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Vladimir Putin trashes U.S. Embassy for flying rainbow flag during Pride Month
Russian president Vladimir Putin scoffed at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow on Friday as the embassy continued flying the rainbow flag in support of LGBT rights, Reuters reported. At a press conference, Putin said the flag “revealed something about the people that work there,” according to Reuters, in reference to their sexual orientation. The embassy began flying the flag from a window on June 25, though it could not officially put it on a flagpole because the Trump administration has shut down such requests since June 2019.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 22:56:01 GMT

Iran and North Korea: The Real Axis of Evil (As in Missile Allies?)
Iran's close relationship with the DPRK extends to missile development.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 21:00:00 GMT

Amid furor over monuments, Trump seeks `garden' of US heroes
President Donald Trump has a vision for his second term, if he wins one, of establishing a “National Garden of American Heroes” that will pay tribute to some of the most prominent figures in U.S. history, a collection of “the greatest Americans to ever live.” The group of 30-plus features Founding Fathers and presidents, civil rights pioneers and aviation innovators, explorers and generals. Absent from Trump’s initial list are any Native American, Hispanic or Asian-American individuals.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 19:10:15 GMT

Chlorine gas leak at plant sickens 70 in southeast Iran

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 18:02:29 GMT

WHO halts hydroxychloroquine, HIV drugs in COVID trials after failure to reduce death

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 17:31:33 GMT

Coronavirus in South Africa: Deciding who lives and dies in a Cape Town township
Without enough supplies of oxygen or staff, health workers in South Africa are making some difficult decisions.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 17:26:41 GMT

US holiday weekend adds to virus worries as case counts grow
Florida and Texas reported record daily increases in confirmed coronavirus cases Saturday, the latest sign that the virus is surging in many parts of the United States, casting a pall over Fourth of July celebrations. Officials and health authorities warned people to take precautions or simply stay home on Independence Day, as confirmed cases are climbing in dozens of states. The U.S. reported more than 50,000 confirmed cases on Saturday for the third day in a row, according to a tally kept by Johns Hopkins University.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 17:01:13 GMT

Egypt's top court upholds 15-year-sentence for activist

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 16:35:42 GMT

Egypt sets August election dates for restored Senate

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 15:56:06 GMT

Turkey: Fireworks factory employees detained after explosion
Turkey’s official news agency says three people have been detained in connection to a massive explosion at a fireworks factory that left at least four people dead. Anadolu news agency reported Saturday that a manager and two supervisors were detained following Friday’s explosion in northwestern Sakarya province. Television footage on Friday showed a large, mushroom-shaped cloud of smoke rising from the factory amid sounds of explosions.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 15:51:42 GMT

Russia Denies Paying Bounties, but Some Say the U.S. Had It Coming
MOSCOW -- Three years into a grinding war in eastern Ukraine, the Trump administration, in a sharp break with Obama-era policy, proposed providing the Ukrainian army with potent American weapons, Javelin anti-tank missiles, to aid its struggle with Russian-backed separatists.President Vladimir Putin of Russia responded with an ominous warning, saying weapons in the separatist regions could easily be sent "to other zones of conflict" -- which many took to mean Afghanistan.Russia's grievances against what it sees as American bullying and expansion into its own zones of influence have been stacking up for decades, starting with the CIA's role in arming mujahedeen fighters who, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, delivered a fatal blow not only to the invading Red Army but the entire Soviet Union.A deep well of bitterness created by past and current conflicts in Afghanistan, Ukraine and more recently Syria, where U.S. forces killed scores of Russian mercenaries in 2018, help explain why Russia, according to U.S. intelligence officials, has become so closely entangled with the Taliban. In Ukraine, the Trump administration did send Javelins but with the stipulation that they not be used in the war.Russian officials and commentators reacted with fury to a report last week in The New York Times that U.S. intelligence officials had concluded that Russia's military intelligence agency had gone so far as to pay bounties to the Taliban and criminal elements linked to it to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.Intercepted electronic data showed large financial transfers from Russia's military intelligence agency, known as the GRU, to a Taliban-linked account, according to U.S. officials. Officials also identified an Afghan contractor as a key middleman between the GRU and militants linked to the Taliban who carried out the attacks.Russian officials have scoffed at the idea they would hire killers from a radical Islamist group that is banned in Russia as a "terrorist" outfit and that shares many views of the Afghan fighters who killed so many Red Army soldiers, and those of Islamic militants who caused Moscow so much pain in Chechnya during two wars there.In remarks to a state news agency Monday, Zamir Kabulov, Putin's special envoy for Afghanistan and a former ambassador in Kabul, dismissed the Taliban bounties report as "outright lies" generated by "forces in the United States who don't want to leave Afghanistan and want to justify their own failures."Amid a torrent of outraged denials, however, there have been pointed reminders that, in Russia's view, the U.S., because of its overreach overseas, deserves to taste some of its own medicine.Speaking during a talk show on state television dominated by conspiracy theories about plots by President Donald Trump's Democratic rivals, Alexei Zhuravlyov, a member of the Russian parliament, reminded viewers that as far as Russia was concerned, the U.S. has long had it coming.Recalling Operation Cyclone, the CIA's secret program to arm Moscow's enemies in Afghanistan during the 1980s, Zhuravlyov said the U.S. had spent billions of dollars on weapons that "killed thousands and thousands" of Russians. "This is a medical fact."While dismissing reports of Russian bounties for American scalps as "fake news," he said, "Let's suppose we paid," the Taliban, and then asked how many Americans had perhaps been killed as a result. "At most 22," he responded.There is no evidence to date that Putin signed off on any program to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and even independent experts say they strongly doubt he would have done so.Yet, Russia under Putin has for years throbbed with real and imagined pain from hurt inflicted by the U.S., notably the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a desire to make it pay.Andrei Serenko, an expert at the Center for the Study of Contemporary Afghanistan in Moscow, said Russia has no real desire to see the U.S. leave Afghanistan and revels in America's agonies from an endless conflict he described as a "sore blister for the United States."All the same, he said, Russia has been preparing for an eventual pullout by cultivating ties to the Taliban as well as to various Afghan warlords. It has done this with money and other inducements in the hope of shaping future Afghan events and securing a useful instrument to poke Washington.The Taliban, like many other Afghan groups, he added, has a long record of running protection rackets and taking cash from foreigners, including Russians, Americans and Chinese. "This is what they do," he said. "They are Afghanistan's most successful business."Russia, he said, "decided that if we can create lots of problems for Americans in Afghanistan, they will create fewer problems for us in Ukraine and Syria."Moscow has been reaching out to the Taliban for years, starting in 1995 when Kabulov traveled to Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold in the south, to negotiate the release of Russian pilots who had been taken hostage.The pilots eventually got away with their aircraft in what was described at the time as a daring escape. But what really happened is unclear. One thing that seems certain, however, is that this first Russian negotiation with the Taliban revolved around money."Everything was based on money," Vasily Kravtsov, a former KGB officer during the Soviet war and until 2018 a Russian diplomat in Kabul, recalled of the hostage talks.Kravtsov denied Russia had since paid the Taliban bounties for the deaths of coalition soldiers, even as he recalled that Soviet soldiers had been killed in large numbers by American arms supplied to the mujahedeen. He said he himself had been wounded twice by weapons "bought with American funds."Igor Yerin, who fought in Afghanistan as a young Red Army conscript in the 1980s, said he never saw any Americans on the battlefield but "they were everywhere because of their Stingers."Stingers were anti-aircraft missiles provided to mujahedeen fighters by the U.S. as part of a covert CIA program. They enabled the mujahedeen to shoot down hundreds of Soviet planes and helicopters, turning the tide in the decadelong war.Now the curator of a small museum in Moscow commemorating the inglorious Afghan war, Yerin showed off a display of land mines and other weapons sent to kill Russians as part of the CIA program.Putin has for years played on this and other sources of Russian pain.Soon after coming to power two decades ago, he pledged support for President George W. Bush in his "with or against us" war on terrorism in 2001 and cooperated with America's drive to oust the Taliban. But he quickly soured on the idea that Washington could be a reliable partner and began blaming it for most of the world's problems.Bristling with wounded pride, Putin in a fiery speech in Munich in 2007 denounced what he said was a "world of one master, one sovereign" and complained that the "United States has overstepped its national borders, in every area."He has been settling scores ever since, often with help from the GRU, which even before Putin took power had won its spurs putting the U.S. in its place. Since he took office, the military intelligence agency has been accused of involvement in widespread mischief-making, from a bungled 2016 coup attempt in Montenegro aimed at preventing the Balkan nation's entry into NATO, to meddling the same year in the U.S. presidential election.In a rare recent interview, the former head of the GRU, Valentin Korabelnikov, told state television how his officers had in 1999 organized a frantic dash by Russian troops and armor to Kosovo to occupy the airport in the capital, Pristina -- just hours before the arrival of NATO forces. The stunt, he said, was "about the prestige of our state" and showing that Russia could not be ignored.Speaking in his former office at the headquarters of the GRU in Moscow, Korabelnikov said that his agency had organized many other secret operations but that those could not be revealed."The vast majority of operations carried out both by us and our brothers," he said, referring to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service and the Federal Security Service, known as the FSB and headed in the late 1990s by Putin, "are completely closed, and only the small tip of the iceberg sometimes appears."Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia's security apparatus who wrote a doctorate on Moscow's disastrous Afghan war, said "some old war horses" in the GRU could have hatched a scheme to kill Americans as payback for Russians killed with U.S. weapons in Afghanistan. But he said he doubted that such a plan would have been approved by the Russian leadership or executed without approval as a "maverick operation."Even Yerin, the former conscript who lost friends in Afghanistan, recalled that during his tour there, spent mostly near the northern city of Kunduz, he never believed political commissars in his unit who explained the 1979 Soviet invasion was necessary to keep the U.S. from moving into Russia's backyard."Today, I believe them," said Yerin. "Afghanistan is our next-door neighbor," he said, stabbing with his finger the southern border of the former Soviet Union on a big wall map, "What happens here is our business, not the Americans'."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 14:28:24 GMT

