U.S. President Donald Trump, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto have signed the new U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement, a deal designed to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement. White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara reports.
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Category Archives: News
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Markets Sweat on Lopez Obrador’s ‘True Colors’ on Eve of New Mexican Presidency
During Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s successful campaign for the Mexican presidency, his advisers met representatives of dozens of investment funds to allay fears about the leftist’s plans, saying he prized economic stability and wanted to attract foreign capital.
Initially, it worked.
When Lopez Obrador won office by a landslide on July 1, the peso and the stock market rose, buoyed by his conciliatory tone.
The rally continued when Mexico and the United States reached a deal to rework the NAFTA trade pact in late August.
But the mood has since changed.
Lopez Obrador, who takes office Saturday, began saying in September that Mexico was “bankrupt.” When he canceled a new $13 billion Mexico City airport on Oct. 29 on the basis of a widely-derided referendum, investors took flight.
“[Lopez Obrador] behaved quite well from the election in early July until the referendum on the airport. That was really an indication of his true colors,” said Penny Foley, portfolio manager for emerging markets and international equities groups at TCW Group Inc, which manages $198 billion in total.
Foley said the referendum prompted TCW to cut its exposure to bonds issued by state oil firm Pemex, on the grounds that under a Lopez Obrador administration the company would be driven more by politics than by profit.
“We are now slightly underweight Mexico in the dollar fund and neutral in the local currency fund,” she added.
Lopez Obrador wants to attract investment from home and abroad to fuel economic growth and drive an ambitious infrastructure agenda, including a major rail project linking Cancun to Mexico’s southeast, plus a new oil refinery.
Yet decisions such as the airport cancellation have fed investors’ concerns he could push Mexico toward a more authoritarian, arbitrary and partisan form of government.
Mexico’s S&P/BVM IPC stock index has tumbled 17 percent since the market’s post-election peak on Aug. 28, while the peso has fallen around 8 percent against the dollar.
Bond yields on Mexican 10-year sovereign debt have jumped 121 basis points, a sign investors see it as a riskier bet.
By contrast, yields on Brazil’s 10-year debt have fallen over 20 basis points since the Oct. 28 presidential election victory of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right politician who has appointed a group of pro-market economists to his team. Mexican corporate debt markets have taken note.
Airport operator GAP, which controls terminals in a dozen cities including Tijuana and Guadalajara, canceled a planned 6 billion peso debt issuance this week.
“We decided to wait for better conditions,” GAP chief financial officer Saul Villarreal told Reuters.
Some European businesses are also in wait-and-see mode, said Alberico Peyron, a board member and former head of the Italian chamber of commerce in Mexico.
There was “no panic so far,” but a few executives had put plans on hold until the picture became clearer, he said, adding: “There are more who are worried than are optimistic.”
‘Errors’ made
After 30 years of kicking against the establishment, the veteran Lopez Obrador, a 65-year-old former mayor of Mexico City, claimed the presidency with a promise to clean up government, cut poverty and tame Mexico’s drug cartels.
Aiming to almost double economic growth to around 4 percent, Lopez Obrador wants to revive Pemex, increase pensions and spur development in the poorer south to contain illegal immigration that has strained ties with U.S. President Donald Trump.
Lopez Obrador says rooting out corruption will free up billions of dollars, while he intends to save more with pay cuts for civil servants. However, critics say the cuts could affect the quality of officials in his new administration.
Johannes Hauser, managing director of the German chamber of commerce in Mexico, told Reuters the association’s annual survey of firms, currently underway, was upbeat on Mexico.
Still, initial results suggested companies were not quite as eager to invest or create new jobs as they were a year ago. And the airport cancellation had been a shock, he said.
During their campaign outreach, some of Lopez Obrador’s advisers sought to play down the airport’s importance to markets, while others suggested it was likely to be completed.
Without providing evidence, Lopez Obrador said the project — which has been under construction since 2015 — was tainted by corruption. But more than once, Lopez Obrador had raised the possibility of turning its completion into a private concession.
Incoming Finance Minister Carlos Urzua, whose team sat down with financial heavyweights such as Bank of America, BlackRock, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley, told Reuters in April that foreign investors were “not very worried” about the airport.
Now, the scrapping of the hub has raised the prospect of a messy legal dispute with investors that could cost billions of dollars — as well as cloud interest in new projects.
Some members of Lopez Obrador’s incoming government privately express deep misgivings about the decision to cancel the airport, which was based on a referendum organized by his own party in which barely 1 percent of the electorate voted.
They felt the poll, which critics lambasted as opaque and open to abuse, undermined the credibility he had built up over the years he spent campaigning against corruption and vote-rigging.
Lopez Obrador’s taste for rule by referendum, and changes to laws governing everything from banking to mining and pension funds that have been proposed by his National Regeneration Movement and the party’s allies in Congress, have further curdled sentiment.
“I’ve moved from being cautiously optimistic after the election, to being quite pessimistic now,” said Andres Rozental, a former deputy foreign minister of Mexico. “He’s not building on what he got. He’s destroying little by little what he got.”
Facing questions about the airport controversy from a panel of prominent Mexican journalists this month, Lopez Obrador was unrepentant about the referendum, saying that “errors” made were blown out of proportion by adversaries trying to hurt him.
“What I regard as most important in my life is my honesty,” he said. “We are not creating a dictatorship,” he added, repeating what is a frequent aside in his public pronouncements.
Nevertheless, Arturo Herrera, an incoming deputy finance minister, conceded this week that the transition had tested the next government, which must present its first budget by mid-December.
“What we’re all learning is that we need to be extremely careful,” he told Mexican television.
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Indian Politicians Spar Over Dodgy Economic Data as Election Nears
It may be the world’s sixth largest, but most other things about India’s economy are up for debate.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is under fire for the release of new historical GDP figures that significantly downgraded growth during the years the opposition Congress party was in power, replacing old government estimates and those prepared by an independent committee.
The figures, released by the government’s Central Statistics Office (CSO), showed growth in the 10 years of Congress rule to 2014 averaged 6.7 percent, below an average of 7.4 percent under the current government. A previous government estimate had growth under Congress at 7.8 percent.
P. Chidambaram, a former Congress finance minister, called the release “a joke”. In response India’s current finance minister, the BJP’s Arun Jaitley, said the CSO was a credible organization.
The fallout comes at a critical time for Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
India’s economy grew a weaker-than-expected 7.1 percent in the July-September quarter, from a more than two-year high of 8.2 percent in the previous quarter, government data showed on Friday.
Modi faces a general election next year, when the performance of the economy under his pro-business administration compared with the Congress era is likely to dominate campaigning.
The spat has also alarmed India’s top statisticians, who have long faced the difficult task of estimating growth and unemployment in an economy with hundreds of millions of informal workers, and dominated its financial press and political cartoons in recent days.
“The entire episode threatens to bring disrepute to India’s statistical services,” said an editorial in Mint, one of the country’s leading business newspapers, on Friday.
A joke widely circulated on WhatsApp said the government would soon be reinterpreting the last cricket World Cup, in which India crashed out in the semi-finals, to say the country won based on a new methodology.
COMPETING INTERESTS
Unlike many major economies, India lacks an independent statistical body.
An organization called the National Statistics Commission (NSC) was formed in 2005 with that intention, though it is yet to be recognized as the official body for generating statistics.
Last year the NSC set up a committee, chaired by economist Sudipto Mundle, to come up with a new set of historical GDP figures.
Its report, published in July, showed growth averaged 8.1 percent in the decade before the BJP took power.
After the figures were cheered by the Congress, the government issued a clarification saying the report “had not yet been finalised and various alternative methods are being explored”. Shortly after, the report was pulled from the government’s website.
“The whole thing has unfortunately become very political,” said Mundle, on the battle between the two parties. “It is very troubling.”
Attempts to formalize the NSC’s role have been successively stonewalled by both Congress and the BJP, said N R Bhanumurthy, who sat on the committee chaired by Mundle.
“They have not shown much interest in making it independent from our government,” he said.
The debate over India’s true level of growth is the latest to frustrate economists looking to measure the performance of the country of 1.3 billion people.
India has not published its official employment survey since 2015, while a smaller quarterly survey on companies employing more than 10 workers has not been released since March while the government comes up with new methodology.
India’s large informal sector made calculating employment “almost impossible”, Bhanumurthy said, leading to a vacuum that was filled with competing political interests.
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Washington’s New Power Standoff – Trump, Pelosi
They haven’t spoken in days, not since President Donald Trump called to congratulate Nancy Pelosi on Democrats’ election night win.
