Viewers in both the US and overseas have been responding to the Senate judiciary committee testimonies of Dr Christine Blasey Ford and nominee Brett Kavanaugh, whom she accuses of sexually assaulting her while they were in high school. Kavanaugh denies the allegations.As scenes played out in court voices of survivors who felt moved to recount their stories reached the airways, a moment captured by Jean Hannah Edelstein, who writes for the Guardian that: “We were all Dr Ford on Thursday.”In an emotional exchange captured by live TV cameras ahead of the vote, one sexual assault survivor told senator Jeff Flake: “You’re telling me that my assault doesn’t matter and that you’re going to let people who do these things into power.”We would like to hear from you about how the hearings have made you feel. You can share your thoughts – anonymously if you prefer – using the encrypted form below. Only the Guardian has access to your contributions. One of our journalists may contact you to discuss further.If you’re having trouble using the form, click here. Read terms of service here. In the US, the national sexual assault hotline is 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) and the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). More information can be found on Rainn’s website: https://www.rainn.org. In the UK the Rape Crisis national helpline is 0808 802 9999 and the #5MillionMen national helpline is 0808 800 500. Topics Brett Kavanaugh US supreme court Law (US) callout

“In any regulation, the government of Vietnam always highlights the importance of national security,” Mr. Dang said. The ghosts of wars with China and the West are never far from mind, he said. Huawei may not be officially banned in Vietnam, but officials here go to great lengths to avoid talking about it. Last month, Vietnam’s deputy minister of information and communications, Nguyen Thanh Hung, agreed to an interview with The Times. But when a Times reporter arrived in Hanoi, the Ministry of Information and Communications postponed the interview repeatedly over the course of a week. In the end, no interview took place. The ministry also declined to answer written questions. Mr. Thang, a deputy general director at Viettel, was initially more open when he met a Times reporter at the company’s offices in Hanoi. Viettel has been developing its own software and equipment for many years, Mr. Thang said, and employs 300 engineers in research and development. It has designed and produced its own base stations, which exchange radio signals with cellphones, and its own computer systems for billing customers’ accounts, he said. Most mobile carriers simply buy these things from outside vendors such as Ericsson or Huawei. Mr. Thang said Viettel had deployed around 1,000 self-produced 4G base stations across Vietnam, Cambodia and other countries. But when asked whether Viettel’s aim in developing its own equipment was to help keep its networks secure, Mr. Thang first consulted in Vietnamese with a company communications officer, Le Duc Anh Tuan, who then answered in English.