Somalia restaurant attack: Six killed by al-Shabab
Militant group al-Shabab said it carried out the bomb explosion in the town of Baidoa.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 14:24:51 GMT

Trump's `strong wall' to block COVID-19 from China had holes
President Donald Trump has repeatedly credited his February ban on travelers from mainland China as his signature move against the advance of the coronavirus pandemic -- a “strong wall” that allowed only U.S. citizens inside, he boasted in May. Exempted were thousands of residents of the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macau. Efforts to track U.S. residents returning from mainland China were riddled with errors and broken communications.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 14:01:01 GMT

Fire flares at Iranian power plant, latest in series of incidents

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 13:47:12 GMT

As monuments fall, Confederate carving has size on its side
Some statues of figures from America's slave-owning past have been yanked down by protesters, others dismantled by order of governors or city leaders. Stone Mountain's supersized sculpture depicting Gen. Robert E. Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson mounted on horseback has special protection enshrined in Georgia law. An old photo shows a worker on scaffolding just below Lee's chin barely reaching his nose.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 13:42:30 GMT

'People aren’t stupid': Pence's virus spin tests credibility
Vice President Mike Pence has long played the straight man to Donald Trump, translating the president's bombast into more measured, calming language. As coronavirus cases spike across large parts of the country despite months of lockdown, Pence has spent the past week trying to convince the American public that things are going very well, even though they're not. “Make no mistake about it, what you see today is that America is going back to work and the American people are finding a way every day to put this coronavirus farther in the past," he told CNBC the same day the country reported more than 55,000 new virus cases, a daily record.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 13:09:06 GMT

In troubled times: Independence Day in a land of confusion
On Independence Day, we Americans — if there is in fact a “we” in American life — celebrate the anniversary of a time when a lot of people, feeling really angry and scared, decided to do something about it that changed the world forever. A national conversation — loud, enraged and anguished — about the place that a history blemished by ugliness should hold in the present. Irritable, overstressed, buffeted by invisible forces and just plain worn out, the United States of America on its 244th birthday is a land of confusion.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 13:08:53 GMT

Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia return to talks over disputed dam
Three key Nile basin countries will continue on Saturday their latest round of talks to resolve a years-long dispute over the operation and filling of Ethiopia’s giant hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile, Egypt's irrigation ministry said. Officials from Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia resumed their negotiations through video conference Friday, aiming to bridge the gaps and finalize a deal on the contentious mega-project within two to three weeks, Sudan's irrigation ministry said. The current round of talks came after negotiations last month failed to produce a deal, prompting Egypt and Sudan to appeal to the United Nations Security Council to intervene in the dispute.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 12:21:37 GMT

North Korea dismisses chance of 'face to face' U.S. nuclear talks ahead of election
"The U.S. is mistaken if it thinks things like negotiations would still work on us," said North Korea's Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 12:16:00 GMT