But they don’t really need to. Trump and Pelosi go way back, from the time she first showed up at Trump Tower fundraising for the Democrats long before he would become president or she the House speaker. Two big-name heirs to big-city honchos — Trump and Pelosi each had fathers who were political power players in their home towns — they’ve rubbed elbows on the Manhattan social scene for years.
And despite daily barbs in Washington, he’s always “Mr. President” to her, and she’s one prominent politician he has not labeled with a derisive nickname.
Not quite friends, nor enemies, theirs is perhaps the most important relationship in Washington. If anything is to come of the new era of divided government, with a Republican president and Democratic control of the House, it will happen in the deal-making space between two of the country’s most polarizing politicians.
The day after their election night phone call, Trump and Pelosi did speak again, indirectly, across Pennsylvania Avenue.
“I really respected what Nancy said last night about bipartisanship and getting together and uniting,” Trump said in a press conference at the White House. “That’s what we should be doing.”
Pressed after his unusual public lobbying for Pelosi to become House speaker, Trump insisted he was sincere.
“A lot of people thought I was being sarcastic or I was kidding. I wasn’t. I think she deserves it,” he said. “I also believe that Nancy Pelosi and I could work together and get a lot of things done.”
Pelosi sent word back a few minutes later from her own press conference at the Capitol, which she delayed for nearly an hour as the president conducted his.
“Last night, I had a conversation with President Trump about how we could work together,” Pelosi said, noting that “building infrastructure” was one of the items they discussed.
“He talked about it during his campaign and really didn’t come through with it in his first two years in office,” she nudged. “I hope that we can do that because we want to create jobs from sea to shining sea.”
Despite all the campaign trail trash talk, both Trump and Pelosi have incentive to make some deals.
The president could use a domestic policy win heading into his own re-election in 2020, alongside his regular railing against illegal immigration, the “witch hunt” of the Russia investigation or other issues that emerge from his tweets.
Democrats, too, need to show Americans they can do more than resist the Trump White House. It’s no surprise that two of the top Democratic priorities in the new Congress, infrastructure investment and lowering health care costs, dovetail with promises Trump made to voters, but has not yet fulfilled.
“I do think there’s opportunities to pass legislation,” said former White House legislative director Marc Short.
Trump has long viewed Pelosi as both a foil and a possible partner, and she sees in him the one who can sign legislation into law.
The president has told confidants that he respects Pelosi’s deal-making prowess and her ability to hang on to power in the face of a series of challenges from the left wing of the party, according to four White House officials and Republicans close to the White House. The officials were not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations and requested anonymity.
He told one ally this month that he respected Pelosi “as a fighter” and that he viewed her as someone with whom he could negotiate.
“The president respects her,” said Short.
Short described the interaction between Pelosi and Trump during a 2017 meeting with other congressional leaders at the White House to prevent a government shutdown. “They were throwing pros and cons back at each other,” he said.
“The question I can’t answer is to what extent will Democrats give Pelosi political bandwidth” to strike deals, Short said. He pointed to potential areas of agreement like infrastructure, drug prices and prison reform.
But part of Trump’s push for Pelosi to return to power was more nakedly political. Pelosi has long been a popular Republican target, spurring countless fundraising efforts and attack ads. And Trump has told advisers that, if needed, he would make her the face of the opposition in Democratic party until the 2020 presidential field sorts itself out.
Pelosi’s name draws some of the biggest jeers at his rallies and he believes that “she could be Hillary” in terms of a Clinton-like figure to rally Republicans against, according to one of the advisers familiar with the president’s private conversations.
At the same time, Trump has not publicly branded Pelosi with a mocking nickname. She’s no “Cryin’” Chuck Schumer, as he calls the top Senate Democrat, or “Little” Adam Schiff at the Intelligence Committee or “Low IQ” Rep. Maxine Waters of California, who will chair the Financial Services Committee.
On whether Trump likes Pelosi as ally or adversary, Short said, “I don’t think those are mutually exclusive.”
Pelosi, perhaps more than her Republican counterparts — outgoing Speaker Paul Ryan or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — became an early observer, and adapter, to the Trump style of governing.
When Trump and Democrats were trying to broker an immigration deal in September 2017, she suggested he could tweet his assurances to the young Dreamers. And he did.
Around the same time when Trump and congressional leaders convened at the White House to avoid a federal government shutdown, Republicans and Trump’s own Cabinet team pressed for their preferred solution. But Pelosi kept asking a simple question: How many Republican votes could they bring to the table? When it was clear they could not bring enough for passage, Trump intervened and agreed with Democrats “Chuck and Nancy,” as he came to call them.
Votes, Pelosi explained later, were the “currency of the realm.” Trump, as a businessman, she said, got it.
Pelosi is poised to become House speaker again if she wins her election in January. Asked this week how Trump might react to having a woman in power, Pelosi recalled the first time she held the office, when George W. Bush was president, in 2007.
Bush would call her “No. 3,” she said, a reference to the speaker’s spot in the presidential succession line, after the president and the vice president.
“He treated me and the office I hold with great respect,” she said. “I would expect nothing less than that from this President of the United States.”
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Cohen Guilty Plea Signals New Turn in Russia Probe
The investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election took a potentially significant turn Thursday when President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, entered a guilty plea at a federal court in New York. Cohen admitted that he lied to Congress about Trump’s interest in a real estate project in Russia while he was running for president. VOA National correspondent Jim Malone has more from Washington.
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Trump’s Ex-Lawyer Pleads Guilty to New Charge
Reporters traveling with President Donald Trump to the G-20 Summit in Argentina say he is in a bad mood and distracted after his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, admitted lying to Congress about a Trump real estate deal in Russia.
Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court in New York Thursday, admitting he misled lawmakers about the timing of talks with Russia for building a Trump tower in Moscow.
Special counsel Robert Mueller, who is probing possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian election meddling, brought the charges against Cohen. Cohen is already facing prison time for bank fraud and activities related to his taxicab business.
WATCH: Cohen Guilty Plea Signals New Turn in Russia Probe
What Cohen said to Congress
Cohen told the Senate Intelligence Committee last year that negotiations between the Trump organization and Russia to build the tower in Moscow ended in January 2016. The talks actually continued as late as June of that year, after Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination.
Cohen also admitted to lying to Congress about other details of the Moscow project, including his own contacts with Russian officials and that he never asked Trump to fly to Moscow himself.
According to the charging documents, Cohen’s close friend and onetime Trump employee Felix Sater talked about giving Russian President Vladimir Putin a $50 million penthouse in the Trump tower as a ploy to get Russian oligarchs to pay top dollar to also live there.
Cohen told the judge he lied to Congress because he wanted to be consistent with Trump’s “political messaging” and out of his desire “to be loyal” to Trump.
Trump tower in Moscow
Trump’s plans to build a hotel-retail-apartment complex in Moscow go back more than 20 years.
The president insisted throughout the campaign that he had nothing to do with Russia and had no connections to the Kremlin.
But earlier Thursday, while standing outside the White House, Trump told reporters he had been “thinking about building a building.”
“There would be nothing wrong if I did do it. I was running my business while I was campaigning. There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would have gone back into the business and why should I lose lots of opportunities?” he asked reporters.
Trump landed in Buenos Aires late Thursday for the Group of 20, a meeting of leaders from industrial and emerging-market nations.
Cohen had once said he would “take a bullet” for Trump.
The president now blasts him as a “weak person” who lied to Mueller to get a lighter prison sentence for his financial crimes.
Trump also stressed that his Moscow deal was never a secret and that he abandoned the idea because he wanted to focus on running for president.
The talks between Russia and Cohen for a Trump tower appear to be unrelated to the question of whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to meddle in the 2016 election.
But the negotiations over the deal were going on at the same time Russia was interfering in the election by hacking Democratic party e-mails.
The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, said Cohen’s plea is another example of Trump allies being untruthful about Russia, asking reporters, “What are they covering up for?”
Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, in line to become chairman of the House Intelligence Committee next year, said Cohen’s guilty plea clearly demonstrates “the president’s own denials during the campaign were false or misleading.”
Trump has tried to distance himself from Cohen, despite their long relationship. Cohen testified in August that Trump ordered him to illegally arrange payments before the 2016 election to buy the silence of two women who claim they had affairs with Trump, something Trump has denied.
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Rosenstein Calls for Tech Firms to Work With Law Enforcement
U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein called on social media companies and technology firms Thursday to work with law enforcement to protect the public from cybercriminals.