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — Officials in Kyrgyzstan knew they could no longer put off the decision. An aging plant that provided nearly all the heat and electricity for the country’s capital was on its last legs.As the officials were weighing rival bids to reconstruct the plant, letters arrived at the Kyrgyz Energy Ministry and Foreign Ministry from the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital. They strongly “recommended” a Chinese company called TBEA as the “only executor” for the project, worth hundreds of millions of dollars.It was more than just a recommendation. China was dangling the prospect of a loan to Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian nation of 6.2 million people, but made clear that its favored contractor had to be chosen. Believing they had no option, the Kyrgyz officials selected TBEA, a company with grand ambitions but modest experience in building and repairing power stations.The 2013 decision to choose TBEA over a far more experienced Russian company led to disaster. Last year, soon after the overhaul was completed, the plant broke down, leaving much of Bishkek without heat or electricity in freezing weather.ImageFormer Prime Minister Sapar Isakov of Kyrgyzstan, rear center, and other former officials accused of corruption relating to the power plant contract awarded to the Chinese company TBEA.CreditMaxime Fossat for The New York TimesThe public outcry and a trial underway in Bishkek have exposed Chinese business practices and local corruption to months of intense scrutiny from Kyrgyzstan’s boisterous news media and elected politicians. The scandal also highlights a tectonic shift underway in the economics and geopolitics of Central Asia, a vast, resource-rich expanse of desert, steppe and mountains that Russia has viewed as its turf for centuries.Fierce rivals during the Soviet era who fought a dangerous border conflict in 1969, Russia and China settled into something of a cold peace in subsequent decades. Lately, though, the two nations have made a great show of drawing together strategically and commercially, a relationship fueled primarily by tensions with the United States and its Western allies.China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and the man he recently described as his “best friend,” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, last month traded smiles and gibes about the United States during trips to Central Asia. They both attended a meeting in Kyrgyzstan of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a group of regional states established by China, and then met again in neighboring Tajikistan, where Mr. Putin gave the Chinese leader a birthday gift of ice cream.Despite the growing ties, however, a deep-seated rivalry remains between the two former adversaries, one that this case exposes.ImageA housing complex in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. The outcry over the power plant fiasco has exposed Chinese business practices and local corruption to months of intense scrutiny from Kyrgyz lawmakers and news media.CreditMaxime Fossat for The New York Times“There is a big hidden fight going on between Russia and China for influence in Central Asia,” said Rasul Umbetaliev, a former Kyrgyz official and energy expert. Russia has more support from a Kyrgyz population that often speaks Russian and looks to Moscow as a place to work or study, he said, but “the Russians don’t have any money.”The power of Chinese cash is at the center of the trial in Bishkek of a former Kyrgyz prime minister, Sapar Isakov, and other former officials accused of corruption relating to the TBEA contract. Prosecutors say rigged bidding and inflated pricing will cost Kyrgyzstan $111 million.Mr. Isakov denies that there was anything untoward about the contract, and says that neither he nor any other Kyrgyz official selected TBEA. The choice was made “by the government of the P.R.C.,” meaning the People’s Republic of China, he said in a recent statement issued from jail. That was China’s right, “since it financed the modernization project,” he said.The statement offered a rare insider’s acknowledgment that China, with the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, can tilt the business playing field abroad to serve its interests no matter what local residents think or rivals offer.A commission created by the Kyrgyz Parliament found widespread irregularities in the awarding and execution of the contract. TBEA was not chosen after an open, competitive tender, but through a closed-door review of bids submitted by a few companies that had somehow learned a contract was available.Iskhak Masaliev, an opposition lawmaker on the parliamentary commission, says he believes that TBEA’s Russian rival, Inter RAO, never stood a chance. “The whole project smelled bad from the start, but if there had not been an accident, nobody would have noticed,” he said.Xiao Qinghua, China’s former ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, told the Kyrgyz news media that TBEA had been selected because it was an “authoritative” company with a “good global reputation.” He declined to comment on the findings of the Kyrgyz investigations.“We do not interfere with them,” he said. “We respect the sovereignty of Kyrgyzstan.” TBEA’s head office in China did not respond to repeated requests for comment.ImageA sign over a highway in Kyrgyzstan promoting friendship and economic cooperation between the country and China.CreditMaxime Fossat for The New York TimesThe power plant fiasco, the persistent troubles of a Chinese-funded refinery and Kyrgyz anger over China’s oppression of the Uighurs, a fellow Turkic Muslim people, have curbed Beijing’s ambitions somewhat, at least temporarily.But Russia has struggled to compete in what has become a new version of the so-called Great Game, the 19th-century struggle over Central Asia between Russia and Britain. Citing Russia’s “unfavorable economic situation” and inability to provide promised funding, Kyrgyzstan in 2016 scrapped an agreement to allow Russian companies to build a series of dams and hydroelectric plants in the north of the country.Russia still has large reserves of good will in the former Soviet republics, and it remains the region’s dominant security player. On a visit to Kyrgyzstan in March, Mr. Putin secured an agreement to expand an air base that Russian military forces have used since the Soviet era.But when it comes to building roads, refineries and power lines, China has left Russia far behind.Central Asia is a crucial part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the signature policy of Mr. Xi, who announced the gigantic infrastructure program on a visit to Kazakhstan in September 2013. Days later, Mr. Xi traveled to neighboring Kyrgyzstan and told officials in Bishkek that the Export-Import Bank of China could finance the reconstruction of the capital’s aging heating and electricity plant.ImagePolice officers outside the court room where Mr. Isakov was being tried.CreditMaxime Fossat for The New York TimesThe bank’s loans to Kyrgyzstan, just $9 million in 2008, have ballooned to more than $1.7 billion. Some estimates put the value of infrastructure projects financed by China at $2.2 billion, almost a third of the value of Kyrgyzstan’s annual economic output.Mr. Xi’s intervention turned the Bishkek power plant into an early test of Belt and Road. Anxious that Kyrgyz officials were not moving faster, the Chinese Embassy prodded them in November 2013 to get the project started, repeating the insistence that TBEA do the work and stressing that “this is the final position of the Chinese side.”The loan offer, the embassy said in a letter to the Kyrgyz Ministry of Energy and Industry, “was one of the fundamental results of the first visit by the head of the Chinese state and gave important meaning to the development of an energy project so significant for the Kyrgyz economy.”Construction started shortly afterward.Nurlan Omurkul, who was chief of the plant, said that he had harbored strong doubts about hiring a company with no track record of building power stations, but that he had been badgered by senior Kyrgyz officials to endorse a decision that he said had obviously already been made.ImageNurlan Omurkul, rear center, who was chief of the plant, said that he had harbored strong doubts about hiring a company with no track record of building power stations.CreditMaxime Fossat for The New York Times“They just kept saying, ‘Agree, agree, agree,’ ” he said.Mr. Omurkul was fired after the breakdown last year, charged with negligence and sentenced this year to four years in prison. In an interview before his conviction, he said the case against him and other technical experts had been a smoke screen to hide corruption by senior officials.“I’ve worked my whole life in power and heating plants and knew all along that the Chinese price of $386 million was too expensive,” he said. Kyrgyzstan will pay about $470 million over 20 years, including interest and fees.Another Chinese company, China Machinery Engineering Corporation, offered a lower bid, $356 million, the parliamentary commission said in its report. But the Chinese Embassy insisted that its offer be dismissed. It is not clear why Chinese diplomats took sides so forcefully, but TBEA is based in Xinjiang, the Western region whose economic development is a priority for Beijing.The losing Russian bidder, Inter RAO, bid $518 million, but for very different terms. Rather than require Kyrgyzstan to borrow, the Russian company offered to invest its own money to build an entirely new plant in return for partial ownership and a share of future revenue.ImageA bus stop marked by rocks on an unfinished highway in Kyrgyzstan that was supposed to have been built by a Chinese company.CreditMaxime Fossat for The New York TimesThe minutes of government meetings about the project show that some Kyrgyz experts favored the Russian proposal, while others favored the cheaper Chinese option. But those views made no headway against the Chinese Embassy’s unequivocal support for TBEA.Mr. Omurkul, the fired plant director, said he began to fathom why TBEA’s price was so high after he started receiving reports listing items like $1,600 for fire extinguishers, $320 for pliers and tens of millions of dollars in unspecified consulting fees.“It was obscene,” he said. “We were all in shock.”Mr. Masaliev, the lawmaker on the parliamentary investigating commission, said that for all the strong-arm tactics of the Chinese, he believes it was Kyrgyz officials who were siphoning money off the project.The son of a senior Communist Party official during the Soviet era, Mr. Masaliev has known and worked with Russians for decades. But China, about which he knows little except that it has a lot of money and people, makes him nervous.“Of course we are afraid,” he said. “A small Chinese town has more people in it than our entire population.”