Mississippi could drop Jim Crow-era statewide voting process
Mississippi just ditched its Confederate-themed state flag. Later this year, the state's voters will decide whether to dump a statewide election process that dates to the Jim Crow era. The amendment would simplify elections for governor and other statewide officials by erasing an Electoral College-type provision from Mississippi's 1890 constitution — one that was written to dilute Black voting power and maintain white control of state politics.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 12:10:28 GMT

North Korea says it has no plans for talks with U.S.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 12:09:11 GMT

Governors stress 'personal responsibility' over virus orders
Earlier this week, as Tennessee registered what then was its highest single-day coronavirus case increase, Gov. Bill Lee held a news conference and issued a stern response. “When we have people dying in this state as a result of this virus, we should be taking personal responsibility for this,” the Republican governor said. It was the same message Lee issued in late March as the COVID-19 disease was beginning to spread.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 12:05:09 GMT

Iran imposes new curbs as coronavirus toll rises

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 10:41:49 GMT

Police: 2 women hit by car on Seattle highway amid protest
A 27-year-old man drove a car onto a closed freeway in Seattle early Saturday and barreled through a panicked crowd of protesters, critically injuring two women, officials said. Dawit Kelete of Seattle drove the car around vehicles that were blocking Interstate 5 and sped into the crowd at about 1:40 a.m., according to a police report released by the Washington State Patrol. Summer Taylor, 24, of Seattle, was in critical condition while Diaz Love, 32, of Portland, Oregon, was upgraded to serious condition in the intensive care unit, according to Harborview Medical Center spokeswoman Susan Gregg.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 10:29:48 GMT

US envoy forges ahead with troubled Taliban peace deal
Washington's envoy to Afghanistan on Saturday emphasized the economic benefits of the peace deal with the Taliban, forging ahead with an agreement that has run into new political obstacles in the U.S. and the region. Zalmay Khalilzad was wrapping up a week-long trip that included stops in Uzbekistan, Pakistan and the Gulf state of Qatar, where Taliban negotiators are headquartered. Accompanying Khalilzad for the first time was an economic development team led by U.S. International Development Finance Corporation Chief Executive Officer Adam Boehler.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 10:17:41 GMT

English pubs reopen but little normal elsewhere in the world
Pubs, hair salons and movie theaters across England reopened Saturday as part of Britain’s biggest step toward post-outbreak normal, while South Africa and other parts of the world signaled anything but — reporting another day of record confirmed coronavirus cases. Many people relished the easing of restrictions on public life that had shuttered U.K. restaurants and bars, although a trade group estimated that only about half of England's pubs elected to open on the first possible day. “Let’s not blow it now,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said as some in England rushed to restaurants or barbers for the first time in more than three months.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 10:02:03 GMT

Virus spike in Spain reveals plight of seasonal farm workers
In the 20 years since he left his native Senegal, Biram Fall has never slept in the streets. This week, when he ran out of savings after failing to find work in northern Spain’s peach orchards, he still refused to do so. As part of an army of cheap labor that follows the ripening of different crops across the country, the 52-year-old responded in May to an urgent call for workers in Lleida, a major gateway to surrounding fertile farmland.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 09:35:42 GMT

UK executed more European Arrest Warrants than any EU country for four years in a row
Britain carried out more than eight times as many European Arrest Warrants than were executed on its behalf by EU police forces in the last decade and arrested more suspects than any other EU country for four years in a row. Tory MPs said that the “justice deficit” meant the EU should drop demands in Brexit negotiations over a new extradition treaty for a role for the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and a UK pledge to stay in the European Convention on Human Rights. The UK will leave the European Arrest Warrant system (EAW) at the end of the Brexit transition period on December 31. British and EU negotiators will resume talks over a replacement treaty when trade negotiations resume in London on Monday. “Since the European Arrest Warrant came into force in the UK, we have surrendered over 10,000 individuals to face trial or serve sentences in EU Member States,” a Home Office spokesperson said. “That is why we are seeking fast track extradition arrangements based on the EU’s existing agreement with [non-EU countries] Norway and Iceland.” “I can tell you we are not far from an agreement but we have some fundamental problems for the operationality and implementation of this objective because in some areas we need a clear reference to the Court of Justice,” Michel Barnier told the Sunday Telegraph. “When the interpretation of the EU law is concerned, we must and we will refer to the Court of Justice,” the EU’s chief negotiator said. “The EU is going to have to swallow its pride on this one. Quite clearly the UK contribution to the EAW system is considerably more than any of the EU member states,” said David Jones, a former minister at the Department for Exiting the European Union. “It does highlight how important the UK is to the system of criminal law enforcement in the EU. So it is clearly in Brussels’ interest to replicate the EAW with something that doesn’t require ECJ oversight,” the MP for Clwyd West said.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 08:21:43 GMT

Hachalu Hundessa: 'My friend the hero who was gunned down'
The BBC's Amensisa Ifa was close to Ethiopian protest singer Hachalu Hundessa, who was shot dead on Monday.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 07:20:46 GMT

Sex workers lack food for taking HIV drugs during COVID-19
As the coronavirus spreads in Africa, it threatens in multiple ways those who earn their living on the streets — people like Mignonne, a 25-year-old sex worker with HIV. The lockdown in Rwanda has kept many of her customers away, she said, so she has less money to buy food. “Yet it’s equally dangerous when you don’t take the drug,” Mignonne said in an interview.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 07:02:52 GMT

Families of Syria detainees hope for news amid US sanctions
Alaa Arnous and his family found the photo of his father Mohammed online last week, the first proof of his fate since he was seized by Syrian government forces seven years ago. The elder Arnous was among thousands of Syrians who, since their country’s civil war began in 2011, went missing into Syrian government prisons. Anguished relatives are poring over photos of torture victims from Syrian prisons, posted online by activists after the United States imposed heavy new sanctions on the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad last month.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 06:21:21 GMT

