The first-ever Global Refugee Forum has ended with more than 770 pledges worth billions of dollars in financial, technical, material, legal and other assistance in support of millions of refugees and the communities that host them. 

The biggest single contribution came from the World Bank, which pledged $2.2 billion. This was matched by pledges of more than $3 billion dollars in additional resources by states and $250 million from private corporations.

However, the total value of the pledges made at the forum will not be known for some time. This is because many of the contributions come in the form of projects run by corporations, aid agencies, civic, faith-based and other organizations. Many involve beneficial projects for refugees by creating jobs and livelihoods, enhancing employment for women, educational opportunities for children, pro bono legal services and the like.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi says everything will be quickly analyzed and monitored.

“It is difficult to add up the different type of contributions, but…we want to monitor the implementation of these pledges altogether and we want to measure impact as soon as possible. We have developed with states a set of indicators that will give us progressively a sense of how much the pledges made around this forum have an impact,” Grandi said. 

More than 3,000 people, including heads of state, U.N. leaders, senior officials from international institutions, development organizations, and the private sector attended the forum.

About 80 refugees from 22 countries living in 30 countries of exile also participated. Their presence, testimonies and stories of suffering and endurance put a human face on the cold statistics that accompany refugee numbers.

The aim of the three-day meeting was to generate new approaches and long-term commitments in support of the world’s 25 million refugees. Grandi says the burden of caring for these refugees falls mainly on the poor countries. He says the forum pushed the message that this responsibility must be shared by the rich countries.

“We cannot go to a world in which responsibility sharing means some states keep all the refugees and some states pay all the money. We cannot do that. That is why we have resettlement. That is why we have different types of partnership. That is why asylum has to remain in reality in all parts of the world, including in the rich countries,” Grandi said.

Grandi says the success of this forum will be measured by the number of pledges that are kept and implemented. He says he believes the enthusiasm and creativity shown by the participants augurs well. He says this has all the makings for a successful outcome. He notes a second Global Refugee Forum will take place in four years time.

U.S. President Donald Trump rallied supporters in Battle Creek, Michigan, as the U.S. House of Representatives began voting on impeaching him.

Trump took to the stage for his last campaign rally of the year as the House began voting.

 “It doesn’t feel like we’re being impeached,” Trump said, to cheers, as Congressman Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,  introduced the two articles of impeachment. Minutes later, he was impeached on the first article.

As House passed the threshold to pass the second article, Trump continued his speech in front of an energetic crowd, highlighting the military and Space Force, the strength of the economy and the investments made by numerous companies in Michigan.

 “You’re back, very proud of you,” he said.

He cast “the radical left” as consumed with rage and envy, saying, “I have the greatest economy in the history of this country. If crooked Hillary won the economy would have crashed.”
 
Trump continuously blasted Democrats for what he called “a very dark era.”

“This lawless partisan impeachment is a political suicide march for the Democrat party,” he told the crowd. “Have you seen my polls in the last four weeks?”

Earlier in the day, Trump stayed at his White House residence with no public events on his schedule except for the rally — but he did weigh in on Twitter several times, tweeting midday:  “SUCH ATROCIOUS LIES BY THE RADICAL LEFT, DO NOTHING DEMOCRATS. THIS IS AN ASSAULT ON AMERICA, AND AN ASSAULT ON THE REPUBLICAN PARTY!!!!”

As Trump continued addressing the crowd, the House voted to impeach him largely along party lines with all Republicans united behind Trump. Trump mentioned the vote in his speech, noting that three Democrats voted against his impeachment, which drew roars from the audience.

“The Republican party has never been so affronted but they have never been so united as they are right now,” he said.

The Republican-led Senate will now hold a trial to determine whether to convict and remove Trump from office, but he’s expected to be acquitted.

 

The House’s center of power took a seat toward the back of the chamber Wednesday. Her golden mace brooch, symbol of the House and the speaker’s authority, glinted.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi spent much of the historic day within a few steps of the cloakroom door, away from better-lit seats where the managers and members were debating impeachment. Only briefly, she stepped into the glare of the well.

“Today, as speaker of the House, I solemnly and sadly open the debate on the impeachment of the president of the United States,” Pelosi said.

Like it or not, Pelosi’s role leading Trump’s expected impeachment will dramatically shape her legacy after more than 30 years in Congress. So in a town where body language and proximity often convey power, Pelosi went with a show of confidence, sitting quietly for long stretches flipping through other work, checking her phone and keeping an eye on the debate.

Being remembered for impeachment is not something she relishes after a career spanning six presidents, several wars, passage of the Affordable Care Act and her own debut as speaker, second in line to the presidency. But she said Trump had left the Democrats with “no choice” other than to act.

Pelosi arrived in the chamber with Democrats largely unified, thanks to a careful balancing act that played out over several months. The House was impeaching Trump, as liberals had long demanded. The impeachment articles centered on Trump’s pressure on Ukraine, as moderates wanted. And a slate of other legislation was wrapped, giving all of the Democrats achievements to show off at home.

Pelosi’s hold on the caucus made it possible for her to lead just by being there, rather than openly twisting arms as she had during passage of the health care law. Democrats lost the House the next year, and with it, Pelosi lost the speaker’s post.

Back in possession of the gavel this year, Pelosi resisted impeachment until a whistleblower report revealed Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. That, she said, the House could not ignore. But neither would they celebrate it.

“He gave us no choice,” Pelosi, clad in black, said from the well of the House.

Trump, a lifelong businessman now face-to-face with an equivalent branch of government, insists he is the victim of Democrats who have wanted to impeach him from the start.