Most major market groups posted decreases in April. The production of consumer goods fell 1.2 percent, with declines for both durables and nondurables. The index for durable consumer goods moved down 0.8 percent, mostly because of a drop in the output of automotive products, while the output of nondurables was held down by sizable declines for both chemical products and consumer energy products. Production decreased for business equipment, construction supplies, and business supplies, but output advanced for defense and space equipment and for materials. Among the components of materials, a drop for durables was more than offset by gains for nondurable and energy materials.

The embattled Chinese telecom giant Huawei has unveiled plans to deploy high-speed wireless internet to dozens of underserved communities in Canada’s remote northern regions.The move – mostly 4G deployments and not the superfast fifth-generation or 5G – comes with Huawei under sanctions in the United States over national security concerns and amid a diplomatic crisis between Canada and China over the detention of a Huawei executive in Vancouver.On Monday, Huawei said it would partner with Ice Wireless and Iristel to help them connect by 2025 rural communities in the Arctic as well as remote areas of north-eastern Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador.Huawei added that some 25 communities in the largely Inuit areas of the Nunavut territory would also benefit from the deployment.“We strongly believe that everyone should be connected to 4G LTE, no matter where they live in Canada – even in areas where high-speed service may not be economically viable,” said Eric Li, president of Huawei Canada.Although most Canadians have access to high-speed internet, connectivity remains unavailable across some sparsely populated areas of the country.Huawei officials said they will work to deploy wireless internet that will operate in some of the coldest temperatures on earth.“We need to use highly reliable, world-class equipment to minimize physical intervention and to avoid outages that risk making our communities isolated once again. That’s why we partner with Huawei Canada,” said Jean-François Dumoulin, vice-president at Ice Wireless and Iristel.The move comes with Washington pressuring its allies to avoid using Huawei for deployment of 5G wireless, claiming the Chinese firm’s ties to Beijing and its intelligence services could pose security risks.Meanwhile tensions have been high between Beijing and Ottawa since the arrest in December of Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, in Canada at the request of Washington.US authorities want to put her on trial on fraud charges for allegedly violating Iran sanctions and lying about it to US banks – accusations that Meng’s lawyers dispute.Since then, two Canadians have been arrested in China in what has been viewed as retaliation for Meng’s detention. Topics Huawei Canada China Americas news

MORRISTOWN, N.J. (Reuters) - Hong Kong’s freedoms of assembly and expression should be protected, a senior U.S. official said on Tuesday, after protesters opposed to China’s growing influence in the former British colony clashed with police. “Freedoms of expression and assembly are core values that we share with the people of Hong Kong and these freedoms should be protected,” said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Reporting by Jeff Mason; Writing by Eric Beech; Editing by Mohammad ZarghamOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

BERLIN (Reuters) - German industrial output fell more than expected in June driven by weaker production of intermediate and capital goods, in a further sign that Europe’s biggest economy contracted in the second quarter as exporters get caught in trade disputes. FILE PHOTO: Steel rolls are pictured at the plant of German steel company Salzgitter AG in Salzgitter, Germany March 5, 2019. REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer/File PhotoIndustrial output dropped by 1.5% on the month - a far steeper decline than the 0.4% fall forecast in a Reuters Poll of analysts, figures released by the Statistics Office showed on Wednesday. “The continued plunge in production is scary,” Bankhaus Lampe economist Alexander Krueger said, adding that a recession in the manufacturing sector was likely to continue due to the escalating trade dispute between China and the United States. Both countries are important export destinations for German manufacturers, which means that the tit-for-tat tariff dispute between the world’s two largest economies is having a disproportionately large impact on German goods producers. “The longer this continues, the more likely it is that other sectors of the economy will be dragged into this. Growth forecasts for Germany are likely to be trimmed further,” Krueger said. In the second quarter as a whole, industrial output fell by 1.8% on the quarter, driven by steep drops in metal production, machinery and automobile manufacturing, the economy ministry said. “Industry remains in an economic downturn,” the ministry said. Production in construction fell 1.1% in the second quarter while energy output dropped 5.9% in the same period. The figures came after German industrial orders on Tuesday exceeded expectations in June, but the economy ministry cautioned that the sector had not yet reached a turning point as a slowing world economy, international trade disputes and Brexit uncertainty are taking their toll. Commerzbank economist Ralph Solveen said the industrial figures supported expectations that the German economy shrank slightly in the second quarter and that manufacturing output was likely to decline also in the coming months. “A look at the individual sectors shows that the crisis in the automotive sector is continuing unabated,” Solveen said, adding that car production had not recovered from the slump caused by problems associated with last year’s switch to a new emissions measurement standard. “However, the main reason for this weakness is now likely to be significantly weaker foreign demand,” Solveen said. The German government expects the economy to grow by a meager 0.5% this year and rebound with a 1.5% expansion in 2020. Andreas Scheuerle from DekaBank said the industrial data suggested the economy contracted by 0.2% in the second quarter after expanding by 0.4% in the first three months of the year. “We assume that this is the prelude to a technical recession,” Scheuerle added. A technical recession is normally defined as at least two quarters of contraction in a row. The Federal Statistics Office will release preliminary gross domestic product figures for the April-June period next Wednesday. Reporting by Michael Nienaber; Editing by Raissa KasolowskyOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

“Today’s healthy job numbers have exceeded market expectations and show renewed momentum following last month’s weak performance, which should be enough to calm fears of a near-term recession.“Nonetheless, investors still face uncertainty around slowing global economic growth and an ongoing U.S.-China trade war, despite assurances at the G20 that talks would resume. Economic data has yet to reflect a significant impact from trade concerns, but that’s unlikely to last if the stalemate drags on, or another round of tariffs is imposed.“Equity markets may have breathed a sigh of relief for now, but this is by no means the end of the trade war drama. A highly anticipated interest rate cut later this month could result in a welcome spike in borrowing and business investment, but the burning question is whether the Fed has sufficient ammunition to offset a slowdown, if and when it arrives.”

