WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Congress is determined to get access to U.S. President Donald Trump’s calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other world leaders, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said on Sunday, citing concerns the Republican leader may have jeopardized national security.
“I think the paramount need here is to protect the national security of the United States and see whether in the conversations with other world leaders and in particular with Putin that the president was also undermining our security in a way that he thought would personally benefit his campaign,” Democrat Adam Schiff said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Following a whistleblower complaint that Trump solicited a political favor from Ukraine’s president that could help him get re-elected, the lawmakers are investigating concerns Trump’s actions jeopardized national security and the integrity of U.S. elections.
The whistleblower’s complaint cited a telephone call in which Trump asked President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to launch an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Hunter Biden sat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
The July 25 phone call came shortly after the United States froze nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine, prompting concern that Trump was using the taxpayer money already approved by Congress as leverage for his personal political gain.
Joe Biden is a leading candidate in the race to challenge Trump in the November 2020 presidential election. There is no evidence of wrongdoing in Biden’s actions involving Ukraine.
The matter prompted Democratic House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to launch an impeachment inquiry against Trump on Tuesday.
Trump says there was nothing wrong with his phone call with the Ukrainian leader and denounced the whistleblower as a “political hack.”
White House adviser Stephen Miller took up the attack on Sunday, accusing the whistleblower of being part of a “deep state” government conspiracy to foment opposition to Trump.
“I know the difference between a whistleblower and a ‘deep state’ operative. This is a ‘deep state’ operative pure and simple,” he told “Fox News Sunday.”
Trump’s Republican supporters in Congress defended the president’s actions on Sunday TV news shows.
“I have zero problems with this phone call,” Senator Lindsey Graham said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
The whistleblower’s complaint was deemed credible by the inspector general of the U.S. intelligence community and the acting director of national intelligence told lawmakers the person “acted in good faith” and “did the right thing.”
The complaint said White House lawyers directed that an electronic summary of the call, which was released to the public on Wednesday, be moved from the place where such things are usually kept to a secret server reserved for covert matters.
“If those conversations with Putin or with other world leaders are sequestered in that same electronic file that is meant for covert action, not meant for this, if there’s an effort to hide those and cover those up, yes we’re determined to find out,” Schiff said on NBC.
The intelligence committee has reached an agreement with the whistleblower to appear before the panel, Schiff told ABC’s “This Week.”
Lawmakers were working out logistics to protect the person’s identity and get security clearance for lawyers who will be representing the whistleblower. Schiff said he hoped the whistleblower can appear very soon.
House committees on Friday issued a subpoena to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for documents concerning contact with the Ukrainian government. They also scheduled depositions for five State Department officials within two weeks, including Kurt Volker, Trump’s envoy to Ukraine. Volker resigned on Friday.
Reporting by Doina Chiacu and David Morgan; Editing by Lisa Shumaker
From the moment Donald Trump became a national political figure, he has been cloaked in controversy and shadowed by investigations. Now Trump is facing a high-velocity threat like none that has come before. (Sept. 27) AP, AP
WASHINGTON – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she wants to move “expeditiously” on the impeachment inquiry into whether President Donald Trump abused his power by pushing Ukraine to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden.
At the center of the inquiry, which was launched last week, is a complaint from an unidentified intelligence agency official. The complaint accuses Trump of having “used the power of his office” to solicit foreign interference to discredit Biden, the 2020 Democratic frontrunner. It also alleges that White House officials sought to “lock down” records of a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in which the president urged Zelensky to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter, who once had business interests in Ukraine.
Trump contends he did nothing improper and accuses Democrats of wanting to overturn the results of the 2016 election.
Some lawmakers want the House to decide whether to file articles of impeachment by Thanksgiving, a timeline that could avoid having the issue spill over into the 2020 election year.
Here’s what we know about the process, what’s happening next and the key players:
What is an impeachment inquiry?
Basically, an impeachment inquiry is the fact-finding stage of the impeachment process and largely what House Democrats have been doing for months on various other matters involving Trump.
Since taking over the House after the 2018 midterms, six House committees have been investigating a series of allegations against the president, including whether Trump obstructed justice in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, whether he profited unconstitutionally from his namesake business while in office and whether he violated campaign laws by paying hush money to a porn actress before the election.
And Pelosi has said the Ukraine matter would be the primary target of any possible impeachment charges.
CLOSE
Impeaching a U.S. president might not be the be-all-end-all for their career. We explain why this is the case. Just the FAQs, USA TODAY
The plan for now, according to lawmakers, is to prioritize the Ukraine investigation, which is being led by the House Intelligence Committee, while other panels wrap up their probes and send their best cases to the House Judiciary Committee.
Then lawmakers will decide whether to bring forward articles of impeachment, which would require a full House vote. If it passes, Trump would be impeached – sort of like a criminal indictment.
The process then would shift to the Senate, where an impeachment trial would take place. Basically, House lawmakers would act as prosecutors and senators as the jury for a trial deciding whether to remove Trump from office. After the trial, senators would take a vote. A two-thirds majority is needed for Trump to be removed from office.
While the Constitution puts the responsibility of holding an impeachment trial in the hands of the Senate, there has been some speculation that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell might refuse to hold a trial.
McConnell was asked last March by NPR – before the Ukraine allegation surfaced – about what he saw as the Senate’s responsibility. McConnell said at the time that he thought the Senate would have “no choice” on the matter, saying if articles pass the House it would move to the Senate and it “immediately goes into a trial.”
Despite Congress going on a two-week recess, things are moving rapidly. A series of depositions are scheduled with some of the figures wrapped up in the Ukraine scandal, one hearing is scheduled and a host of new subpoenas could be filed next week, not to mention the first subpoena in the matter being sent to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday.
The chairmen of the Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and Oversight and Reform committees gave Pompeo until Oct. 4 to hand over documents about Trump’s July phone call with Ukraine President Zelensky.
The chairmen – Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y.; Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.; and Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md. – also plan depositions for five State Department officials over the break: (more on these folks below!)
•Oct. 2: Ambassador Marie “Masha” Yovanovitch, former ambassador to Ukraine.
•Oct. 3: Kurt Volker, a special representative for Ukraine who played a role arranging meetings between Giuliani and Zelensky’s representatives.
•Oct. 7: Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent.
•Oct. 8: Counselor T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, who listened to the Ukraine call, according to the whistleblower complaint.
•Oct. 10: Ambassador Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union.
Along with the depositions, which will be taken in private, the House Intelligence Committee also scheduled a hearing on Oct. 4 with Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community, who received the whistleblower’s complaint about Trump and deemed it credible and urgent. The hearing will also take place behind closed doors.
Other hearings could be scheduled but Schiff told reporters Friday the panel has to determine who else will testify voluntarily and who will require a subpoena.
