Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has won a solid majority of seats in Britain’s Parliament — a decisive outcome to a Brexit-dominated election that should allow Johnson to fulfill his plan to take the U.K. out of the European Union next month.

With just over 600 of the 650 seats declared, the Conservatives reached the 326 mark, guaranteeing their majority.

Johnson said it looked like the Conservatives had “a powerful new mandate to get Brexit done.”

The victory will likely make Johnson the most electorally successful Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher, another politician who was loved and loathed in almost equal measure. It was a disaster for left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who faced calls for his resignation even as the results rolled in. The party looked set to gain around 200 seats.

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Britain Brexit Bound as Johnson Set for Big Parliamentary Majority

An exit poll showed Boris Johnson’s Conservatives would win a landslide of 368 seats, more than enough for a very comfortable majority in the 650-seat parliament

Corbyn called the result “very disappointing” for his party and said he would not lead Labour into another election, though he resisted calls to quit immediately,

Results poured in early Friday showing a substantial shift in support to the Conservatives from Labour. In the last election in 2017, the Conservatives won 318 seats and Labour 262.

The result this time looked set to be the biggest Tory majority since Thatcher’s 1980s’ heyday, and Labour’s lowest number of seats since 1935.

The Scottish National Party appeared set to take about 50 of Scotland’s 59 seats — a big increase — with a lackluster dozen or so for the centrist, pro-EU Liberal Democrats. Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson lost her own Scottish seat.

The Conservatives took a swathe of seats in post-industrial northern England towns that were long Labour strongholds. Labour’s vote held up better in London, where the party managed to grab the Putney seat from the Conservatives.

The decisive Conservative showing vindicates Johnson’s decision to press for Thursday’s early election, which was held nearly two years ahead of schedule. He said that if the Conservatives won a majority, he would get Parliament to ratify his Brexit divorce deal and take the U.K. out of the EU by the current Jan. 31 deadline.

Speaking at the election count in his Uxbridge constituency in suburban London, Johnson said the “historic” election “gives us now, in this new government, the chance to respect the democratic will of the British people to change this country for the better and to unleash the potential of the entire people of this country.”

That message appears to have had strong appeal for Brexit-supporting voters, who turned away from Labour in the party’s traditional heartlands and embraced Johnson’s promise that the Conservatives would “get Brexit done.”

“I think Brexit has dominated, it has dominated everything by the looks of it,” said Labour economy spokesman John McDonnell. “We thought other issues could cut through and there would be a wider debate, from this evidence there clearly wasn’t.”

The prospect of Brexit finally happening more than three years after Britons narrowly voted to leave the EU marks a momentous shift for both the U.K. and the bloc. No country has ever left the union, which was created in the decades after World War II to bring unity to a shattered continent.

But a decisive Conservative victory would also provide some relief to the EU, which has grown tired of Britain’s Brexit indecision.

Britain’s departure will start a new phase of negotiations on future relations between Britain and the 27 remaining EU members.

EU Council President Charles Michel promised that EU leaders meeting Friday would send a “strong message” to the next British government and parliament about next steps.

“We are ready to negotiate,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.

The pound surged when an exit poll forecast the Tory win, jumping over two cents against the dollar, to $1.3445, the highest in more than a year and a half. Many Investors hope a Conservative win would speed up the Brexit process and ease, at least in the short term, some of the uncertainty that has corroded business confidence since the 2016 vote.

Many voters casting ballots on Thursday hoped the election might finally find a way out of the Brexit stalemate in this deeply divided nation. Three and a half years after the U.K. voted by 52%-48% to leave the EU, Britons remain split over whether to leave the 28-nation bloc, and lawmakers have proved incapable of agreeing on departure terms.

On a dank, gray day with outbreaks of blustery rain, voters went to polling stations in schools, community centers, pubs and town halls after a bad-tempered five-week campaign rife with mudslinging and misinformation.

Opinion polls had given the Conservatives a steady lead, but the result was considered hard to predict, because the issue of Brexit cuts across traditional party loyalties.

Johnson campaigned relentlessly on a promise to “Get Brexit done” by getting Parliament to ratify his “oven-ready” divorce deal with the EU and take Britain out of the bloc as scheduled on Jan. 31.

The Conservatives focused much of their energy on trying to win in a “red wall” of working-class towns in central and northern England that have elected Labour lawmakers for decades but also voted strongly in 2016 to leave the EU. That effort got a boost when the Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage decided at the last minute not to contest 317 Conservative-held seats to avoid splitting the pro-Brexit vote.

Labour, which is largely but ambiguously pro-EU, faced competition for anti-Brexit voters from the centrist Liberal Democrats, Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties, and the Greens.

But on the whole Labour tried to focus the campaign away from Brexit and onto its radical domestic agenda, vowing to tax the rich, nationalize industries such as railroads and water companies and give everyone in the country free internet access. It campaigned heavily on the future of the National Health Service, a deeply respected institution that has struggled to meet rising demand after nine years of austerity under Conservative-led governments.

It appears that wasn’t enough to boost Labour’s fortunes. Defeat will likely spell the end for Corbyn, a veteran socialist who moved his party sharply to the left after taking the helm in 2015, but who now looks to have led his left-of-center party to two electoral defeats since 2017. The 70-year-old left-winger was also accused of allowing anti-Semitism to spread within the party.

“It’s Corbyn,” said former Labour Cabinet minister Alan Johnson, when asked about the poor result. “We knew he was incapable of leading, we knew he was worse than useless at all the qualities you need to lead a political party.”

For many voters, the election offered an unpalatable choice. Both Johnson and Corbyn have personal approval ratings in negative territory, and both have been dogged by questions about their character.

Johnson has been confronted with past broken promises, untruths and offensive statements, from calling the children of single mothers “ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate” to comparing Muslim women who wear face-covering veils to “letter boxes.”

Yet, his energy and determination proved persuasive to many voters.

“It’s a big relief, looking at the exit polls as they are now, we’ve finally got that majority a working majority that we have not had for 3 1/2 years,” said Conservative-supporting writer Jack Rydeheard. “We’ve got the opportunity to get Brexit done and get everything else that we promised as well. That’s investment in the NHS, schools, hospitals you name it — it’s finally a chance to break that deadlock in Parliament.”

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Time Magazine’s selection of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg as its Person of the Year underscores the growing clout of youth power—pushing governments to escalate the fight against what many consider a climate crisis. That is also happening in Africa, which is especially vulnerable to climate change. At the Madrid climate conference, Lisa Bryant reports on three young Africans who are making a difference

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Rwanda this week (Dec 9) co-hosted the annual Anti-Corruption Excellence Award summit to celebrate and encourage successes against graft, including at home.  Transparency International ranks Rwanda as the fourth-least corrupt country in Africa, behind the Seychelles, Botswana, and Cabo Verde.  Eugene Uwimana reports from Kigali

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A lawyer presenting Gambia’s case accusing Myanmar of committing genocide against Rohingya Muslims said Thursday that Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi ignored allegations of mass killings and rape as she led her country’s defense before the U.N.’s top court.

Paul Reichler told the International Court of Justice in The Hague Myanmar was choosing to ignore the alleged sexual violence because “it is undeniable and unspeakable.”

Aung San Suu Kyi told the court Wednesday the mass exodus of the Rohingya minority stemmed from “an internal conflict started by coordinated and comprehensive armed attacks.”

She said that “Myanmar’s defense services responded” to the attacks, creating an armed conflict “that led to the exodus of several hundred thousand Muslims.”   

Appearing before the court in her official role as Myanmar’s foreign minister, the Nobel Peace laureate reiterated her government’s claim that the military was targeting Rohingya militants who had attacked security posts in western Rakhine state in August 2017.   

Myanmar’s military launched a scorched earth campaign in response to the attacks, forcing more than 700,000 Rohingyas to flee into neighboring Bangladesh. A U.N. investigation concluded the campaign was carried out “with genocidal intent,” based on interviews with survivors who gave numerous accounts of massacres, extrajudicial killings, gang rapes and the torching of entire villages.
 
The case against Myanmar was brought to the IJC by the small West African nation Gambia on behalf of the 57-member Organization for Islamic Cooperation. Lawyers for Gambia recounted numerous acts of atrocities committed by Myanmar’s military during the crackdown during Tuesday’s opening session.

Aung San Suu Kyi called the allegations made by Gambia “misleading” during her opening statement.  

Gambian Justice Minister Abubacarr Tambadou told reporters Tuesday he wants the IJC to order special measures to protect the Rohingyas until the genocide case is heard in full.

“We are signatories to the Genocide Convention like any other state. It shows that you don’t have to have military power or economic power to stand for justice,” Tambadou said.

Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her pro-democracy stand against Myanmar’s then-ruling military junta, which placed her under house arrest for 15 years until finally freeing her in 2010. But her defense of the military’s actions against the Rohingyas has wrecked her reputation among the international community as an icon of democracy and human rights.  

The Rohingya were excluded from a 1982 citizenship law that bases full legal status through membership in a government-recognized indigenous group. The Myanmar government considers the Rohingya illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, effectively rendering the ethnic group stateless.

A ruling from the court to approve measures to protect the Rohingya is expected within weeks. A final ruling on the accusation of genocide could take several years.

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Shares in Saudi Aramco gained on the second day of trading Thursday, propelling the oil and gas company to a more than $2 trillion valuation, where it holds the title of the world’s most valuable listed company.

Shares jumped in trading to reach up to 38.60 Saudi riyals, or $10.29 before noon, three hours before trading closes.

Aramco has sold a 1.5% share to mostly Saudi investors and local Saudi and Gulf-based funds.

With gains made from just two days of trading, Aramco sits comfortably ahead of the world’s largest companies, including Apple, the second largest company in the world valued at $1.19 trillion.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is the architect of the effort to list Aramco, touting it as a way to raise capital for the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, which would then develop new cities and lucrative projects across the country that create jobs for young Saudis.

He had sought a $2 trillion valuation for Aramco when he first announced in 2015 plans to sell a sliver of the state-owned company.

International investors, however, thought the price was too high, given the relatively lower price of oil, climate change concerns and geopolitical risks associated with Aramco. The company’s main crude oil processing facility and another site were targeted by missiles and drones in September, knocking out more than half of Saudi production for some time. The kingdom and the U.S. have blamed the attack on rival Iran, which denies involvement.

In the lead-up to the flotation, there had been a strong push for Saudis, including princes and businessmen, to contribute to what’s seen locally as a moment of national pride, and even duty. Gulf-based funds from allied countries also contributed to the IPO, though it has largely been propelled by Saudi capital.

At a ceremony Wednesday for the start of trading, Aramco Chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan, described the sale as “a proud and historic moment for Saudi Aramco and our majority shareholder, the kingdom.”

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Five candidates have their eyes on becoming the next president of Algeria — without a leader since April — as voting began in Thursday’s contentious election boycotted by a massive pro-democracy movement.

The powerful army chief and his cohorts in the interim government have promised the voting will chart a new era for the gas-rich North African nation that is a strategic partner of the West in countering extremist violence. Those opposed to the voting fear the results will replicate a corrupt, anti-democratic system they are trying to level.