On Wednesday’s Full Frontal, Samantha Bee did not mince her words, laying into the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose sexist and racist comments on women and Muslims resurfaced over the weekend.The audio clips, from a radio show Carlson used to call frequently hosted by Bubba the Love Sponge, capture Carlson saying such niceties as: “I love women but they’re extremely primitive. They’re basic.”“Ugh, that is vile and disgusting,” Bee commented. “And presumably the audition tape that got him a show at Fox.”Bee then turned to more telling comments from Carlson, such as his 2006 wish that a presidential candidate would promise to kill “lunatic Muslims” and his 2008 description of Iraq as a “crappy place filled with a bunch of you know, semi-literate, primitive monkeys”.“Oh my God, Tucker Carlson publicly advocated a genocide while promoting his MSNBC show?” Bee mock-exclaimed. “To quote Tucker Carlson’s face: huh?”Carlson responded to the controversy with “all the grace and humility you’d expect”, Bee deadpanned. “If you want to know what I think, you can watch” his show, he said in a non-apology statement.Bee took him up on the challenge: “We have been watching your show and we found that it’s a revolting trash heap of racist talking points.“Don’t get me wrong,” she said, “I’m not saying Tucker Carlson is a white supremacist – oh no, I’m sorry, yes I am.”Bee then turned to more recent examples of Carlson’s race-baiting, such as when he bemoaned how immigrants make America “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided”, accused Latin American countries of “forcing demographic change” and said nobody cares about Americans (“It’s like shut up, you’re dying, we’re going to replace you”).“Oh, that’s weird, where have I heard sweaty white men yelling about being replaced before?” Bee mused over a picture of white supremacists from the 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville.Many of Carlson’s defenders say you can’t fault someone for their fans, including the former KKK grand wizard David Duke, “which is kind of true”, Bee conceded. “If you own a restaurant that neo-Nazis go to, that doesn’t make you a white supremacist. But if neo-Nazis go there because you make the soup spell racist tropes, then yeah, you might be a white supremacist.”On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert recapped a double whammy of bad news for the former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort. On Wednesday, Manafort faced a second round of sentencing for fraud and conspiracy; whether the new sentence would run concurrently or consecutively to his previously determined 47 months was up to the judge.“Now it might sound impossible to serve two sentences at the same time,” Colbert commented, “but I think Manafort’s up to it, because he’s served two countries at the same time.”All told, Manafort faces seven and a half years in prison. “So someday, Manafort’s going to have to walk up to the biggest guy in the yard and say, ‘Mr President, can I have a pardon?’” Colbert joked.Even worse for Manafort, just minutes after his sentencing, Manhattan’s district attorney “said, ‘hold my beer,’” and indicted Manafort for 16 crimes – in a jurisdiction in which Trump does not have the power to pardon him.On The Daily Show, Trevor Noah unpacked the still-hot college admissions scam, in which wealthy parents, including actors Felicity Huffman and Lori Laughlin, paid thousands of dollars in bribes to get their children into select universities.The scheme implicated several athletic coaches who accepted kids as recruited athletes for sports they didn’t even play.It’s an “insane” scheme, Noah said, adding that “the perfect punishment for these coaches would be forcing them to compete with a team full of all the fake athletes that they recruited. And then on top of that, we say that they have to win the championship or all of them go to jail.“It would be like a really uninspiring Disney movie,” he said over a mock-up poster for his remake of the Mighty Ducks. “The Mighty Dicks.”Of course, these parents probably wanted the best for their kids, Noah said, but he didn’t feel bad for them; according to the criminal complaint, many of the parents wrote off their bribes as tax-deductible donations to charity.“They just added a bonus crime to the crime that they already committed,” Noah said of the fake donations, also known as tax fraud. “That was not necessary – that’s like you’re robbing the bank and on the way out you start robbing the pens.”Noah did admit to feeling bad for their kids, many of whom didn’t know about the fraud behind their college acceptance. The exposure, Noah concluded, is “such a shitty way to find out that your parents think you’re a dumbass”. Topics Late-night TV roundup Samantha Bee Stephen Colbert Trevor Noah TV comedy Comedy US television news