All of the movement in Washington will happen as most of Congress is back home on a two-week break. Some lawmakers voiced concern about the timing of the recess, noting that getting to the bottom of this was urgent, momentum was building on the investigation and leaving the Capitol could shift focus.
But, House leadership said the break was an important chance for lawmakers to explain to their constituents what was happening and why, especially in swing districts and for members who flipped seats from conservative grasp in the midterm election.
“I think it’s very important that members go home to their constituents and explain what they are thinking,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md. “This is a matter of grave importance and the American people need to understand what is occurring.”
It’s also a chance to possibly sway public opinion on the issue as voters remain fairly split on impeaching Trump.
Who are lawmakers questioning?
Lawmakers have a whole host of questions and as they learn more, the questions only seem to grow.
Members of the House Intelligence Committee say some of their priorities are: identifying the estimated dozen officials who were on Trump’s telephone call with the Ukrainian president and questioning them, getting additional documents about the phone call, talking with those officials mentioned in the whistleblower complaint, including the officials in the White House who were troubled by the president’s conduct and hearing from current and former intelligence officials, who could outline whether notes were handled differently for the Ukraine call.
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The whistleblower’s complaint that sparked an impeachment inquiry into President Trump has been released. USA TODAY
The White House has acknowledged that a summary of the call was placed into a highly secure system usually reserved for classified information pertaining to extremely sensitive national security matters.
For now, the House has scheduled a series of depositions and one hearing with some of the officials wrapped up in the scandal. Here’s more about them:
• Marie “Masha” Yovanovitch: Yovanovitch is a career diplomat and the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. She was pulled from her post in May after working years under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Trump called Yovanovitch “bad news” in his July phone call with the Ukrainian president, which followed reports in conservative media that Yovanovitch was disloyal to Trump. She is scheduled to be deposed by Congress on Oct. 2
• Kurt Volker: Volker was a special representative for Ukraine and played a role arranging meetings between Giuliani and Zelensky’s representatives. He resigned on Friday after his name was mentioned in the whistleblower complaint and Giuliani posted private text messages, showing Volker introduced him to a top adviser to the Ukrainian president. The whistleblower complaint also notes that Volker tried to “contain the damage” Giuliani was doing in his efforts to uncover wrongdoing by Biden. He is scheduled to be deposed by Congress on Oct. 3.
•George Kent: Kent is the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the European and Eurasian Bureau at State Department. His job entails, among other things, overseeing policy toward Ukraine. He previously worked as an anti-corruption coordinator for the State Department that specifically targeted Europe. He spoke about the delay in releasing military aid to Ukraine, explaining to Voice of America that it was due to “some issues” with the “the U.S. budgetary process” but that they were “being sorted out.” The delayed aid is one of the things House Democrats are investigating as to whether there was a quid pro quo with Trump giving the aid in return for an investigation into Biden. He is scheduled to be deposed by Congress on Oct. 7.
• T. Ulrich Brechbuhl: Brechbuhl works as the Counselor of the State Department, meaning he provides strategic guidance to the Secretary of State on foreign policy, diplomacy and public outreach. He is said to be one of the officials who was on the call as Trump spoke to Ukraine’s president, according to the whistleblower complaint. He is scheduled to be deposed by Congress on Oct. 8.
• Gordon Sondland: Sondland is the U.S. ambassador to the European Union. The whistleblower said Sondland, along with Volker, had met with Giuliani to try to “contain the damage” his efforts on Biden were having on U.S. national security. The whistleblower said Volker and Sondland also met with Ukrainian officials to help them navigate the “differing messages” they were getting through official U.S. government channels and Giuliani’s private outreach. He is scheduled to be deposed by Congress on Oct. 10.
Michael Atkinson: The House has scheduled a private hearing on Oct. 4 with Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community. Atkinson was the official who received the whistleblower and found it to be credible and of urgent concern. He recommended that the be shared with lawmakers, leading him to clash with his boss, acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, who overruled this determination. The complaint was later shared with Congress and the public after the impasse was made public.
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The Trump administration released the transcript of his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. USA TODAY
Ahead of Saturday’s rally, hundreds of protesters spent hours taping posters and fliers to buildings, sidewalks, roads and footbridges in nearby neighborhoods, turning the area into a giant pro-democracy art installation.
Many of the posters mocked President Xi Jinping of China, with some depicting him as the cartoon character Winnie the Pooh, a meme that the Communist Party’s censors have deemed subversive on the Chinese mainland.
Alexis Wong, a 15-year-old protester who was taping down one of the Winnie the Pooh posters, said it was an important act of rebellion against a leader who directly threatened Hong Kong’s vaunted freedoms.
“We want people to see these, especially those from mainland China,” she said. “If they put these on the street back home, they would end up in jail.”
At one point, a young man from mainland China with a roller suitcase played the Chinese national anthem on his phone and scowled as he took in the fliers. He kicked at some of them, tearing one slightly, but stopped after he was yelled at by passers-by.
Later in the evening, a skirmish ensued at Tamar Park after a man raised a Chinese flag near the rally’s main stage. He was quickly subdued and ushered out, as people jeered at him and the crowd roared, “Free China, free Hong Kong.”
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has personally apologized to the Queen for asking her to approve the unlawful suspension of the House of Commons, The Times of London reported Sunday.
Johnson made his mea culpa on Tuesday, after a British court found that the five-week suspension he had ordered violated the law.
“He got on to the Queen as quickly as possible to say how sorry he was,” an insider told the newspaper.
Johnson’s controversial shutdown order had been meant to give Parliament no time to delay Brexit ahead of the Oct. 31 deadline.
President Donald Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate 2020 presidential challenger Joe Biden is increasingly drawing comparisons to former president Nixon’s Watergate scandal. USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Former Republican Senator Jeff Flake said that he thinks at least 35 Republican senators would vote for President Donald Trump to be removed from office if they could vote in private.
Speaking at the 2019 Texas Tribune Festival Thursday, Flake was responding to comments made by Republican political consultant Mike Murphy on MSNBC who said that if there was a secret vote, at least 30 GOP Senators would back impeachment.
“That’s not true. There would be at least 35,” Flake said.
Once an officeholder has been impeached, the proceedings shift to the Senate, which holds a trial and decides whether to convict the accused and remove him or her from office.
Calls for an official impeachment inquiry came to fruition Tuesday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over the president’s efforts to get Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
During an interview with NPR, the Arizona Republican elaborated on his comments, continuing that “anybody who has sat through two years, as I have, of Republican luncheons realizes that there’s not a lot of love for the president. There’s a lot of fear of what it means to go against the president, but most Republican senators would not like to be dealing with this for another year or another five years.”