Will Erdogan Turn Hagia Sophia Back Into a Mosque?
ISTANBUL—As Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan looks for an issue to fire up his Islamic and nationalist voter base amid declining poll numbers, he is moving closer to turning Istanbul's ancient Basilica of the Hagia Sophia, a world heritage site and a powerful symbol for both Christians and Muslims, from a museum into a mosque.Built 1,500 years ago as the main church of the Byzantine Empire, Hagia Sophia (which means holy wisdom) was the most important house of worship in Christianity for almost a thousand years. The Ottomans declared the building a mosque after conquering Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, in 1453. But modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, decreed in a 1934 cabinet decision that the massive building in the heart of Istanbul’s historic center be used as a museum, banning religious worship there. The U.N. cultural organization UNESCO declared Hagia Sophia a world heritage site in 1985.Islamists have campaigned for years to turn Hagia Sophia, or Ayasofya, back into a mosque, and they are now closer than ever to getting what they want. Once dismissive of their demands, but always conscious of his core Islamist base, Erdogan has signaled his support for the initiative. He told a television interviewer last year that Hagia Sophia might be known as “Hagia Sophia Mosque” in the future. Erdogan’s justice minister, Abdulhamit Gul, told the state news agency Anadolu last month that “it is our joint wish to break the Hagia Sophia’s chains and open it for prayers.”Turkey Is Now the Most Dangerous Player in the Middle EastTurkey’s top administrative court, the Council of State, on Thursday took up the issue after an association calling for the change asked the judges to declare Ataturk’s decision null and void. The hearing lasted just 17 minutes, and the court said it would issue a verdict within 15 days.Turkish media reports say the court is expected to reject the demand to annul Ataturk’s decree but stress that the government has the right to decide about the status of a building like Hagia Sophia. Such a decision would pave the way for Erdogan to go ahead. Some reports say the president is aiming to hold the first Muslim prayer there on July 15, the anniversary of the 2016 coup attempt against his rule.Not everybody in Turkey is happy with this turn of events. Opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu said Erdogan is using religious issues for political ends. The Istanbul-based spiritual leader of 300 million Orthodox Christians worldwide also criticized the plan. Bartholomew, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, said turning Hagia Sophia into a mosque would turn Christians against Muslims.Since its construction in the sixth century, Hagia Sophia has awed everyone who enters the huge building. “Solomon, I have surpassed you,” Byzantine Emperor Justinian I said when he walked into Hagia Sophia for the first time after having it built. Mosaics depicting Jesus, Mary, emperors and saints glitter in the sunlight that filtered in through the windows. The main attraction remains the giant cupola that rises 56 meters (184 feet) above ground and spans 31 meters (102 feet), appearing to float in the air thanks to 90 windows in its base.Some mosaics were painted over after the Ottoman conquest because Islam prohibits the depiction of human features, but the depredations often were overstated by Christian hostile to Sublime Port.The aristocratic 18th century writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of Britain’s ambassador to Constantinople, cajoled her way into Hagia Sophia in 1718, noting that the mosaics of many saints were still visible, their dilapidation merely a factor of neglect. “It is absolutely false, what is so universally asserted, that the Turks defaced all the images that they found in the city.” But the vast mosaics on the ceiling were crumbling and falling to the floor. “The composition seems to me a sort of glass, or the paste with which they make counterfeit jewels,” she wrote.In many places the gem-like brilliance of the mosaics remains or has been restored. Work in 2010 uncovered the face of a seraph angel that had been hidden under plaster, and more recent archeology has turned up significant finds, including a disk where the Emperor Justinian once stood. But some of the most striking features are the enormous medallions of Arabic calligraphy put high on the walls in the 19th century which give the sense in the museum of today that Islam and Christianity can share the space. At the apse the glistening mosaic of the Madonna and Child is flanked by the medallions of Muhammad and Allah.The Orthodox patriarch noted that the basilica, the "Temple of the God of Wisdom," as he called it, "has been a place for the worship of God for 900 years for Christians and 500 years for Muslims" and "makes believers of both religions meet and admire its greatness."But the venerable building has become a pawn in the mean game of Turkish politics. Polls show Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is losing support because of ongoing economic problems, which are made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic, and a perception of growing corruption. The AKP lost control of major cities like Istanbul and the capital Ankara in local elections last year. Turkey’s opposition parties speculate the president may call early elections before things get even worse for him.Howard Eissenstat, a Turkey expert at Saint Lawrence University in New York, said it was not sure whether Erdogan would really go ahead with changing Hagia Sophia’s status.“It remains to be seen whether he will take the plunge,” Eissenstat told The Daily Beast by email. “Promising to convert Hagia Sophia to a mosque is a perennial event in Turkey. It is easy enough to move forward, make some headlines, and then back down.”But Eissenstat added that two developments mean chances are higher now than at other times when the issue has come up. “First, the twin crises of the coronavirus and the economy have further undermined the AKP’s popularity,” he said. “A big, culturally significant act like this would both highlight the AKP’s cultural brand and elicit angry responses abroad… which in turn allow Erdogan to ‘stand tall’ against foreign pressures. This type of cultural politics is a preferred strategy of Erdogan and one which he has gone back to again and again.”“The second reason is that the economic fallout is likely to be slight… the Turkish tourism economy is already in shambles because of coronavirus. If some countries call for a boycott, it isn’t going to do any further damage because tourists already are staying away. In the interim, Turkey would likely take steps to ensure that tourists could still view Hagia Sophia outside of prayer hours.”Having tourists in working mosques would not be new for Istanbul. The 17th century Blue Mosque, just a couple of hundred feet away from Hagia Sophia, is open for visitors except for prayer times. Women are asked to cover their hair when entering the building. There is no question of Christian prayers in other mosques, however, and there might well be in Hagia Sophia.But even if Hagia Sophia is kept open after turning it into a mosque, the move is still likely to trigger international criticism. Turkey’s neighbor Greece, which regards Hagia Sophia as a symbol of the Byzantine past and Orthodox Christianity, has strongly criticized the plan to turn the building into a mosque.U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo urged Turkey “to continue to maintain the Hagia Sophia as a museum, as an exemplar of its commitment to respect Turkey’s diverse faith traditions and history, and to ensure it remains accessible to all.” Turkey rejected Pompeo’s statement, reminding the secretary that “Hagia Sophia is the property of Turkey, like all our cultural assets located on our land.”Eissenstat said that for all the controversy around Hagia Sophia, domestic and international repercussions of changing the building’s status were likely to be limited.“This is a nice piece of symbolism for Erdogan’s base, but its domestic importance can be grossly overstated,” Eissenstat said. “It isn’t like the AKP will gain or lose a tremendous amount of votes either way.”“On the diplomatic front, it will likely reinforce concerns about Turkey’s direction for some Western countries and will likely result in some angry statements and headlines,” he added. But, provided Turkey preserves the Hagia Sophia’s treasures, “I think its overall effect will be minor and relatively short lived.”Omer Lacin, a Turkish tourist from the southern city of Antalya who visited Hagia Sophia this week in the middle of the debate swirling around the building, said the better part of wisdom would be to leave the museum alone.“It’s not good that this issue has been put on the political agenda,” Lacin said. “I think it’s better not to touch history.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 05:37:46 GMT