A Fox Nation host has said that the US has been invaded by a “rampaging horde of illegal aliens” less than two weeks after 22 people were killed in a Hispanic-targeting attack in El Paso, Texas.The comments were first noted by media watchdog Media Matters’ Jason Campbell. They repeat a pattern of extreme rhetoric coming from the Rupert Murdoch-owned media property and come during a national debate over the role of racist language from politicians and media figures in spurring violence and prejudice against immigrants.Todd Starnes, who hosts a show on Fox News’ subscription streaming service spin-off Fox Nation, told viewers Wednesday night: “I do believe that we have been invaded by a horde. A rampaging horde of illegal aliens. This has been a slow-moving invasion.”But Starnes took the invasion analogy further and reached for the Third Reich.“When you go back in time and when you look at what an invasion is,” he declared. “Whether it is the Nazis invading France and western Europe. I mean, whether the Muslims were invading a country back in the early years. It was an invasion.”According to Media Matters, Fox News’ reported or commented on a “migrant invasion” 70 times in the eight months leading up the the El Paso shooting and showed a clip of Donald Trump calling the surge of migrants an invasion at least 55 times.Last week, Tucker Carlson provoked an outcry and caused at least one advertiser to suspend support for his show after he described the issue of US white supremacy as a “hoax”.“It’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power,” Carlson said. Topics Fox News US immigration Nazism news

France has opened an investigation into the disappearance of Meng Hongwei, the Chinese head of the international police agency Interpol.His family have not heard from him since he left Interpol HQ in the French city of Lyon for a trip back to China on 25 September, officials said."He did not disappear in France," a source close to the inquiry told AFP.The South China Morning Post quotes a source as saying Mr Meng, 64, was "taken away" for questioning in China.It is not clear why he was being investigated by "discipline authorities" or where he was being held, the Hong Kong-based newspaper adds.Chinese official to head InterpolOfficials in China have so far made no public comments on Mr Meng, a senior Communist Party official there.It was opened after Mr Meng's wife went to police to report her husband missing.She was initially quoted by police sources as saying she has not heard from him since his departure on 29 September.But the French interior ministry later said the correct date was 25 September."Exchanges with Chinese authorities continue," the ministry said. "France is puzzled about the situation of Interpol's president and concerned about the threats made to his wife."It did not provide any further details.Analysis by BBC Asia Editor Celia HattonMeng Hongwei's disappearance seems to fit in with a now familiar pattern among China's senior Communist Party officials. The official in question suddenly drops out of the public eye and an alarm is raised that the person is "missing", usually by members of the public.Eventually, the party issues a terse statement that the official is "under investigation", the official is then booted from the party for "disciplinary infractions" and - eventually - a prison sentence is announced. Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, well over a million party officials have been disciplined in some way. Mr Meng's case is notable for a few reasons. First, his wife notified the French authorities after he had only been missing for a few days. Family members of missing party officials rarely, if ever, reach out to foreign authorities, in fear their relatives will face ever greater punishment. Did the wife do this because she felt there was no other option? Also, at one time, China prized Mr Meng's lofty position at Interpol. If he has really gone missing within the Chinese state apparatus, whom did he anger, or what could he have done for Beijing to willingly, and publicly, forfeit the top job at Interpol?In a statement, the organisation said it was aware of reports of the "alleged disappearance" of Mr Meng."This is a matter for the relevant authorities in both France and China," it said.Interpol added that the secretary general - not the president - was in charge of the day-to-day running of the 192-member organisation.As president, Mr Meng leads the Executive Committee, which provides the overall guidance and direction to Interpol. Mr Meng's term is scheduled to run until 2020.Before taking over at Interpol, Meng Hongwei was deputy minister in charge of public security in China.After his election human rights groups expressed concern that the move could help China pursue political dissidents who have fled the country. Elected as Interpol's president in November 2016 Scheduled to serve until 2020 Is a senior Communist Party official in China and has served as Chinese vice-minister of public security Has 40 years of experience in criminal justice and policing Mr Meng said at the time that he was ready to do "everything he could towards the cause of policing in the world".Mr Meng has 40 years of experience in criminal justice and policing in China, notably in the fields of drugs, counter-terrorism and border control, according to Interpol.Interpol can issue a red notice - an international alert - for a wanted person.But it does not have the power to send officers into countries to arrest individuals or issue arrest warrants.

A Skadden Arps team led by Gregory B. Craig, a former White House counsel for President Barack Obama, produced a report concluding that, while the trial violated some of Ms. Tymoshenko’s rights, her conviction was supported by the evidence presented at trial. And the report found no evidence that the prosecution was politically motivated.Mr. Craig, who maintained deep connections to Washington’s Democratic establishment and its press corps, worked to shape the public relations strategy for the release of the report, according to a Justice Department filing released with the settlement.The filing, which identifies Mr. Craig as “Partner 1” but does not name him, indicates that he arranged for a journalist to receive a copy of the report, then discussed the report with that journalist. The journalist, who is not named in the filing, is David E. Sanger of The New York Times, which published an article in December 2012 about the report quoting Mr. Craig.Mr. Craig and Skadden Arps should have disclosed that activity under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, known as FARA, which covers both lobbying and public relations on behalf of foreign political interests, the Justice Department said. But Mr. Craig misled both his colleagues at Skadden Arps and officials in the Justice Department’s FARA unit about his interactions with the news media, leading the Justice Department to conclude that the firm was not obligated to register under the act, the settlement filing said.The settlement “puts law firms on notice that they can’t hide behind their identity as lawyers. If they are doing lobbying work on behalf of foreign countries, they need to register under FARA,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School who specializes in legal ethics. “It also shows that the government will not tolerate false statements by lawyers.”Skadden Arps said in a statement that it had “learned much from this incident” and was “taking steps to prevent anything similar from happening again.”Mr. Craig’s lawyer declined to comment.The investigation that led to the settlement with Skadden Arps was handled by the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, which includes the FARA unit. But federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, to which Mr. Mueller’s team referred illegal lobbying cases, asked witnesses about Mr. Craig’s involvement in Mr. Manafort’s work as recently as last month, according to people familiar with the case.