A two-thirds majority, or 67 senators, is needed to convict and remove the accused from office. Republicans currently hold the majority. For the President to be removed from office by the Senate with impeachment, at least 20 Republicans would need to join the Democrats and independents
“That was a pretty damning transcript,” Flake said of the summary of the July 25th phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky released Wednesday. “That was not anything you want your president to be doing. I think we need to wait for the investigation to conclude and wait for likely testimony from the whistleblower him or herself before drawing conclusions. But it seems the House is already moving ahead.”
He stated that he was glad “to see the (House) Intel Committee have the hearing yesterday,” elaborating that he doesn’t want to see impeachment in such a divided country, and that he’d rather see the President defeated the “old fashioned way at the ballot box.”
Flake reinforced Trump’s power of the Senate GOP, stating that “this is the president’s party without a doubt. And to win a Republican primary in just about every state, you’ve got to be with the president. And there’s a lot of fear that if you aren’t, you’ll get primaried.”
Flake also said that he has “not ruled out” voting for a Democrat over Trump, hoping that the “Democrats nominate somebody who has a broad appeal.”
Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy Sandeep Dhaliwal was shot and killed after making a traffic stop on Friday, near Houston. The suspected gunman was charged with capital murder in the slaying.
Harris County Sheriff’s Office via AP
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Harris County Sheriff’s Office via AP
Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy Sandeep Dhaliwal was shot and killed after making a traffic stop on Friday, near Houston. The suspected gunman was charged with capital murder in the slaying.
Harris County Sheriff’s Office via AP
A sheriff’s deputy was shot and killed Friday afternoon in the Houston suburbs during a routine traffic stop. Sandeep Dhaliwal was the first observant Sikh to become a sheriff’s deputy in Harris County, where the city of Houston is located.
He was a “hero” and a “trailblazer,” Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez told reporters on Friday. “He wore the turban. He represented his community with integrity, respect and pride,” Gonzalez said. “And again, he was respected by all.”
Dhaliwal was 42, a married father of three, and a 10-year veteran of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. He had made national headlines in early 2015 when the sheriff’s office changed its policy in order to allow Dhaliwal to grow out his facial hair and wear a traditional Sikh turban while on patrol.
Harris County Sheriff’s Office Maj. Mike Lee said during a news conference on Friday that dash cam footage shows that the suspect “ambushed” Dhaliwal.
The traffic stop, which took place at 12:23 p.m. local time, appeared to be a tame and conversational interaction, Lee said, until the deputy started to return to his vehicle. The suspect then reopened the driver’s side of the door and bolted toward Dhaliwal from behind, gun in hand, and “shot him and struck him in the back of the head,” Lee said.
Dhaliwal was then taken to the hospital, where he died of his injuries a few hours later.
Robert Solis, 47, has been charged with the capital murder of Dhaliwal, the sheriff’s office announced Friday. Solis had an active parole violation warrant for when he was charged with “aggravated assault with a deadly weapon” in January 2017.
A resident who witnessed the traffic stop called 911 after she heard two shots and saw the suspect flee in a getaway car, according to Lee.
Solis was arrested within hours, after dash cam footage allowed authorities to identify and locate the suspect at a business close to where the shooting occurred. Maj. Lee said another suspect who’s believed to have been sitting in the passenger seat of the stopped vehicle has also been taken into custody. Authorities also confiscated the weapon they suspect the gunman used to fatally shoot Dhaliwal, in the business’s parking lot.
Alan Bernstein, the Houston mayor’s spokesman, told NPR that Dhaliwal said his appearance didn’t cause problems while on patrol.
“He was a unifying symbol,” said Bernstein, who worked as a spokesman for the sheriff’s office during the time in 2015 when the office first allowed Dhaliwal to wear a turban on patrol. “He had used his appearance as a conversation starter for educating people about what Sikhs are about, what their values are, including that of selfless service and the long history that Sikhs have for serving in the military and/or law enforcement.”
As a sheriff in 2009, Commissioner Adrian Garcia recruited Dhaliwal. Garcia told reporters on Friday that Dhaliwal walked away from a lucrative trucking business to join the sheriff’s office to help “build bridges between the Sikh community and the sheriff’s office because of a ‘mishap.’ ”
Although Garcia didn’t expand on that incident, The Washington Post reported Garcia had reached out to the Sikh community after a confrontation between the office’s sheriffs deputies and a Sikh family in 2008. “The family called to complain of a burglary, but deputies who arrived were reportedly alarmed to find men in the home wearing beards and turbans and carrying small daggers. They called for extra officers and began interrogating the family,” the Post reported.
“As a result of Sandeep stepping forward to become the first Sikh deputy, we have others,” Garcia said.
Dhaliwal was admired for his generosity and commitment to public service. Sheriff Gonzalez recalled the time his deputy traveled to Puerto Rico after a hurricane to bring aid to the family of a sheriff’s office colleague. When Hurricane Harvey devastated Texas, Dhaliwal and Garcia worked with the humanitarian group United Sikhs to deliver truckloads of donated goods to first responders.
As words of grief, support and fond stories about Dhaliwal continued to pour in from his colleagues, friends and acquaintances on social media, members of Harris County law enforcement joined a community-led candlelit vigil to remember Deputy Dhaliwal.
The Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which has worked with the sheriff’s office for cultural awareness trainings, mourned Dhaliwal’s death.
“We are shocked and saddened to hear the news of the death of Deputy Dhaliwal,” SALDEF tweeted. “He was a pioneer for the Sikh community and will always be remembered. Our condolences and prayers go to his family and friends.”
A funeral ceremony planned for Dhaliwal on Wednesday, in Cypress, Texas, will be open to the public.
The Trump administration’s State Department is intensifying its investigation into the email records of dozens of former department officials and aides to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
As many as 130 officials have been recently contacted by investigators from the State Department, current and former officials told the Washington Post. According to the outlet, those targeted were contacted by the department about emails they sent years ago that have been retroactively classified and could now count as possible security violations. Investigators began communicating with former officials around 18 months ago, but they appeared to suspend the effort before ramping it back up in August.
Although some who are under scrutiny view the recent activity as the Trump administration’s decision to wield power against political adversaries, senior State Department officials said they are simply following standard protocol in an investigation that initially started during the Obama administration.
“This has nothing to do with who is in the White House,” one official said. “This is about the time it took to go through millions of emails, which is about 3 and a half years.”
“The process is set up in a manner to completely avoid any appearance of political bias,” another official added.
Former Obama administration officials, however, told the Post that the investigation is an “aggressive crackdown” by an administration that has had its own problems with handling classified information.
The list of State Department officials being questioned includes assistant secretaries of state responsible for U.S. policy in the Middle East, Europe, and Central Asia, as well as several ambassadors. It also includes many current and former bureaucrats who passed along important messages to Clinton from outside officials. Many of those targeted have been found “not culpable,” while some were sent follow-up letters saying that investigators “determined that the [security] incident is valid” but that they did not “bear any individual culpability.”