Meet the Russian Spies Who Inspired ‘The Americans‘
Donald Heathfield, like his wife, had been born in a cemetery, a ghost rising from the dead. A baby boy had been born on Feb. 4, 1962, in Canada, the third of four children of Howard and Shirley. Six weeks later, on March 23, Shirley found little Donald lying still, a tiny arm sticking out of the side of his crib. Her child had died. Tracey Lee Ann Foley was born on Sept. 14, 1962, in Montreal, the first child of Edward and Pauline Foley. Seven weeks old and just a few days after she had smiled at her mother for the first time, she developed a fever. Within hours, she died of meningitis. As with the Heathfields, the pain of the loss of a child so young never left the family. But then a quarter of a century later, Heathfield and Foley were suddenly there again, brought back to life by Directorate S.The twin tragedies had not gone unnoticed. A KGB officer serving in Canada had observed them. He would steal something from these two families who had already lost something irreplaceable—their children’s identities. KGB officers had the macabre job of strolling around cemeteries looking at graves for likely candidates, a process known as “tombstoning.” The ideal situation was a child who died away from the country in which they were born, with few close relatives, reducing the documentary and witness trail to the death. Once a candidate was found, the next step might be to destroy any documentary evidence of the death. This could be as simple as bribing someone for access to a church registry book and then ripping out the pages. Then came the key—requesting a new birth certificate (a technique that relied on there being no central registry of births and deaths). “It was considered a big success for us when Department 2 managed to obtain children’s birth certificates after a whole family died in a traffic or other kind of accident,” explains one former member of Directorate S. A birth certificate meant a child could be born again as an illegal.Directorate S was broken up into departments. Department 2 was the storytellers. Their job was to create a fictional life and to make it plausible enough to stand up to scrutiny from a discerning critic by building “legends” and providing backstories. Officers of the department would draw up paragraphs in two columns. On one side would be the supposed detail of a person’s life—Donald Heathfield was Canadian and born in Montreal. On the other side would be the made-up evidence supporting that claim—starting with a birth certificate. If there was a claim that did not have documentation, then there would be a plausible story why. It was painstaking work. If there was any doubt, an entire identity would be discarded. Roughly one in ten attempts would create something considered sustainable against checks by Western security services. Each illegal had a “kurator”—literally a curator of the false identity who would supervise their training and act as a handler once they were in the field.The Hick From Indiana Who Nailed Master Spy Kim PhilbyThe Operational Technical section of Department 2 includes a team of highly skilled forgers. What does a French passport issued five years ago look like? What does a Finnish driver’s license look like? They study which inks, papers, glues, and even staples are used in target countries so they can be faked or—if blanks can be stolen—doctored with a new identity inserted. A laboratory works on how to replicate the different types of paper and ink and how to artificially age a document in a special oven so a passport can be filled with the backstory of visas and trips and made to look old when it is in fact new. So why not just create entirely fake personas for the spies? A proper check into someone’s background would raise too many questions and if fake documents are spotted then it is game over. For long-term penetration, the strong preference was always to get hold of real documents rather than rely on fakes. This meant becoming a “dead double”—stealing an identity of someone deceased and then using it to build a set of genuine documents. That was the route for Heathfield and Foley. They might arrive in Canada and start with a birth certificate. This could be used as the stepping-stone to contact public bodies and obtain other identity documents. Ultimately this would eventually lead you to a real passport, helping create what was called an “iron legend.”So who was the resurrected Donald Heathfield? His real name was Andrey Bezrukov. He was born on August 30, 1960, in Kansk, in remote Siberia, a small town near the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway, home to a MiG fighter base. His parents were often away for work and so he was an independent child, self-contained with a strong inner confidence. Bezrukov traces his family tree back to the Russian conquest of Siberia under Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, when his distant relatives had first come to the region. “For me to forget this is to be left with nothing,” he later said. Remembering your roots was important when you were pretending to be someone else. Patriotism would sustain him in his long years far away from home.In 1978, at the age of 18, Bezrukov went to Tomsk State University. His study of history gave him a sense of the uniqueness of Russia’s story, a country engaged in what he calls an “endless, painful search for herself between East and West.” And it was while a student that he was talent-spotted. Universities are the classic recruiting ground for illegals. Department 3 of Directorate S is in charge of the intense selection process. An ideal candidate is in their early twenties. When a person was younger than that you could not be sure they had what it took to survive. By thirty, they were no longer malleable enough to be shaped into a new person. Spotters looked for those who might have the right set of skills—an aptitude for languages was vital, so was intelligence, patience, adaptability, an ability to cope with stress, and a sense of patriotism. Careful psychological assessments were undertaken. Someone who was volatile or looked like they might drink too much or have too much of an eye for the opposite sex was not suitable. This was all initially done at a distance before a move was made—perhaps, as often in the West, on the recommendation of a professor. Somewhere among the stream of students carrying books to and from class and flirting with each other, the KGB had spotted Bezrukov.Bezrukov was not recruited alone. The fact that illegals were selected in their twenties posed a problem—relationships. An illegal was destined to spend decades living undercover. It was unrealistic to think they would not engage in relationships. But this posed a danger. If you fell for a local, you would either have to constantly try to hide the truth from them or risk telling them you were not who you said you were. Worse, you might place love over duty and give up your spying career. Anatoli Rudenko, a 1960s illegal, worked in West Germany and London before ending up in the United States as a piano tuner to the rich and powerful—including the governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller. Rudenko’s career ended when he was forced to reveal he had defied orders by secretly marrying a hairdresser in Germany and taking her with him. Plans to use him to penetrate the United Nations and think tanks—including by seducing lonely young women—had to be shelved. It was an example of why human relationships were the key to an illegal prospering or failing.And so the preference became to send out couples. Marriages were sometimes arranged and manufactured by Directorate S (its officials could even officiate in order to maintain secrecy). An arranged marriage would not just avoid the danger of falling in love but also offer a partner in undercover work. “You would not have to waste your time chasing after girls and risk falling into bed with the wrong one,” one illegal was told during the Cold War when a partner was offered to him. “You would not have to explain your absences. [Y]our partner would be a trained agent who could help with communications, photography, drops—with everything. You would not be alone behind the lines.” Not all marriages worked. Yelena Borisnovna and Dimitry Olshevsky were sent to Canada under the identity of two dead babies, Laurie and Ian Lambert. Their relationship hit the rocks out in the field. Dimitry moved in with a local woman, while Yelena began to date a British-born doctor. Canadian intelligence arrested them in 1996. The pair were deported, landing on a stormy night in Moscow to be whisked away in a blacked-out van straight from the runway.Andrey Bezrukov’s marriage, though, was no fake. This was an adventure that two young people set out on together. Elena Vavilova was a fellow history student at the university. She had been born in November 1962 in Tomsk, where her parents were academics. She was a cheerful, outgoing child who enjoyed figure skating, ballet, and acting. At