He weighed in on Pelosi’s legacy, too, predicting on Twitter she’ll go down as history’s “worst speaker.” In a letter released on the eve of voting, he said Pelosi “is after the entire Republican Party.”

Pelosi’s ultimate power moment Wednesday was a stark departure from where she was a year ago, after the 2018 elections ushered in a new generation of lawmakers. Some newcomers, such as Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger, did not vote for Pelosi to return to the speakership.

But many more, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ultimately helped put Pelosi back on top.

What unfolded since then has been a study in Pelosi’s ability to play the power game against Trump. Earlier this year, she forced him to retreat and reopen the government without the border wall he demanded. She then invited him to deliver his State of the Union speech from the House chamber — but during the event threw her particular brand of shade his way by smirk-and-clap from above and behind him.

She did it again during a White House meeting in October. In an image released by the White House, Pelosi can be seen standing and pointing a finger across a table at him, while the president says something back. The men on Trump’s side are looking away. Pelosi walked out of the meeting immediately after.

All along, even as she derided Trump’s “manhood” in a private meeting, Pelosi resisted impeaching Trump. It was too divisive, and the country was already too divided, she said.

But in September, a group of new lawmakers from Trump-won districts, including Spanberger, gave Pelosi the cover to proceed with an impeachment inquiry. They wrote an op-ed published in The Washington Post supporting impeachment over Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine.

“A solemn moment” has been Pelosi’s message to Democrats throughout the Intelligence and Judiciary Committee hearings that followed. No more boasts that “we’re going to impeach the motherf—ker,” as freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan declared on her first day in office. Democrats, Pelosi made clear in public and private, were not to celebrate when the House approves the articles of impeachment.

Pelosi could have spent the day Wednesday in the speaker’s chair, gavel in hand, though that would have been unusual, an aide said. She could have camped out in the television frame, closer to Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, who was managing the debate. She might have sat in the front row, as several new members did.

But there was no need. By the time she entered the chamber Wednesday morning, Spanberger and all but two Democrats stood together to vote for impeachment.

In the well of the House, Pelosi said nothing short of the future of democracy was at stake.

“If we do not act now, we would be derelict in our duty,” she said.

Pakistan’s ailing former president on Wednesday said the death sentence given to him by a court in a treason case was based on a “personnel vendetta.” 

It was Pervez Musharraf’s first reaction to Tuesday’s court verdict, which the country’s powerful military had already denounced. 

Musharraf’s supporters across the country have held small rallies to show support for him since the court found him guilty of imposing an emergency in violation of the constitution and sentenced him to death. 

In a video released by his party, Musharraf said “there is no example of such a decision in which neither the defendant nor his lawyer was given permission to say something in his defense.” 

He said the court that held his trial in intervals from 2014 to 2019 had rejected his request to record a statement in Dubai, where he has been living since 2016, when he left Pakistan to receive medical treatment. 

‘No need’ to hear case

Musharraf said the court verdict against him was questionable and that the supremacy of rule of law was not maintained. 

“I will say that there was no need to hear this case under the constitution. … [T]his case was taken up and heard because of personal vendetta of some people against me,” he said. 

Without citing names, he said that those who acted against him “are enjoying high positions and they misuse their office.” 

He praised the people and armed forces of Pakistan for standing by him after the court sentenced him to death. He said he would decide his future after consulting with his lawyers and that he expected and hoped that justice would be done. 

His lawyers have already said that he will challenge death sentence. 

Hours earlier, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan consulted his advisers to decide how to handle the situation arising from the sentencing. 

Pakistan and the UAE have no extradition treaty and Emirati authorities are unlikely to arrest Musharraf. 

‘Never’ a traitor

The military earlier said it received the court verdict “with a lot of pain and anguish.” It said that Musharraf, “who has served the country for over 40 years,” fought wars for the defense of the country and “can surely never be a traitor.” 

Musharraf seized power in 1999 by ousting the elected government of then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. In 2007 he imposed an emergency and placed several key judges under house arrest in the capital, Islamabad, and elsewhere in Pakistan. 

Later, when he was back in office, Sharif accused Musharraf of treason in 2013. The general was formally charged in 2014. 

Sharif, ousted by a court in 2017 on corruption charges, is currently receiving treatment in London after being released on bail. 

NATO exercises near the border with Russia reflect the alliance’s preparations for a large-scale military conflict, Russia’s chief military officer said in remarks published Wednesday.

The chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, said at Tuesday’s meeting with foreign military attaches that NATO’s activities have heightened tensions and reduced security along the Russian border.

Asked if the Russian military sees a potential threat of war, Gerasimov said that Moscow doesn’t see “any preconditions for a large-scale war.”

He added, however, that Western pressure on Russia could trigger “crisis situations” that may spin out of control and provoke a military conflict.

Russia-West ties have sunk to their lowest levels since Cold War times following Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea. The Kremlin has repeatedly voiced concern over the deployment of NATO forces in the Baltics and the alliance’s maneuvers near Russia’s western border.

Gerasimov charged that the scenarios of the alliance’s drills in eastern Europe “point at NATO’s deliberate preparation for its troops’ involvement in a large-scale military conflict.”

Britain’s competition regulator said there was a strong argument for tougher regulation of Google and Facebook to curb any negative consequences stemming from their domination of online advertising.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said Google accounted for more than 90% of all revenue earned for search advertising in the UK in 2018, with revenue of about 6 billion pounds, and Facebook accounted for almost half of all display advertising in the same year.

It said ‘big’ was not necessarily ‘bad’ and the platforms had brought innovative and valuable products and services to the market, but it was concerned their position may have negative consequences for the people and businesses who used their services every day.