The State Department review began after the FBI investigated Clinton’s use of an unauthorized server, hosted in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, New York, during her time as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. Former FBI Director James Comey publicly recommended in 2016 that no charges be brought against Clinton or anyone else involved with her private email network, but he admonished Clinton and her team for being “extremely careless” in handling classified information.
This was during the 2016 election when Clinton was the Democratic presidential nominee, and she has often cited the FBI’s handling of the emails investigation as one of the reasons why she believes she lost the contest to President Trump.
One of the main controversies stemming from Clinton’s emails was how Paul Combetta, the tech aide who administered the server, deleted 33,000 emails despite a congressional order to preserve them. The FBI says it was only able to recover about 5,000 of the emails scrubbed by Combetta, and they were released in tranches up until earlier this year as part of a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch. Clinton has said she “never received nor sent any material that was marked classified,” but the FBI found 110 emails did contain classified information.
As recently as last week, Trump called the deletion of the emails “one of the great crimes committed” by Clinton. Also last week, the Democratic-led House initiated a formal impeachment inquiry, spurred by an intelligence community whistleblower complaint that raised concerns about a possible effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, who is running for president in 2020, and an alleged effort to conceal details of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and communications with other leaders.
Earlier this summer, the State Department informed Congress that its review of the mishandling of classified information found 23 “violations” and seven “infractions” by 15 individuals. A “broad range” of disciplinary or administrative actions that could be taken include “counseling, reprimand, suspension, and/or separation,” according to a letter in June from Mary Elizabeth Taylor, the assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs.
The individuals were not identified, nor was it revealed if they were still employed at the State Department, per agency policy, and Taylor said the number of people found culpable could increase.
Taylor sent a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, who is leading the congressional oversight of the security review. Grassley has repeatedly asked for updates on the State Department’s review since 2017. In her letter, Taylor acknowledged that the large number of emails under scrutiny required “a significant dedication of time and resources.” Taylor said the agency was “making every effort to complete its review and adjudication” by Sept. 1, 2019.
Later in June, Republicans called on the Democrat-led House Oversight Committee to hold a hearing focusing on the State Department’s review, but so far have been ignored.
Clinton’s security clearance was withdrawn in the fall of 2018 at her request, along with those belonging to Clinton’s former chief of staff Cheryl Mills and others.
Hong Kong cops in riot gear pulled passengers off buses for searches and broke out water cannons and tear gas to disperse crowds of protestors Saturday, as tensions rose on the 5th anniversary of the city’s pro-democracy “Umbrella” movement.
“It’s a special day for Hong Kong protesters. We will stick together to fight for freedom,” said Sam, 33, dressed in black and wearing a mask. “Most people think Hong Kong was dying after five years, but many people are still fighting for Hong Kong.”
The latest round of protests, which began in June, has outlasted 2014’s 79-day movement, which got its name because the crowds that occupied the streets of the city carried colorful umbrellas.
Among the symbols of the latest demonstrations are “Lennon Walls” filled with anti-government messages. The walls, scattered throughout the city at bus stops, subway stations and on the sides of buildings, are covered with sticky notes placed in patterns or form images, along with images and slogans supporting the pro-democracy movement.
The structures are named after a wall in Prague that was originally filled with messages inspired by musician John Lennon’s lyrics and peace-seeking politics when he was shot in 1980. Similar walls have since popped up in other cities, particularly during political turmoil.
Many of Hong Kong’s walls were torn down last week by pro-China factions. In response, demonstrators on Saturday rebuilt them, and went a step further by plastering slogans and fliers in subway stations and on streets throughout the city.
In some spots, photos of Hong Kong CEO Carrie Lam and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping were affixed to walkways at the top of escalators, so that exiting passengers had to walk over their faces.
While such pranks initially set a lighthearted tone on Sunday, pro-democracy demonstrators found that police were in a more serious mood. Multiple social media posts showed double-decker buses heading into the heart of the city pulled over for passenger searches.
And the evening ended with another violent episode, as police fired tear gas and a water cannon at a massive crowd of demonstrators who gathered downtown Saturday evening outside government buildings. Police said the crackdown was in response to protesters throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails at the buildings and aimed laser beams at a helicopter, posing “a serious threat to the safety of everyone” in the area.
Three months of protests have gridlocked Hong Kong and turned violent multiple times, with protesters smashing the doors of the legislative building and vandalizing subway stations, and setting fires in the streets. Police have used tear gas and pepper spray against demonstrators, along with more violent actions including beating some protester in subway stations.
Students account for 29 percent of the nearly 1,600 people who have been arrested, the Associated Press reported.
With the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China on Tuesday, the pro-democracy movement plans another series of protests, including at the consulate of the former colonial power, Britain, which turned the city over China in 1997. Pro-China demonstrators are expected out in force on Tuesday as well.
The movement started as an objection to an extradition bill that has since been withdrawn, but the movement now has other goals, including the ouster of Beijing-backed Carrie Lam, the chief executive of the city, and a probe into alleged police brutality.
The Los Angeles Police Department was trying to figure out Saturday how one of its ads for new recruits ended up on right-wing news site Breitbart.
The department, in which Latinos comprise the largest ethnic group of officers, was quick to denounce the placement on a platform that has often highlighted the misdeeds and crimes of people living in the U.S. without proper documentation and that critics have accused of posting racist content.
LAPD Chief Michel Moore tweeted Saturday that his department would team up with the city’s Personnel Department to determine how the ad, featuring a photo of an officer and the words, “Choose Your Future,” ended up on the website once run by Stephen Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump.
The ad placement story went viral after Noah Shachtman, editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast, tweeted about it Friday night.
The department’s Media Relations Division responded Saturday on Twitter.
“The LAPD celebrates diversity and embraces it within our ranks, and within the city we serve,” it said. “We are aware that a recruitment advertisement has been circulated on a website that creates a negative juxtaposition to our core values.”
How the advertisement ended up on Breitbart was not much of a mystery to media experts, who noted that online ad buys, particularly those made through Google, target demographics rather than publications and can even follow targeted readers from site to site.
Some experts have say that sites like Breitbart can be omitted from such buys, but that advertisers have to proactively discriminate.
“The Personnel Department has not made any purchase of LAPD recruitment ads on Breitbart or similar sites,” it said. “Recruitment ads were purchased through Google and ended up on sites that do not reflect the City’s values through automatic placement.”
“We have stopped these Google Ads altogether while we reexamine our ad filters and take all necessary steps to ensure tighter control of ad settings,” the department said.
Breitbart spokeswoman Elizabeth Moore said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times that Breitbart has “one of the most pro-police, pro-law-enforcement news organizations in America.”
Afghan Sikhs show their inked fingers after casting their votes at a polling station in the city of Jalalabad, east of Kabul, Afghanistan, on Saturday.