university she played the violin as she studied for her degree. There she met Bezrukov. There was a confidence to him and also a sense he might take her out of the well-ordered world she had grown up in. “Andrey offered me something out of the ordinary, an adventure,” she later said. The young couple spent the night together in the university library, sneaking in before closing time and staying among the book-lined shelves. But they were caught by the director the next morning. There was a telling off but no punishment. Perhaps it was this spirit of adventure and the willingness to take risks together that got them noticed.The young couple was approached by a man who had an unusual proposal. Did they want to serve their country? She was only 21. “I wondered what would happen to our relationship,” Vavilova thought. “I believe if we were selected separately, each of us could have refused the proposal,” Vavilova later explained to me. “However, since we were already romantically involved, it was more beneficial to have us as a couple for the training.” She would later reflect that love marriages among illegals were better than arranged ones because of the trust that was always there. Their first curator sat down with them and in long conversations began to see if they were suitable—their recruiter talked to them about their backgrounds, their lives, their friendships, and their studies, carefully probing them to make sure they had what it took. The strains of the life they were to live drove others apart but, in their case, it would bring them even closer together.Why did Elena Vavilova agree to become a spy? “The concept of the Motherland—an amalgamation of everything that is important to you,” was her explanation later. Vavilova and Bezrukov were still living in the era of communism when they were approached by the KGB, but it was always as much defending Mother Russia as spreading communism that had motivated them. “For me the main motive that made me agree and accept this job was the desire to prevent another terrible war, like the Great Patriotic War,” Vavilova later said, using the Russian name for World War II. “As a teenager, all the films about the war and the suffering the people had to go through and the high price we had to pay for victory, all of this fostered in me a wish to be part of whatever could be done to prevent it from happening again.” This was the driving force for many Russian spies from the Cold War generation—the sense of threat to their country and the story of their near defeat at the hands of the Nazis before a victory that came at an enormous cost (one which many feel is rarely acknowledged in the West). Almost every family had lost someone in that brutal war. The illegals’ mission was to prevent it happening again by acting as a warning system. The early eighties, when the couple was approached, were years when the need for such warning seemed all too real. In Washington, there was an American president calling the Soviet Union “the evil empire” and who, Moscow feared, might be gearing up for confrontation and perhaps even a first nuclear strike. And at the same time, young men from the Soviet Union, including fellow students from Tomsk, were heading off to fight in a brutal conflict in Afghanistan.In the West, the word spy refers to both heroes—the James Bonds—and villains—traitors like the Kim Philbys. But in Russia they separate the two concepts with different words—a spy is a betrayer of secrets. Meanwhile, their word for heroic intelligence officers translates more closely in English to “scouts”—in the sense of someone who is working behind enemy lines to scout ahead and report back, providing advance warning. The separating of the two ideas makes it easier in Russia to lionize the heroes and demonize the villains. It also explains how the illegals saw themselves as operating behind enemy lines in order to protect the motherland. They were the “soldiers of the invisible front.”Soon after, the couple was married. Bezrukov’s parents came to the modest reception in Elena’s parents’ house. A few years later they would be married for a second time, this time as Donald Heathfield and Ann Foley (she chose to use her new middle name rather than Tracey). “The gap between our weddings was short, a few years, but those years were very intense,” Vavilova later explained. There was no honeymoon the first time. Instead, Bezrukov and Vavilova simply vanished from the life of friends and family as they headed to Moscow. Despite the excitement of being in the nation’s capital and the luxury of a two-bedroom apartment, this period was challenging. “The years before we left were quite taxing physically, psychologically, and intellectually,” she would say. By the end of every week, they would be exhausted. They had to learn all the traditional “tradecraft” involved in being a spy—out on the Moscow streets they practiced brush-pass contacts, where one person hands over items to another surreptitiously—and tested on whether they could spot surveillance. Inside, they learned martial arts, how to shoot a gun, and how to evade a polygraph lie-detector test. But there was much more to the creation of an illegal than attending regular spy school. For a start, the training was provided to them as a couple by a small group of tutors. They did not mix with other recruits to protect their identity. But it also involved going much deeper. Each illegal required a staggering investment—around four years and by some estimates a million dollars. This compares to CIA and MI6 training for new officers, which is measured in months, not years. “It was not a mass production,” one head of the KGB said. “You do not train illegals… in the classes. It’s a piecemeal operation. You work with an individual, one on one. And only in such a way, we can make them look like an Englishman or a Spaniard or a German.”As the Moscow snows came and went, Bezrukov and Vavilova’s education involved former illegals educating them in the history of the elite spies whose ranks they were to join. Moscow had developed its specialty in illegals after the 1917 revolution. Many countries did not have diplomatic relations with the communist Soviet Union so diplomatic cover was not an option. In those early years, there had also been a pool of ideologically committed communists of various nationalities who were willing to spy for Moscow. This led to the heyday of the illegals in the 1930s and 1940s. Richard Sorge operated undercover in Japan, moving in the highest diplomatic circles to provide vital intelligence about Tokyo’s relationship with Nazi Germany. In Europe, illegals recruited people who were students, and some would slowly work their way into positions of power and influence. Some, like Kim Philby and the Cambridge spies in the United Kingdom, would reach the highest echelons of Western intelligence agencies. In America, illegals worked with the atomic spies who stole the most sensitive secrets imaginable, which proved vital in allowing the Soviet Union to avoid defeat in the early Cold War. Many of these early international illegals were rewarded with execution in Stalin’s purges.In the mid-1950s, the KGB began a push for a new generation of homegrown illegals. They never quite matched their predecessors, although there were some successes. Among the best known was Konon Molody, who turned into Canadian Gordon Lonsdale. He came to London and ran a spy ring stealing naval secrets. Molody had previously worked as an understudy in the United States for another of the great illegals—Rudolf Abel, a remarkably talented individual who had been born in Britain and served in World War II on the front lines before embedding himself in New York. These were the footsteps Bezrukov and Vavilova were to follow in.The illegals were treated as heroes in the Soviet Union, far more than their spy counterparts in the United States or Britain. There were stories of their daring undercover operations in World War II. The most fabled was Nikolai Kuznetsov. Films and books were based on his time posing as a member of the German occupying army in Ukraine during which he killed six senior Nazis. The accounts of World War II illegals were a central part of Soviet popular culture promoted by the KGB. One fictional work was turned into a 1973 TV series called Seventeen Moments of Spring. It featured a deep-cover illegal, a Soviet version of James Bond, who posed as a German aristocrat to infiltrate the Nazi SS and who prevented the Nazis from negotiating a peace deal with America. The series was a massive hit, reaching up to 80 million viewers, and was constantly repeated, embedding itself in the popular mind. Vladimir Putin was 21 when the series was first shown, and he became desperate to sign up for the KGB. One of his first jobs in East Germany in the 1980s, he would later boast, was to work with illegals.Excerpted from the book Russians Among Us by Gordon Corera. Copyright 2020 by Gordon Corera. From William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 05:23:07 GMT