Speaking at a symposium on online crime, Rosenstein said that “social media platforms provide unprecedented opportunities for the free exchange of ideas. But many users do not understand that the platforms allow malicious actors, including foreign government agents, to deceive them by launching vast influence operations.”
He said it was up to the companies to “place security on the same footing as novelty and convenience, and design technology accordingly.”
He warned that if the technology sector failed to do so, government would have to step in.
“I think the companies now do understand if they do not take it upon themselves to self-regulate — which is essentially the theme of my talk today — they will face the potential of government regulation,” he said.
Extortion scheme
Rosenstein’s remarks came a day after the Justice Department charged two Iranian hackers in connection with a multimillion-dollar cybercrime and extortion scheme that targeted government agencies, cities and businesses.
Rosenstein said many tech companies are willing to work with law enforcement and to prevent the use of their platforms to spread disinformation.
But he said that “some technology experts castigate colleagues who engage with law enforcement to address encryption and similar challenges. Just because people are quick to criticize you does not mean that you are doing the wrong thing.”
U.S. law enforcement officials have long been pushing tech companies to make it easier for them to access information on private devices such as cellphones and social media accounts. But most firms have resisted, citing privacy of the users.
Rosenstein said data encryption practices were a “significant detriment to public safety.”
“Improvements in the ability to investigate crime and hold perpetrators accountable must match the pace at which technology is making crimes easier to commit and more destructive,” Rosenstein said.
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52% of Americans Would Be ‘Very Comfortable’ with Woman President
Several Democratic women, including Senators Kamala Harris (California), Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), Kirsten Gillibrand (New York) and possibly even 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton, are potential presidential contenders in 2020, but it could be more of an uphill battle for them than for their male counterparts.
That’s because just over half of Americans are totally comfortable with the idea of a woman president, according to a new report by the consulting firm Kantar Public.
The report finds that while 63 percent of Americans are perfectly fine with the idea of a woman heading a major corporation, just 52 percent are as comfortable with a scenario featuring a female president.
Men are more inclined to judge a person’s leadership suitability based on gender, while women are more likely to think men and women are equally suited to leadership, according to the report, which finds that 60 percent of women would be OK with one of their own as commander-in-chief, compared to just 45 percent of men.
Ten thousand people in seven developed countries – members of the G7 – were surveyed for the study. In addition to the United States, members of the G7 include Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. England and Germany currently have a woman leading their governments.
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Judicial Nominations, Congressional Probes Likely to Flourish in 2019
A bolstered Republican Senate majority will facilitate U.S. President Donald Trump’s push to remake the federal judiciary even as Congress as a whole returns to political gridlock beginning next year, observers say.
While Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in midterm elections earlier this month, Republicans boosted their Senate majority from 51 to 54 seats in the 100-member chamber, with only one contest, in Republican-leaning Mississippi, yet to be decided.
Beginning in January, Democrats will be able to use their House majority to block any legislation to which they object. But in one critical area, judicial nominees, Republicans will have a stronger hand to confirm Trump’s picks for lifetime appointments to the federal bench and make the judiciary far more ideologically conservative for years, perhaps decades, to come.
“While most things the Senate does need to get 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, nominations only need 51 votes,” Molly Reynolds, a governance studies fellow at Washington‘s Brookings Institution, said. “When you have 53 votes (Republicans have just gained another Senate seat in a Mississippi runoff election), that gives you more of a margin for error.”
‘Judge factory’
“The Senate has become a judge factory,” American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Norman Ornstein said. “[Republican Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell is bringing up a substantial number of judges. With 53 [Republican senators], you can withstand one, two, or even three defections (Republican ‘no’ votes), and still get it done. So for McConnell, this is a substantial amount of breathing room.”
Lawmakers have signaled they are coming to terms with a Congress that will be politically divided and require bipartisan cooperation to send legislation to the president’s desk.
“Marshaling resources against the opioid crisis, reforming Dodd Frank [financial regulations], funding our armed forces, taking care of our veterans…are some of the things we have done in this Congress on a bipartisan basis,” McConnell, who represents Kentucky, recently tweeted.
In an opinion piece for Fox News, the majority leader wrote, “Looking ahead to the coming year, there will be no shortage of opportunities to continue this impressive record of cooperation across the aisle and across the Capitol.”
‘Check on Donald Trump’
For their part, Democrats are not dismissing bipartisanship, but are making clear they intend to flex their newfound political muscle.
“There is now a check on Donald Trump, and that is great news for America,” Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said at a post-election news conference.
On Twitter, Schumer wrote, “We have tremendous unity in our caucus…Democrats are going to be relentlessly focused on the issues that matter most to the American people.”
“Divided control of the two houses of Congress is not a recipe for [producing] major legislation over the next two years,” Reynolds said. “There will be some things they work together on, perhaps infrastructure, perhaps prescription drug prices. But by and large, I expect the two chambers to be operating on different playing fields.”
The year 2010 saw the mirror image of the 2018 midterm election results. In 2010, Republicans won control of the House of Representatives and used it as a check on then-president Barack Obama, a Democrat, as well as what was then a Democratically-led Senate. Legislative gridlock and a series of partial U.S. government shutdowns ensued beginning in 2011.
“Just as in 2011 and 2012, we’re going to see almost no progress on the major issues facing the country, with one possible exception, [improving U.S.] infrastructure, where the interests of House Democrats and the president may come together,” Ornstein said.
Investigations expected
But differences between 2019 and 2011 are likely, given Democrats’ stated intention to investigate the Trump administration.
“I expect Democrats to spend most of their time on oversight and engaging in a wide range of investigations, some of which will target President Trump personally as well as the conduct of the executive branch over the last two years,” Reynolds said.
“This time around, Democrats in the House are not going to instigate a [government] shutdown. We may get a shutdown in the coming months but it will come from Donald Trump insisting on full funding for his [border] wall,” Ornstein said, adding. “[Congressional] investigations are going to bring a great deal of tension.”
Trump remains combative on the ongoing Russia probe and is warning of consequences if House Democrats open the investigative floodgates, recently tweeting, “The prospect of Presidential Harassment by the Dems is causing the Stock Market big headaches!”
Changes in party control of one or both houses of Congress occurred in 2007, 2011, 2015, and will occur again in 2019. Throughout it all, Congress has suffered low approval ratings from the American people, a situation that is unlikely to improve anytime soon.
“We’re going to have sharper partisan edges in the body, a lot of partisan and ideological combat, tribal combat, in the coming years,” Ornstein said. “It’s hard for me to imagine that Americans are going to feel better about things.”
“Gridlock is likely to keep most Americans not terribly happy with how Washington works,” Reynolds said.
Trump’s Ex-Lawyer Pleads Guilty to New Charge
President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty Thursday to a new charge of lying to Congress about a Russian real estate venture Trump sought to develop during his presidential campaign.
The charge was filed by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading a probe into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
Cohen, who previously pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws, directed efforts to construct a Trump-branded complex in Moscow.
He admitted to a federal judge in New York he lied about the timing of negotiations and other information in order to be consistent with Trump’s “political message” and “to be loyal to Individual One,” a reference to Trump during the court session.
Among the lies Cohen told the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017 was that discussions of the project ended by January 2016 when they actually continued until June of that year.
Cohen said he also lied about his communications with Russian officials, when he said he did not agree to a project-related trip to Russia, and when he said he never thought about asking Trump to travel to support the project.
Trump strongly denounced his former attorney, accusing him of succumbing to pressure from prosecutors.
“He’s a weak person and what he’s trying to do is get a reduced sentence,” Trump told reporters outside the White House. “So he’s lying about a project that everybody knew about. I mean we were very open with it. We were thinking about building a building,” Trump added.
“I decided ultimately not to do it. There would have been nothing wrong if I did do it. If I did do it, there would have been nothing wrong,” Trump said.
In the nine page filing by prosecutors, Cohen said Trump was among the people he updated about the project, doing so on at least on three occasions. Cohen also said Trump signed a letter of intent. Trump has repeatedly denied he had business dealings in Russia.
Cohen also said he reached out to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman by email as part of the potential deal.
The former Trump attorney said he collaborated on the deal with Russian-born developer Felix Sater, who Cohen said claimed to have deep connections in Moscow.
Discussions about the real estate proposal began after Trump announced his candidacy. Cohen said the talks ended when it became clear the project was not feasible.
The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, said Cohen’s plea is another example of Trump allies being untruthful about Russia, asking reporters, “What are they covering up for?”
Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani said, “It’s no surprise that Cohen lied to Congress.” Giuliani called Cohen a “proven liar” who is trying to avoid a long prison term for “serious crimes … that had nothing to do with the Trump Organization.”
Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, in line to become chairman of the House Intelligence Committee next year, said Cohen’s guilty plea clearly demonstrates “the president’s own denials during the campaign were false or misleading.”
Schiff said the guilty plea also highlights the belief of Democratic committee members that “other witnesses were also untruthful” during testimony before the panel in August and in October of 2017.
Trump has tried to distance himself from Cohen despite their long relationship. Cohen testified in August that Trump ordered him to illegally arrange payments to buy the silence of two women before the 2016 election, who said they had affairs with Trump. The president has denied their claims.
The developments come as Trump continues almost daily attacks on Mueller’s investigation of Trump campaign links to Russia and whether Trump, as president, obstructed justice in an effort to thwart the probe.
Trump last week provided written answers to about two dozen questions posed by Mueller about his own actions and recollections of the campaign.
It is not known, however, whether Mueller will seek to follow up with more questions for Trump, now nearly halfway through his first term in the White House.
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Deutsche Bank Offices Raided in Money Laundering Probe
Police raided six Deutsche Bank offices in and around Frankfurt on Thursday over money laundering allegations linked to the “Panama Papers”, the public prosecutor’s office in Germany’s financial capital said.
Investigators are looking into the activities of two unnamed Deutsche Bank employees alleged to have helped clients set up offshore firms to launder money, the prosecutor’s office said.
Around 170 police officers, prosecutors and tax inspectors searched the offices where written and electronic business documents were seized.
“Of course, we will cooperate closely with the public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt, as it is in our interest as well to clarify the facts,” Deutsche Bank said, adding it believed it had already provided all the relevant information related to the “Panama Papers”.
The news comes as Deutsche Bank tries to repair its tattered reputation after three years of losses and a drumbeat of financial and regulatory scandals.
Christian Sewing was appointed as chief executive in April to help the bank to rebuild. He trimmed U.S. operations and reshuffled the management board but revenue has continued to slip.
Deutsche Bank shares were down more than 3 percent by 1220 GMT and have lost almost half their value this year.
Offshore links
The investigation was triggered after investigators reviewed so-called “Offshore-Leaks” and “Panama Papers”, the prosecutor said.
The “Panama Papers”, which consist of millions of documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, were leaked to the media in April 2016.
Several banks, including Scandinavian lenders Nordea and Handelsbanken have already been fined by regulators for violating money laundering rules as a result of the papers.
The prosecutors said they are looking at whether Deutsche Bank may have assisted clients to set up offshore companies in tax havens so that funds transferred to accounts at Deutsche Bank could skirt anti-money laundering safeguards.
In 2016 alone, over 900 customers were served by a Deutsche Bank subsidiary registered on the British Virgin Islands, generating a volume of 311 million euros, the prosecutors said.
They also said Deutsche Bank employees are alleged to have breached their duties by neglecting to report money laundering suspicions about clients and offshore companies involved in tax evasion schemes.
The investigation is separate from another money laundering scandal surrounding Danish lender Danske Bank, where Deutsche Bank is involved.
Danske is under investigation for suspicious payments totaling 200 billion euros from 2007 onwards and a source with direct knowledge of the case has told Reuters Deutsche Bank helped to process the bulk of the payments.
A Deutsche Bank executive director has said the lender played only a secondary role as a so-called correspondent bank to Danske Bank, limiting what it needed to know about the people behind the transactions.
Under scrutiny
Weaknesses in Deutsche Bank’s controls that aim to prevent money laundering have caught the attention of regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. The bank has publicly said that it agreed it needed to improve its processes to properly identify clients.
In September, Germany’s financial watchdog – BaFin – ordered Deutsche Bank to do more to prevent money laundering and “terrorist financing,” and appointed KPMG as third party to assess progress.
In August, Reuters reported that Deutsche Bank had uncovered further shortcomings in its ability to fully identify clients and the source of their wealth.
Last year, Deutsche Bank was fined nearly $700 million for allowing money laundering through artificial trades between Moscow, London and New York. An investigation by the U.S.
Department of Justice is still ongoing.
Deutsche Bank has been under pressure after annual losses, and it agreed to pay a $7.2 billion settlement with U.S. authorities last year over its sale of toxic mortgage securities in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.
Trump Studying New Auto Tariffs After GM Restructuring
U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that new auto tariffs were “being studied now,” asserting they could prevent job cuts such as the U.S. layoffs and plant closures that General Motors Co. announced this week.
Trump said on Twitter that the 25 percent tariff placed on imported pickup trucks and commercial vans from markets outside North America in the 1960s had long boosted U.S. vehicle production.
“If we did that with cars coming in, many more cars would be built here,” Trump said, “and G.M. would not be closing their plants in Ohio, Michigan & Maryland.”
The United States has a 2.5 percent tariff on imported cars and sport utility vehicles from markets outside North America and South Korea. The new North American trade deal exempts the first 2.6 million SUVs and passenger cars built in Mexico and Canada from new tariffs.
Several automakers said privately on Wednesday that they feared GM’s action could prompt Trump to act faster than expected on new tariffs.
GM did not directly comment on Trump’s tweets but reiterated that it was committed to investing in the United States. On Monday, the company said it would shutter five North American plants, stop building six low-selling passenger cars in North America and cut up to 15,000 jobs. The company has no plans to shift production of those vehicles to other markets.
The administration has for months been considering imposing dramatic new tariffs on imported vehicles.
The U.S. Commerce Department has circulated draft recommendations to the White House on its investigation into whether to impose tariffs of up to 25 percent on imported cars and parts on national security grounds, Reuters reported earlier this month.
“The President has great power on this issue – Because of the G.M. event, it is being studied now!” Trump said.
Shock to industry
The prospect of tariffs of 25 percent on imported autos and parts has sent shock waves through the auto industry, with both U.S. and foreign-brand producers lobbying against it and warning that national security tariffs on EU and Japanese vehicles could dramatically raise the price of many vehicles.
Trump has also harshly criticized GM for building cars in China. The United States slapped an additional 25 percent tariff on Chinese-made vehicles earlier this year, prompting China to retaliate.
China currently imposes a 40 percent tariff on U.S. automobiles, while the United States has a 27.5 percent tariff on Chinese vehicles.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said in a statement on Wednesday that he “will examine all available tools to equalize the tariffs applied to automobiles.”
Additional tariffs on Chinese-made vehicles and parts would have a limited impact, said Kristin Dziczek, an economist at the Center for Automotive Research. She noted only a small number of vehicles were exported from China to the United States annually.
The White House previously pledged not to move forward with imposing national security tariffs on the European Union or Japan while it was making constructive progress in trade talks.
Trump wants the EU and Japan to buy more American-made vehicles. He wants the EU and Japan to make trade concessions, including lowering the EU’s 10 percent tariff on imported vehicles and cutting nontariff barriers.
The White House in recent weeks has reached out to the chief executives of German automakers, including Daimler AG, MW AG and Volkswagen AG about meeting to discuss the status of auto trade.
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Stocks Leap as Fed Chief Hints Interest Rate Increases May Taper Off
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell boosted U.S. stock markets on Wednesday when he said interest rates were “just below” estimates of a level that neither brakes nor boosts a healthy economy. Many took his comments as a signal that the Fed’s three-year tightening cycle is ending.
The S&P 500 and Dow posted their biggest percentage gains in eight months, while the Nasdaq saw its largest advance in just over a month following Powell’s speech to the Economic Club of New York.
Powell said that while “there was a great deal to like” about U.S. prospects, “our gradual pace of raising interest rates has been an exercise in balancing risks.”
Earlier in the day, in its first-ever financial stability report, the Fed cautioned that trade tensions, Brexit and troubled emerging markets could rock a U.S. financial system where asset prices are “elevated.”
‘Close to neutral’
“[Powell is] now acknowledging he’s close to neutral, which suggests maybe not quite as many rate hikes in the future as investors believed,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Cresset Wealth Advisors in Chicago. “It’s certainly a change of language and welcome news to investors.”
The U.S. Commerce Department affirmed that U.S. GDP grew in the third quarter at a 3.5 percent annual rate, but the goods trade deficit widened, consumer spending was revised lower and sales of new homes tumbled, suggesting clouds are gathering over what is now the second-longest economic expansion on record.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 617.7 points, or 2.5 percent, to 25,366.43, the S&P 500 gained 61.61 points, or 2.30 percent, to 2,743.78 and the Nasdaq Composite added 208.89 points, or 2.95 percent, to 7,291.59.