Mohammad Anwar Danishyar/AP
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Mohammad Anwar Danishyar/AP
Afghan Sikhs show their inked fingers after casting their votes at a polling station in the city of Jalalabad, east of Kabul, Afghanistan, on Saturday.
Mohammad Anwar Danishyar/AP
Polls closed Saturday in Afghanistan’s presidential election amid reports of historically low voter turnout due to Taliban threats, chaos among candidates and flawed voting procedures.
About 9.6 million Afghans are registered to vote, but only a fraction were expected to cast a ballot — fewer than the 2014 presidential election or the 2018 parliamentary elections, reporter Jennifer Glasse told NPR’s Weekend Edition. A report from the Afghanistan Analysts Network puts rough estimates of turnout from the Independent Election Commission, or IEC, at under 2 million voters. This means a small percentage of the country will determine the democracy’s fate.
The two front-runners, incumbent President Ashraf Ghani and his chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah, have shared power since the 2014 presidential elections in a compromise negotiated by former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. In that race, Abdullah had accused Ghani of rigging the election, citing an alleged million fraudulent votes, and again warned of a possible illegitimate Ghani victory in Saturday’s election.
“The American officials are adamant that they will not ride to the rescue again,” said Kate Clark, the co-director of Afghanistan Analysts Network, a Kabul-based policy research organization, adding that the sentiment stems from a stronger opinion in Washington that Afghans “have to sort things out themselves.”
Preliminary results are expected on Oct. 17 and final results on Nov. 7. With 18 candidates on the ballot, there is a chance that no one candidate will receive a majority of votes, which will force a second ballot between the top two candidates.
Another prominent candidate and former warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, warned that “if the vote wasn’t fair and transparent, he would call on his thousands of supporters across the country to perhaps go back to the battlefield,” according to Glasse. Hekmatyar is running on behalf of his Hezb-e-Islami party, a former militia that signed a peace deal with the Ghani administration in 2016.
In an interview with The Associated Press, former President Hamid Karzai, who still wields significant political power in Afghanistan, said that Saturday’s election “has all the potential and possibilities to lead the country further down to the abyss of crisis and insecurity and divisions.” Karzai said he believes elections should be held after peace is negotiated between the U.S., the Afghan government and the Taliban. Glasse said that many Afghans thought peace talks would preclude the presidential elections.
“The one thing everyone agrees with, wherever you go in Afghanistan, is they want the fighting to stop. They would like to see peace,” Glasse said.
The election, which had already been pushed back twice, comes after peace talks between the U.S. and the Taliban collapsed earlier this month, prompting a spate of attacks throughout the country by the Islamic insurgent group.
“The concessions made looked like a withdrawal agreement in the end,” Clark said, referring to the failed peace deal. “The Taliban didn’t give what they needed to give, and if it had been signed, many within the Taliban were thinking it gave them carte blanche to march into Kabul.
“They didn’t see it as a peace agreement, they saw it as a means of getting rid of their main and most deadly opponent.”
On Sept. 17, the Taliban claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings that killed 48 people. One of the bombings targeted a Ghani campaign rally where Ghani himself was present.
The Taliban had warned Afghan civilians not to vote, go to polling centers, or participate in any election-related efforts. The AP reported that tens of thousands of Afghan security officers were deployed throughout the country to ensure that the polling centers are protected from Taliban attacks, although a bomb attack on a mosque designated as a polling station in the southern city of Kandahar wounded 15 earlier Saturday. Reuters reported that at least five bombs went off in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, killing one. The northern city of Kunduz, located in an area contested by both the Taliban and the Afghan government, was also fired upon by mortars and attacked by armed insurgents with confirmed civilian casualties, according to the AP.
Wounded Afghans lie on a bed at a hospital after a bomb attack in the city of Jalalabad, east of Kabul, on Saturday.
Mohammad Anwar Danishyar/AP
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Wounded Afghans lie on a bed at a hospital after a bomb attack in the city of Jalalabad, east of Kabul, on Saturday.
Mohammad Anwar Danishyar/AP
Operation Resolute Support, the NATO mission in Afghanistan, has discontinued its collection of data on the number of districts and people under Taliban or Afghan government control, saying it “no longer saw decision-making value in these data,” according to an April 30 report. The most recent report on territory control from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction had the Afghan government controlling or influencing 56% of its territory as of October 2018. The Taliban held 17%, and 27% was contested.
The IEC gave several figures throughout the day as to the actual number of polling centers closed, according to a report by Afghanistan Analysts Network. The IEC had planned to open 5,373, and on Friday security officials said 445 would be closed on election day because of security concerns. Since then, the IEC has offered figures of 481 and 464 closed, with the most recent figures, given by the Ministry of Information, at 4,905 centers open and 468 closed.
“If you’ve got centers that are reported open but are not, it raises suspicions — they could provide opportunities for ballot stuffing,” Clark said.
Even with protected polling centers and motivated voters, Al-Jazeera reported that “voters complained that lists were incomplete or missing and biometric identification machines intended to reduce fraud were not working properly or people were not adequately trained on how to use them.”
Between threats from the Taliban, mismanaged or closed polling centers, and the possibility of chaos if the results are disputed by candidates, Afghans face a tough decision — leave the election in the hands of others and stay home, or head out to polling centers and express their opinion at the possible cost of their lives.
“He wore the turban. He represented his community with integrity, respect and pride,” Gonzalez said. “And again, he was respected by all.”
Dhaliwal, 41, was returning to his patrol car around 1 p.m. when a man got out of the stopped car with a pistol and shot him “in a coldblooded manner, ambush-style,” Gonzalez said. He said he did not know the reason for the stop or the motive for the shooting.
First responders brought Dhaliwal to a hospital, where he was declared dead around 4 p.m.
Robert Solis, 47, was charged with capital murder in connection with the killing, the sheriff’s office announced Friday. He had an active parole-violation warrant in a January 2017 case in which he was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
A woman whom police believed to be a passenger in the stopped car was also in custody Friday, the sheriff’s office said. Officials said they had confiscated the gun they believed Solis used in the shooting.
Dhaliwal, whom his colleagues described as a “trailblazer,” owned a lucrative trucking business before he sold it to join the sheriff’s department, said Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia. Dhaliwal wanted to build a bridge between the department and the Houston area’s large Sikh community because of a prior “mishap,” Garcia said.
Garcia did not offer details about that incident, but The Washington Post previously reported that he reached out to Sikhs in 2009 because of a confrontation with a Sikh family the prior year. When the family called to report a burglary, deputies reportedly were alarmed to see the men wearing beards and turbans and carrying small daggers, which Sikhs sometimes wear at their waists as a reminder of their faith’s martial history. The deputies called for more officers and interrogated the family, The Post reported.