PARIS (Reuters) - France is puzzled by the disappearance of Interpol president Meng Hongwei, reported missing after traveling from the country to his native China, and is concerned about threats received by his wife, the Interior Ministry said on Friday. “Exchanges with Chinese authorities continue,” the ministry said in a statement. “France is puzzled about the situation of Interpol’s president and concerned about the threats made to his wife.” Meng’s family have not heard from him since Sept. 25, the ministry added, earlier than the Sept. 29 date police sources had previously reported. His wife, who contacted police in Lyon, the French city where the international police agency is based, had also said she had received threats by phone and on social media, according to the ministry. (Fixes Meng Hongwei’s name on second reference.) Reporting by Simon Carraud, Writing by Sarah White; Editing by Richard BalmforthOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

China has cut off all cooperation with France on police affairs, after Paris gave asylum to the Chinese wife of a former Interpol chief now in jail on corruption charges, the French newspaper Le Monde reported.Chinese authorities told a diplomat in Beijing in late July that a decision had been made to halt all cooperation after Grace Meng was awarded political asylum in May, the newspaper reported.Increasingly assertive internationally, Beijing has made the decision to suspend a key aspect of the diplomatic and security relationship with Paris at a time when it is already in the global spotlight over protests in Hong Kong and an escalating trade dispute with the US.Meng first hit headlines last year, when she decided to go public about her husband’s sudden disappearance during a trip home to China in September.Interpol had not been given any information about the whereabouts of Meng Hongwei, who had been elected president of the body in 2016, leading to the bizarre spectacle of the global police body pleading with China for information about its chief.In October, under international pressure, China finally admitted that Hongwei had been detained. He was not seen in public again until June, when he appeared in court in the north-eastern port city of Tianjin, confessed to accepting more than $2m in bribes and expressed regret for his crime, a court statement said.A confession assures a conviction but it was not immediately clear when a verdict and sentence would be handed down. Confessions in corruption cases, often televised, have become a hallmark of President Xi Jinping’s rule; he has put a very public crackdown on official graft at the heart of his rule.Chinese authorities reportedly also wanted to charge Grace Meng, Le Monde said, but she stayed in France, where she has been given police protection, and sought asylum. Grace says she fears personal retaliation from Chinese authorities, and in spring France opened a judicial inquiry into an alleged kidnapping attempt.The end of police cooperation is likely to complicate Chinese efforts to seek fugitives in France, Le Monde said. For Paris, it will complicate efforts to track down up to €500m stolen by fraudsters and sent by bank transfer to China.It will also undermine work to protect intellectual property rights in China, where, despite decades of pressure from western governments, counterfeiting is still rampant. Topics China France Asia Pacific Europe news

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal judge dealt President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort a major blow on Tuesday by refusing to dismiss criminal charges brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, after Manafort claimed that Mueller’s probe has run amok and should be reined in. Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort leaves a U.S. District Court after attending a motions hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S. April 19, 2018. REUTERS/Carlos BarriaIn a sharp rebuke of those claims, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had followed all the Justice Department’s rules when he hired Mueller and Mueller’s case against Manafort is not overly broad or improper. Rosenstein “expressly approved the Special Counsel’s investigation of the facts alleged in the indictment, so there has been no violation of the regulations, and the Special Counsel did not act without authority,” wrote Jackson, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama. In response to the ruling, Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said: “Paul Manafort maintains his innocence and looks forward to prevailing in this matter.” A spokesman for the Special Counsel declined to comment. Manafort, who performed lobbying work for a pro-Russian former Ukrainian president before serving as Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016, is facing two indictments brought by Mueller in federal courts in Washington and Alexandria, Virginia. The charges against him in the Washington case include conspiring to launder money, conspiring to defraud the United States and failing to register as a foreign agent. In Virginia, he faces charges that include bank fraud and filing false tax returns. He has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges, none of which are directly related to work he performed for Trump’s campaign. In both criminal cases, Manafort has asked the courts to dismiss the charges on the grounds that Rosenstein’s May 17, 2017 appointment order hiring Mueller runs afoul of Justice Department rules on special counsels. He has also argued that Mueller’s case against him has nothing to do with Russian interference in 2016 election, and that the probe by the FBI into his Ukraine dealings predates the Russia probe. Trump has denied that his campaign colluded with Russia and called the probe that has dogged his presidency a “witch hunt.” Jackson was not moved by any of Manafort’s assertions. “Manafort was, at one time, not merely ‘associated with,’ but the chairman of, the Presidential campaign, and his work on behalf of the Russia-backed Ukrainian political party and connections to other Russian figures are matters of public record,” she wrote, adding that it was “logical” for investigators to probe Manafort’s dealings. Her ruling also pointed to an August 2017 memo by Rosenstein that further detailed the scope of the probe. That memo explicitly gave Mueller authority to probe all of Manafort’s Ukraine-related work predating the 2016 campaign. Republicans in the House of Representatives who are critical of the Mueller probe have pressed the Justice Department in recent months to provide them with an unredacted copy of the August memo. The ruling marks a setback for Manafort, who last month was buoyed when the judge in the Alexandria case aggressively questioned prosecutors about whether their case was overly broad and mused that he believed they were using the charges to get Manafort to turn over dirt on Trump. That judge, T.S. Ellis III for the Eastern District of Virginia, has yet to rule on whether to dismiss the charges against Manafort. Ellis, who was appointed to the bench by Republican President Ronald Reagan, has also said he too wants to see an unredacted copy before he can fully form a decision on whether to dismiss the charges. He told prosecutors to turn over a copy to him by Friday. Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; editing by Tom Brown and Cynthia OstermanOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