Tension was palpable on the eve of the vote as protesters in at least 10 towns denounced the elections. In Bouira, east of Algiers, the capital, security forces used tear gas to push back protesters who had invaded a voting station in a high school, according to the online TSA news agency, citing witnesses. Several thousand people demonstrated in Algiers.

Polls opened at 8 a.m. (0700 GMT) and are to close at 8 p.m. (1900 GMT). Results were not likely until Friday, to be announced by a newly created National Independent Electoral Authority overseeing the voting. The body was among the nods of authorities to protesters, like the decision for soldiers to vote in civilian clothes at regular polling stations, rather than in barracks.

The five candidates, two of them former prime ministers, Ali Benflis and Abdelmadjid Tebboune, endured insults and protests during the 22-day campaign. All five contenders have links to former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was forced to resign in April after 20 years in office under pressure from weekly street protests that began in February, with an assist from army chief Ahmed Gaid Salah.

The turnout rate should be a critical indication of whether the contender elected has popular legitimacy. There was no firm indication which of the five had the upper hand ahead of the vote. Opinion polls for elections are not permitted.

Tebboune, 74, was until recently seen as the favorite due to his reportedly close ties to Gaid Salah. However, a 60-year-old former culture minister, Azzedine Mihoubi, a writer and poet, has been touted in the media. Mihoubi has deep ties to the fallen Bouteflika regime. He took over leadership of the National Democratic Rally party, which governed in alliance with the FLN, the sole party for nearly three decades, until 1989, and now in tatters.

Benflis, 75, was making his third attempt at the presidency. A lawyer and former justice minister, he was Bouteflika’s top aide before falling out when he ran against him in 2004. He started his own party.

The other candidates are Abdelaziz Belaid, 56, a former figure in the FLN who started his own party, and Abdelkader Bengrini, 57, a one-time tourism minister and former member of the moderate Islamist party, Movement for a Society of Peace (MSP). He then started his own Islamist party el Bina, which like the MSP, backed Bouteflika.

Gaid Salah, who has emerged as the authority figure in the political vacuum, setting the date for the elections, has maintained that the voting is the shortest and surest way to raise Algeria out of its paralyzing political crisis and give birth to a new era. He was the force behind an anti-corruption campaign that has seen top figures jailed and convicted, including Said Bouteflika, the president’s brother and chief counselor, sentenced to 15 years in prison in September for “plotting against the state.”

Gaid Salah refers to Bouteflika’s entourage as “the gang,” as do pro-democracy protesters who include Gaid Salah among them.

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Russia’s foreign minister is back in Washington to discuss nuclear arms control, the wars in Syria and Ukraine, as well the continuing controversy over Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Patsy Widakuswara reports from the White House, where Sergei Lavrov met with President Donald Trump.
 

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Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is polling No. 1 in the key state of Iowa, which holds the first-in-the-nation caucus in February. He also has risen to the top tier nationally. But criticism that the South Bend, Indiana, mayor has little support from black voters and lacks political experience continues to shadow his political narrative. VOA’s Esha Sarai traveled to South Bend to hear what residents think about his presidential aspirations.

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In opting for a narrow rather than a broad set of charges, Democrats sought to blunt Republican criticism that the impeachment proceeding against Trump is a reckless attempt to undo a democratically elected president, according to some experts

As they conducted a two-month-long impeachment inquiry into the conduct of President Donald Trump, Democrats considered a range of charges against him, including articles stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and violations of the emoluments clause to the U.S. Constitution.

In the end, however, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democratic leaders settled on just two charges: abuse of office and obstruction of justice.

In opting for a narrow rather than a broad set of charges, Democrats sought to blunt Republican criticism that the impeachment proceeding against Trump is an illegitimate attempt to undo a democratically elected president, according to some experts.

Kim Wehle, a former associate independent counsel in the Whitewater impeachment investigation against former President Bill Clinton, said the Democrats’ decision is a smart play, if only to make it more difficult for Republicans to be totally dismissive of the historic action.

“If it had been a laundry list of articles of impeachment, the Republicans could say, The Democrats are out of control. This is a witch hunt, or this is overreaching.’ And they can hide behind that rhetoric to basically walk away from impeaching this president,” said Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore.

Articles of impeachment

Articles of impeachment are similar to criminal charges. The two articles of impeachment revealed on Tuesday are focused on Ukraine and are related to Trump’s efforts to get Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a political rival, and a discredited theory about Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign and Trump’s subsequent attempt to impede a congressional inquiry.

Though not a criminal offense, abuse of power is a long-running theme in U.S. presidential impeachments, according to Louis Michael Seidman, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University. Obstruction of Congress is less common; Richard Nixon faced a similar charge of contempt of Congress.

Article 1

The first article accuses Trump of using the power of his office to solicit Ukrainian interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.  It alleges that the president asked Ukraine to conduct investigations that would “benefit his reelection, harm the election prospects of a political opponent, and influence the 2020 United States presidential election to his advantage.”

It says that Trump “sought to pressure” Ukraine to take these steps by conditioning nearly $400 million in military aid and a White House meeting between Trump and the president of Ukraine on the investigations.

Throughout the impeachment inquiry, Democrats sought to prove that Trump pushed for the investigations in exchange for military aid and an Oval Office meeting with Ukraine’s president.  But establishing an explicit quid pro quo proved more challenging than they’d anticipated. That may explain why the resolution plays down a quid pro quo in making its case.

Article 2  

The second article is centered on Trump’s effort to impede the congressional impeachment inquiry. After Democrats announced the investigation in late September, Trump ordered the White House and executive branch agencies not to cooperate with the inquiry.

“In the history of the Republic, no president has ever ordered the complete defiance of an impeachment inquiry or sought to obstruct and impede so comprehensively the ability of the House of Representatives to investigate high crimes and misdemeanors,” the resolution states.

Narrow set of charges

In recent weeks, House Democrats seemed divided over the scope of a possible Trump impeachment. Many advocated including a charge of obstruction of justice related to Trump’s alleged effort to interfere with the Mueller probe, a lengthy investigation into whether Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with Russia to influence the outcome. That investigation found no evidence of collusion, but cited nearly a dozen instances of possible obstruction.

Others wanted charges of bribery, extortion and campaign finance violations included in the articles of impeachment.

In the end, however, the Democrats opted for a straight-forward case they felt was easy to prove. The decision to drop the extraneous charges won praise from an unlikely critic: Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who was invited by Republicans to testify in the House Judiciary Committee last week.

“While my fellow witnesses made good-faith arguments for those articles, my testimony primarily focused on the legal and constitutional flaws in claiming those criminal acts,” Turley wrote on his personal blog.

Rush to judgment

The impeachment proceeding is set to barrel ahead. On Thursday, the Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on the articles, followed by a vote by the full House next week. Should the House approve one or both articles of impeachment, Trump would become only the third U.S. president in history to be so charged. He then would face a trial in the Senate early next year.

The Democratic push has raised charges that they’re rushing to judgment. Turley told lawmakers last week that while Trump could be impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, the Democrats have not fully developed their case.

“The problem is that the House has not bothered to subpoena the key witnesses who would have such direct knowledge,” Turley testified.

But Democrats say they don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of subpoenas. Adam Schiff, House Intelligence Committee chairman, noted that it took a federal court eight months to rule in favor of a congressional subpoena for former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify.

Even if takes another eight months to get a second court order, Schiff said, Trump administration officials could still claim executive privilege over certain documents sought by Congress.

“The argument, Why don’t you just wait?’ amounts to this: Why don’t you just let him cheat in just one more election? Why not let him cheat one more time? Why not let him have foreign help just one more time,” Schiff said Tuesday.

Democrats also appear intent on getting impeachment out of the way ahead of the November 2020 election, in part to prevent Democratic senators running for president to be pinned down in Washington during a prolonged impeachment trial.

“But I think the danger is that it could be done so soon that it will be in the rearview mirror (for) most people, most voters, when they actually go to the polls in November,” Wehle said.

Republicans insist Trump has done nothing wrong. They say the president simply asked Ukraine to root out corruption, and that no evidence of a quid pro quo has emerged.

They also defend Trump’s right to bar members of his administration from cooperating with the impeachment inquiry on the grounds of executive privilege.

Ultimately, though, it matters little how strong the impeachment case is. Impeachment is a quasi-judicial and political process. And with Republicans controlling the Senate, it is highly unlikely that Trump will be convicted and removed from office.

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Governments around the world must allow the voices of human rights advocates, including young people, to be heard, the U.N. secretary general said Tuesday. The remarks came as the world body marked the 71st anniversary of the United Nations’ World Human Rights Day. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi reports.

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After a bomb exploded in a downtown Atlanta park midway through the 1996 Olympics, a security guard initially cast as a hero was recast as a villain virtually overnight. More than 20 years later, a movie to be released later this week, “Richard Jewell,” explores the roles played by law enforcement and the media in the guard’s ordeal.

Now the movie is drawing its own share of criticism.

Kevin Riley, the current editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is disputing the film’s depiction of the newspaper’s reporting and decision-making processes, especially the portrayal of reporter Kathy Scruggs, who the movie implies traded sex with an FBI agent for a tip on the story.

In an interview with The Associated Press, director Clint Eastwood dismissed the criticism of his movie, which is based on a 1997 Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner, by saying the paper likely is looking to “rationalize” its actions.

Jewell’s saga began on July 27, 1996, when he spotted an abandoned backpack during a concert in Centennial Olympic Park shortly before 1 a.m. and helped clear the area as federal agents determined it contained a bomb. The explosion about 20 minutes later killed 44-year-old Alice Hawthorne of Albany, Georgia, and injured 111 people, some of them seriously. A Turkish television cameraman died after suffering a heart attack while running to film the explosion’s aftermath.

Jewell, who likely helped prevent many more casualties, was initially hailed as a hero but a few days later was reported to be the focus of the FBI investigation, and the public quickly turned on him.

The park reopened within days, the games continued and Jewell was publicly cleared three months later. But he grappled with the fallout for the rest of his life, and Atlanta lived with the fear and unease of a bomber still at large.

A new book, “The Suspect,” attempts to bring clarity to the aftermath of the bombing. Its authors were in the thick of it: Kent Alexander was the U.S. attorney in Atlanta when the bombing happened and Kevin Salwen led The Wall Street Journal’s southeastern section.

In the frantic days after the bombing, Scruggs confirmed with law enforcement sources that the FBI was focusing on Jewell. The paper published that information three days after the explosion and scores of reporters descended on the apartment complex where Jewell lived with his mother, leaving them feeling as if they were under siege for months.

Jewell had made clear his dream of working in law enforcement and was endlessly mocked as an overzealous but bumbling wannabe cop.

It’s easy to say in hindsight that the investigation focused too heavily on Jewell, Alexander said. But some of Jewell’s actions and tips from people who knew him raised serious questions, the former prosecutor said. There was also the memory of a police officer at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles who was celebrated for disarming a bomb until it emerged that he’d planted it.