A husband and a father of three children, Dhaliwal joined the Harris County Sheriff’s Office as a detention officer and worked his way up. He was the first adherent of Sikhism, a monotheistic religion that originated in India, to become a deputy.
The Harris County sheriff in 2015 announced that Dhaliwal would be allowed to wear his religion’s beard and turban while on patrol. At the time, only police departments in the District of Columbia and Riverside, Calif., had made that accommodation.
Dhaliwal was known to have a giving heart, Gonzalez said. He coordinated the arrival of a tractor-trailer that brought donations from California to the Houston area in 2017 after Hurricane Harvey. When a colleague’s relatives in Puerto Rico needed help after Hurricane Maria the same year, Gonzalez said, Dhaliwal joined the department’s trip to provide aid there.
Dhaliwal’s last actions were ones of service, Gonzalez said.
“He died a hero,” Gonzalez said. “He died serving the Harris County community.”
Sheriff’s Office Maj. Mike Lee, who watched the dashboard-camera video of Dhaliwal’s traffic stop, told reporters that the driver-side door of the suspect’s car was open for about two minutes while Dhaliwal talked with him. The conversation did not appear combative, Lee said.
Dhaliwal then shut the car door and began to walk back to his patrol car, Lee said. About three seconds later, Lee said Solis opened the door, got out with a gun in his hand and ran toward Dhaliwal. He shot Dhaliwal in the back of the head, Lee said.
A neighbor reported hearing two gunshots and seeing the shooter run away and leave in a “getaway car,” Lee told reporters. He did not specify whether that car was the stopped vehicle or a different one. Authorities found the suspect inside a business about a quarter-mile from the shooting scene, Lee said.
As a sign of respect, Gonzalez said, sheriff’s office deputies lined the walkway to the medical examiner’s office when Dhaliwal’s body was brought there. Community members later held an impromptu memorial vigil.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner (D) said in a statement that he stood with Dhaliwal’s family and the Sikh community.
“He represented the diversity and inclusiveness of our community and everything that is good,” Turner wrote. “Evil you do not win here.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said Dhaliwal’s death was a reminder of the daily risks that law enforcement officers face.
“I thank the officers who bravely responded to apprehend the suspect, and I assure you that the state of Texas is committed to bringing this killer to justice,” Abbott said in a statement.
Simran Jeet Singh, senior fellow at the civil rights group Sikh Coalition, told The Post that only a handful of Sikhs have served in U.S. law enforcement. Most departments’ policies ban headwear, Singh said, and few police forces have allowed Sikhs to wear beards and turbans on patrol.
“To have an office that’s opened itself up to Sikh service and also at the same time to have candidates who are interested and willing to get into this work, it’s been quite challenging,” Singh said.
Sikhism, the world’s fifth-largest religion with about 25 million followers, emphasizes devotion to God, truthfulness, the equality of all people, and the denunciation of superstitions and blind rituals. There are about 500,000 Sikhs in the United States.
Sikhs frequently face discrimination in the United States They have been confused with Muslims — and wrongly associated with terrorism — since the 9/11 attacks. In 2012, a white-supremacist gunman killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.
Republican presidential challenger Bill Weld implied that Donald Trump should face the death penalty for treason over the impeachment investigation he is facing.
The former Massachusetts Governor said that President Donald Trump’s ‘acts of treason’ in allegedly pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden deserved the death penalty.
During an interview on MSNBC’S Morning Joe, he claimed: ‘Talk about pressuring a foreign country to interfere with and control a U.S. election, it couldn’t be clearer.
‘And that’s not just undermining Democratic institutions, that is treason. It’s treason pure and simple and the penalty for treason under the U.S. code is death.
Republican presidential challenger Bill Weld implied that Donald Trump should face the death penalty for treason over the impeachment investigation he is facing
Weld said said Trump’s ‘acts of treason’ in allegedly pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr, (pictured), Zelenskyy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden deserved the death penalty
‘That’s the only penalty, the penalty on the Constitution is the removal of office and that might look like a pretty good alternative to the President if he could work out a plea deal.’
There appeared to be audible gasps in the studio as Weld made the remarks during a joint interview with two other Republicans challenging Trump for the GOP nomination, former congressmen Joe Walsh and Mark Sanford.
‘Donald Trump needs to be impeached. Period,’ Walsh said. ‘As Bill Weld just said, he told a foreign leader two months ago to interfere in our 2020 election. He needs to be impeached.’
Sanford, who also served as governor of South Carolina, echoed Weld and Walsh’s strong rhetoric.
‘I think you know where the three of us are on this larger debate,’ he said.
On Saturday, Trump berated top House Democrats leading the charge for impeachment, including Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler.
Trump also called out freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her ‘Squad’ in tweets on Saturday morning from the White House, prior to departing for Trump National Golf Club in nearby Sterling, Virginia.
‘Can you imagine if these Do Nothing Democrat Savages, people like Nadler, Schiff, AOC Plus 3, and many more, had a Republican Party who would have done to Obama what the Do Nothings are doing to me. Oh well, maybe next time!’ the president wrote.
‘PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!’ he added in a follow-up tweet.
There appeared to be audible gasps in the studio as Weld made the remarks during a joint interview with two other Republicans challenging Trump for the GOP nomination, former congressmen Joe Walsh and Mark Sanford
On Saturday, Trump berated top House Democrats leading the charge for impeachment, including Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler
Trump is remaining in Washington DC for the weekend with no public events scheduled.
On Saturday morning, he was spotted leaving the White House in a white polo shirt and red hat, in the company of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.
Graham is a staunch supporter who was recently overheard blasting impeachment efforts in a phone call on a JetBlue flight.
On Friday, House Democrats took their first concrete steps in the impeachment investigation of Trump, issuing subpoenas demanding documents from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and scheduling legal depositions for other State Department officials.
At the White House, a senior administration official confirmed Friday a key detail from the unidentified CIA whistleblower who has accused Trump of abusing the power of his office by asking the Ukrainian president to investigate allegations that Joe Biden quashed an investigation into a company his son sat on the board of.
The White House acknowledged that a record of the Trump phone call that is now at the center of the impeachment inquiry had been sealed away in a highly classified system at the direction of Trump’s National Security Council lawyers.
Activists rally for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday
Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to set a deadline for the probe but promised to act ‘expeditiously’
Trump, for his part, insisted that his actions and words have been ‘perfect’ and the whistleblower’s complaint might well be the work of ‘a partisan operative.’
Separately, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told reporters that the whistleblower ‘has protection under the law,’ something Trump himself had appeared to question earlier in the day. He suggested then that his accuser ‘isn’t a whistleblower at all.’
Trump’s comment questioning the whistleblower’s status seemed to foreshadow a possible effort to argue that legal protection laws don’t apply to the person, opening a new front in the president’s defense, but Conway’s statement seemed to make that less likely.