As she spoke to CNN, keeping her face hidden throughout the interview, her mobile phone rang three times. She said the Chinese consulate had been calling incessantly, but that she refused to meet them alone and would only do so with the media and a lawyer present.Grace Meng's husband had served as Interpol's president for two years when he took a flight to Beijing in late September and vanished. Beijing announced in recent days that he was being held on suspicion of corruption. Chinese authorities have not given details of specific allegations.When CNN asked Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang about the alleged threats and consulate phone calls at a press conference Wednesday, he said he had no knowledge of them. "If she's a Chinese citizen, then being contacted by the Chinese embassy or consulate sounds like something that any government would do to their citizens," he told reporters.Grace Meng now says she has no idea whether she will see Meng Hongwei again. "I miss him very much. That's why I always wake up at night."During Xi Jinping's six-year presidency, more than a million officials are estimated to have been punished in a widespread crackdown on corruption, many of them mysteriously disappearing for days as Chinese officials question them.Grace Meng spoke to journalists at a press conference on Sunday.Critics suggest that the campaign is a tool for Xi to remove political opponents and cement his power.Grace Meng defended her husband as an innocent man and criticized the Chinese government for the disappearances and lack of transparency over the detentions. "He is a person of integrity, he strictly abides to the law, and he has worked all his life to help build a society based on rule of law."When asked why she was speaking out, she said: "For all of China's children, for all of the China's wives, for all of ... China's daddy, mommy."She said that Meng Hongwei had been worried that authorities would come after him, having seen so many people vanish without explanation.Grace Meng told of how many elderly Chinese people had lost their adult children in the disappearances, never finding out what happened to them."They died but can't see their children, their son, their daughter -- they're lost. You can imagine. I have this responsibility to help the other people."

In the US, September 2018 will likely be remembered as the month of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, where America learned that the controversial federal judge likes beer and is inclined to tears.“I was surprised at how vocal he was about the fact that he liked beer,” US president Donald Trump admitted about his Supreme Court nominee at a White House press conference on Oct. 1. But, the president said, “I think [he] spoke very conclusively and very well.”Trump was referring to Kavanaugh’s testimony on Sept. 27, in a second round of hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, after he was accused of sexually assaulting professor Christine Blasey Ford while the two were in high school. In the initial hearings, starting on Sept. 4, the judge appeared collegial and calm and promised to be a neutral arbiter, apolitical and loyal to the Constitution above all else. The later hearing revealed a very different man, however, despite Trump’s approval of the performance.Putting the veracity of Blasey Ford’s accusations against the judge aside momentarily, Kavanaugh’s emotional testimony raised questions about whether he has the right temperament to be a judge on the highest court in the land. Georgetown Law professor Victoria Nourse, who was chief counsel to Joe Biden when he was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and a contributor to the Federalist Society, which is widely respected among conservatives, says that Kavanaugh’s erratic display last week indicates that he lacks the character of a Supreme Court justice. “Judges do not yell, scream, or cry,” Nourse says. “Compare, if you will, justice Thomas’s performance, decades earlier. There was emotion, but far less histrionic behavior.”Judging is not an easy job and it requires special qualities that are difficult to quantify, among them “[o]pen-mindedness, not taking oneself too seriously, wit, self-awareness, humility, being a generous and respectful colleague, and being willing to work at getting it right,” Sixth Circuit Court judge Jeffrey S. Sutton wrote in a 2010 Michigan Law Review article. Those qualities add up to what we might call temperament, and “[t]emperament, perhaps most critically, affects how judges decide cases,” Sutton wrote.The American Bar Association (ABA) says its committee on the federal judiciary evaluates judicial temperament by considering a nominee’s “compassion, decisiveness, open-mindedness, courtesy, patience, freedom from bias, and commitment to equal justice under the law.” Because these qualities are hard to measure, suitable temperament can seem like a mysterious and elusive quality, more a gut feeling than anything else. Some argue that it’s a kind of smokescreen, code for whether or not a person is popular rather than qualified. As Vanderbilt University law and medicine professor Terry Maroney points out in the introduction to a 2018 article posted on the University of California-Berkeley law school site (pdf), “Judicial temperament is simultaneously the thing we think all judges must have and the thing that no one can quite put a finger on.”She notes that when justice Louis Brandeis was nominated to the high court in 1916, his temperament was widely criticized by prominent lawyers. Given the respect his work garnered later, however, Maroney argues that the attacks on temperament were most likely just a cover for anti-Semitism and had little to do with the judge’s fitness for the bench.Maroney writes that the proper temperament “generally is thought to manifest in consistent exercises of patience, level-headedness in challenging moments, treating people with courtesy, projecting a dignified demeanor, and being a respectful colleague.” She contends that empathy and impulse-regulation are important, and that “a tendency to be quick to both feel and act out of anger” indicates that a prospective judge doesn’t have what it takes. After Kavanaugh testified for the second time, Democratic senators argued that the nominee didn’t display the proper temperament for the job he seeks. Kavanaugh’s opening statement was emotional and outraged and showed he did indeed harbor partisan sentiment, despite assurances in earlier testimony that he would not be a political justice.On Sept. 28, Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said confirming Kavanaugh “will be a disaster for the court.” He argued that Kavanaugh’s “partisan screed” was “telling,” and characterized his testimony as not credible. And California senator Dianne Feinstein declared that Kavanaugh displayed a temperament unbefitting a Supreme Court justice.Meanwhile, many others who watched his testimony—including the president and Republican senators like Arizona’s Jeff Flake, who crossed party lines to call for a week-long FBI investigation into the allegations against Kavanaugh—thought the judge was justified in showing much emotion.Of course, any accusation, especially if false, will make a person defensive. Indeed many of us, under as much pressure as Kavanaugh was facing last week, would crack, responding to the charges with alternating episodes of rage and despair. But most of us are not up for the most prestigious law job in the United States. As professor Nourse says, “I don’t begrudge anyone showing emotion when they have been unfairly accused, but judges are supposed to be able to do things the ordinary person is not capable of doing. The ordinary person can let his emotions fly; judges are held to a higher standard. They must be able to stand above the emotions and the politics of the day.”Doubts about Kavanaugh’s character have been raised in the past. As Heather Timmons wrote in Quartz before he was nominated, Kavanaugh’s colleagues called him “sanctimonious” and criticized his ability to be fair and balanced. In 2006, the ABA’s committee on the federal judiciary downgraded his 2003 rating of “well-qualified” to just “qualified,” noting that legal practitioners complained he was difficult and “dissembled” in his representations in court. The ABA’s assessment was criticized at the time by the Bush White House; in 2006, Kavanaugh was confirmed by the US Senate to the DC Appeals Court by a vote of 57-36, putting him on track for his nomination 12 years later to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Meng has already become one of the most spectacular examples of how Mr. Xi’s drive for control offers little safety for officials, even for senior representatives of global organizations.Mr. Meng’s appointment, like his detention, almost certainly had the approval of Mr. Xi himself. The Ministry of Public Security is one of the pillars of Communist Party control, and corruption at its top also carries the odor of political betrayal.Mr. Zhao, the minister of public security, hinted at the meeting on Monday that Mr. Meng’s misdeeds were part of the “toxic residues” left by Zhou Yongkang, the once-powerful, grim-faced former chief of domestic security who was imprisoned for life on corruption charges in 2015.Mr. Meng’s downfall is “entirely the outcome of his sticking to his own ways, and he only has himself to blame,” Mr. Zhao said. “It fully shows that there are no special privileges or exceptions before the law.”Yet until a couple of weeks ago, Mr. Meng, 64, was apparently at the height of a career built on enhancing China’s international reach and respectability in law enforcement. His election as president of Interpol symbolized how Chinese policing was becoming globally respected.As president of Interpol, he was based in Lyon, the French city where the organization has its headquarters, and he regularly gave speeches promoting Interpol’s priorities and China’s contribution to them.