Doubts about Jewell’s guilt surfaced quickly, especially once it became clear he couldn’t have made a 911 call reporting the bomb from a pay phone blocks away.

In late October 1996, Alexander took the unusual step of sending a letter to one of Jewell’s attorneys saying Jewell was not a target of the investigation.

“His name had been so badly muddied and tarnished that it just seemed like we should do something, so I did,” Alexander said.

That left authorities sifting through dozens of possible suspects — the actual bomber, anti-government extremist Eric Rudolph, not among them. Rudolph, who was behind two more bombs in Atlanta in early 1997 and another in Alabama in January 1998, was eventually captured in 2003 and pleaded guilty in 2005.

‘Voice of God’

The media frenzy surrounding Jewell drew backlash, and the Journal-Constitution was criticized for the “voice of God” style in its initial story, which carried no attribution and left the origin of the information unclear.

Ron Martz, who shared a byline with Scruggs on the scoop, said questions and rumors swirled in the wake of the horrific attack and he saw it as a public service to let people know where the investigation stood.

Scruggs had solid sources and the story had been through several editors, Martz said. Editors even had him take the highly unusual step of reading the entire story to an FBI spokesman to confirm that the information was correct and to make sure it wouldn’t jeopardize the investigation.

But Martz said he regrets not pushing for clearer attribution on the original story, which could have spared the paper much grief with the addition of just five words: “according to law enforcement sources.”

Once he was effectively cleared, Jewell’s lawyers filed libel suits against numerous news outlets. Most settled, but the Journal-Constitution didn’t. The legal battle continued for more than a decade, beyond Jewell’s death in 2007 at age 44. The courts ultimately ruled the newspaper’s stories weren’t libelous because they were substantially true when published.

Criticism of the newspaper, and particularly Scruggs, was devastating to her, Martz said.

“She felt very hurt by the way she was being portrayed and the fact that this was to be the shining moment of her career and people were going after her personally to get at her professionally,” he said.

Scruggs was a “wild child,” loud, foul-mouthed and often provocative, Martz said, but she was also relentless, hard-nosed and one of the best reporters he ever worked with. She died at 42 in 2001 from an overdose of prescription drugs.

Demand for disclaimer

In an op-ed, Journal-Constitution editor Riley wrote that there’s no evidence Scruggs committed the breach of journalistic ethics implied in the movie and disputed implications that the newspaper’s reporting was sloppy.

Eastwood defended the depiction of Scruggs, saying he’d “read a lot of material” on her that seemed to “corroborate the fact that she was somewhat on the wild side.” He also said the news media sometimes rushes because of competition to be first, and “they pull the trigger before they’re dialed in.”

In a letter sent Monday to Eastwood, a Warner Brothers lawyer and others, a lawyer for the newspaper demands a public statement that dramatization was used in the film’s portrayal of events and characters, and asks that a “prominent disclaimer” to that effect be added to the film.

“It is highly ironic that a film purporting to tell a tragic story of how the reputation of an FBI suspect was grievously tarnished appears bent on a path to severely tarnish the reputation of the AJC,” lawyer Martin Singer wrote.

Warner Brothers fired back, saying that the newspaper’s claims are baseless, that the film seeks to confirm Jewell’s innocence and restore his name.

“It is unfortunate and the ultimate irony that the Atlanta Journal Constitution, having been a part of the rush to judgment of Richard Jewell, is now trying to malign our filmmakers and cast,” the studio wrote in a statement.
 

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The Pentagon has denied intentionally misleading the public about the 18-year war in Afghanistan, after The Washington Post published a trove of government documents revealing that officials made overly optimistic pronouncements they knew to be false and hid evidence that the conflict had become un-winnable. 

“There has been no intent by DoD to mislead Congress or the public,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Thomas Campbell wrote to VOA on Monday. 

“The information contained in the interviews was provided to SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) for the express purpose of inclusion in SIGAR’s public reports,” he added.

The Post said the documents contain more than 400 interviews with senior military and government insiders who offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of war.

According to the Post, U.S. officials, most of whom spoke on the assumption that their remarks would not be made public, acknowledged that the strategies for fighting the war were flawed and that the U.S. wasted hundreds of billions of dollars trying to make Afghanistan into a stable, democratic nation. 

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, said in 2015, according to the documents. “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

The Post said the interviews also highlight botched U.S. attempts to reduce corruption, build a competent Afghan army and reduce the country’s opium trade.

U.S. presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump all vowed to avoid becoming mired in “nation-building” in Afghanistan. However, the report shows how even from the early days of the war, senior officials in charge of directing U.S. policy in the country expressed confusion about Washington’s basic objectives and strategy for achieving them.

The Post said the interviews “contradict a long chorus of public statements” that assured the U.S. was “making progress in Afghanistan.”

Outgoing Command Sgt. Maj. John Troxell, who serves as the senior enlisted adviser to the top U.S. military officer, told reporters on Monday that he “firmly thought the strategy we had in place was working.”  

“I feel that we’ve never been lied to, and we are continuing to move forward (in Afghanistan),” Troxell added.

The Afghan war is estimated to have killed more than 150,000 people, including civilians, insurgents, local and foreign troops, since the U.S. and its allies invaded 18 years ago to oust the Taliban from power for sheltering al-Qaida leaders accused of plotting the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes on the U.S.

The conflict has claimed the lives of more than 2,400 U.S. service members and cost Washington nearly $1 trillion.

The Post waged a legal battle for three years to force the government to disclose the information because of its importance to the public.

The U.S. and the Afghan Taliban restarted peace negotiations on Saturday, three months after Trump abruptly stopped the yearlong process aimed at finding a political settlement with the insurgent group and ending the war in Afghanistan.

Afghan-born U.S. special reconciliation representative, Zalmay Khalilzad, led his team at a meeting Saturday in Doha, Qatar, where insurgent negotiators are based.

The draft agreement the U.S.-Taliban negotiations had produced before Trump called off the process on Sept. 7 would have set the stage for a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

The Taliban, in return, had given counterterrorism guarantees and promised to engage in intra-Afghan peace negotiations to permanently end decades of hostilities in the country.

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Experts say North Korea appeared to have conducted a fuel engine test on the ground, potentially for a long-range missile, in what Pyongyang claimed as “the test of great significance.”

Michael Elleman, director of the Non-Proliferation and Nuclear Policy Program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said it is safe to assume North Korea conducted “a static engine test” but cannot conclude the type of engine tested based on currently available information.

A static engine test means the engine was tested on the ground with a missile component but without launching an actual missile into the air.

“The size of the engine, whether it was based on liquid or solid fuel, or the success of the test are impossible to know without more evidence, photographs,” said Elleman.  He added that it is also difficult to determine if the engine tested was “a new type or a test of an existing model.”

North Korea said “a very important test took place at the Sohae Satellite Launching Ground” on Saturday afternoon, according to a statement issued on Sunday by the country’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). 

“The results of the recent important test will have an important effect on changing the strategic position of the DPRK once again in the near future,” said a spokesperson for the Academy of the National Defense Science of North Korea.  The DPRK stands for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea’s official English name.

Pyongyang did not give further details about the weapon it tested.

Choi Hyun-soo, a spokesperson for South Korean Defense Ministry, on Monday said, “We are aware of North Korea’s announcement” without making a public assessment of the test.

The spokesperson said Seoul is continuing to work closely with Washington to monitor activities around major test sites in North Korea including Dongchang-ri, the site of the Sohae facility.

Bruce Bechtol, a former intelligence officer at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and now a professor of political science at Angelo State University in Texas, said it is difficult to determine what kind of engine North Korea tested because it broke with recent practice and did not release any photos of the test.

Bechtol said the U.S. and South Korea governments may have images of the test. However, they have remained silent on the kind of weapons North Korea tested, he added.

Ian Williams, deputy director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), expressed concern that the type of engine North Korea tested is “a larger solid fuel rocket engine” for a long-range missile.

He said the next technology North Korea is probably looking to test is a long-range missile using a solid fuel engine because it had already tested a liquid fuel engine for an inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM).  He said all the short-range missiles North Korea tested this year are propelled by solid fuel engines.

“A big advance to them would be if they could get their longer-range missiles, move them into the use of solid fuel, which makes them much more operationally useful,” said Williams. 

Missiles using solid fuel engines are harder to detect because it takes shorter time to prepare than missiles using liquid fuel engines. Two years ago, physicist David Wright wrote that North Korea’s ICBMs are capable of reaching the continental U.S.

Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the Rand Corporation, said although it is hard to determine what kind of rocket engine North Korea tested and whether the engine is for solid or liquid fuel, “the test stand that was used [to place an engine for the test] was apparently designed for testing ICBM engines.”

Bennett said, however, the test “does not prove that the North Koreans are building their own ICBM engines, but they certainly want to imply that is the case.”

He added, “If the engine [North Korea] tested this weekend really was of an ICBM engine, and the test succeeded, then North Korea would pose a more serious threat to the United States in the future. And that would change the North Korean strategic position.”

Days ahead of the test, activities were detected at Sohae Satellite Launching Station, according to satellite imagery captured by Planet Lab on Thursday, which was reported by CNN.

North Korea has reportedly rebuilt the launch site after dismantling it partially when denuclearization talks with the U.S. began last year.

The talks remain stalled without much progress made since the Singapore Summit held in June 2018 due to their differences.  Washington has been demanding Pyongyang take full denuclearization while Pyongyang wants Washington to relax sanctions first.  The two have remained locked in their position since the Hanoi Summit held in February.

The most recent test came as North Korean ambassador to the United Nations said on Saturday that denuclearization is off the table in talks that he described as a “time-saving trick” to benefit a “domestic political agenda” of the U.S.

Prospects for any talks with North Korea seem to be diminishing further as Pyongyang returned belittling U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday.

Calling Trump “a heedless and erratic old man,” former North Korean nuclear negotiator Kim Yong-chol said, “We have nothing more to lose.”  He continued, “The time when we cannot but call him a ‘dotard’ again may come” through a statement released by the KCNA. 

Pyongyang called Trump a “dotard” when it exchanged threats and insults with Washington in 2017 while testing missiles. Trump resorted to calling Kim a “rocket man,” an expression he used in reference to Kim in 2017.

In a separate statement issued by the KCNA on Monday, Ri Su-yong, vice-chairman of the Central Committee of North Korea ruling Workers’ Party, said, “Trump might be in great jitter, but he had better accept the status quo that as he sowed, so he should reap, and think twice if he does not want to see bigger catastrophic consequences.” 

Pyongyang’s two statements follow Trump’s Sunday Twitter message.  Trump said Kim “has far too much to lose, everything actually, if he acts in a hostile way” in response to North Korea’s test.

Kim Jong Un is too smart and has far too much to lose, everything actually, if he acts in a hostile way. He signed a strong Denuclearization Agreement with me in Singapore. He does not want to void his special relationship with the President of the United States or interfere…. https://t.co/THfOjfB2uE

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2019

Trump warned Kim not to jeopardize the “special relationship” with him or “interfere with the U.S. Presidential Election in November.

