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GOP political consultant Mike Murphy predicts President Trump will be distracted at tonight's debate as a result of reports on his taxes.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 29, 2020 5:23 PM

All nine personnel -- one in the F-35B and eight in the KC-130J tanker -- are accounted for.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 29, 2020 10:02 PM

Singapore Airlines' fleet of Airbus A380s is now turning into a tourist attraction as the pandemic has rendered the long-range jets obsolete.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 30, 2020 5:16 PM

Actress Mack faces prison sentence for role when sentenced later this year

POSTED SEPTEMBER 29, 2020 5:56 PM

The border towns were shaken relentlessly, data shows

POSTED SEPTEMBER 30, 2020 8:50 PM

Hundreds of migrants began walking Wednesday night from this city in northern Honduras toward the Guatemala border, testing a well-trod migration route now in times of the novel coronavirus. Calls for a new migrant caravan to leave from the San Pedro Sula bus station Oct. 1 have been circulating on social media for weeks. The caravan comes just two weeks after Guatemala reopened its borders after keeping them sealed for months to slow the spread of COVID-19.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 30, 2020 11:05 PM

The event where the picture was taken was not a Black Lives Matter protest, USA TODAY found. It was an event in St. Louis involving a statue.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 30, 2020 4:47 PM

Kuwait's emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, architect of the nation's modern foreign policy and mediator in some of the worst crises to grip the Gulf, died on Tuesday at the age of 91.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 29, 2020 3:20 PM

These days, foreign journalists are facing unprecedented challenges in China.A March report from the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC) finds that in 2019, “82% of [foreign] reporters [in China] experienced interference or harassment or violence while reporting. . . . 43% said digital/physical surveillance affected reporting. And 70% reported interviews cancelled due to actions taken by Chinese authorities.” The FCCC also finds that Chinese authorities continue to restrict foreign journalists’ access to certain parts of China, including Xinjiang, where millions of Uighur Muslims languish in internment camps. The most striking finding of the report, however, is that not even a single foreign journalist said working conditions in China had improved from 2018 to 2019.It seems that this state of affairs has only gotten worse in 2020. Just this week, the Washington Post’s Anna Fifield published a story about the difficulties she’d faced as a foreign reporter in China. “Reporting in China increasingly feels like reporting in North Korea,” she tweeted. Beijing has expelled around 17 foreign journalists this year, including 15 Americans, and is threatening to expel more. Chinese authorities also continue to punish some foreign journalists by refusing to renew their visas.In August, Cheng Lei, an Australian citizen of Chinese descent who worked for the state-owned China Global Television Network (CGTN), was detained by Chinese authorities. No charges were filed, and Cheng simply “disappeared.” China's foreign ministry waited until early September to announce that she was suspected of “criminal activity endangering China's national security.” Her family and friends still do not know her whereabouts, and it is unclear if she has any legal representation.The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s announcement of Cheng’s detention came after the Australian government was forced to mount a frantic mission to extricate the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Bill Birtles and the Australian Financial Review’s (AFR) Mike Smith from the country. Both had been questioned by Chinese authorities regarding their dealings with Cheng, and both sought help from the Australian consulate. They were allowed to leave China only after a five-day diplomatic standoff. Birtles’s former boss, the ex-ABC China bureau chief Matthew Carney, recently disclosed the threats and interrogations that he and his family, including his 14-year-old daughter, had to endure from Chinese authorities back in 2018, which eventually led them to leave the country, too.Early this month, a Los Angeles Times reporter was detained by Chinese police in Inner Mongolia while investigating the central government’s push to teach Mongolian children key curriculums in Mandarin rather than Mongolian. Many parents and students have been protesting that effort, which they view