It was also concerned that people did not feel in control of their data when they were on the platforms.

“Most of us visit social media sites and search on the internet every day, but how these firms work can be a mystery,” CMA Chief Executive Andrea Coscelli said.

“Digital advertising fuels big businesses like Google and Facebook and we have been building a picture of how this complex new market works.”

France’s warring trade unions on Wednesday defended their decision to cut power to thousands of homes, companies and even the Bank of France to force a weakened government to drop a wide-ranging pension reform.

The power cuts added to a sense of chaos in the second week of nationwide strikes that have crippled transport, shut schools and brought more than half a million people onto the street against President Emmanuel Macron’s reform.

Asked on French radio whether the power cuts, illegal under French law, weren’t a step too far, Philippe Martinez, the head of the hardline CGT union, said the cuts were necessary to force Macron to back down.

“I understand these workers’ anger,” the mustachioed union leader said. “These are targeted cuts. You’ll understand that spitting on the public service can make some of us angry.”

His remarks coincided with comments by Macron’s office saying the president ruled out abandoning his reform plans but was keen to make improvements in talks with unions, ahead of a new day of talks between his prime minister and union leaders.

The government is keen to reach a truce before Christmas, when millions of French people travel to their home place to spend the holiday with their families.

Macron’s transport minister condemned the power cuts, which hit at least 150,000 homes on Tuesday according to the French power grid, and said the government would ask the grid company to file complaints.

“I hear they’re cutting power to CAC 40 companies, prefectures, shopping malls. That’s already rather questionable,” Elisabeth Borne said, referring to an index of blue chip companies on the French stock market.

“But clinics, metro stations, fire brigades and thousands of French people also saw power cuts. This is far from normal ways of striking,” she said.

The hardening union tactics came just as Macron was forced to change the lead negotiator for the reform, naming a lawmaker from his party to replace pensions tsar Jean-Paul Delevoye, who resigned following accusations of conflicts of interest.

Macron wants to turn the myriad of French pension systems into a single points-based one.

That would force employees at state-backed companies such as the national railways company SNCF or power utility EDF, who currently enjoy more generous pension plans than private-sector workers, to work longer.

Train drivers at SNCF can retire at just over 50, for instance, against 62 for those in the private sector. That means French taxpayers have to plug in the deficit of the railway company’s pension system to the tune of 3 billion euros every year.

 

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lashed out Tuesday at Western nations for their lack of support for his so-called Operation Peace Spring, which he launched in October in Kurdish-controlled areas of northeastern Syria. 

Speaking at the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva, Erdogan described the difficulties encountered by the millions of refugees forced to flee war and persecution, and the need for universal solidarity to support them.  

The Turkish president, who said his country has welcomed more than 5 million displaced individuals — 3.7 million of them Syrian refugees, criticized the European Union for its lack of financial support and the member nations’ unwillingness to share the burden of welcoming refugees inside their own borders.

Erdogan also criticized Western leaders, whom he said have failed to support his military offensive against the Kurds in northern Syria. He has accused the Kurds of being allied with PKK terrorists in Turkey, and said his reason for launching Operation Peace Spring was to clear a 120-kilometer area in Syria of what he called a terrorist presence.

“Let us declare these areas as safe zones,” Erdogan said through an interpreter. “Let us implement resettlement and housing projects altogether. Let us have hospitals. Let us have schools there and let the refugees go back to their motherland peacefully and in a dignified fashion. But nobody seems to be inclined to help us. Why? Because oil is a much more needed commodity.”  

President Donald Trump announced in November his decision to post U.S. soldiers in Syria to guard oil fields. The Trump administration previously had been criticized by allies for allowing Turkey’s military assault to go forward by withdrawing U.S. troops allied with the Kurds in the region. The Kurds have called the move a betrayal.

Erdogan said he will go ahead with his plans to resettle about 1 million Syrian refugees in this so-called peace zone in northern Syria, despite international criticism. 

“The YPG and PKK terrorist organizations are attacking civilians, but despite that fact, these areas are now the safest and most stable zones of Syria, which are inhabitable,” Erdogan said. “The Syrian refugees should go back on a voluntary basis, but we know what powers around the world would be disturbed by their resettlement peacefully and in a dignified fashion.”  

Western powers and humanitarian organizations have expressed alarm at Turkey’s insistence on relocating the refugees across the border into the area once controlled by the Syrian Kurds. They warn this will lead to enduring ethnic tensions between the two groups, leading to permanent instability in the region.
 

The U.S. this week deported a German man convicted in the high-profile killings of his girlfriend’s parents 35 years ago, in a crime that stunned a Virginia community and prompted decades of media obsession.

Jens Soering, 53, flew from a Washington, D.C.-area airport to Frankfurt on Monday, according to

At midday on Dec. 17, 2014, the sound of church bells echoed in Havana as presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro announced that the United States and Cuba would reestablish diplomatic relations and end nearly 60 decades of hostility.

Five years later, it feels almost as if that historic moment never happened, Cubans said in interviews in the capital Tuesday.

President Donald Trump has spent roughly as much time undoing detente as Obama spent constructing it, and relations between the two countries are at one of their lowest points since the end of the Cold War.

Trump has cut back U.S. visits to Cuba — barring cruise ships, flights to most cities and unguided educational travel — the most popular form of American trip to Cuba.

The U.S. Embassy in Havana has been reduced to skeleton staffing after diplomats reported a string of health problems whose source remains a mystery. The closure of the embassy’s visa section, and end of special five-year visas for Cubans this year, means travel to the U.S. has become near-impossible for many Cubans who used to fly regularly to South Florida to see family and buy supplies for businesses.