On Monday, a State Department official said the U.S. plans to ask the United Nations Security Council to discuss North Korean provocations including the test on Saturday during its meeting this week. 

…

The U.N. General Assembly unanimously approved a resolution Monday urging all nations to observe a truce during the 2020 Summer Olympics in Japan, saying sports can play a role in promoting peace and tolerance and preventing and countering terrorism and violent extremism.

Diplomats burst into applause as the assembly president announced the adoption of the resolution by the 193-member world body.

The resolution recalls the ancient Greek tradition of “ekecheiria,” which called for a cessation of hostilities to encourage a peaceful environment, ensure safe passage and participation of athletes in the ancient Olympics.

The General Assembly revived the tradition in 1993 and has adopted resolutions before all Olympics since then calling for a cessation of hostilities for seven days before and after the games. But member states involved in conflicts have often ignored the call for a truce.

Yoshiro Mori, head of the Tokyo organizing committee for the 2020 games, introduced the resolution calling on U.N. members states to observe the truce around next year’s Summer Olympics, being held July 24-Aug. 9, and the Paralympics, following on Aug. 25-Sept. 6.

The resolution also urges nations to help “use sport as a tool to promote peace, dialogue and reconciliation in areas of conflict during and beyond” the games.

Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, told the General Assembly that as the United Nations approaches its 75th anniversary next year, an Olympic year, there is no better time to celebrate the shared values of both organizations to promote peace among all countries and people of the world.

But he warned that “in sport, we can see an increasing erosion of the respect for the global rule of law.”

Bach said the IOC’s political neutrality is undermined whenever organizations or individuals attempt to use the Olympic Games as a stage for their own agendas - as legitimate as they might be. The Olympicsare a sports celebration of our shared humanity … and must never be a platform to advance political or any other potentially divisive ends,” he said.

Looking ahead, Bach announced that “we will achieve gender balance at the Olympic Games for the first time in Tokyo, with the highest-ever number of female athletes in history at about 49%.”

He said Tokyo 2020 also aims “for carbon-neutral games,” saying medals will be made from recycled electronics and renewable energy and zero-emission vehicles will be used.

The resolution notes that the Tokyo event will be the second of three Olympics in Asia, following the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and ahead of the 2022 winter games in Beijing.

It also notes that the Summer Olympics will give Japan the opportunity to express gratitude to countries and people around the world for their “solidarity and support” after the 2011 earthquake and “to deliver a powerful message to the world on how it has been recovering.”

…

North Korea addressed new insults to U.S. President Donald Trump Monday, calling him a “heedless and erratic old man.”

Pyongyang was responding to a Trump tweet saying that “Kim Jong Un is too smart and has far too much to lose, everything actually, if he acts in a hostile way.” Trump added that Kim “does not want to void his special relationship with the President of the United States or interfere with the U.S. Presidential Election in November.”

Former North Korean nuclear negotiator Kim Yong Chol, said in a statement that his country has “nothing more to lose” even though “the U.S. may take away anything more from us, it can never remove the strong sense of self-respect, might and resentment against the U.S. from us.”

Kim Yong Chol said Trump’s tweets clearly show that he is “bereft of patience” and the time may come “when we cannot but call him a ‘dotard’ again.”

He leveled accusations that the Trump administration is attempting to buy time ahead of an end-of-year deadline set by Kim Jong Un for Washington “to salvage the nuclear talks.”

Trump on Sunday warned North Korean leader Kim Jong Un against hostile military actions, even as Pyongyang announced it had conducted “a very important test” at a satellite launching site.

“He signed a strong Denuclearization Agreement with me in Singapore,” the U.S. leader said. “He does not want to void his special relationship with the President of the United States or interfere with the U.S. Presidential Election in November. North Korea, under the leadership of Kim Jong Un, has tremendous economic potential, but it must denuclearize as promised. NATO, China, Russia, Japan, and the entire world is unified on this issue!” 

….with the U.S. Presidential Election in November. North Korea, under the leadership of Kim Jong Un, has tremendous economic potential, but it must denuclearize as promised. NATO, China, Russia, Japan, and the entire world is unified on this issue!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2019

Trump’s remarks came after North Korea’s state media said the test was conducted Saturday at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station 7, a long-range rocket launching site station in Tongch’ang-ri, a part of North Pyongan Province located near the border of China.

The government-run Korean Central News Agency said the results “will have an important effect on changing the strategic position of the DPRK once again in the near future,” it added, using an acronym for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. But the report did not say what kind of test was performed at the site.

The North Korean announcement came a day after CNN reported that Planet Labs, a commercial satellite imagery company, had detected activity at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station, including the image of a large shipping container.

This year has been one of North Korea’s busiest in terms of missile launches. Saturday’s test comes as North Korea continues to emphasize its declared end-of-year deadline for the United States to change its approach to stalled nuclear talks.

Pyongyang has carried out 13 rounds of short- or medium-range launches since May. Most experts say nearly all of the tests have involved some form of ballistic missile technology.

Earlier this month, Trump, in answering reporters’ questions about North Korea at the NATO summit in London, said, “Now we have the most powerful military we’ve ever had and we’re by far the most powerful country in the world. And, hopefully, we don’t have to use it, but if we do, we’ll use it. If we have to, we’ll do it.”

North Korea responded in kind. “Anyone can guess with what action the DPRK will answer if the U.S. undertakes military actions against the DPRK,” Pak Jong Chon, head of the Korean People’s Army, said on state media. “One thing I would like to make clear is that the use of armed forces is not the privilege of the U.S. only.”

North Korea last tested an intercontinental ballistic missile in November 2017 and conducted a nuclear test in September 2017.

In April 2018, Kim announced a self-imposed moratorium on ICBM and nuclear tests, saying North Korea “no longer need(s)” those tests. Recently, however, North Korean officials have issued reminders that North Korea’s pause on ICBM and nuclear tests was self-imposed and can be reversed.

…

The World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) executive committee has sent a “robust” rebuke of Russia’s sports authorities, banning the country’s athletes and officials from the Olympics and world championships in a range of sports for four years.

The committee made the move “unanimously” on Monday after WADA concluded that Moscow had tampered with laboratory data by planting fake evidence and deleting files linked to positive doping tests that could have helped identify drug cheats.

“For too long, Russian doping has detracted from clean sport. The blatant breach by the Russian authorities of RUSADA’s reinstatement conditions … demanded a robust response. That is exactly what has been delivered today,” WADA President Sir Craig Reedie said in a statement.

“Russia was afforded every opportunity to get its house in order and rejoin the global anti-doping community for the good of its athletes and of the integrity of sport, but it chose instead to continue in its stance of deception and denial,” he added.

“As a result, the WADA [executive committee] has responded in the strongest possible terms, while protecting the rights of Russian athletes that can prove that they were not involved and did not benefit from these fraudulent acts.”

The Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) has 21 days to officially appeal the ruling with the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Several Russian lawmakers immediately decried the move and said it should be appealed.

Aleksandr Ivlev, head of RUSADA’s supervisory board, said the body would meet in the next 10 days to decide on further steps that may be taken.

It is expected that WADA’s official notice will be sent to RUSADA alleging noncompliance with the World Anti-Doping Code for failing to provide an “authentic” copy of Moscow anti-doping laboratory data.

WADA’s decision was based on the recommendations of the agency’s Compliance Review Committee (CRC), which had alleged that this data was manipulated before being handed over to investigators, as required under conditions for reinstating RUSADA’s compliance with the code in September 2018.

As a signatory of the World Anti-Doping Code, the International Olympic Committee is bound to honor the decision.

Falsified data

Doping allegations have plagued the country since the revelation of large-scale, state-sponsored doping aimed at improving its medal performance at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi.

In September 2018, WADA lifted the suspension of the Russian anti-doping agency RUSADA that had been in place for three years on condition that Russia hand over doping data and samples from 2012 to 2015.

But the CRC on November 25 accused Russia of falsifying some of the data provided by a Moscow laboratory in January, and proposed imposing a four-year ban on RUSADA and excluding the country from major sporting competitions.

Sofya Velikaya, a 2016 fencing gold medalist and executive committee member of the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC), has said she will leave her post ahead of the decision.

“I informed the summit participants about the situation in which we find ourselves based on the recommendations of ROC’s sports committee members, and foremost, its chairman,” Velikaya said, as cited by ROC press-service head Stanislav Pozdnyakov.

However, RUSADA chief Yury Ganus has called the proposed punishments “justified.”

…

A Taliban suicide bomber Monday detonated his explosives-laden vehicle near a military base in southern Afghanistan, killing at least nine soldiers and injuring several others.

Officials said the insurgent bombing occurred near the center of Nad Ali district in Helmand province, where most of the territory is controlled or contested by the Taliban. The blast reportedly destroyed the Afghan National Army (ANA) facility.

Rescue workers were trying to retrieve bodies from the rubles and the death toll could increase, Barali Nazari, the district chief, told VOA.

The Taliban took responsibility for the attack, claiming it killed dozens of security forces and destroyed several armored vehicles, though insurgent claims are often inflated.

Separately, a Taliban raid in the volatile eastern Ghazni province late on Sunday killed at least six ANA soldiers, the provincial police chief, Khalid Wardak, told VOA.

The violence comes as American and Taliban negotiators continued their meetings in Qatar Monday.  The two adversaries in the 18-year-old Afghan war returned to the negotiating table last week, three months after President Donald Trump had suspended the process.

U.S. chief negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad restarted the latest round of talks with a mission to persuade the Taliban to reduce violence and enter into intra-Afghan negotiations for permanently ending hostilities in Afghanistan.

…

Women in Saudi Arabia will no longer need to use separate entrances from men or sit behind partitions at restaurants in the latest measure announced by the government that upends a major hallmark of conservative restrictions that had been in place for decades.

The decision, which essentially erodes one of the most visible gender segregation restrictions in place, was quietly announced Sunday in a lengthy and technically worded statement by the Municipal and Rural Affairs Ministry.

While some restaurants and cafes in the coastal city of Jiddah and Riyadh’s upscale hotels had already been allowing unrelated men and women to sit freely, the move codifies what has been a sensitive issue in the past among traditional Saudis who view gender segregation as a religious requirement. Despite that, neighboring Muslim countries do not have similar rules.

Restaurants and cafes in Saudi Arabia, including major Western chains like Starbucks, are currently segregated by “family” sections allocated for women who are out on their own or who are accompanied by male relatives, and “singles” sections for just men. Many also have separate entrances for women and partitions or rooms for families where women are not visible to single men. In smaller restaurants or cafes with no space for segregation, women are not allowed in.

Reflecting the sensitive nature of this most recent move, the decision to end requirements of segregation in restaurants was announced in a statement published by the state-run Saudi Press Agency. The statement listed a number of newly-approved technical requirements for buildings, schools, stores and sports centers , among others.

The statement noted that the long list of published decisions was aimed at attracting investments and creating greater business opportunities.

Among the regulations announced was “removing a requirement by restaurants to have an entrance for single men and [another] for families.”