The wife of Meng Hongwei, incumbent president of Interpol who has been detained in secret by China, says she is not sure her husband is alive after he disappeared mysteriously last month, to turn up under investigation in China.In an emotional interview with the BBC, Grace Meng said she and her children have been waiting for news of Meng Hongwei, who has not been seen or heard from since 25 September when he flew from France to China. “I tell them Daddy is on a long business trip … We want to hear his voice,” she said in an interview published on Friday.In September she reported her husband missing after he sent her a cryptic message on WhatsApp saying: “Wait for my call,” followed by an emoji of a knife. After French police opened an investigation and Interpol appealed to Beijing for answers, Interpol received his resignation and Chinese authorities announced on 7 October that he was in their custody and under investigation for bribery.Meng Hongwei was the first Chinese national to become president of the international law enforcement agency, and had been living in France with his wife and two children. He appears to be the latest victim of a years-long anti-corruption crackdown that most observers say is a thinly veiled political purge to root out rivals and officials disloyal to President Xi Jinping. On 8 October China’s ministry of public security released a lengthy statement accusing Meng Hongwei of bribery, while hailing Xi and the need for “absolute loyal political character”.“I think it is political persecution. I’m not sure he is alive,” Grace told the BBC. “They are cruel. They are dirty,” she said, referring to the ruling Chinese Communist party.Meng Hongwei is likely in a new form of custody called “liuzhi”, overseen by the National Supervisory Commission (NSC), a super-agency created in March to investigate corruption throughout the government.Liuzhi, or “retention in custody”, is meant to be an improvement on the system it replaced, “shuanggui,” a disciplinary process run by the party that was known for its use of torture.Under liuzhi detainees can still be denied access to legal counsel or families for as long as six months, and human rights advocates do not believe it will be much better. In May the driver of a low-ranking official in Fujian province died after almost a month under liuzhi. When relatives saw his body it was covered in bruises and his face was disfigured.Grace Meng has previously said she received a threatening phone call from someone claiming to know where she and her children live. The family is now under French protection.Her speaking out is unusual for family members of fallen Chinese officials who normally remain silent and out of public view. “This thing shows … it means they can do anything. I can’t imagine. [There is] no limit. That is also for all of China now,” she said. “That’s why I must stand up and I don’t want any other wives and children like me.” Topics Human rights China Torture Asia Pacific news

FILE PHOTO: Germany's Economy Minister Peter Altmaier speaks to the media in front of the Drum Tower in Beijing, China June 19, 2019. REUTERS/Jason LeeBERLIN (Reuters) - Data showing Europe’s largest economy contracted by 0.1% in the second quarter is a “wake-up call and a warning signal”, Economy Minister Peter Altmaier told Germany’s Bild newspaper on Wednesday. “We are in a phase of economic weakness but not yet in recession. We can avoid that if we take the right measures,” Altmaier said. A technical recession is normally defined as at least two quarters of contraction in a row. Reporting by Michelle Martin; Editing by Thomas SeythalOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.