The whistleblower complaint alleges that Trump used his office to ‘solicit interference from a foreign country’ to help himself in next year’s U.S. election.
In the phone call, days after ordering a freeze to some military assistance for Ukraine, Trump prodded new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to dig for potentially damaging material on Democratic rival Joe Biden and volunteered the assistance of both his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and U.S. Attorney General William Barr.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to set a deadline for the probe but promised to act ‘expeditiously.’ The House intelligence committee could draw members back to Washington next week.
Pelosi said she was praying for the president, adding, ‘I would say to Democrats and Republicans: We have to put country before party.’
Some Twitter users pointed out that Trump’s latest broadside against Democrats focused on four women of color as well as the two heads of committees helping to lead the impeachment inquiry — Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, who chairs the Judiciary Committee and Adam Schiff of California, who leads the Intelligence Committee.
Can you imagine if these Do Nothing Democrat Savages, people like Nadler, Schiff, AOC Plus 3, and many more, had a Republican Party who would have done to Obama what the Do Nothings are doing to me. Oh well, maybe next time!
“AOC plus 3” apparently refers to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who is of Puerto Rican heritage, and the three other members of the so-called “squad” of progressive congresswomen: Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, an immigrant from Somalia; Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, who is black; and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who is of Palestinian descent.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday that Attorney General William Barr had “gone rogue” because of the way he and the Justice Department handled the whistleblower complaint centered on President Donald Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president in which he repeatedly urged him to investigate Joe Biden and his son.
After first making the comment on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Pelosi repeated it to CNN.
“I do think the attorney general has gone rogue, he has for a long time now. Since he was mentioned in all of this, it’s curious about how he would be making decisions about how the complaint would be handled,” she told CNN.
“If by “going rogue” Speaker Pelosi means that the Department of Justice follows the law and [long]-established procedures, she is correct,” DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said in a statement Friday evening.
The Justice Department has denied that Barr and Trump ever spoke about the Ukraine matter, but Democrats expressed fury over Trump’s comments, which suggested the president was prepared to try to task the country’s lead law enforcement official with pushing forward an investigation into his political opponent.
“What adds another layer of depravity to this conversation is that the President of the United States then invokes the Attorney General of the United States as well as his personal lawyer as emissaries,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Wednesday. “In the case of the attorney general, as the official head of the … Department of Justice, that will be part and parcel in this.”
The Justice Department revealed Wednesday that the whistleblower complaint sparked a referral to the DOJ’s criminal division about whether Trump potentially violated campaign finance law. However, the criminal division determined there was no campaign finance violation and “has concluded the matter,” Kupec said Wednesday.
A DOJ official said the assistant attorney general for the criminal division made the “final call” to clear the president and said Barr was “not involved in the analysis by the criminal division.” There was no consideration for Barr to formally recuse himself from the matter, the official said, and no consideration of the appointment of a special counsel.
This isn’t the first time Barr and Pelosi have been on each other’s radar.
Carlos Barria/Reuters
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi walks behind President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr as they all attend the 38th Annual National Peace Officers Memorial Service on Capitol Hill, May 15, 2019.
The attorney general of the United States did not tell the truth to the Congress. That’s a crime,” Pelosi said in May about Barr’s testimony on the Mueller report.
The House voted to hold Barr in contempt and some Democrats suggested he even be locked up in a jail cell underneath the Capitol used decades ago, although it’s not clear it still exists.
“He lied to Congress. If anybody else did that, it would be considered a crime,” Pelosi said at the time. “Nobody is above the law. Not the president of the United States and not the attorney general. Being attorney general does not give you a pass to go say whatever you want and it is the fact because you are the attorney general. It just isn’t true.”
Not long after, at the 38th Annual National Peace Officers Memorial Service on Capitol Hill, Barr approached Pelosi, shook her hand, and said loudly, “Madam Speaker, did you bring your handcuffs?” according to a source who witnessed the conversation.
Pelosi smiled and quickly threw some shade back at Barr, indicating that “the House Sergeant at Arms was present at the ceremony should an arrest be necessary,” according to a source who observed the exchange.
Barr chuckled and walked away, according to the bystander.
The intensifying overlap this summer between Mr. Trump’s political agenda in Ukraine and his official foreign policy apparatus is now at the center of an impeachment inquiry that will examine whether the president of the United States directed or encouraged his subordinates to lean on a vulnerable ally for personal political gain.
Among the subjects covered in a subpoena sent Friday by House Democrats to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and demands for depositions from American diplomats was Mr. Trump’s decision to freeze a $391 million military aid package to Ukraine this summer not long before his July 25 call with Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who defeated Mr. Poroshenko this spring.
Democrats are also looking into the recall in the spring of the United States ambassador to Kiev, Marie L. Yovanovitch, a career foreign service officer who was seen as insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump by some of his conservative allies. On Friday evening, the State Department’s special envoy for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, abruptly resigned, not long after receiving a summons from House Democrats to sit for a deposition in the coming week.
Mr. Trump has dismissed the impeachment investigation as another “witch hunt.”
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Giuliani defended his efforts to push the Ukrainians to investigate Mr. Biden, his son, Hunter Biden, and others. He asserted that he was not doing it to try to influence the 2020 presidential election, though Mr. Biden is a leading contender for the Democratic nomination to challenge Mr. Trump.
“I was doing it to dig out information that exculpates my client, which is the role of a defense lawyer,” he said.
Environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s searing address at the United Nations earlier this week earned enthusiastic praise from climate researchers, with many saying that the 16-year-old has found ways to raise awareness of climate science, galvanize support and resonate with people in ways that they have struggled to for decades.
“Speaking as a climate change scientist who has been working on this issue for 20 years and saying the same thing for 20 years, she is getting people to listen, which we have failed to do,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change & Development in London.
“I thought it was the most powerful speech I’ve ever seen.”
Sally Benson, co-director of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University, applauded Thunberg’s emotional remarks and her efforts to mobilize young people to demand action on climate change.
“She has been a catalytic leader,” Benson said. “We’re seeing more grassroots action, and she’s creating a movement where young people are pushing communities, cities, states and corporations and saying, ‘we’re not going to wait.’”
The report stated that the planet has already warmed by 1 degree Celsius since the 19th century, and used 1.5 degrees as a threshold beyond which the effects of climate change, such as melting ice, extreme heat and sea-level rise, become life-threatening for tens of millions of people around the world.
Youth Climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks during the UN Climate Action Summit at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on Sept. 23, 2019.Ludovic Marin / AFP – Getty Images
“The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50 percent chance of staying below 1.5 degrees and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control,” Thunberg said.
But even the possibility of reducing global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions so drastically by 2030 is fast becoming impractical, according to Simon Donner, a climatologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
“Mathematically and technically, it is possible, but it’s not realistic,” Donner said. “To reduce emissions that sharply in what is now only a 10-year period would take enormous changes in countries around the world.”