Couched between a new regulation about the length of a building’s facade and allowing kitchens on upper floors to operate was another critical announcement stating that restaurants no longer need to “specify private spaces” — an apparent reference to partitions.

Across Saudi Arabia, the norm has been that unrelated men and women are not permitted to mix in public. Government-run schools and most public universities remain segregated, as are most Saudi weddings.

In recent years, however, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has pushed for sweeping social reforms ,with women and men now able to attend concerts and movie theaters that were once banned. He also curtailed the powers of the country’s religious police, who had been enforcers of conservative social norms, like gender segregation in public.

Two years ago, women for the first time were allowed to attend sports events in stadiums in the so-called “family” sections. Young girls in recent years have also been allowed access to physical education and sports in school, a right that only boys had been afforded.

In August, the kingdom lifted a controversial ban on travel by allowing all citizens — women and men alike — to apply for a passport and travel freely, ending a long-standing guardianship policy that had controlled women’s freedom of movement.

The new rules remove restrictions that had been in place, but do not state that restaurants or cafes have to end segregated entrances or seated areas. Many families in conservative swaths of the country, where women cover their hair and face in public, may prefer eating only at restaurants with segregated spaces.  

…

The leader of the House of Representatives committee weighing articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump contended Sunday that there is a “rock solid case” against the U.S. leader.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler declared on CNN that Trump would be found guilty in “three minutes flat” if he were facing charges before a criminal court jury that he abused his office by soliciting Ukraine to investigate one of his chief 2020 Democratic presidential challengers, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Nadler said if Trump “had any exculpatory evidence,” he would be making it known rather than rejecting participation, as the White House has, before the Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee’s consideration of impeachment allegations against the Republican president.

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3 US Constitutional Scholars Contend Trump Has Committed Impeachable Offenses

Full House to decide whether president’s actions stemming from a July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president rose to the constitutional level of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ warranting impeachment

Nadler said the Judiciary panel, after a hearing Monday on evidence already collected by the House Intelligence Committee on Trump and his aides’ interactions with Ukraine, could possibly vote on the articles of impeachment by the end of the week. The full House then could be on track to impeach Trump before it recesses for its annual Christmas holiday break in two weeks, setting the stage for a January trial in the Republican-majority Senate, although Trump’s conviction and removal from office remains unlikely.

But Nadler declined to speculate on how many articles of impeachment will be brought against Trump and their content.

There is a division among the majority House Democrats advancing the impeachment case against Trump on whether to limit the allegations to abuse of power (asking a foreign government for help in a U.S. election) and obstruction of Congress (for refusing to turn over key documents related to Ukraine and to allow key Trump aides to testify) or to also include allegations that Trump sought to obstruct special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Some more moderate Democratic lawmakers who won seats in the current session of Congress by capturing districts that Trump won in the 2016 presidential election have sought to limit the articles of impeachment to Ukraine, centered on his July 25 telephone request to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy “to do us a favor,” to investigate Biden, his son Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian natural gas company and whether Ukraine meddled in the 2016 presidential election Trump won, not Russia, as the U.S. intelligence community concluded.

More vocal Trump opponents among House Democrats say they want to include allegations related to Trump’s actions during the Mueller investigation.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff told the CBS “Face the Nation” show on Sunday that he thinks it is best to focus the impeachment charges on Ukraine.

“It’s always been my strategy … to charge those that there is the strongest and most overwhelming evidence and not try to charge everything, even if you could charge other things,” Schiff said.

Trump’s request to Zelenskiy for the Biden investigations came at a time he was temporarily withholding $391 million in military assistance from Kyiv it wanted to help fight pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country, although Trump in September released the aid without Zelenskiy announcing any investigations.

Twenty years ago, when a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, was facing impeachment for lying about an affair he had with a White House intern, Nadler said the impeachment case against Clinton would lack legitimacy if it was almost entirely supported by Republicans and few Democrats, as was the case.

No current Republicans have supported the impeachment effort against Trump. Asked whether he was comfortable with such a Democrats’-only impeachment vote against Trump, Nadler said of Republicans, “It’s up to them to decide whether they want to be patriots or partisans.”

Trump has almost daily vented his wrath against the impeachment effort, even as his legal team has rejected Nadler’s invitation for it to participate in the Judiciary Committee’s hearings this week.

Trump said Sunday on Twitter, “Less than 48 hours before start of the Impeachment Hearing Hoax, on Monday, the No Due Process, Do Nothing Democrats are, believe it or not, changing the Impeachment Guidelines because the facts are not on their side. When you can’t win the game, change the rules!” It was not immediately clear what rules Trump was referring to.

Less than 48 hours before start of the Impeachment Hearing Hoax, on Monday, the No Due Process, Do Nothing Democrats are, believe it or not, changing the Impeachment Guidelines because the facts are not on their side. When you can’t win the game, change the rules!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2019

One of Trump’s most vocal Republican supporters in the House, Congressman Mark Meadows, noted in another CNN interview that Trump’s request to Zelenskiy for the Biden investigations made no mention of a reciprocal deal for the military assistance Kyiv wanted.

“It’s appropriate to make sure nothing was done wrong in Ukraine,” Meadows said of Trump’s call for investigating Biden and his son. He said that “to give [Biden] a free pass, that’s just not appropriate.”

Trump could be the third U.S. president to be impeached, after Andrew Johnson in the mid-19th century and Clinton two decades ago, although both were acquitted in Senate trials and remained in office. Former President Richard M. Nixon resigned in 1974 in the face of certain impeachment in the Watergate political corruption scandal and cover-up.

…

Kenyan rescuers digging through the rubble of a six-story building found two survivors alive Sunday, two days after it collapsed in Nairobi, as the death toll rose to 10.

When the survivors of Friday’s building collapse were found Sunday morning, a crowd of onlookers burst into cheers and claps.

A military member at the scene told The Associated Press they had been communicating with people believed to have been trapped in pockets of debris. He said some were screaming for help but the sounds of their voices had died down as time wore on. He insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the media.

Nairobi Police Chief Philip Ndolo said four bodies were recovered from the scene Sunday including that of a child, while a fifth person died in a hospital. According to authorities, that brings the overall toll to 10 dead, 30 injured and 20 missing.

Ndolo said the rescue of a man and a woman had invigorated emergency workers with hopes of finding other survivors. He said the two were in stable condition in a hospital.

“Given we have rescued two people two days after the incident, we hope to find more survivors. Remember there is more than 20 people missing,” he said.

He said the heavy rains that Kenya was experiencing, more than 300% above normal, were slowing the rescue operation. It was not immediately clear what caused the building, which the Red Cross said housed 22 families, to collapse.

But building collapses are common in Nairobi, where housing is in high demand and unscrupulous developers often bypass regulations.

On Saturday, one person died and others were injured when the balcony of single-story building in Chuka in central Kenya collapsed.

In September, a school collapsed in Nairobi, killing at least seven primary students.

After eight buildings collapsed and killed 15 people in Kenya in 2015, President Uhuru Kenyatta ordered an audit of all the country’s buildings to see if they were up to code. The National Construction Authority found that 58% of the buildings in Nairobi were unfit for habitation.

…

U.S. Representative Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, has been a leading voice defending President Donald Trump throughout the congressional Democrats’ impeachment inquiry. 
 
But the 300-page impeachment report released Tuesday by the Democratic majority on the Intelligence Committee revealed that the California congressman has connections to the Trump-Ukraine scandal that have raised questions about his own official conduct. 
 
House Democrats obtained phone records of Nunes’ calls with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who Democratic investigators say led a shadow effort to subvert U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine in a manner that would benefit the president’s own political interests in the 2020 election campaign. 
 
Logs show five calls between Giuliani and Nunes on April 10, 2019. Two of those were missed calls and the longest was almost 3 minutes in duration. The phone calls occurred at a time when Giuliani has been accused of waging a smear campaign to oust U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch as part of an effort to clear the way for pressuring the Ukrainian government to announce investigations of one of Trump’s leading political rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter.  

The previously undisclosed phone records provided to the committee by AT&T and Verizon also showed Nunes spoke at least four times with Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian American associate of Giuliani who has been indicted on charges of campaign finance violations. Parnas allegedly was part of Giuliani’s efforts to dig up damaging information on the Bidens. Parnas has pleaded not guilty to the campaign finance charges. 
 
The phone calls raised suspicions among House Democrats that Nunes was working behind the scenes to help the president. 
 
Nunes: Calls not suspicious 
 
Nunes told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday that the timing of his calls with Giuliani, whom he has known for some time, should not be considered suspicious and were more focused on former special counsel Robert Mueller and his report on Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.  

Asked about his contact with Parnas, Nunes said he found it unlikely he would be taking calls from random people. 
 
“l haven’t gone through all my phone records,” Nunes told Fox News. “I don’t really recall that name, I remember that name now because he’s been indicted.” 

According to the phone records in the impeachment report, Nunes spoke with Parnas at least four times on April 12, 2019, including one 8-minute phone call. 
 
Parnas has alleged through his attorney that Nunes used taxpayer funds for official travel to Vienna in 2018 to meet with former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, according to CNN reports. Parnas’ lawyer has also said his client is willing to testify that he met with a Nunes aide and Giuliani to discuss Biden. 
 
Nunes has called those allegations “fake.” He has filed a lawsuit against CNN for its reporting on his conversations with Parnas and has threatened internet publication The Daily Beast with similar litigation. 
 
“It’s not unusual for members of Congress to have contact with persons in foreign countries,” said Todd Belt, professor and political management program director at The George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management. 
 
Members of Congress routinely coordinate official trips through the State Department to learn more about areas receiving aid from the United States. “But this sort of freelance thing is pretty unusual,” Belt said. 
 
Nunes-Trump relationship 
 
Nunes is no stranger to defending his close relationship with the Trump White House. 
 
In 2017, during his time as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he investigated Trump’s tweeted claims that the Obama administration had him “wiretapped” in Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign. 
 
Reporters discovered Nunes was coordinating with White House officials to release classified information supporting that allegation. 
 
Nunes later told reporters the incidental collection of intelligence was legal, part of routine surveillance of Trump campaign officials in discussion with foreign agents after the election. 

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US House Intelligence Panel Weighs Future of Wiretap Probe

The House of Representatives Intelligence Committee met behind closed doors Thursday, a day after its investigation into wiretapping allegations involving President Donald Trump and his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, was thrown into disarray.Republican Congressman Devin Nunes, chairman of the panel, defended his disclosure Wednesday that legal, wiretapped conversations of foreign agents talking with Trump officials after the November election, but before he took office in late January led…

Nunes, however, was forced to recuse himself from the House Intelligence Committee investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and temporarily relinquish his chairmanship because of his apparent conflict of interest. A House Ethics Committee investigation subsequently cleared him. 
 
Belt said Nunes has a “really cozy relationship with the president.” 
 
Relevance to impeachment inquiry 
 
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff told reporters Tuesday that he would reserve comment on Nunes but said it was “deeply concerning” a member of Congress could be complicit in behind-the-scenes efforts to assist the president at the public’s expense. 
 
