that could potentially undermine the new national government.

In December, the poor southern region of Calabria goes to the polls and it will be the turn on Jan. 26 of Emilia Romagna, a northern region with more than four times the population of Umbria and which is the historic heartland of Italy’s left. Opinion polls show the League, with its anti-migrant, anti-tax message, has shed little support since it lost power nationally, and remains easily Italy’s most popular party, with around 30% of the vote.

The European Union is likely to agree a 3-month flexible Brexit delay on Monday as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson pushes for an election after he was

forced by his opponents to request an extension he had pledged he would never ask for.

Just three days before the United Kingdom is due to leave the EU on Oct. 31 at 2300 GMT, Brexit is hanging in the balance as British politicians are no closer to reaching a consensus on how, when or even if the divorce should take place.

Johnson, who won the top job by pledging – “do or die” – to deliver Brexit on Oct. 31, was forced by opponents to request a delay after he was defeated in parliament over the sequencing of the ratification of his divorce deal.

The 27 European Union countries that will remain after Brexit hope to agree on Monday to delay Britain’s divorce until Jan. 31 with an earlier departure possible should the factious UK parliament ratify their separation deal, sources said.

Diplomatic sources told Reuters the bloc’s 27 EU ambassadors would meet at 0900 GMT on Monday in Brussels to agree on the three-month delay from the current Brexit date of Oct. 31.

“There will most likely be an agreement on Monday morning between the 27 on extension until January 31,” said a source close to French President Emmanuel Macron. “The prospect of elections has strengthened significantly over the weekend.”

Brexit has already been delayed twice – from March 29 and April 12 – after Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, failed to get her deal through the British parliament.

The source close to Macron stressed that the third Brexit delay would come with conditions, including a refusal to renegotiate the divorce agreement and giving a green light to other EU countries to meet without Britain to discuss the bloc’s future.

With the British political system still deadlocked over Brexit, Johnson is demanding parliament approve an election on Dec. 12 in return for having more time to approve his deal. But he needs the support of two-thirds of parliament’s 650 lawmakers for a new election. A vote is due in parliament later on Monday.

The latest delay plan envisages that Britain could be out on Dec. 1 or Jan. 1 should parliament ratify the agreement in November or December, respectively, according to diplomats who deal with Brexit in Brussels.

The EU will state that the extension, the third granted so Britain can sort out its departure, will not be used to renegotiate the divorce treaty again and that London should not impede other essential work by the EU on projects from budgets to climate policies.