The Cuban economy is stagnant, with tourism numbers flat and aid from Venezuela far below its historic peak as Cuba’s oil-rich chief ally fights through its own long crisis.

In 2014, Obama and Castro’s announcement felt like the end of a dark era for Cuba and the start of something positive and new, people said in Havana. Now, the two years of detente under Obama feel like a temporary break in a long history of tension and struggle that has no end in sight, they said.

“There was hope, thinking that there would be an opening with Obama,” said Alfredo Pinera, a 37-year-old construction worker. “And with Trump, it’s like a child’s dream, gone up in smoke.”

Pinera works in Mexico, and returns to Cuba regularly to see his wife and sons, ages 16, 11, and 9. He said he hoped that the end of hostilities with the U.S. would bring a better life for him, his family and the entire country.

“I felt good,” he said. “There was hope for improvement, for change in this country, economically, politically, socially.”

He said he and his family were surviving in the hard times, which were far from the depths of the post-Soviet “Special Period” of the 1990s. But he said the optimism they felt five years ago had suffered a heavy blow.

“All of those hopes that so many Cubans went crashing to the round,” said Pinera as he sat on a curb connecting his phone to a public WiFi access point outside the baseball stadium where Obama and Castro watched an exhibition game during the U.S. president’s historic 2016 visit to Havana.

The Cuban government celebrated Tuesday as the anniversary of the return of three of five Cuban agents arrested as they carried out infiltration of anti-Castro emigre groups. The swap of the agents for U.S. contractor Alan Gross and a jailed spy was an essential precursor to the re-establishment of relations, but the larger context was barely mentioned in Cuban state media on Tuesday.

The Trump administration says it is trying to cut off the flow of cash and oil to the Cuban economy in order to force the communist government to end its support for Venezuela.

Carlos Fernández de Cossio, the director of U.S. affairs for the Cuban Foreign Ministry, said some influential interests in the United States were working to end diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba, and the island’s government was prepared.

“I don’t think there will be a break-off in relations, frankly I don’t know if that will happen. I do know that there’s a group of powerful people that have that intention,” he said. “Cuba can’t be taken by surprise by that reality if it occurs.”

Elizabeth Alfonso, 21, left school after she got pregnant at 14. She has spent the last six years raising her son and working as a waitress in a state cafeteria and maid in other Cubans’ homes.

Still a child herself when Obama and Castro made their announcement, she has only vague memories of the two years of improved relations, but she knows things felt better.

“I thought things would get better. That’s what everybody thought,” said Alfonso, who sat in a park near the U.S. Embassy, waiting to start her shift as a maid in a nearby home.

She said she planned to return to school next year to get the equivalent of a high-school diploma, but had few hopes for improvement in Cuba. Many of her friends and relatives want to leave the country, she said, but that had become far more difficult due to Obama’s ending of near-automatic residency for Cuban immigrants and Trump’s increased deportations of people who once were guaranteed entry at the border.

Alfonso said she was waiting for the return of a cousin who crossed Mexico to get to the southern U.S. border but was detained and is awaiting deportation.

Antoin Ugartez, a 42-year-old father of three who rents a three-wheeled covered scooter known as a Cocotaxi from a state-run agency, said the post-Trump decline in tourism had hit him hard.

Detente, he said, “was a great step forward for Cuban society. Things developed and you started to see different perspectives, a different vision of economic improvement for your family, the conditions you live in.”

Now, he said, “I barely make enough to put food on the table.”

Pope Francis has abolished the “pontifical secret” used in clergy sexual abuse cases, after mounting criticism that the high degree of confidentiality has been used to protect pedophiles, silence victims and keep law enforcement from investigating crimes.

In a new document, Francis decreed that information in abuse cases must be protected by church leaders to ensure its “security, integrity and confidentiality.” But he said “pontifical secret” no longer applies to abuse-related accusations, trials and decisions under the Catholic Church’s canon law.

The Vatican’s leading sex crimes investigator, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, called the reform an “epochal decision” that will facilitate coordination with civil law enforcement and open up lines of communication with victims.

While documentation from the church’s in-house legal proceedings will still not become public, Scicluna said, the reform now removes any excuse to not cooperate with legitimate legal requests from civil law enforcement authorities.

Prominent Irish survivor Marie Collins said the reform was “excellent news” that abuse survivors and their advocates had been pressing for. “At last a real and positive change,” she tweeted.

Francis also raised from 14 to 18 the cutoff age below which the Vatican considers pornographic images to be child pornography.

The new laws were issued Tuesday, Francis’ 83rd birthday, as he struggles to respond to the global explosion of the abuse scandal, his own missteps and demands for greater transparency and accountability from victims, law enforcement and ordinary Catholics alike.

The new norms are the latest amendment to the Catholic Church’s in-house canon law — a parallel legal code that metes out ecclesial justice for crimes against the faith — in this case relating to the sexual abuse of minors or vulnerable people by priests, bishops or cardinals. In this legal system, the worst punishment a priest can incur is being defrocked, or dismissed from the clerical state.

Pope Benedict XVI had decreed in 2001 that these cases must be dealt with under “pontifical secret,” the highest form of secrecy in the church. The Vatican had long insisted that such confidentiality was necessary to protect the privacy of the victim, the reputation of the accused and the integrity of the canonical process.

However, such secrecy also served to keep the scandal hidden, prevent law enforcement from accessing documents and silence victims, many of whom often believed that “pontifical secret” prevented them from going to the police to report their priestly abusers.

While the Vatican has long tried to insist this was not the case, it also never mandated that bishops and religious superiors report sex crimes to police, and in the past has encouraged bishops not to do so.