“There’s a lot more to learn about that, and I don’t want to state that that’s an unequivocal fact,” Schiff said. “Our focus is on the president’s conduct first and foremost. It may be the role of others to evaluate the conduct of members of Congress.” 
 
Belt noted Democrats would have to prioritize their investigations, focusing on the impeachment investigation into Trump rather than the allegations against Nunes. 
 
“The fact that they’re trying to move ahead as fast as possible really doesn’t give them much, you know, wiggle room to sort of revisit this,” he said. 
 
During the impeachment inquiry hearings, Nunes has consistently pushed the unfounded theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election, arguing that the interference gave Trump a good reason to suspect the country’s motives and temporarily withhold military aid. 

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Top US Diplomat Open to Investigation of Ukraine for Election Meddling

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says US should ‘chase down’ any information related to possible election interference

That theory has been rejected by U.S. intelligence agencies, who conclusively found Russia meddled in the 2016 election. 
 
Democratic Representative Jackie Speier, another member of the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted: “If Devin Nunes was using taxpayer money to do ‘political errands’ in Vienna for his puppeteer, Donald Trump, an ethics investigation should be initiated and he should be required to reimburse the taxpayers.” 
 
What’s next for Nunes? 
 
The House Committee on Ethics considers cases of misconduct by members of Congress and could likely end up weighing in on this matter. Unlike other House committees, membership is evenly divided among Democrats and Republicans. This ensures that each party has veto power over disciplinary action of a member of Congress. 
 
The committee cleared Nunes of wrongdoing in the 2017 wiretapping controversy. 
 
Members of Congress facing ethics investigations often resign to save political face. The committee can refer the matter to a full House floor vote, censuring or expelling the member of Congress, although such action is extremely rare. 

…

The Israeli military said Saturday that three rockets had been fired from the Gaza Strip toward southern Israel. 
 
The military said air defenses had intercepted two of the missiles. 
 
There were no reports of injuries, and no Palestinian group claimed responsibility for the rocket fire. 
 
Cross-border violence between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza has ebbed and flowed in recent years. Fighting last month was the most violent in months. 
 
Leaders from Hamas, the militant group ruling Gaza, and the smaller but more radical Islamic Jihad are in Cairo, talking with Egyptian officials about cementing a cease-fire. 

…

U.S. Democratic lawmakers met privately Saturday to work on the investigation into President Donald Trump, inching closer to an impeachment vote, possibly before the Christmas holiday recess. 
 
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee were working through the weekend to review evidence against the Republican president and to draft charges that they could recommend for a full House vote as early as Thursday. 
 
The legislators disclosed a 55-page report Saturday that outlined what they viewed as the constitutional grounds on which the charges, known as articles of impeachment, could be based. 
 
On Friday, the White House said it would not cooperate with the remaining House impeachment proceedings against Trump.  

“As you know, your impeachment inquiry is completely baseless and has violated basic principles of due process and fundamental fairness,” read a letter from Pat Cipollone, counsel to the president, addressed to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler. 
 
The response was issued less than an hour before a Friday afternoon deadline for lawyers of the president to state whether they would represent him in the next round of the committee’s impeachment proceedings. 
 
“You should end this inquiry now and not waste even more time with additional hearings,” Cipollone said in the letter. 
 
The counsel reiterated the president’s tweeted words that “if you are going to impeach me, do it now, fast, so that we can have a fair trial in the Senate and so that our Country can get back to business.” 

‘He cannot claim’ unfairness
 
Later Friday, Nadler expressed disappointment Trump had decided not to participate.   
 
“We gave President Trump a fair opportunity to question witnesses and present his own to address the overwhelming evidence before us. After listening to him complain about the impeachment process, we had hoped that he might accept our invitation,” the committee chairman said in a statement. “If the President has no good response to the allegations, then he would not want to appear before the Committee. Having declined this opportunity, he cannot claim that the process is unfair.” 
 
Democrats contend the Republican president defied the norms of conduct for the office and violated his sworn obligation to uphold the U.S. Constitution by asking Ukraine to launch an investigation of Joe Biden, the former vice president running for the Democratic Party nomination to challenge Trump next year, and his son Hunter. 

Trump contends his phone conversations with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy have been perfect and he did nothing wrong. Republicans have defended the president, saying Trump was right to press Ukraine to scrutinize the work that Biden’s son did for a Ukrainian natural gas company. 
 
Republicans are also pushing a debunked theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election that Trump won. The U.S. intelligence community concluded it was Ukraine’s neighbor, Russia, that was doing the meddling. 
 
Trump’s request to Kyiv came at a time when his administration was withholding $391 million in military assistance approved for Ukraine to fight pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country. The aid was released in September without Ukraine opening investigations of the Bidens. 
 
The request for such an investigation in exchange for military assistance is expected to be among the articles of impeachment against Trump. 

Congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson contributed to this report. 

…

Pacific Gas and Electric says it has reached a $13.5 billion settlement that will resolve all major claims related to devastating wildfires blamed on its outdated equipment and negligence.

The settlement, which the utility says was reached Friday, still requires court approval. PG&E says it is a key step in leading it out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The settlement is to resolve all claims arising from the 2017 Northern California wildfires and 2018 Camp Fire, as well as all claims from the 2015 Butte Fire and 2016 Ghost Ship Fire in Oakland.

“From the beginning of the Chapter 11 process, getting wildfire victims fairly compensated, especially the individuals, has been our primary goal,” Bill Johnson, PG&E Corporation’s CEO and president, said in a statement. “We want to help our customers, our neighbors and our friends in those impacted areas recover and rebuild after these tragic wildfires.”

The settlement is still subject to a number of conditions involving PG&E’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization plans, which must be completed by June 30, 2020.

Friday’s settlement figure responds to pressure from Gov. Gavin Newsom to give wildfire victims more than it originally offered, but it still relies on the bankruptcy judge’s approval as part of the proceedings. A February hearing at which an official estimation of losses will be made still looms for the utility and could upend any settlement deals.

“We appreciate all the hard work by many stakeholders that went into reaching this agreement,” Johnson said. “With this important milestone now accomplished, we are focused on emerging from Chapter 11 as the utility of the future that our customers and communities expect and deserve.”

PG&E said the proposed settlement is the third it has reached as it works through its Chapter 11 case. The utility previously reached a $1 billion settlement with cities, counties and other public utilities and an $11 billion agreement with insurance companies and other entities that have paid claims relating to the 2017 and 2018 fires.

…

He came to Afghanistan as Dr. Tetsu Nakamura in the 1980s to help treat leprosy patients in Afghanistan and refugee camps in Pakistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. His body is leaving Afghanistan as “Kaka Murad” or Uncle Murad, revered by millions of people across the country who feel indebted to his three decades of humanitarian work in the war-torn country.

On Wednesday, Nakamura was on his way to work with five members of his aid organization, Peace Japan Medical Services, when his car came under attack by unidentified gunmen in Jalalabad, the capital of eastern Nangarhar province.

He and his staff were shot and killed, with Nakamura dying of his wounds on the way to Bagram Airfield, a U.S. military base in northern Afghanistan, local Afghan officials said.

Life’s work in Afghanistan

Nakamura, 73, had dedicated most of his adult life to working in Afghanistan, trying to save lives at times as a physician and at times as a mason, building water canals for people affected by drought.

“You’d hear a child screaming in the waiting room, but by the time you got there, they’d be dead,” Nakamura told NHK TV, Japan’s national broadcasting organization, in October.

“That happened almost every day. They were so malnourished that things like diarrhea could kill them. … My thinking was that if those patients had clean water and enough to eat, they would have survived,” he added.

Japanese Afghan citizen

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani bestowed upon Nakamura an honorary Afghan citizenship in October, and earlier this year residents of Nangarhar province campaigned on social media for him to become the mayor of Jalalabad city.

“This morning a terror attack against the reconstruction hero of Afghanistan, Japanese Afghan Dr. Tetsu Nakamura, resulted in his injury. His deep wounds unfortunately led to his death,” Ghani tweeted in Pashto earlier this week.

Ghani offered “our deepest condolences” to Japanese Ambassador to Afghanistan Mitsuji Suzuka, as well as to the families of the Afghans who were killed in the attack.

On Friday, Ghani met with Nakamura’s family in Kabul, the presidential office said.

#SorryJapan

#SorryJapan has been trending on Afghan social media networks with officials, activists and Afghan citizens expressing sorrow over Nakamura’s death and apologizing to Japan for not being able to protect him.

“#Nakamura I can’t stop my tears. My heart cries for you, my heart aches so much. I can’t forget you, you were the true servant of this land,” Basir Atiqzai wrote on twitter.

Bilal Sarwary, a former BBC reporter in Afghanistan, said Nakamura had great affection for the people of Afghanistan.

Sarwary tweeted he remembered “the joy and jubilation” on Nakamura’s face “after inaugurating the water canal. His friendly hugs with Gul Agha Shiraz and his laughter of joy shows his deep love for Afghanistan.”

Amrullah Saleh, the former chief of Afghan intelligence and Ghani’s running mate in September’s presidential elections, said the crime against Nakamura would not go unpunished.

Nakamura has become “a hero of compassion for all Afghans. He was an uncle for east Afg before. There is no way his murder will remain a mystery for ever. No way. He is too big to be cremated or buried. This high profile crime won’t go unpunished. We promise,” Saleh wrote on Twitter Thursday.

Vigils

Candlelight vigils have been held in several provinces in Afghanistan. Locals named a roundabout after Nakamura in Eastern Khost province with Kam Air, a local Afghan airline, putting Nakamura’s portrait on an Airbus 340 to pay tribute to the slain aid worker.

WATCH: Afghan Activists Hold Vigil in Honor of Slain Japanese Doctor

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Afghans living in the Washington, D.C., area are planning a candlelight vigil Saturday.

No group has immediately claimed responsibility for the attack against the group. The Taliban denied responsibility for it, but Afghan officials and civil society activists have blamed the insurgent group for it.

On Friday, a group of activists held a protest in Kabul in front of Pakistan’s Embassy to condemn the terror attack and criticize Pakistan’s alleged support for the Afghan militants.

Pakistan has not immediately reacted to the protest.

“Afghans will never forget his services for this country,” Rahimullah Samandar, a civil society activist, told Reuters. “The whole nation will love him and keep him in their memories.”

‘I couldn’t ignore Afghans’

Nakamura was born in western Japan. He was a physician by profession and left his country in 1984 to work at a clinic in the Pakistani city of Peshawar. He treated Afghan refugees displaced by war and suffering from leprosy.

He eventually opened a clinic in Afghanistan in 1991. He found the health problems in Afghanistan overwhelming for his clinic and instead found another way to combat them: irrigation canals.

In 2003, borrowing tactics from Japan’s irrigation systems, he swapped his doctor’s tools for construction gear. He began building an irrigation canal to help address the drought issue in eastern Afghanistan. He and local residents spent six years completing the construction of a canal that has reportedly changed the lives of nearly a million people.