Recent trends have demonstrated how challenging it is to even keep carbon emissions level. A report released last year by the Global Carbon Project, formed by an international consortium of climate researchers, stated that global carbon emissions hit a record high in 2018. After a period of stability from 2014 to 2016, global greenhouse gas emissions rose in 2017 and then jumped another 2.7 percent in 2018 to an all-time high of more than 37 billion metric tons.
“The trend is very bad if we want to stay within the 1.5-degree window,” said Michael Mehling, deputy director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
At current emissions levels, the so-called CO2 budget — which calculates how much more carbon dioxide can be released into the atmosphere while limiting warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius — will likely be used up in about eight years, according to Mehling, a fact echoed by Thunberg in her speech to the U.N.
But even if some of these challenges seem insurmountable, Donner said it’s important for people to not feel disheartened, because incremental changes can make a big difference.
“The real message of the IPCC report last year is that every action counts,” he said. “The world is not going to end in 2030, even if we fail to avoid 1.5 degrees of warming. But we should still do the best we can, because the more we reduce emissions, the less the planet will warm and the less people will suffer.”
Nathan Hultman, director of the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland, said Thunberg’s U.N. address was particularly effective at conveying the need for urgent action.
“I like that it ruffled feathers,” said Hultman, who worked at the White House on climate and energy policy for the Obama administration from 2014 to 2016. “The statement she made is not the normal kind of statements you hear at U.N. summits. We need to cut through the chummy approaches that happen at the international level and speak truthfully about what we need to do.”
He added that Thunberg’s speech and the climate strike movement that the Swedish teen started in 2018, which on Sept. 20 drew millions to the streets for a “Global Climate Strike,” has sparked what he thinks is real progress on the issue.
“I don’t think we’re grasping at straws — I think we’re seeing some real signs of movement, and that gives me hope,” Hultman said. “We’ve been crossing this bridge for decades and now we’re partially over it, but there’s a lot more bridge to go.”
Kurt D. Volker has resigned as the Trump administration’s special envoy for Ukraine, a person with knowledge of the event said Saturday. He is the first casualty of Congress’s impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s conduct with that country.
Volker tendered his resignation to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday, within hours of an announcement from three House committees that the veteran diplomat was among State Department officials who would be compelled to testify.
That committee has set a hearing for Thursday for Volker, one of several officials whose interactions with Trump or Ukrainian officials are outlined in a whistleblower complaint made public last week.
The impeachment inquiry will examine whether Trump abused his office to lean on Ukraine’s leader to investigate Trump’s political rivals, and whether the White House tried to cover it up. House Democrats hope to conclude their work by the end of the year.
The State Department has not commented on Volker’s resignation, which was first reported by the State Press, Arizona State University’s student newspaper. The departure was confirmed by a person familiar with the events who requested anonymity to discuss a personnel matter.
Volker, a former career diplomat who heads the McCain Institute at ASU, had worked at the Ukraine job part time for the past two years.
He worked for months to facilitate a meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the young anti-corruption reformer elected in April. Despite Volker’s efforts, that meeting that may have been held up as part of Trump’s pressure campaign.
The committee is expected to examine Volker’s role in facilitating contacts between Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani and officials of the new Ukrainian government this past summer. Those efforts appear to have been aimed at separating Giuliani’s interest in investigating Biden from official U.S. dealings with the new Ukrainian government.
Volker was apparently not on a July telephone call between Trump and Zelensky that is at the center of the impeachment inquiry announced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) last week.
But Volker could be a significant figure in the inquiry because of his potential knowledge of Giuliani’s efforts, which Giuliani has claimed without corroboration had come at the behest of the State Department. If Volker was concerned about Giuliani and how he could shield Ukraine from any damaging interactions with the president’s private attorney, House Democrats will want to know.
Volker, according to the complaint, traveled to Kiev the day after Trump’s July 25 call to Zelensky. He was accompanied by Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union and a Trump ally.
“Based on multiple readouts of these meetings recounted to me by various U.S. officials, Ambassadors Volker and Sondland reportedly provided advice to the Ukrainian leadership about how to ‘navigate’ the demands that the President had made of Mr. Zelenskyy,” the whistleblower wrote.
Giuliani has long been a proponent of unsubstantiated theories that Biden’s son Hunter profited improperly from work in Ukraine and that as vice president Joe Biden helped wave off a Ukraine corruption investigation that could have ensnared his son. There is no evidence of that. There is also no evidence to substantiate the separate claim aired by Trump last week that officials in Ukraine had helped his 2016 Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, or that deleted emails from her time as secretary of state might reside in Ukraine.
Giuliani has published images of messages he exchanged with Volker to refute the notion that he was freelancing.
After a brief stint as a CIA analyst, Volker joined the State Department in 1988 and worked largely on European issues. He rose to become European director at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush, whom he served for less than a year as U.S. ambassador to NATO before being replaced after Barack Obama’s election.
Volker kept his job as executive director of the McCain Institute, dedicated to developing “character-driven leaders” in memory of the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), after he was tapped in 2017 as Ukraine envoy by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
But about a decade ago, he noticed the dynamic changing. His siblings were starting to become wealthier. They bought bigger apartments. They had good government pensions. They were no longer so interested in visiting Hong Kong. Recently, when he asked them before the Mid-Autumn Festival if they wanted mooncakes from Hong Kong, he was stung when they said no.
“Now their lives are better than mine,” Mr. Wong said wistfully. “If I had known back then how developed China would become, I never would have left.”
Mr. Wong’s community of mainland escapees in Hong Kong remains closely connected. Many knew one another as children growing up back in Guangdong; others met later in Hong Kong, through friends or through work. Now in their 60s and 70s, most of them retired, they gather regularly for dim sum, Ping-Pong sessions and mah-jongg tournaments.
But the recent turmoil in Hong Kong has exposed a new fault line within this typically tight-knit community. Though most escapees initially fled to Hong Kong in search of economic freedom, many, like Wu Hay-wing, a retired truck driver, say they’ve come to wholeheartedly cherish the political freedoms they found once they arrived. Unlike Mr. Wong, the cellphone accessories seller, some in his group regularly join the protests.
“The essence of the Communist Party has never changed — it is a totalitarian regime,” said Mr. Wu, 68, who made it to Hong Kong in an improvised boat.
Mr. Wu said he feared that Hong Kong would soon become just another mainland city.
“If that happens, what did I escape here for then?” said Mr. Wu. “All my efforts would have been for nothing.”
Still, there is a certain degree of nostalgia for the motherland. Many, even those who identify now as Hong Kongers, still maintain close ties with relatives on the mainland and make regular trips across the border. Some made large fortunes by leveraging their ties with the mainland.
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