According to the new instruction, which was signed by the Vatican secretary of state but authorized by the pope, the Vatican still doesn’t mandate reporting the crimes to police, saying religious superiors are obliged to do so where civil reporting laws require it.

But it goes further than the Vatican has gone before, saying: “Office confidentiality shall not prevent the fulfillment of the obligations laid down in all places by civil laws, including any reporting obligations, and the execution of enforceable requests of civil judicial authorities.”

The Vatican has been under increasing pressure to cooperate more with law enforcement, and its failure to do so has resulted in unprecedented raids in recent years on diocesan chanceries by police from Belgium to Texas and Chile.

But even under the penalty of subpoenas and raids, bishops have sometimes felt compelled to withhold canonical proceedings given the “pontifical secret,” unless given permission to hand documents over by the Vatican. The new law makes that explicit permission no longer required.

“The freedom of information to statutory authorities and to victims is something that is being facilitated by this new law,” Scicluna told Vatican media.

The Vatican in May issued another law explicitly saying victims cannot be silenced and have a right to learn the outcome of canonical trials. The new document repeats that, and expands the point by saying not only the victim, but any witnesses or the person who lodged the accusation cannot be compelled to silence.

Individual scandals, national inquiries, grand jury investigations, U.N. denunciations and increasingly costly civil litigation have devastated the Catholic hierarchy’s credibility across the globe, and Francis’ own failures and missteps have emboldened his critics.

In February, he summoned the presidents of bishops conferences from around the globe to a four-day summit on preventing abuse, where several speakers called for a reform of the pontifical secret. Francis himself said he intended to raise the age for which pornography was considered child porn.

The Vatican’s editorial director, Andrea Tornielli, said the new law is a “historical” follow-up to the February summit and a sign of openness and transparency.

“The breadth of Pope Francis’ decision is evident: the well-being of children and young people must always come before any protection of a secret, even the `’pontifical secret,’” he said in a statement.

Also Tuesday, Francis accepted the resignation of the Vatican’s ambassador to France, Archbishop Luigi Ventura, who is accused of making unwanted sexual advances to young men.

Ventura turned 75 last week, the mandatory retirement age for bishops, but the fact that his resignation was announced on the same day as Francis’ abuse reforms didn’t seem to be a coincidence.

 

Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, says he provided the president with information that the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine was impeding investigations that could benefit Trump politically. Within weeks, she was recalled from her post.

In an interview with The New York Times, Giuliani portrayed himself as directly involved in the effort to oust Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, and he provided details indicating Trump’s knowledge of that effort.

Giuliani’s interview, published Tuesday, comes as Trump is facing near-certain impeachment Wednesday by the House for abuse of power over his pressure on Ukraine to announce investigations of Democrats while he was withholding aid to the Eastern European nation.

Giuliani said he passed along information to Trump “a couple of times” about how Yovanovitch had frustrated efforts that could help Trump, including efforts to have Ukraine investigate political rival Joe Biden.

Trump, in turn, passed the information on to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Giuliani said. Within weeks, Yovanovitch was told Trump had lost trust in her and she was recalled as ambassador.

Trump has said he did nothing wrong and his pressure on Ukraine was aimed at rooting out corruption there.

Early last year, Giuliani said, he told Trump that Yovanovitch was impeding investigations in Ukraine that could benefit Trump.

“There’s a lot of reasons to move her,” Giuliani told the Times. He said Trump and Pompeo “relied on” his information, likely leading to Yovanovitch’s ouster last April.

“I just gave them the facts,” Giuliani said. “I mean, did I think she should be recalled? I thought she should have been fired. If I was attorney general, I would have kicked her out. I mean — secretary of state.”

Testimony in the Trump impeachment inquiry showed that the claims about Yovanovitch were either unsubstantiated or taken out of context.

In the Times interview, Giuliani portrayed himself as directly involved in the effort to derail Yovanovitch’s career. He said he told Trump and Pompeo that Yovanovitch was blocking visas for Ukrainian prosecutors to come to the United States to present evidence that he claimed could be damaging to Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

“I think I had pointed out to the president a couple of times, I reported to the president, what I had learned about the visa denials,” Giuliani said, as well as claims that she ordered one Ukrainian prosecutor to drop cases.

According to an article published Monday in The New Yorker, Giuliani said that he needed Yovanovitch “out of the way” and that she “was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody.”

“I forced her out because she’s corrupt,” Giuliani told Fox News on Monday. He claimed that Yovanovitch “committed perjury” when she said she turned down the visa requests for a prosecutor because he was corrupt. Giuliani claimed he had witnesses “who will testify that she personally turned down their visas because they were going to come here and give evidence either against Biden or against the Democratic Party.”

Yovanovitch, testifying in October in defiance of Trump, said there was a “concerted campaign” against her based on “unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives.”

In a tweet Tuesday, Giuliani insisted, “Yovanovitch needed to be removed for many reasons most critical she was denying visas to Ukrainians who wanted to come to US and explain Dem corruption in Ukraine. She was OBSTRUCTING JUSTICE and that’s not the only thing she was doing. She at minimum enabled Ukrainian collusion.”

Trump and his allies falsely claim that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. The special counsel’s investigation, as well as U.S. intelligence agencies, found that Russia, not Ukraine, meddled in the election.

 

A former officer with a Belarusian police special unit said he participated in the murder of opposition activists and that he was now seeking political asylum in an unnamed European country.