“As a doctor, nothing is better than healing patients and sending them home,” and providing water to drought-stricken areas did the same for rural Afghanistan, Nakamura told NHK TV.

“A hospital treats patients one by one, but this helps an entire village. … I love seeing a village that’s been brought back to life,” he added.

Since the construction of the irrigation canal, more than 16,000 hectares (about 40,000 acres) of desert has been reportedly brought back to life.

Nakamura was fluent in both Dari and Pashto, the two main languages spoken in Afghanistan.

“I couldn’t ignore the Afghans,” Nakamura told NHK TV.

VOA’s Mehdi Jedinia and Rikar Hussein contributed to this story from Washington. Some of the materials used in this story came from Reuters.

…

Maritime sovereignty rivals China and Vietnam have started talking again after a prolonged standoff earlier this year, entering what analysts call a routine show of peace before more flare-ups.

China’s withdrawal of a survey ship from disputed waters in October and Vietnam’s ascent to chair the Association of Southeast Asian Nations led the reasons that the two began talking this month, political observers say.

On Wednesday, a Vietnam-China working group on maritime cooperation held its 13th round of talks in Ho Chi Minh City. The event brought in midlevel officials from each side’s foreign ministry, Viet Nam News reported.

“It seems to me they’re moving into a phase of talk, because the confrontation no longer serves any particular purpose,” said Carl Thayer, Southeast Asia-specialist emeritus professor with the University of New South Wales in Australia.

China and Vietnam have cycled through dozens of tiffs and talks over at least the past 20 years. Diplomacy normally comes after the two sides bury a specific issue and one or both wants to boost its image as a peacemaker — especially when a tense China-ASEAN dialogue looms — experts have said. Their talks do not solve underlying disagreements about rights to the resource-rich South China Sea.

“China’s still maintaining a firm stance on the South China Sea issue,” said Nguyen Thanh Trung, Center for International Studies director at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City. “They will not make many concessions to push forward for negotiations with other countries in the region.”

The two neighbors with a centuries-long history of territorial disputes both claim western parts of the 3.5 million-square-kilometer sea, although China is militarily and economically stronger, which has given it more clout at sea since the 1970s. Both countries are looking for potentially vast reserves of oil and gas under the seabed.

Cycle of spats, talks

Vietnam and China typically negotiate after China moves ships or a rig into contested waters, or the Vietnamese step up energy exploration. For example, talks picked up speed in 2014 as both sides wanted to get past an incident in which Vietnamese boats had rammed Chinese counterparts near the Gulf of Tonkin over Beijing’s approval for an oil rig. Then, during a meeting in Vietnam in 2017, senior officials from both sides agreed to manage disputes in the sea.

This year’s standoff began in June when a Chinese energy survey ship, the Haiyang Dizhi 8, began patrolling contested waters around Vanguard Bank, 350 kilometers off the coast of southeastern Vietnam. In October a rig contracted by Vietnam said it had stopped work in the tract and a day later the survey ship retreated.

Reasons for talks this month

Vietnam should look like a negotiator, not a fighter, among regional leaders over the next year as ASEAN chair, analysts say. Beijing for its part hopes to get along with Vietnam through its term into late 2020, in case the 10-country bloc takes action on the South China Sea, they say.

“China has to confront an ASEAN with Vietnam at the chair, which has already been very, very strongly opposing China’s actions,” Thayer said.

The Vietnamese government wants its citizens to see it trying to work with China in case something goes wrong later, Nguyen said. Talks might produce more deals on fishing or energy exploration, he added.

“For Vietnam, because now it’s the ASEAN chair, so it doesn’t look good on Vietnam if it continues to adopt a more militant stance toward China, especially after China has already withdrawn that survey vessel from Vanguard bank,” said Collin Koh, maritime security research fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

In the future, though, China will still “coerce within a manageable threshold” and Vietnam will want China to stop, Koh said. The negotiations now mark a “repetition of the cycle” of struggle and reconciliation, he said.

…

Steven Lacchin grew up a fatherless boy, but he knew some very basic facts about the man who was his father.
                   
He knew Lacchin, the name on his Kenyan birth certificate, was his dad’s name. He knew that Mario Lacchin abandoned him and his mother.
                   
When he was older, he learned that his father was an Italian missionary priest – and that in leaving, he had chosen the church over his child.
                   
What he did not know is that less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) away, another man was on a quest to prove that Mario Lacchin was his father, too.
                   
These two men would find each other thanks to an Associated Press story that appeared on the front page of Kenya’s main newspaper. All agreed that they bore a marked resemblance, but they underwent genetic testing to be certain.
                   
Were they indeed half-brothers, sons of the same Father?
                  
The Vatican only publicly admitted this year that it had a problem: Priests were fathering children. And it only acknowledged the problem by revealing that it had crafted internal guidelines to deal with it.
                   
“I don’t know how many children of priests there are in the world, but I know that they are all over the planet,” said Anne-Marie Jarzac, who heads the French group Enfants du Silence (Children of Silence), which recently opened negotiations with French bishops to access church archives so these children of priests can learn their true identities.
                   
Just as clergy sex abuse victims have long suffered the indifference of the Catholic hierarchy, many of these children of priests endure rejection multiple times over: abandoned by their fathers, deprived of their identities and ignored by church superiors when they seek answers or help.
                   
Steven Lacchin’s lineage was no secret. Members of Mario Lacchin’s order were well aware of it and exerted pressure on him to choose the church over his young family, according to his letters.
                   
His mother, Madeleine, kept a decade worth of correspondence with the priest, as well as meticulous records of her efforts to seek child support from the Consolata leadership and regional bishops after Steven was born June 21, 1980. (Steven Lacchin asked that his mother be identified only by her first name.)
                   
The two had met two years earlier in Nanyuki, about 200 kilometers north of Nairobi, where Madeleine was a school teacher at an all-girls school and Lacchin would celebrate Mass. Madeleine would later tell the Consolata regional superior that she first went to Lacchin with “a spiritual problem,” but that they then eased into a “friendly pastor-parishioner” relationship that grew into love.
                   
On July 28, 1979, Mario Lacchin wrote a birthday card to Madeleine in his neat cursive, promising to spend more time with her and her young daughter from a previous relationship, Josephine, despite the risks their union posed.
                   
“I do really love you with all my heart and body,” he wrote. “You are the only one who is giving me, not only physical satisfaction, but a lot more. You are telling me and teaching me how beautiful it is to love and be together no matter the sacrifices we have to make for it.”
                   
Soon after, Madeleine became pregnant. A few months before Steven was born, Lacchin wrote from Rome about meetings he held with the Consolata leadership at the order’s headquarters about his impending fatherhood.
                   
“I had a little trouble in Rome with my superiors,” he wrote Madeleine on March 4, 1980. “It is my impression that nobody is going to help me in the way I would like to go,” he wrote, adding: “How is the baby?”
                   
By the end of 1981, with Steven Lacchin a year old, the priest seemed determined to end his “double life” and devote himself to his family.
                   
“I took a courage to meet with my provincial superior about you, about Steven, about my readiness to leave the priesthood,” he wrote. “I want you, and I will fight until I will be with you, Steven and Josephine forever.”
                   
But in that same letter, Lacchin told Madeleine that his superior wasn’t at all on board with the plan. “He told me that he wants to save my priesthood, but I told him that I will never be able to continue in such a life knowing I had a child belong to me,” he wrote.
                   
Lacchin never left the Consolatas. His letters over the following years speak of his order’s “pressure” to remain a priest, as well as his own feelings of “failure” and his apologies for having promised Madeleine “a future which will never come.”
                   
While the Vatican was loath in those years to let a priest abandon his vocation, the Consolata’s deputy superior, the Rev. James Lengarin, insists that if a priest formally requested to be released from his vows because he had fathered a child, he would have been allowed to go.
                   
By 1985, Madeleine was increasingly unable to care for the children. She was ill, and shunned by her devout Catholic family because of her liaison with Lacchin.
                   
Lacchin, then stationed in Uganda, had left 1.7 million Ugandan shillings for her in the Ugandan diocese of Tororo that year (the equivalent at the time of $2,500), but in the midst of a civil war, Madeleine couldn’t access the money. Due to the upheaval, the money lost nearly all its value.
                   
Two years later, Madeleine wrote to Lacchin’s superiors seeking financial and bureaucratic help as she increasingly feared for Steven’s future. Who would pay for his education? And the child couldn’t get Kenyan citizenship because his father wasn’t Kenyan; Steven Lacchin’s birth certificate and other identity papers all bore Mario Lacchin’s name.
                   
The Consolata’s then-regional superior, the Rev. Mario Barbero, replied that he understood Lacchin had left money for Steven’s care in Uganda.
                   
“With this I think that Mario has given some contribution towards meeting the expenses for Steven’s upbringing, though I know that money is not enough to heal psychological wounds and frustrations you had to go through,” Barbero wrote.
                   
A year later, Madeleine took her case directly to Lacchin.
                   
“Even as I write, I find it difficult to believe that you, Mario, could turn me into the helpless beggar I am,” she wrote on Jan. 5, 1988.
                   
“I accepted your decision regarding me, and yet I cannot accept your hiding behind the priesthood to refuse to help a child you helped bring into the world,” she wrote. “I do not know what you think he will think of you and of your priesthood and other priests when he grows up and learns how you treated him.”
                  
By then, Mario Lacchin had been transferred north and was working at the Consolata mission in Archer’s Post, a onetime trading station in the Northern Rift Valley. There, he met Sabina Losirkale, a young girl in her final year at Gir Gir Primary School who cleaned the Consolata priests’ quarters after classes.
                   
Impregnated at 16, before the age of legal consent in Kenya, she would give birth to a boy, Gerald Erebon, on March 12, 1989. He was pale complexioned, unlike his black mother or siblings or the black man he was told was his father.
                   
When Sabina became pregnant, the Consolatas transferred Lacchin out of Archer’s Post, and he vanished from her life.
                   
Shortly before her death in 2012, family members say, Sabina told them Lacchin was Gerald’s father. The priest has denied it, and refused to take a paternity test. The order acknowledged nothing.
                   
The AP told Gerald Erebon’s story in October. That article led Steven Lacchin to reach out to Erebon on Facebook.
                   
“I saw your story and I feel for you,” he wrote. “I am letting you know, you are not alone.”
                   
Intrigued, but skeptical, Erebon responded. What did the writer want to share?
                   
“He is my dad too,” Lacchin replied.
                   
A few days later, the two met in Nairobi. It turns out they are practically neighbors, living in adjacent neighborhoods along Nairobi’s main Magadi Road. They marveled at how much they looked alike: two bi-racial men born to black African mothers, soft-spoken and pensive, though Erebon towers over Steven.
                   
Awkwardly, they hugged for the first time and looked over the documentation Steven had brought along detailing the years-long relationship between Lacchin and his mother and her efforts to hold him responsible for Steven’s upkeep.
                   