Of the 11 major sectors in the S&P 500, all but utilities were positive. Technology and consumer discretionary were the biggest percentage gainers, each up more than 3 percent.
The S&P 500 Automobile & Components index was up 1.4 percent after President Donald Trump said he was studying new auto tariffs in the wake of General Motors Co.’s announcement that it would close plants and cut its workforce.
Humana cuts forecast
Health insurer Humana Inc. cut its 2019 forecast for Medicare drug plan enrollment but upped its estimated enrollment in the company’s Medicare Advantage plan. Its stock ended the session up 6.2 percent.
Salesforce.com Inc. beat analysts’ earnings estimates and forecast better-than-expected 2020 revenue, sending its shares up 10.3 percent. Other cloud software makers rose on the news, with the ISE Cloud Index gaining 3.5 percent.
Microsoft Corp briefly surpassed Apple Inc. in market cap but Apple took back its lead by closing. Nevertheless, Microsoft closed 4.0 percent higher as it benefited from optimism regarding demand for cloud computing services.
Among losers, Tiffany & Co. shares dropped 11.8 percent after the luxury retailer missed quarterly sales estimates on slowing Chinese demand.
Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by a 3.95-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 3.58-to-1 ratio favored advancers.
The S&P 500 posted 17 new 52-week highs and six new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 37 new highs and 129 new lows.
Volume on U.S. exchanges was 8.04 billion shares, compared with the 7.82 billion-share average over the last 20 trading days.
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Pelosi Nominated by Democrats for US House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi was nominated by fellow House Democrats to be speaker on Wednesday, but she still faces a showdown vote when the full House convenes in January.
Pelosi entered the closed-door caucus election in an unusual position — running unopposed despite the clamor by some Democrats for new leadership. Votes were still being counted, but she was assured of victory.
“Are there dissenters? Yes,” the California Democrat told reporters as voting was underway. “But I expect to have a powerful vote going forward.”
Pelosi was nominated as her party’s choice for speaker by Rep. Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts, with no fewer than eight colleagues set to second the choice, including Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, the civil rights leader, and three newly elected lawmakers.
As House Democrats met in private in the Capitol, they faced a simple “yes” or “no” choice on the ballots.
A sign of the party’s mood emerged early as the House Democrats elected Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York as caucus chairman, elevating the charismatic 48-year-old from the Congressional Black Caucus as a new generation of leaders pushes to the forefront.
His slim victory in that race, 123-113, over veteran Rep. Barbara Lee of California, another influential member of the Black Caucus, offered a window into the shifting landscape. Flanked by top progressive leaders, Lee made her pitch during the closed session, drawing on the record number of women, including minority women, who ran for office and are entering the new Congress.
The majority, though, went to Jeffries who used his speech to remind Democrats of their core accomplishments — from passage of the Civil Rights Act to the Affordable Care Act — before pivoting to his vision for the future.
“I’m focused on standing up for everyone — white, black, Latino, Asian, Native American — every single American deserves us, here in the United States Congress to work, Democrats and Republicans, on their behalf to make their life better,” he said afterward.
Democrats regrouped for an afternoon session, and voting that includes various caucus positions could stretch on for hours.
In a letter to colleagues ahead of voting, Pelosi gave a nod to those clamoring for change.
“We all agree that history is in a hurry, and we need to accelerate the pace of change in Congress,” she wrote, noting the “historic” class of new first-term lawmakers, the largest since Watergate, who led Democrats to the majority in the midterm election.
“My responsibility is to recognize the myriad of talent and tools at our disposal to take us in to the future by showcasing the idealism, intellect and imagination of our caucus,” she wrote.
Pelosi’s opponents had pledged to usher in a new era for Democrats. But one by one, the powerful California congresswoman picked off the would-be challengers and smoothed skeptics. In the end, there was no one willing, or able, to mount a serious campaign against her bid to reclaim the speaker’s job, which she held from 2007 to 2011, before the GOP took back the majority.
Pelosi still lacks the vote tally she’ll need in January, when the new Congress convenes, to ascend to the post.
“You can’t beat someone with no one,” said Rep.-elect Jahana Hayes, D-Conn., who explained in a statement that she came to Washington eager to hear from colleagues and “hopeful that many candidates would step up to the plate.”
But “the only person that declared their intentions, spoke to me about their vision and asked me for my vote is Nancy Pelosi.”
Democrats were poised to return their entire top leadership team, including Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland in the No. 2 spot as majority leader and Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina in the No. 3 spot as whip. They were running unopposed.
Plenty of newcomers were set to fill the down-ballot slots
Those trying to oust Pelosi say they always knew the internal caucus election would fall in her favor. She only needed a simple majority of Democrats, who have a 233-seat majority, with several races still undecided, to win the nomination.
But she’ll need 218 votes in January, half the full 435-seat House, which is harder, if all Republicans vote against her, as is likely — though she could win with fewer votes if some lawmakers are absent or vote present.
Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., played down the significance of Wednesday’s caucus vote and said the true fight for House speaker will occur in January.
“We’re not going to make a big play of it,” he said. “It’s Jan. 3.”
Several factions within the Democratic caucus in the House worked against Pelosi, but they failed to gain ground in recent days. Still, there seem to be more than enough votes to stop Pelosi in January. Some say only with a floor fight in view will new leaders emerge. They say there are plenty of Democrats on the bench who could step up to the job.
But Pelosi’s ability to stand unopposed Wednesday, despite the threats from within and reams of attack ads against her, showed the staying power of her brand of machine politics.
“The reality is there is no alternative,” said Rep. Brian Higgins, D-N.Y., who had signed on to the letter opposing her but reversed course after Pelosi tapped him to lead his effort to expand Medicare options to those age 50 to 65.
She was the female speaker and hopes to return to a role few men have had twice — most recently, legendary Speaker Sam Rayburn a half-century ago.
Between now and January, Pelosi will work the levers of power by doling out the many committee seat assignments, subcommittee chairmanships and other perks she is able to offer, or withhold, as incentives to win over supporters.
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Rwandan Dissident Draws US Congressional Support
U.S. congressional lawmakers are pressing Rwanda’s government against incarcerating dissident politician Diane Rwigara, who faces up to 22 years in prison after being convicted of inciting insurrection and forgery.
Diane Rwigara, a former presidential candidate, is scheduled to be sentenced December 6, along with her mother, Adeline Rwigara. Both women were tried November 7, with the elder Rwigara convicted of insurrection and promoting ethnic hatred. They had been detained by police in October 2017 and jailed for a year but released on bail last month, prior to trial. They remain at home in Kigali, the capital city, under travel restrictions.
“Peaceful political expression is not a crime. Running for office is not a crime,” the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission — a bipartisan congressional caucus named for its co-founder — said in a tweet posted earlier Monday.
The commission, which defends and promotes human rights internationally, has scheduled a December 4 briefing on Rwanda’s treatment of human rights and political prisoners, including the Rwigaras.
Diane Rwigara ran for president in 2017, challenging incumbent Paul Kagame, but was disqualified after election officials alleged that some signatures needed for her candidacy had been falsified.
In July 2017, the activist started the People Salvation Movement to “encourage Rwandans to hold their government accountable,” as she told CNN. She later was arrested on charges of incitement and fraud. Her mother also was arrested for criticizing the government in a WhatsApp exchange with another relative living outside Rwanda.
Diane Rwigara denied the charges, saying Kagame was trying to prevent her from speaking out against injustice. In an interview with VOA after her October release, she called for the release of political prisoners and others unjustly detained.
Kagame oversaw the central African country’s reconciliation after the 1994 genocide, but rights groups have accused him and the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front of increasingly clamping down on dissent.
This report originated in VOA’s Central Africa Service.
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Trump Says Manafort Pardon ‘Not Off the Table’
U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that a pardon for his onetime 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who is facing years in prison for financial fraud, was “not off the table.”
Trump told the New York Post in a White House interview that he had never discussed pardoning the 69-year-old longtime lobbyist.
“But I wouldn’t take it off the table,” Trump said. “Why would I take it off the table?”
In August, a jury in northern Virginia, just outside Washington, found Manafort guilty of eight counts of tax and bank fraud stemming from his work as a political consultant in Ukraine that predated six months of work, including three as chairman, on Trump’s successful 2016 run for the White House.
Manafort later pleaded guilty in Washington to two new counts — conspiracy against the U.S., which involved financial crimes, and conspiracy to obstruct justice — and agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of possible Trump campaign links to Russia and whether Trump, as president, obstructed justice to try to thwart the probe.
As part of his plea deal with Mueller, Manafort agreed to “fully, truthfully, completely and forthrightly” questions about “any and all matters” of interest to the government.