as Beijing’s latest attempt to erase their cultural identity. The Times reporter said plainclothes men “took her to a police station, where she was interrogated and separated from her belongings, despite identifying herself as an accredited journalist. She was not allowed to call the U.S. Embassy; one officer grabbed her throat with both hands and pushed her into a cell.”Beijing’s treatment of foreign journalists is appalling. But surprisingly, this wasn’t always the case. In fact, for decades, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) welcomed foreign journalists when it found them to be of use in helping achieve its strategic policy goals.The most famous example of this phenomenon was American journalist Edgar Snow. In the 1930s, Snow visited the CCP’s stronghold in the Chinese countryside and interviewed its leaders, including Mao Zedong. Back then, the People’s Liberation Army was no more than a ragtag bunch of poorly fed, ill-equipped guerrilla fighters. Mao was dismissed by the ruling Nationalist Party as a “bandit,” and he was virtually unknown to the West. Mao recognized the help that Snow could provide in solving that problem. He granted Snow access that was unavailable to any Chinese journalist and charmed the American. Snow, who was somewhat naive and ideologically left-leaning, fell for Mao’s charisma. Mao asked that the texts of Snow’s interviews be translated from English back to Chinese so he could “correct any inaccuracies” prior to the publication, and Snow granted him his wish.The final output was Snow's 1937 book, Red Star Over China, which presented Mao as a great leader who was candid, thoughtful, and funny. It described the goal of the Communist revolution as the creation of a new China that would be egalitarian and democratic. Nowhere did it mention Mao’s brutal purge of a rival faction within the Communist Party, which ended with the arrest of over 100 party members and the execution of more than a dozen. The purge was an early indication of Mao’s ruthlessness in quashing dissent, and there would be many more like it to come.Unfortunately, the inaccurate portrait painted by Snow’s book cast Mao and the Communists in such a positive light that it won them many domestic and international supporters. This, in turn, set a precedent. Recognizing the propaganda value that Snow had provided, Mao invited him back to China several more times over the next three-plus decades. Each time, he manipulated Snow into serving as his mouthpiece for domestic and international audiences.After Mao’s death, a succession of Chinese Communist Party leaders followed the same template, welcoming foreign journalists to China as the regime launched its campaign of economic reform and opened up to the rest of the world. These leaders recognized that they needed the foreign press to tell stories about China, and sure enough, the resulting stories helped attract badly needed foreign investment and tourism to boost the country’s economy.In a country where corruption is rampant and justice is whatever local authorities say it is, many Chinese people have come to believe that the fastest way to get their grievances heard and resolved is through reporting by journalists, especially foreign journalists. As Yuan Yang, the Financial Times’s deputy Beijing bureau chief, has noted, “Sometimes it is not the coverage itself, but the mere appearance of a foreign journalist on the scene, that gets officials to start listening intently to their problems.”Sadly, even that means of getting authorities’ attention is increasingly being closed off by China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, who demands absolute loyalty from all corners of China including the media. Unlike his predecessors, Xi doesn't see foreign media as a friend or a useful tool, but rather as a threat to the narratives advanced by his propaganda and an obstacle to his goal of building a new, China-centric world order. Especially after the coronavirus outbreak, Xi has needed an obedient media to tell a story of Chinese success under his leadership, which has only increased his incentive to keep a tight leash on critical reporting.Xi seems to believe that China is now wealthy, powerful, and resourceful enough that it no longer needs the prestige that foreign media outlets once lent it; state media can tell the stories he wants told both at home and abroad. Since Xi doesn’t see foreign journalists as useful to his own strategic objectives, Chinese authorities have intensified their attacks on foreign journalists. If any informed observer had any remaining doubts about the true nature of the Chinese regime, this crackdown should have dispelled them.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 30, 2020 6:30 AM