North Korea says it has no plans for talks with US
North Korea on Saturday reiterated it has no immediate plans to resume nuclear negotiations with the United States unless Washington discards what it describes as “hostile” polices toward Pyongyang. The statement by North Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui came after President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, told reporters in New York Thursday that Trump might seek another summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as an “October surprise” ahead of the U.S. presidential election.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 05:23:03 GMT

N.Korea says no need to sit down with US for talks

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 05:14:28 GMT

At Mount Rushmore, Trump digs deeper into nation's divisions
At the foot of Mount Rushmore and on the eve of Independence Day, President Donald Trump dug deeper into America's divisions by accusing protesters who have pushed for racial justice of engaging in a “merciless campaign to wipe out our history.” The president, in remarks Friday night at the South Dakota landmark, offered a discordant tone to an electorate battered by a pandemic and seared by the recent high-profile killings of Black people. Four months from Election Day, his comments amounted to a direct appeal to the political base, including many disaffected white votes, that carried him to the White House in 2016.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 05:10:03 GMT

Critics of US-Taliban deal say militants can't be trusted
Intelligence that Afghan militants might have accepted Russian bounties for killing American troops did not scuttle the U.S.-Taliban agreement or President Donald Trump’s plan to withdraw thousands more troops from the war. It did give critics of the deal another reason to say the Taliban shouldn’t be trusted. The bounty information was included in Trump's president's daily intelligence brief on Feb. 27, according to intelligence officials, and two days later, the U.S. and Taliban signed an agreement in Qatar.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 04:57:27 GMT

Trump entices masses with capital event as virus cases rise
Officials across the country pleaded with Americans to curb their enthusiasm for large Fourth of July crowds Saturday even as President Donald Trump enticed the masses with a “special evening” of tribute and fireworks staged with new U.S. coronavirus infections on the rise. People wandered the National Mall in baking heat and took shade under the scattered trees while, not far away, music wafted from a party on the White House South Lawn. To come: the “Salute for America” celebration with Trump's speech from the White House grounds, a military air show and a more ambitious fireworks display than has been seen in years.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 04:47:08 GMT

Heavy rain floods southern Japan; over a dozen presumed dead
Heavy rain in southern Japan triggered flooding and mudslides on Saturday, leaving more than a dozen people presumed dead, about 10 missing and dozens stranded on rooftops waiting to be rescued, officials said. More than 75,000 residents in the prefectures of Kumamoto and Kagoshima were urged to evacuate following pounding rains overnight. NHK footage showed large areas of Hitoyoshi town in Kumamoto inundated in muddy waters that gushed out from the Kuma River.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 03:45:35 GMT

Will Putin Really Return To The Kremlin in 2024?
President Vladimir Putin now has the legal right to remain in power until 2036, after a large majority of Russians voted in favor of Kremlin-backed constitutional reforms.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 00:19:00 GMT

Iran's Rouhani calls for mask order to be enforced
People not wearing masks against the novel coronavirus should be refused service in enclosed public spaces, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Saturday, as his government moves to make it obligatory. Addressing the committee in charge of Iran's efforts to stem its virus outbreak -- the deadliest in the Middle East -- Rouhani said that the new order "requires some guarantee that it will be respected". Since late last month, the government has also undertaken a public information campaign, with officials and state television anchors wearing masks on camera to encourage their use.

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 00:16:48 GMT

The Latest: Trump to establish 'National Garden' of heroes
President Donald Trump says he will establish a “National Garden of American Heroes,” which he is describing as “a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans who ever lived.” Trump made the announcement as he opened the Fourth of July weekend with a speech and fireworks at the iconic Mount Rushmore. The executive order released Friday by the White House says the garden will feature statues of several presidents as well as other historic notables, including Davy Crockett, Amelia Earhart, Billy Graham, Harriet Tubman and Orville and Wilbur Wright.

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 23:40:04 GMT

The UK buys a 45 percent stake in broke satellite startup OneWeb
It's part of the government's post-Brexit plan to replace the EU's sat-nav system.

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 23:00:05 GMT

Alabama health officials can't verify 'COVID party' reports

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 22:41:05 GMT

8-year-old killed, 3 injured in shooting at Alabama mall
An 8-year-old boy was killed Friday in a shooting at an Alabama shopping mall that left three other people injured, police said. Hoover Police Chief Nick Derzis said the child was killed in the afternoon shooting at the Riverchase Galleria. The police chief said a girl and two adults were also hospitalized after the shooting.

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 21:05:56 GMT

Iran agrees to compensate families of plane crash victims, Sweden says
Iran has reportedly agreed to compensate the families of the foreign victims who were killed when a passenger jet was blown out of the sky outside Tehran in January, a horrific crash mistakenly caused by the country’s own military forces. “We have signed an agreement of mutual understanding that we will now negotiate together with Iran about amends, compensation to the victims’ next of kin,” she told Swedish news agency TT. The January crash came on the heels of Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes against American military facilities following a President Trump-sanctioned drone strike that killed top Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 21:04:48 GMT

Epstein cohort's arrest becomes new test for plea deal
Could that same deal now help Ghislaine Maxwell, the Epstein confidante arrested Thursday, evade charges she helped lure at least three girls into sexual liaisons with him? The British socialite was arrested Thursday in New Hampshire on charges that she acted as a recruiter of underage girls for Epstein, usually under the guise of hiring them to perform massages, and sometimes participated in his sexual abuse of the teens. The allegations against the couple date back many years, but Epstein, for a while, appeared to have resolved them under a deal with federal and state prosecutors in South Florida in which he pleaded guilty to lesser state charges and served 13 months in jail and a work-release program.