But in an abrupt twist this week, Mueller accused Manafort of breaching the plea agreement by repeatedly lying to federal investigators, an allegation Manafort’s lawyers rejected. Prosecutors did not describe what Manafort lied about but said they would spell it out in a court filing.
Trump has for months derided Mueller’s 18-month investigation as an unending “witch hunt,” one that he suggested in the interview “can go on for the rest of [Mueller’s] life.”
Trump claimed in the interview with the New York tabloid that Mueller had asked Manafort, former Trump political adviser Roger Stone and Stone’s associate, Jerome Corsi, to lie about their roles in the 2016 political campaign in order to implicate others in the Trump orbit.
“If you told the truth, you go to jail,” Trump said of the prosecutors’ pressure on witnesses.
“You know, this flipping stuff is terrible,” Trump said of witnesses asked to implicate higher-ups. “You flip and you lie and you get — the prosecutors will tell you 99 percent of the time they can get people to flip. It’s rare that they can’t.
“But I had three people: Manafort, Corsi — I don’t know Corsi, but he refuses to say what they demanded — Manafort, Corsi and Roger Stone,” Trump said.
Corsi this week broke off negotiations on a plea deal with Mueller’s investigators. Corsi and Stone have both suggested Mueller might indict them for criminal offenses related to the 2016 campaign.
“It’s actually very brave,” Trump said of Manafort, Stone and Corsi. “But this is where we are. And it’s a terrible thing.”
Trump last week provided written answers to about two dozen questions posed by Mueller about his own actions and recollections of the campaign as he shifted from his life as a New York real estate mogul to that of a first-time candidate for public office. But it is not known whether Mueller will seek to follow up with more questions for Trump, now nearly halfway through his first term in the White House.
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Trump: US Tariffs on More Foreign Vehicles Would Have Prevented GM Plant Closures
U.S. President Donald Trump touted the use of U.S. tariffs on foreign small trucks Wednesday, saying their placement on other foreign vehicles would have prevented the closure of several General Motors plants and the loss of thousands of coveted manufacturing jobs.
Trump noted on Twitter that brisk U.S. small truck sales in the country are due to a 25-percent tariff on small truck imports.
The president reiterated on Twitter that “countries that send us cars have taken advantage of the U.S. for decades.” Trump added he has “great power on this issue,” which he said “is being studied now.”
Trump has threatened to eliminate all federal subsidies to GM in response to the company’s planned closure of five plants and the elimination of 14,000 jobs in North America. Questions remain, though, about whether Trump has the authority to act against the automaker without congressional approval.
Federal tax credits of up to $7,500 are available to those who buy GM electric vehicles. Killing the subsidies may have little financial impact on GM because it is on the cusp of reaching its subsidy limit.
Many of the jobs would be eliminated in Midwestern U.S. states, a region where Trump has long promised a manufacturing rebirth.
GM, which said it has invested more than $22 billion in U.S. operations since it came out of bankruptcy in 2009, has tried to appease the Trump administration while justifying its decisions.
“We appreciate the actions this administration has taken on behalf of industry to improve the overall competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing,” GM said in a statement Tuesday.
Before GM can shutter factories next year in Michigan, Ohio and Ontario, Canada, it must reach agreement with the United Auto Workers union. The union has vowed to fight the closures legally and in collective bargaining.
GM’s restructuring reflects changes in buying trends in North America, prompting vehicle manufacturers to shift away from cars and toward SUVs and trucks.
With An Eye on Past Problems, Facebook Expands Local Feature
Facebook is cautiously expanding a feature that shows people local news and information, including missing-person alerts, road closures, crime reports and school announcements.
Called “Today In,” the service shows people information from their towns and cities from such sources as news outlets, government entities and community groups. Facebook launched the service in January with six cities and expanded that to 25, then more. On Wednesday, “Today In” is expanding to 400 cities in the U.S. — and a few others in Australia.
The move comes as Facebook tries to shake off its reputation as a hotbed for misinformation and elections-meddling and rather a place for communities and people to come together and stay informed.
Here are some things to know about this effort, and why it matters:
The big picture
It’s something users have asked for, the company says. Think of it as an evolution of a “trending” feature the company dropped earlier this year. That feature, which showed news articles that were popular among users, but was rife with such problems as fake news and accusations of bias.
Anthea Watson Strong, product manager for local news and community information, said her team learned from the problems with that feature.
“We feel deeply the mistakes of our foremothers and forefathers,” she said.
This time around, Facebook employees went to some of the cities they were launching in and met with users. They tried to predict problems by doing “pre-mortem” assessments, she said. That is, instead of a “post-mortem” where engineers dissect what went wrong after the fact, they tried to anticipate how people might misuse a feature — for financial gain, for example.
Facebook isn’t saying how long it has been taking this “pre-mortem” approach, though the practice isn’t unique to the company. Nonetheless, it’s a significant step given that many of Facebook’s current problems stem from its failure to foresee how bad actors might co-opt the service.
Facebook also hopes the feature’s slow rollout will prevent problems.
How it works
To find out if “Today In” is available in your city or town, tap the “menu” icon with the three horizontal lines. Then scroll down until you see it. If you want, you can choose to see the local updates directly in your news feed.
For now, the company is offering this only in small and mid-sized cities such as Conroe, Texas, Morgantown, West Virginia, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Large cities such as New York or Los Angeles have added challenges, such as an abundance of news and information, and may need to be broken up into smaller neighborhoods.
The posts in “Today In” are curated by artificial intelligence; there is no human involvement. The service aggregates posts from the Facebook pages for news organizations, government agencies and community groups like dog shelters. For this reason, a kid couldn’t declare a snow day, because “Today In” relies on the school’s official page. Discussion posts from local Facebook groups may also be included.
For now, the information is tailored only by geography, but this might change. A person with no kids, for example, might not want to see updates from schools.
Safeguards?
Facebook uses software filters to weed out objectionable content, just as it does on people’s regular news feed. But the filters are turned up for “Today In.” If a good friend posts something a bit objectionable, you are still likely to see it because Facebook takes your friendship into account. But “Today In” posts aren’t coming from your friends, so Facebook is more likely to keep it out.
Porsche Shows off New Edition of Mainstay 911 Sports Car
Porsche says its future is in electric cars but for now it is rolling out a more powerful version of its internal combustion mainstay, the sleek 911 sports car.
Stuttgart-based Porsche, part of Volkswagen, is to show off the eighth version of its brand-defining model at the Los Angeles Auto Show.
The new 911 doesn’t look much different than earlier editions of the car. The new one has bigger wheel housings and a slightly wider body but the same long hood, sloping roof and prominent headlights that have marked successive versions since 1963.
The company said in a news release Wednesday that the new 911 Carrera S and 4S have flat six-cylinder turbocharged engines putting out 443 horsepower, 23 horsepower more than the predecessor. The Carrera S has a top speed of 191 mph and accelerates from zero to 60 mph (96.5 kph) in 3.5 seconds.
The rear-drive 2020 Carrera S has a base price of $113,200 and the 4S all-wheel drive version starts at $120,600, not including a $1,050 delivery fee. They can be ordered now and will reach dealers in summer 2019.
Porsche boss Oliver Blume says that the 911 remains “the core of our brand, we are making it even more emotional.”
Blume says nonetheless by 2025 about half of all new Porsche cars and SUVs will have electric motors, whether they are all-electric or hybrids combining batteries with internal combustion engines.
He was quoted by the Welt am Sonntag newspaper as saying that the company would be ready for a world in which some cities and countries are talking about banning internal combustion cars in coming decades. “It’s clear, the future belongs to electric mobility,” he said.
The company is developing an all-electric sports car, the Taycan, that would compete with sports car offerings by Tesla, BMW and others.
US Charges 2 Iranians in First Online Ransom Case
In the first case of its kind, the U.S. Justice Department announced charges Wednesday against two Iranian hackers for allegedly launching so-called ransomware on the computer networks of U.S. municipalities, hospitals and other public institutions and extorting millions of dollars.
Ransomware is a type of malware used by cybercriminals to lock down computers and extort money from their users in exchange for providing the keys to unlock them. Once used primarily against individuals, ransomware has been increasingly employed in cyberattacks on businesses.
Faramarz Shahi Savandi, 34, and Mohammad Mehdi Shah Mansouri, 27, are accused of creating the SamSam Ransomware in December 2015 and installing it on the computer networks of more than 230 public and private entities in the United States and Canada, according to a 26-page indictment unsealed Wednesday.