They shared the stories of their lives. Like Erebon, Steven Lacchin was brought up in the church and attended seminary for a time. Steven said he was kicked out once his bishop discovered that his father was a Catholic priest. Eventually he was able to put himself through law school, and now is married with three children.
                   
“I wouldn’t need a DNA to tell these two are brothers,” said Lacchin’s wife, Ruth. “If you look at Mario, you look at Steven, you look at Gerald, it’s one person. It’s one tree. They are brothers!”
                   
Still, they needed to know. The AP arranged for DNA tests.
                   
Two weeks later, the results were in: The findings were “entirely consistent with a direct male-line biological relationship,” the lab said.
                   
In other words, the men are almost certainly half-brothers, said Darren Griffin, a geneticist at the University of Kent who reviewed the lab results for AP.
                   
“The only thing I can say is welcome to the family!” Lacchin told Erebon, shaking his hand.
                   
“This is eternal,” Lacchin said. “We can’t run away from this. We may go our separate ways, but one thing, you know you have a brother out there.”
                   
Erebon said he had thought he was alone, and having “a relative, a family, someone you can call your own, makes it a bit easier for me now.”
                   
Mario Lacchin, who has taken a leave from his parish work in Nairobi to see his Italian relatives, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
                   
Lengarin, the deputy Consolata superior, said he searched the order’s Nairobi archives in 2018 after Erebon came forward and turned up no information about Erebon or Steven Lacchin. But he acknowledged that he only looked into the two years surrounding Erebon’s 1989 birth, and that the order doesn’t keep complete personnel files.
                   
He said AP’s inquiry about Steven Lacchin was the first the order in Rome and Nairobi had heard about a possible second son of Mario Lacchin.
                   
But Steven’s mother was in touch with the Consolata superiors in the 1980s. Steven sent letters to Consolata officials in Nairobi in 2010 and 2014, seeking financial assistance (he wanted to buy land to build a home for his family) along with help sorting out his citizenship status.
                   
Getting no response, starting in 2016 he made the same requests of Mario Lacchin’s bishop, Virgilio Pante, like Mario Lacchin, an Italian member of the Consolata order.
                   
Pante responded with an Oct. 14, 2017, text: “You look for something big. My diocese of Maralal now financially is suffering. True. Can I send you now a Christmas gift 25,000?” (In Kenyan shillings, the equivalent of around $250.)
                   
Steven still wants the church’s help in ironing out his Kenyan and Italian citizenship issues; Erebon wants Mario Lacchin to acknowledge his paternity, so the heritage of his own two children can be recognized and they can obtain Italian citizenship.
                   
“It started very long time ago and our father has to do the right thing, at least once,” Erebon said. “He needs to make it right. And the church should not continue with the cover-up. They should just make this right.”

…

Kenyan police arrested the Nairobi County governor, known for his chunky gold jewelry and impromptu raps, Friday on corruption charges, a high profile move in the government’s much trumpeted anti-graft push.

Chief public prosecutor Noordin Haji told a news conference that Governor Mike Mbuvi Sonko and his associates were accused of conspiracy to commit corruption, failure to comply with laws related to procurement, unlawful acquisition of public property and laundering the proceeds of crime.

Sonko and his assistants did not respond to calls seeking comment.

Citizens and international investors have long complained of corruption in Kenya, East Africa’s business hub and richest economy.

President Uhuru Kenyatta appointed Haji, a former deputy head of national intelligence, last year after years of taking little action to rein in widespread graft.

On Friday, Haji accused Sonko, who runs the Kenyan capital as Nairobi’s most senior regional politician, of “deploying intimidation tactics and using goons to threaten law enforcement officials” investigating the case.

Police used tear gas to disperse hundreds of Sonko’s supporters when he was called into the anti-corruption office for questioning in November.

Flamboyant Sonko

Sonko, a former senator, was elected in 2017 after years of news splashes featuring his flamboyant lifestyle and flashy fashion, complete with ubiquitous chunky gold jewelry and eye-catching hairstyles.

After Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto faced charges of crimes against humanity following the disputed 2007 elections and subsequent violence, Sonko showed up to the proceedings at the Hague-based International Criminal Court with “Uhuruto Not Guilty” dyed into his hair.

He was recently photographed using a gold-plated iPad and matching iPhone and has appeared in rap videos gyrating in public offices wearing gold-colored trainers while insulting political opponents.

Gold-plated taste

He invited a storm of public criticism this month after he shared photos online of his dining room, featuring a gold-plated lion statue, and a gold-tinted dining table and chairs.

He has recruited hundreds of people into his “Sonko Rescue Team” who sweep out streets or appear at fires wearing “Sonko” branded red boiler suits in Nairobi’s poorest neighborhoods.

On Thursday, Sonko received an award sponsored by the Kenya Red Cross and United Nations Volunteers for encouraging volunteering.

Sonko has been photographed handing out cash for things like hospital bills, but Nairobi has seen little improvement in public services under his watch.

Nairobi’s public schools and clinics are crumbling, roads are potholed and hundreds of thousands of people live in slums without access to electricity, sewage or services.

…

Singer, songwriter and guitarist Andrew Griffin formed the alternative rock band “Better Than Ezra in 1988.” As a songwriter, Griffin stands out as a five-time BMI Pop Award winner and ARIAA Award-winner with multiple number ones, including Sugarland’s “Stuck Like Glue” and Howie Day’s “Collide.” In October, he released his first solo album, “Anywhere You Go.”

…

BOLSOVER, ENGLAND — Dennis Skinner is a no-nonsense, unchanging socialist and the only British MP ever to heckle the Queen’s Speech Ceremony, when Britain’s lawmakers process from the Commons annually to the House of Lords to hear the monarch’s address outlining the government’s legislative program.

Nicknamed the “Beast of Bolsover,” a reference to the Derbyshire constituency he has represented since 1970, the 87-year-old Skinner has traditionally occupied the seat of the front bench below the gangway in the Commons, where invariably wearing a tweed jacket and red tie, he has harangued those he deems “class enemies,” earning himself a dozen cooling off’ suspensions for what was deemed “unparliamentary language.”

The son of a coal miner — his father was sacked after the historic coal strike of 1926 — and a former miner himself, his first brush with the Speaker of the House of Commons was in 1984 when he dubbed the leader of a group of Labour defectors a “pompous sod” and was ordered out of the chamber when he agreed to withdraw only the word “pompous.” In 1992, he incurred another suspension for describing the then Conservative agriculture minister as “a little squirt” and “a slimy wart on Margaret Thatcher’s nose.”

Skinner’s working-class constituents, many of them former coal-miners or the sons and daughters of miners, have been relentlessly behind their pugnacious tribune with the snappy bark, and they have been loyal to the Labour Party. The closure of local collieries by Conservative governments in the 1980s and 1990s only deepened Bolsover’s allegiance to Labour and to their MP, who took a pay cut himself in support of the miners during a ferocious 1984-85 miners’ strike.

But the times are changing and the country’s oldest serving MP may became next week a casualty of electoral war thanks to the scrambling of British politics by Brexit and a makeover of the Labour Party, which has become more focused on metropolitan issues pushed by progressive urban recruits, irritating older and more socially conservative traditional Labour voters.

Britain’s ruling Conservatives hope Boris Johnson can pull off what his predecessor at 10 Downing Street, Theresa May, failed to do in a snap election 18 months ago. Their hope is that Johnson will breach the Labour Party’s so-called northern red wall,’ once thought to be impregnable, by persuading anti-European Union northern working-class voters to defect to the class-enemy Conservatives to “deliver Brexit.”

Skinner’s constituency is one brick in that wall and on the streets of Bolsover in the north east of the county of Derbyshire amid rolling hills, the talk is the December 12 general election may mark the end of the long-serving lawmaker’s political career. Locals say while they still admire their local MP, who’s been unable to campaign personally because of recent hip-replacement surgery, Brexit is driving them away from a Labour Party, which wants to hold a second Brexit referendum, if it wins power.

Bolsover voted 70 percent to Leave the EU in the 2016 referendum and because of that high proportion of pro-Brexit voters, the seat is a key target for the Conservatives. On a cold, breezy day when VOA visited the town center, which has the feel of left-behind desperation about it with boarded-up shops, shuttered pubs, neglected terrace houses and shabby cheap takeaways, it wasn’t difficult to find locals planning to switch their votes to either the Conservatives or the newly-minted Brexit Party of Nigel Farage.

One former miner, Dave Michaels, a stocky 65-year-old wearing a flat cap, said, “I’ve been Labour all my life, as was my father, and I don’t like Johnson, don’t trust the man, but I think he’ll get us out of the EU and stop all the dithering.” He voiced annoyance at the influx of eastern European migrants to staff new warehouses and online retail distribution centers. Locals complain migration has altered the social cohesion of this corner of Derbyshire and strained already under-resourced public services.

Others expressed similar sentiments, suggesting that Skinner’s 5,000 majority may well collapse next week, adding to a possible seismic change in British politics that could see Labour and the Liberal Democrats snatch traditional Conservative seats in the pro-EU south of England and the commuter belt around London, but lose heartland seats of their own in the north, midlands and southwest of the country.

The Conservatives’ assault on the “red wall” will make or break Johnson’s dream of securing a parliamentary majority and dictate whether Britain leaves the European Union or not.

Daphne, a 52-year-old, who’d just finished shopping in a butcher’s shop, said she’ll be voting for Skinner’s Conservative rival Mark Fletcher. The mother of two grown up daughters, Lewis says she remains grateful to Skinner for all he’s done in the past, but he is “long in the tooth” and it is time for a change. “The Conservatives seem to have a goal,” she says.

The 34-year-old Fletcher, the grandson himself of a miner who was educated at state schools before heading to Cambridge University, says locals “want to get Brexit done and the Labour party has lost its way.” He’s convinced he can win Bolsover and that the Brexit Party won’t deny him victory by splitting the Leave vote. He is buoyed by a seat-by-seat opinion survey last week produced by the YouGov polling agency that predicted he will win the seat on December 12 with 42 percent of the vote, with Labour trailing 38 percent and the Brexit Party picking up 12 percent.

But the remaining days will be crucial before voting — in Bolsover, as well as in 49 other Labour seats in Wales, the midlands and northern England targeted by the Conservatives. At the last general election there were hints the ‘red wall’ isn’t as strong as Labour strategists suppose — two of Bolsover’s neighboring constituencies, North East Derbyshire and Mansfield, defected to the Conservative camp.

The Labour activists are hitting the doorsteps hard in the northern constituencies, though, trawling residual party support. And while the Conservatives are doing well when it comes to the issue of Brexit, they are on the back foot when it comes to public-service issues, and especially in regards to the under-staffed and under-funded National Health Service.

But Brexit isn’t Labour’s only problem in the north in what commentators describe as a “hold-your-nose election.” Johnson and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, seen widely as the most far-left leader the party has ever had, are vying in the unpopularity stakes, and according to opinion polls neither are trusted by voters. Johnson is the most disliked new prime minister in the modern history of opinion polling, while Corbyn is the most disliked leader of the opposition.

General election victory or defeat may come down to who is disliked the most.

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