Former Hillary Clinton aides, ex-intelligence officials and Senate Democrats are accusing Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe of laundering Russian disinformation before an election after Ratcliffe suggested Clinton attempted to manufacture a scandal about Russian interference in the 2016 election on behalf of President Trump.On Tuesday, Ratcliffe, a loyalist whom Trump placed atop U.S. intelligence in the spring, sent Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) a letter claiming that in late July 2016, U.S. intelligence acquired “insight” into a Russian intelligence analysis. That analysis, Ratcliffe summarized in his letter, claimed that Clinton had a plan to attack Trump by tying him to the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee. Trump, in late July 2016, had publicly called for Russia to purloin Clinton’s emails. And both U.S. intelligence and former special counsel Robert Mueller have since attributed that hack to Russia.None of the subsequent Trump-Russia investigations have verified the claims Ratcliffe published, although top House intelligence-committee Republican Devin Nunes of California has insisted baselessly that Clinton and not Trump colluded with Russia.Ratcliffe stated that the intelligence community “does not know the accuracy of this allegation or to the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.” Though he subsequently insisted that his letter was not itself a disinformation campaign by Russian officials, his move to send the letter, and Graham’s decision to release it, was roundly criticized.“DNI Ratcliffe should be ashamed of his blatant politicization of his position,” said Nick Shapiro, the former CIA deputy chief of staff to John Brennan, who was CIA director in 2016 and whose notes are cited in Ratcliffe’s summary.Trump’s Pick for Intelligence Chief Follows a Slew of QAnon AccountsGraham, who spoke to The Daily Beast on the phone Tuesday evening, said he did not know whether the information presented by Ratcliffe was true and said he was not concerned with releasing the uncorroborated allegations to the public even with the presidential election just 35 days away."There are allegations from the CIA that the Clinton campaign was involved in Russia. I don't know if that is true,” Graham said. “It's not about whether it is true. It's about whether the FBI took [the allegations] seriously. That's the question. I supported the Mueller investigation. I don’t get why you wouldn’t look with the same suspicion with both campaigns. The point is what did they [the FBI] do with the information?"Graham’s post-facto rationalization was just the latest illustration of how uniformly invested Trump allies have become in the narrative that Russian involvement in U.S. politics is either overstated or deliberately fabricated as a means of delegitimizing the president. Now that belief has been adopted at the senior most level of U.S. intelligence, something Democrats and former intelligence officials greeted with alarm.“It's all straight-up Russian disinfo,” said Jesse Lehrich, the foreign-policy spokesperson for the 2016 Clinton campaign.Since the 2016 presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials have paid particularly close attention to the ways in which Russia uses disinformation to sow chaos among Americans. As early as March of 2019, officials in the intelligence apparatus and within the national security community have tracked how Moscow uses proxies, including journalists and Russia-friendly politicians, to propagate conspiracy theories about Biden, his son Hunter, and their dealings in Ukraine.Several internal reports warned of the efforts of Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian parliamentarian, to dig up dirt on the Bidens. Derkach worked closely with Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to do so, and his talking points showed up in Giuliani’s cable appearances on Fox News and One America News throughout 2019 and 2020. Last month, the Treasury Department listed Derkach as a “Russian agent” and for his attempts to meddle in the 2020 election.Despite several warnings from the intelligence communities that Russia is actively trying to denigrate the Biden campaign and interfere in the 2020 election, Democrats now say that Graham and Ratcliffe have themselves engaged in proliferating Russian propaganda. Indeed, both the substance and the timing of the Ratcliffe summary, coming hours before the first presidential debate, drew the ire of former Clinton aides, intelligence veterans and the vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee for politicizing intelligence.“It’s very disturbing to me that 35 days before an election, the director of national intelligence would release unverified Russian rumint,” or rumors-intelligence, said Sen. Mark Warner, the panel’s top Democrat. Politico reported that the Senate intelligence committee, on a bipartisan basis, rejected the allegation Ratcliffe published as false. “I’m very, very proud of the bipartisan work of the intelligence committee [over] three and a half years and five volumes, and that work speaks for itself,” Warner told reporters on Tuesday.Mueller Defends Russia Investigation After Top Aide’s Criticism in Tell-All BookWarner’s Democratic colleague on the panel, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, said Ratcliffe was abusing his power “exactly as I feared he would” shortly before November’s election.“His politicization of intelligence, including through selective releases to political allies, damages the country and undermines the intelligence community he purports to lead,” Wyden said in a Tuesday statement. “Ratcliffe is even willing to rely on unverified Russian information to try to concoct a political scandal, a shocking abdication of his responsibilities to the country.”Ratcliffe’s summary comes two days after Maria Bartiromo reported for Fox News that it was unlikely a Justice Department prosecutor scrutinizing the intelligence agencies’ origins of the Trump-Russia probe was unlikely to bring charges before the election. Attorney General William Barr claimed earlier this month that bringing charges prior to the election was a possibility, despite the long-standing policy of the Department to not announce charges so close to Election Day. Ratcliffe’s statement suggested that Barr concurred with the decision to release the summary, saying Barr “has advised that the disclosure of this information will not interfere with ongoing Department of Justice investigations.”The office of the Director of National Intelligence did not clarify Barr’s role in the Tuesday release of the summary.A former senior intelligence official stopped short of claiming Ratcliffe was laundering Russian disinformation, claiming a lack of familiarity with the underlying intelligence.“This should be taken with an entire shaker of salt unless the actual documents are released,” the ex-intelligence official said. “The selective release of information is getting rather obvious. Fits right in the pattern in the Flynn case, where they are releasing every document that suggests that an individual agent had a concern.”Representatives for the director of national intelligence did not respond when asked if they would release the material undergirding Ratcliffe’s summary.Ratcliffe’s summary alleged that then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama and others on both the alleged Russian intelligence and a claim that Clinton had approved a plan to “vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference from Russian security forces.” That interference remains the assessment of U.S. intelligence.Ratcliffe cited Brennan’s “handwritten notes” as the basis for that heretofore unknown assessment. Clinton’s alleged approval came, per Ratcliffe, on July 26, 2016, the day she accepted the Democratic presidential nomination—an assertion her former campaign staffers found preposterous.“Hillary would never sign-off on manufacturing a scandal the way the alleged Russian intel, as summarized in Brennan's notes, indicate,” said Lehrich, the former Clinton campaign spokesperson. “For one thing, she would've been incensed that anyone would think she needed to cheat to beat Donald Trump.”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.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 29, 2020 8:13 PM