With the targeted computer users unable to access their data, Savandi and Mansouri, operating out of Iran, would then demand a ransom payment made in the form of the virtual currency bitcoin in exchange for decryption keys for the encrypted data.
According to the indictment, the two Iranians received more than $6 million in cryptocurrencies from their victims which they converted into Iranian currency, or rial, using Iran-based bitcoin exchanges. About half of the infiltrated entities refused to make a ransom payment and suffered over $30 million in lost data, according to the indictment.
The victims included the cities of Atlanta, Newark and San Diego, the Colorado Department of Transportation, the University of Calgary in Calgary, Canada, and six U.S. public health care-related entities.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced the six-count indictment at a press conference in Washington.
“Every sector of our economy is a target of malicious cyberactivity,” Rosenstein said. “But the events described in this indictment highlight the urgent need for municipalities, public utilities, health care institutions, universities, and other public organizations to enhance their cybersecurity.”
The two indicted Iranians remain at large and have been placed on the FBI’s wanted list. They’re charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and two counts of intentional damage to a protected computer, among other related crimes.
The indictment marks the first time the Justice Department has brought charges against cybercriminals involved in a ransomware and extortion scheme, according to Rosenstein.
Ransomware has grown in sophistication and distribution in recent years. According to a report by the cybersecurity firm Bitdefender, ransomware payments were expected to reach a record $2 billion in 2017.
‘Trend’ from Iran
The charges are also the latest in a string of indictments brought against Iranian hackers and cybercriminals in recent months. In March, prosecutors charged nine Iranian hackers with penetrating the computer networks of hundreds of American and foreign universities and other institutions to steal valuable research material. Unlike some of the previously indicted Iranian hackers, however, Savandi and Mansouri are not believed to have ties to Tehran.
“The actions highlighted today, which represent a continuing trend of cybercriminal activity emanating from Iran, were particularly threatening, as they targeted public safety institutions, including U.S. hospital systems and governmental entities,” said Amy Hess, executive assistant director of the FBI. “As cyberthreats evolve and cybercriminals develop more sophisticated techniques, so do we.”
The 35-month computer hacking scheme led by Savandi and Mansouri began in January 2016 with an attack on an unidentified business in Mercer County, New Jersey, and moved on to public entities such as the City of Newark and health care providers such as Kansas Heart Hospital in Wichita, Kansas.
Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski said the Iranian hackers carefully chose their targets. A few days prior to attacking the network of Kansas Heart Hospital, for example, they “conducted online searches concerning the hospital and accessed its website,” he said.
Kimberly Goody, manager of cybercrime analysis at cybersecurity firm FireEye, said the hackers probably chose to target health care and government organizations because “they provide critical services and believed their likelihood of paying was higher as a result.”
The indictment does not name the entities that paid a ransom.
Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.
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Seoul’s Telecom Outage Highlights Need for Redundancy in Connected World
Residents in Seoul discovered how fragile their telecommunications system was this past weekend when a fire disrupted service for millions. The government and the provider vowed to implement changes to avoid a repeat of the event, but the system failure demonstrated a need for greater redundancy and preparation for future natural and technological disasters.
The fire affected customers of KT, the nation’s second largest telecommunications company. They found themselves unable to make calls, access the internet, complete ATM or credit card transactions, and watch television. Local media also reported an elderly woman died when she fell ill and her husband wasn’t able to reach emergency services during the service outage.
Lee Manjong, chairman of the Korean Association for Terrorism Studies and professor of the department of Law & Police at Howon University, told VOA that while it is nearly impossible to prevent widespread system outages, certain steps can be taken to avoid catastrophic failures.
“It is necessary to split the public safety net (fire, medical, and police emergency services) and make system backups (redundancies) compulsory,” he said.
Following the blaze, South Korea’s minister of Science and ICT (Information, Communications, and Technology), You Young-min, spoke to the CEOs of South Korea’s three major communication companies (SK Telecom, KT, and LG U+) to discuss their backup plans.
You said the companies “need to swiftly change their contract clauses on compensation issues and also need to come up with plans that would reroute traffic if such accidents, which shouldn’t happen again, happen.”
When asked for specifics on what steps the government planned on taking to prevent a similar event in the future, the ministry declined to offer specifics, stating that responsible parties would prepare fire prevention measures this year and set up a task force to implement recommendations.
Local broadcaster MBC also reported that telecommunication companies and the government held a 20-minute virtual natural disaster drill in May to simulate a system outage, but the simulation proved to be ineffective in real-world situations.
Interconnected services
The Seoul fire and resulting system outage demonstrated how interconnected services are in the 21st century.
“If a network is down, then it affects other networks such as finance, power, energy, and railway,” said Lee.
He said there are multiple ways the electronic infrastructure can be paralyzed. This includes physical damage, natural disasters, and cyber attacks. However, Lee notes disruptions caused by cyber incursions are more effective.
“Cyber attacks are more efficient as they can take place without access to the physical location of the target,” he said.
According to Lee, this is because the government is able to secure physical sites, so cyber-warriors choose “soft targets” connected through the Internet.
A distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attack could be launched from the Internet and attack telecommunication networks. This type of attack floods a computer network with incoming data packets and overwhelms the system, effectively shutting it down. Lee said such attacks on telecom systems could wreak havoc and paralyze communication.
He cautioned that a successful cyber attack on South Korea’s technological infrastructure could yield “unimaginable” damage because of the country’s reliance on networked services.
Fire and recovery
Saturday’s fire struck an underground facility of KT, destroying telephone lines and fiber optic cables, taking about 10 hours to suppress.
Seoul authorities rate facilities on a scale from A to D. Buildings rated A, B, or C must have adequate fire prevention systems installed, while those receiving a D rating do not.
KT’s Ahyeon facility, where the fire took place, was one of 27 D-rated facilities belonging to the company. As such, fire scene investigators found there were no fire detectors or sprinkler system installed at the Ahyeon facility and only a single fire extinguisher present.
South Korea’s other telecommunication carriers utilize over 800 similar facilities throughout the country, none of which are required to have fire detection equipment or sprinklers installed.
Lee said government regulations must be altered to bridge the gaps to ensure that such facilities are required to have redundant services elsewhere in the event of a natural disaster or cyber attack.
Estimates are the blaze resulted in about $7 million in property damage. KT has announced it would compensate affected customers by awarding them a free month of service for their inconvenience. KB security expects that amount to total about $27.5 million.
In a text message to customers, KT said it was “deeply sorry for the inconvenience. We will adopt preventive measures such as safety inspections… to avoid a recurrence.”
Seoul officials told VOA the cause of the fire remains unknown and the investigation to determine its source could last a month.
Lee Ju-hyun contributed to this report.
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Ocean Shock: Building a Silicon Valley of the Sea
This is part of “Ocean Shock,” a Reuters series exploring climate change’s impact on sea creatures and the people who depend on them.
Norway has built the world’s biggest salmon-farming industry. But it wants to go bigger. With their lucrative oil fields now in decline, Norwegians have ambitious plans for aquaculture to power their economy far into the future.
Climate change could make those dreams harder to realize.
Salmon feed is based on fishmeal, produced by grinding up wild-caught fish. With warming waters and ocean acidification pushing underwater ecosystems to the breaking point, Big Aquaculture is seeking ways to feed fish that aren’t hostage to increasingly unpredictable seas.
“Feed has a couple of bottlenecks: We’re still using marine resources, for example fishmeal and fish oil, to then put into fish. This is not necessarily sustainable in the long term,” said Georg Baunach, co-founder of Hatch, an accelerator focused on supporting aquaculture startups. “And that’s why we need innovation in feed.”
Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and scientists are racing to identify alternatives, turning the Norwegian cities of Bergen and Stavanger into a Silicon Valley of the Sea. Spending on research and development in Norway’s aquaculture sector increased by 30 percent to 2.3 billion kroner, or $275 million, between 2013 and 2015, according to official data quoted by Hatch, as startups and research institutes raced to develop disruptive new technologies.
The innovators aren’t short of ideas. At Norway’s biggest oil refinery, a startup called CO2Bio is harnessing greenhouse gases to culture algae that can then be harvested as a sustainable source of fish feed.
At the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen, the Aquafly project is investigating whether black soldier flies fed on waste products from the food industry or the seaweed growing off Norway’s coast could be another viable feed ingredient.
“The insects are also part of this whole circular economy, where instead of throwing away things you would reuse and recycle and upcycle,” said Nina Liland, one of the Aquafly researchers. “Potentially you could use food waste from households to produce insects that could be used for fish feeds: That would be an optimal scenario.”