The comments by Yury Harauski, made in an interview with Deutsche Welle published Dec. 16, added fuel to long-standing accusations that security forces overseen by President Alexander Lukashenko were involved in the disappearance of opposition leader Viktor Gonchar, businessman Anatoly Krasovsky, and two other men in 1999 and 2000.

Harauski told the publication that in the late 1990s he served in a division of Belarus’s Interior Ministry called the Special Rapid Response Unit (SOPR).

He said he participated in the May 7, 1999, kidnapping of former Interior Minister Yury Zakharenko in the Belarusian capital, Minsk. Zakharenko was driven to a military base outside the city and then shot, Harauski said, by his superior officer.

Harauski said he was also involved in the September 16, 1999, abduction of Gonchar, the former head of the country’s Central Election Commission, and Krasovsky, a businessman who supported the country’s opposition.

The two men disappeared after visiting a sauna in Minsk.

Both, he said, were taken to a military base, executed, and their bodies buried in a forest in graves that had already been dug.

Gonchar was a former Lukashenka campaign official who later joined the opposition, while Krasovsky was critical of the Belarusian president.

Harauski specifically blamed Dzmitry Pavlichenko, a lieutenant colonel who was the head of the SOBR unit, as having both recruited him into the unit and of executing Zakharanka.

Relatives of the men have publicly said they believe they were abducted for political reasons and have accused government officials of complicity.

Deutsche Welle said that Harauski was now living in an unnamed “German-speaking” country in Europe and that he was seeking political asylum.

In comments to the Belarusian news portal Tut.by, Pavlichenko called Harauski’s comments nonsense, and he accused Harauski of having been kicked out of SOBR for criminal activity.

A report by a top official with the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe concluded in 2004 that senior Belarusian officials “may themselves be involved” in the disappearances of the men.

 

Members of the Japan soccer team that won the Women’s World Cup in 2011 will be the first to carry the torch for the Tokyo Olympics when the relay opens its Japanese leg on March 26, 2020.

The relay is to begin in J-Village in Fukushima prefecture, located about 250 kilometers (150 miles) north of Tokyo. The area was devastated on March 11, 2011, by an earthquake, tsunami, and the subsequent meltdown of three nuclear reactors.

Organizers made the announcement on Tuesday but did not say which player – or players – would be the first to carry the torch. The torch will go to all 47 Japanese prefectures.

Former coach Norio Sasaki has also been asked to be part of the relay.

Organizers and the International Olympic Committee chose to start the relay in Fukushima to show how the area is recovering from the disaster almost nine years ago.

The torch will go through much of the Fukushima prefecture, although some parts are still off limits to the general public.

The torch relay will take in several World Heritage Sites including Mt. Fuji and the Itsukushima shrine – known as the “Floating Shrine” – in Hiroshima prefecture.

The torch will be lit on March 12 in Greece.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is signalling that he won’t soften his Brexit stance now that he has a majority in Parliament, seeking to rule out any extension of an end-of 2020 deadline to strike a trade deal with the European Union.

Johnson’s office says the government will insert a clause in its Withdrawal Agreement Bill to rule out extending trade negotiations with the EU beyond next year. That could mean Britain leaving without a deal at the start of 2021, a prospect that alarms many U.K. businesses.

The pound plunged Tuesday on the news, falling 1% to less than $1.32.

U.K. lawmakers are meeting in Parliament Tuesday for the first time since last week’s general election, and the bill is due to get its first vote in the House of Commons on Friday.

It implements a divorce agreement struck between Britain and the EU. It will see the U.K. leave the 28-nation bloc on Jan. 31 and enter a transition period until the end of 2020 while a new trade deal is negotiated. During the transition period, Britain will effectively remain member of the EU, though without voting rights.

The withdrawal agreement allows for the transition to be extended until the end of 2022. Johnson has said repeatedly he won’t use the extra time, although trade experts say striking a new deal in only 11 months will be challenging.

Inserting a legal clause into domestic law ruling out an extension would underscore Johnson’s commitment to leave the EU in full by the end of next year, though it would not prevent his government changing its mind later.

Sam Lowe of think tank the Center for European Reform said Johnson likely believed a “firm deadline” would help speed up negotiations. But he told the BBC the government “could easily introduce a later bill saying ‘actually we could extend it.’”

“It’s a firmer deadline, but of course there is still some flexibility,” Lowe said.

Opposition politicians said the move would cause more uncertainty for businesses, who are still unsure what Britain’s trade relationship with the EU will be, three-and-a-half years after the U.K. voted to leave the bloc.

Johnson’s Conservatives won an 80-strong majority in Parliament in last week’s general election. The majority gives Johnson the ability to overcome opposition to his Brexit plans and implement his legislative agenda — unlike predecessor Theresa May, who led a minority administration.

 

 

 

A Princeton University scholar who was freed from Iran this month after three years in captivity  said Monday that his release “is a victory of humanity and diplomacy across nations and political differences.”

Xiyue Wang and his wife, Hua Qu, said in a statement to The Associated Press that the family is doing well and overjoyed by the support they have received. They say their joy is tempered by the fact that other prisoners remain in Iran.

Wang was released on Dec. 7 as part of a prisoner exchange that saw America release a detained Iranian scientist. It was a rare diplomatic breakthrough between Tehran and Washington after months of tensions.

“Xiyue’s release is a victory of humanity and diplomacy across nations and political differences,” the couple said in a statement. “We urge world leaders to come together and find the compassion and common ground to free all political prisoners as soon as possible. Where there is a will, there is a way.”

Wang, a Chinese-American academic, was arrested in Iran in 2016 while conducting research for a doctorate in late 19th- and early 20th-century Eurasian history, according to Princeton. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison there for allegedly “infiltrating” the country and sending confidential material abroad.