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 20:56:49 GMT

Former world leaders warn against Israel annexation plan
A group of former world leaders urged European leaders on Friday to keep pressuring Israel against annexation of parts of the West Bank, warning against complacency after Israel made no move to take over the territory on July 1. The Elders, founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007, said in letters to the leaders of France, Germany, Britain and the European Union that they should insist to Israel that annexation would have negative political and economic consequences for bilateral and regional relations.

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 20:36:33 GMT

Cop who stopped Elijah McClain fired over response to photos
One of the white officers who stopped Elijah McClain was fired over photos showing colleagues reenacting the chokehold used on the Black man before he died last year, authorities said Friday. Police stopped McClain as he walked down the street in a ski mask last August for “being suspicious.” Aurora Officer Jason Rosenblatt tried to use a chokehold on the 23-year-old but couldn't because of his position, so another officer did, a report from prosecutors said.

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 19:56:11 GMT

Bounties Uproar Casts a Shadow Over a Rare Trump Foreign Policy Achievement
For a president with few tangible foreign policy accomplishments under his belt, Afghanistan had come to look something like a bright spot.His nuclear talks with North Korea have proved fruitless; his "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran has produced no concessions from Tehran; Palestinians declared his Middle East peace plan dead on arrival; and a trade deal with China looks more unlikely every day.But while President Donald Trump has not achieved his goal of a full U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, he has drawn down thousands of U.S. troops and struck a deal with the Taliban intended to pave the way for a complete exit and an end to the 19-year conflict.Now the uproar over U.S. intelligence showing that Russia paid bounties for the killings of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is renewing focus on a conflict that had drifted to the political back burner and turning what had been a qualified success story for the president into at least a short-term political disaster.What remains to be seen is whether, and how, the episode might affect Trump's future plans. The military recently finished drawing down troops in Afghanistan from about 14,000 last fall to roughly 8,600. That is the minimum level that military commanders say allows them to prevent the Taliban and other radical fighters from overrunning the shaky, U.S.-backed Afghan government in Kabul.But with the November election coming, military officials say they are braced for Trump to announce at any time his intention to pull thousands more troops from the country before then.One person familiar with the president's thinking said he had repeatedly spoken of having all U.S. soldiers out of the country by the end of the year. That prospect may become even more likely now that the United States' continuing presence in Afghanistan has badly stung a president who lost patience with the U.S. mission there long ago but for years has found himself pressured to stay by congressional and military leaders invoking the specter of another attack in the mold of Sept. 11.The debate over what Trump officials knew about the intelligence on Russian bounties and when is "ignoring the bigger picture here," said Dan Caldwell, senior adviser of Concerned Veterans for America, a conservative group that opposes U.S. troop deployments overseas. "The bigger problem," he added, "is that by leaving our troops not only in places like Afghanistan but also in Iraq and Syria, we make it easier for our adversaries like Russia, Iran and nonstate actors like al-Qaida to bleed us on the cheap."Trump has called stories about the bounties "a made up Fake News Media Hoax" and studiously avoided commenting on the substance of the intelligence, including how it could change his policies toward either Russia or Afghanistan. But however willing he may be to overlook or downplay Russian aggression worldwide as he seeks to thaw relations with Moscow, it seems likely that the political grief he has suffered will only fuel his desire to withdraw troops from the country.Trump's patience with the conflict has been steadily waning in recent months, and he was particularly angry after two U.S. soldiers were killed when a member of Afghanistan's security forces opened fire on U.S. troops during a joint patrol in early February. Days later, Trump, who has often remarked on the burden of writing military condolence letters, traveled to Dover Air Force Base to witness the return of the soldiers' remains, a somber nighttime ceremony chillingly punctured by a widow's desperate screams.The recently published book by Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton confirms what has become increasingly obvious. Bolton recounts numerous instances when Trump, making liberal use of expletives, asked his exasperated advisers when he could be finished with the country. "We've got to get out of there," Bolton recalls Trump saying in March 2019.Trump took a key step in that direction Feb. 29, when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and a Taliban leader signed an agreement in Qatar under which the U.S. would begin a phased troop withdrawal in exchange for a halt in Taliban attacks on U.S. forces and the beginning of political talks between the insurgent group and the Afghan government.The signing came just days after officials say intelligence about the Russian bounties appeared in Trump's daily intelligence briefing. Some Trump officials were concerned that the intelligence could jeopardize the Taliban deal. Whether for that reason or others, officials say Trump was not verbally briefed about it at the time.That agreement has been plagued with setbacks, including an unwelcome increase in Taliban attacks on Afghan targets, an exchange of prisoners between the Taliban and the Afghan government that has taken months longer than expected, and an Afghan election with disputed results that paralyzed the country's government.In one sign that Trump is determined to press ahead, Pompeo spoke by video conference Monday with the Taliban's deputy and chief negotiator, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, "to discuss implementation of the U.S.-Taliban agreement," according to a State Department spokeswoman."The secretary made clear the expectation for the Taliban to live up to their commitments, which include not attacking Americans," added the spokeswoman, Morgan Ortagus. (There is no indication that U.S. intelligence has tied Russian bounties to any attacks on Americans since the agreement was signed or that the Taliban's senior leadership was aware of them.)All the while, however, U.S. troops have been on their way out. And while Afghanistan continues to suffer horrific attacks like a May assault on a maternity ward in Kabul, there is little evidence that American voters, whose support for the war has long been waning, feel any less safe."Certainly there's a political resonance for the notion that, after all these years, President Trump will end the war that other presidents were unwilling to end," said Richard Fontaine, chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based policy group.Fontaine cautions against a withdrawal of troops, reminiscent of the U.S. exit from Iraq in 2011, that could allow militants to rampage and terrorists to find safe haven as al-Qaida did in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks.For now, that view has significant support in Congress. On Wednesday, the House Armed Services Committee voted 45-11 to approve a bipartisan amendment to an annual defense authorization bill that would restrict funds for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan below the level of 8,000.One of the amendment's co-sponsors, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the third-ranking House Republican, warned in a statement that "the U.S.-Taliban deal allows for premature troop withdrawal that is not conditions-based."A Senate effort from the opposite perspective met a swift rebuke the same day. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. and one of Congress' leading noninterventionist voices, co-sponsored an amendment with Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan within a year. The Senate voted 60-33 to table the amendment.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 18:57:35 GMT

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