Various companies are working on projects to recycle more of the vast amounts of waste dumped into the sea by Norway’s aquaculture industry into products such as biogas or fertilizer.
Researchers are also looking for ways to combat the sea lice parasites that thrive in salmon cages, which are a major brake on the industry’s plans to expand.
Time may not be on the fish farmers’ side. With climate change projected to intensify in the coming decades, the challenge will be to turn promising new ideas into viable projects fast enough to shield their dreams of a prosperous future from the growing turmoil at sea.
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Manafort Allegations Throw New Uncertainty into Russia Probe
The breakdown of a plea deal with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and an explosive British news report about alleged contacts he may have had with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange threw a new element of uncertainty into the Trump-Russia investigation on Tuesday.
A day after prosecutors accused Manafort of repeatedly lying to them, trashing his agreement to tell all in return for a lighter sentence, he adamantly denied a report in the Guardian that he had met secretly with Assange in March 2016. That’s the same month he joined the Trump campaign and that Russian hackers began an effort to penetrate the email accounts of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The developments thrust Manafort back into the investigation spotlight, raising new questions about what he knows and what prosecutors say he might be attempting to conceal as they probe Russian election interference and any possible coordination with Trump associates in the campaign that sent the celebrity businessman to the White House.
At the same time, other figures entangled in the investigation, including Trump himself, have been scrambling to escalate attacks and allegations against prosecutors who have spent weeks working quietly behind the scenes.
Besides denying he’d ever met Assange, Manafort, who is currently in jail, said he’d told special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors the truth in weeks of questioning. And WikiLeaks said Manafort had never met with Assange, offering to bet London’s Guardian newspaper “a million dollars and its editor’s head.”
Assange, whose organization published thousands of emails stolen from Clinton’s campaign in 2016, is in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London under a claim of asylum.
It is unclear what prosecutors contend Manafort lied about, though they’re expected to make a public filing ahead of sentencing that could offer answers.
Dissolution of the plea deal could be a devastating outcome for a defendant who suddenly admitted guilt last September after months of maintaining his innocence and who bet on his cooperation getting him a shorter sentence. But it’s also a potentially major setback for investigators given that Manafort steered the campaign during a vital stretch of 2016, including a time when prosecutors say Russian intelligence was working to sway the election in Trump’s favor.
The prosecutors’ terse three-page filing underscored their exasperation not only at Manafort’s alleged deception but also at the loss of an important witness present for key moments under investigation, including a Trump Tower meeting at which Trump’s oldest son expected to receive “dirt” about Democrat Hillary Clinton from a Kremlin-connected lawyer.
“The fact is, they wanted his cooperation. They wanted him to truthfully reveal what he knew, so they’re not getting what they wanted,”said Washington defense lawyer Peter Zeidenberg. “This isn’t like a good development where they’re clapping their hands and saying, ‘Now we get to crush this guy.'”
Manafort’s motivation, if indeed he lied to Mueller’s team, also was unclear.
Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said in a telephone interview that Trump and his lawyers agree a presidential pardon should not be considered “now.”
However, he added, “The president could consider it at an appropriate time as Manafort has the same rights as any American.”
The Monday night revelation of the Mueller filing on Manafort came at a delicate time for investigators, who have gone months without any new charges and continue to probe possible links between Trump associates and WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy website that released tens of thousands of Democratic emails stolen by Russian spies during the 2016 campaign.
As Trump continues raging against the investigation — he tweeted Tuesday that Mueller was doing “TREMENDOUS damage to our Criminal Justice system” — others in the crosshairs have filled the vacuum of Mueller’s recent silence by publicly declaring their innocence, accusing prosecutors of coercing testimony or tempting fate by turning aside negotiations.
An associate of Trump confidant Roger Stone is contesting a grand jury subpoena in court. Jerome Corsi said Monday he was rejecting a plea offer and told CNN that being questioned was like being “interrogated as a POW in the Korean War.”
Stone, under investigation himself for connections to WikiLeaks, has repeatedly disparaged Mueller’s investigation and said Monday his friend Corsi was at risk for prosecution “not for lying but for refusing to lie.”
That statement called to mind a Trump tweet from earlier this month in which he stated without evidence that Mueller’s investigators were “screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want.”
Manafort, for his part, had been quiet in public since pleading guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice and conspiracy against the United States. He has met repeatedly since then with investigators.
He remained in the spotlight Tuesday when the Guardian newspaper published a report saying he had secretly met Assange within days or weeks of being brought aboard the Trump campaign. The report suggested a direct connection between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign.
The Guardian, which did not identify the sources for its reporting, said Manafort met with Assange “around March 2016” — the same month that Russian hackers began their all-out effort to steal emails from the Clinton campaign.
Manafort called the story “totally false and deliberately libelous,” saying in a statement that he had never met Assange or anyone close to him.
The Guardian cited unidentified sources as saying Manafort first met Assange at the embassy in 2013, a year after Assange took refuge there to avoid being extradited to Sweden over sex crime allegations.
The newspaper said Manafort returned in 2015 and 2016 and that its sources had “tentatively dated” the final visit to March.
There was no detail on what might have been discussed.
The Trump campaign announced Manafort’s hiring on March 29, 2016, and he served as the convention manager tasked with lining up delegates for the Republican National Convention. He was promoted to chairman that May.
An AP investigation into Russian hacking showed that government-aligned cyberspies began an aggressive effort to penetrate the Clinton campaign’s email accounts on March 10, 2016.
Justice Department prosecutors in Virginia recently inadvertently disclosed the existence of sealed criminal charges against Assange, though it’s unclear what the case involves. Prosecutors were in court Tuesday arguing against unsealing any charge.
Meanwhile, a judge may soon set a sentencing date for Manafort whose hopes for leniency now appear dashed.
“The cooperating defendant usually is very aware of what’s at stake,” said Shanlon Wu, who represented Manafort’s onetime co-defendant Rick Gates. “What I always say to any client of mine who’s contemplating that — there is no going back.”
“It’s like being a little bit pregnant,” he added. “There’s no such thing.”
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Republican Hyde-Smith Wins Divisive Mississippi Runoff
Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith won a divisive Mississippi runoff Tuesday, surviving a video-recorded remark decried as racist and defeating a former federal official who hoped to become the state’s first African-American senator since Reconstruction.
The runoff was rocked by the video, in which Hyde-Smith said of a supporter, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” A separate video showed her talking about “liberal folks” and making it “just a little more difficult” for them to vote.
The comments by Hyde-Smith, who is white, made Mississippi’s history of racist lynchings a theme of the runoff and spurred many black voters to return to the polls Tuesday.
In the aftermath of the video, Republicans worried they could face a repeat of last year’s special election in Alabama, in which a flawed Republican candidate handed Democrats a reliable GOP Senate seat in the Deep South. The GOP pumped resources into Mississippi, and President Donald Trump made a strong effort on behalf of Hyde-Smith, holding last-minute rallies in Mississippi on Monday.
The contest caps a campaign season that exposed persistent racial divisions in America — and the willingness of some political candidates to exploit them to win elections. With Hyde-Smith’s victory, Republicans control 53 of the Senate’s 100 seats. The GOP lost control of the House, where Democrats will assume the majority in January.
In the final weeks of the runoff, Hyde-Smith’s campaign said the remark about making voting difficult was a joke. She said the “public hanging” comment was “an exaggerated expression of regard” for a fellow cattle rancher. During a televised debate nine days after the video was publicized, she apologized to “anyone that was offended by my comments,” but also said the remark was used as a “weapon” against her.
Democratic opponent Mike Espy, 64, a former U.S. agriculture secretary, replied: “I don’t know what’s in your heart, but I know what came out of your mouth.”
Addressing his supporters Tuesday night, Espy said: “While this is not the result we were hoping for, I am proud of the historic campaign we ran and grateful for the support we received across Mississippi. We built the largest grassroots organization our state has seen in a generation.”
The “public hanging” comment also resonated with his supporters.
Some corporate donors, including Walmart, requested refunds on their campaign contributions to Hyde-Smith after the videos surfaced.
Hyde-Smith was in her second term as Mississippi agriculture commissioner when Republican Gov. Phil Bryant appointed her to temporarily succeed GOP Sen. Thad Cochran. The longtime lawmaker retired in April amid health concerns.
The win makes Hyde-Smith, 59, the first woman elected to Congress from Mississippi.
Hyde-Smith and Espy emerged from a field of four candidates Nov. 6 to advance to Tuesday’s runoff. Her win allows her to complete the final two years of Cochran’s six-year term.
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