Wang’s family and Princeton strongly denied the claims. The United Nations’ Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said “there was no legal basis for the arrest and detention.”

The prisoner trade took place on the tarmac of a Swiss airport, and Wang and Qu on Monday thanked officials in both the United States and Switzerland for facilitating it.

He was freed in exchange for scientist Massoud Soleimani, who was accused in the U.S. of violating sanctions by trying to have biological material brought to Iran.

Multiple other hostages and detainees remain in Iran. They include Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who vanished in Iran in 2007, as well as U.S. Navy veteran Michael White, who is serving a 10-year espionage sentence.
 

Local governments across the U.S. Midwest and Northeast urged drivers to stay off the roads as a second major storm brought snow, ice and a wintry mix to areas from Kansas to New Hampshire.

The death toll rose to 11 from weather-related crashes, including two killed Monday in Indiana. Fatalities were also reported in Missouri, Nebraska and Kansas.

The National Weather Service is warning more than 53 million people to expect hazardous conditions.  

Milder warnings were posted for areas just west of Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia and west of New York City and Boston, where a wintry mix is supposed to turn to rain.

The heaviest snow in the Northeast will stretch from northern Pennsylvania into New England, where 5-10 centimeters is forecast.
 

Former FBI Director James Comey acknowledged Sunday that a Justice Department  inspector general report  identified “real sloppiness” in the surveillance of a former Trump campaign aide and said he was wrong to have been “overconfident” about how the Russia investigation was handled.

But Comey also insisted he was right to feel some measure of vindication because the report did not find evidence for the most sensational of President Donald Trump’s claims, including that he had been wiretapped and illegally spied on and that the FBI had committed treason in investigating ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign.

“Remember how we got here,” Comey said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “The FBI was accused of criminal misconduct. Remember, I was going to jail, and lots of other people were going to jail.”

The inspector general, he added, “did not find misconduct by FBI personnel, did not find political bias, did not find illegal conduct.” The significant mistakes the inspector general identified are “not something to sneeze at” but also not evidence of intentional misconduct, Comey said.

In a tweet Sunday, Trump called for an apology from Comey, now that he “got caught red handed.”

“So now Comey’s admitting he was wrong,” Trump wrote. “So what are the consequences for his unlawful conduct. Could it be years in jail? Where are the apologies to me and others, Jim?”

The report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that the FBI opened the Russia investigation for a legitimate reason and was not motivated by partisan bias when it did so.

But Horowitz also found major errors and omissions in applications the FBI submitted to eavesdrop on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Those problems include the omission of key information about the reliability of a source whose information had been relied on for the warrant, and the altering of an email by an FBI lawyer.

Comey said in retrospect that he was wrong when he said last year that the applications to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were handled in a “thoughtful, responsible way.”

“I was overconfident in the procedures that the FBI and Justice had built over 20 years. I thought they were robust enough. It’s incredibly hard to get a FISA. I was overconfident in those,” Comey said Sunday.

“Because he’s right,” Comey added, referring to Horowitz. “There was real sloppiness, 17 things that either should’ve been in the applications or at least discussed and characterized differently. It was not acceptable and so he’s right. I was wrong.”

Current FBI Director Christopher Wray told The Associated Press last week that the report identified problems that the report found problems that are “unacceptable and unrepresentative of who we are as an institution.” The FBI is taking more than 40 steps to fix those problems, he said.

Horowitz told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that no one who was involved in the warrant application process should feel vindicated, rejecting claims of vindication that Comey had made earlier in the week. Comey said Sunday that he simply meant that the report had debunked some of the gravest allegations that Trump and his supporters had made.

“All of that was nonsense. I think it’s really important that the inspector general looked at that and that the American people, your viewers and all viewers, understand that’s true,” Comey said.

He also criticized Attorney General William Barr for saying in a separate interview last week that the many errors by the FBI left open the possibility that agents may have acted in bad faith.

“The facts just aren’t there, full stop,” Comey said, when asked whether Barr has a valid point. “That doesn’t make it any less consequential, any less important, but that’s an irresponsible statement.”

Comey, who was fired by Trump in May 2017, also said Sunday that he did not know the particulars of the investigation.

“As a director sitting on top of an organization of 38,000 people, you can’t run an investigation that’s seven layers below you,” Comey said. “You have to leave it to the career professionals to do, to the special agents who do this for their lives.”

 

 

A female tattoo artist, a rarity in ultra-conservative Afghanistan, is taking a big risk with every customer she takes on.

It’s been 18 months since Suraya Shaheedi started her mobile tattoo shop in the capital, Kabul. She’s received death threats for taking on the taboo of the ink-on-skin drawings she does — as well as being a single woman willing to work with men.

“I have struggled a lot, even been threatened with death, because people in Afghanistan think doing tattoos is haram,” she said, using the Arabic word meaning prohibited by religion.

“Whether my customers are men or women doesn’t matter to me. I do tattoos for both,” says Shaheedi, a 26-year-old, divorced single mother.

In a black curtained room, surrounded by his friends, a young customer shrieks in pain as the needle pierces and inks his skin.

“I can’t leave the profession I love,” Shaheedi adds.

She easily gets customers, whether men or women, as social attitudes toward tattoos loosen up and more ink parlors open. It’s the kind of small, but important change that Shaheedi feels a return of Taliban rule could threaten.

After decades of war, Afghans want peace. A big concern for many like Shaheedi is that U.S.-led peace talks with the Taliban will boost the militant group.

“I am happy if the Taliban return results in peace, but if they disagree with my work and impede the freedom and progress of women, then I will be the first to stand against them,” she vowed.

Women like Shaheedi have carved out a space for themselves in a society where custom heavily restricts women’s roles and education. Close to 40% of Afghanistan’s eligible girls are not allowed by their families to go to school, and almost 20% are forced by their families to leave school after grade six, according to a survey by the Asia Foundation released this year.

In areas under the Taliban, who now control or hold sway over roughly half of the country, women are not allowed to leave their homes without a male escort. The insurgent group ruled Afghanistan with a harsh version of Islamic law from 1996 to 2001, when the U.S. invaded.

Shaheedi divorced her husband eight years ago while she was pregnant. She and her son now live with her parents. Her father supports her work, even though Afghanistan’s patriarchal society often forbids a woman from touching a man to whom she is not related or married.

Her parents and elder brother persuaded her to become a tattoo artist, Shaheedi said, after she got her first tattoo while visiting Turkey — an arrow piercing the image of an eye on her right hand, which she says symbolizes overcoming adversity.

Shaheedi’s father, Hussain, 58, believes the strict customs controlling women in Afghanistan need to change. “I support my daughter in every way, and she makes me proud the way she’s stood against this taboo,” he said.

Shaheedi uses Instagram and other social media to find and meet customers. She prefers not to keep a parlor with a fixed address out of concerns for her safety.

She also does manicures and makeup. When she met one customer recently at a hair salon, the customer’s husband recognized her from her social media pages as being the tattoo artist “Ahoo,” the nickname she uses online. The husband threatened to kill Shaheedi if she kept posting images of her tattoo work on social media.

Tattoos were common in some of Afghanistan’s rural areas, especially among Pashtun and Hazara women, but the ink piercings were used sparingly, often as only a few green dots on the face.

Tattoo artists say demand among the younger generation has risen for more flamboyant and personal designs, and with it, the number of ink parlors increased in the capital.

Omid Noori, 23, has 16 tattoos all over his body. He wants to add another on his left arm, showing the head of a lion with a crown and wreaths. But he only wants new designs on parts of his body that his clothing can hide, because he says he’s tired of hearing people’s negative comments about the ink piercings.

He also worries what would happen if Islamic militants caught him.

“I’m thinking that if the Taliban return, they’ll cut off my hands and legs,” he said.

He inked his last tattoos at a parlor belonging to a former Afghan army officer, Nazeer Mosawi.

Mosawi, 42, fought for seven years in Afghanistan’s civil war with the Islamic insurgents. He says he is still fighting the war, but this time his battle is against society’s conservatism, with his tattoo machine as his weapon.

Mosawi receives threatening phone and social media messages almost every day, demanding he close his tattoo business. “They even threaten to beat me, burn my shop,” he said. “There is no alternative: I tell them, OK, I can’t flee this country because of these threats. It’s my homeland.”

But for every threat he gets, Mosawi said he gets several messages with positive feedback or people curious to learn more.

Shaheedi said she is also working to put her 8-year-old son, now in second grade, through school. She is also studying business management at a university in Kabul.

“Being a woman in Afghanistan requires guts,” she said. “I am proud of myself for having the guts.”

 

Iraqi political parties struggled to reach a consensus on a new prime minister Monday amid unprecedented protests as the deadline for a parliamentary vote loomed.

Iraq’s competing factions typically engage in drawn-out discussions before any official decision, but replacing outgoing premier Adel Abdel Mahdi has been further complicated by the scrutiny of the months-old protest movement that forced his resignation.

For over two months, Baghdad and the Shiite-majority south have been rocked by protests against the government and Iranian influence, rejecting in advance any politician from the “corrupt system” in place since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The protest movement erupted on October 1 and was met with violent suppression, with some 460 people killed and 25,000 wounded to date.

Abdel Mahdi’s resignation on December 1 was precipitated by a wave of violence against demonstrators and the intervention by top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, whose influence looms large in Iraqi politics.

Abdel Mahdi continues to carry out day-to-day government business pending the naming of a new premier.

In an official letter made public late Sunday, President Barham Saleh said he’d received a letter from the speaker of parliament accepting Abdel Mahdi’s resignation “on December 4.”

According to the constitution, parliament has two weeks to designate a new prime minister, making the deadline Thursday.

Several names circulated

In his own letter, Saleh asks parliament to tell him “what is the largest coalition” in the assembly, from which the new premier should theoretically come.

When naming Abdel Mahdi 13 months ago, parliament remained vague on the “largest coalition” and the premier was approved as soon as he was designated by Saleh.

The prime minister then formed his government with the support of two allies, now divided in their responses to the protest movement.

In one corner is the powerful Shi’ite cleric Moqtada Sadr, who holds the largest bloc in parliament and supports the protesters calling for an overhaul of the political system.

In the other is the bloc made up of veterans of the Hashed al-Shaabi pro-Iranian paramilitary group now integrated into Iraqi security forces. Making up the second largest bloc, they see the protest movement as the product of a foreign “conspiracy.” 

Several names have circulated, including 49-year-old Mohammed al-Soudani, a former minister and ex-governor of a southern province.

He has already been rejected by protesters, who demand an “independent” candidate.

Several sources told AFP Soudani’s approval by parliament was “risky,” with one saying “there is a big risk his candidature will be rejected.”

Saleh “is betting on this rejection, so he can present the candidate of his choice” without needing parliament’s approval, as the constitution stipulates, this source added.

Another complication in the negotiations is the unusual disassociation from the process of Sistani, 89.

While he has played kingmaker of Iraqi governments since 2003, Sistani said ten days ago that this time he intended to play “no role”, only expressing a wish that the choice be made without “foreign interference.”