Brazil’s president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro, has prompted outrage and disbelief after he said the people of Brazil – which was ruled by the military for two decades – “still don’t know what dictatorship is”.The former army captain – who has made no secret of his admiration for the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964-1985 – was speaking after phone talks with Hungary’s conservative and fiercely anti-migrant prime minister, Viktor Orban.Hungary “is a country that has suffered a lot with communism in the past, a people that knows what dictatorship is”, Bolsonaro told a news conference outside his home in Rio de Janeiro.“The Brazilian people still do not know what dictatorship is, do not know what it is to suffer at the hands of these people.”José Miguel Vivanco, executive director in the Americas division at Human Rights Watch, criticised Bolsonaro’s “cold war tactics”.“It is extremely troubling and revealing that Bolsonaro is taking advice from a well-known populist autocrat like Orbán,” he said. “Anyone who has any doubts about what Brazil suffered under military rule, just remember the gross, systematic and widespread violations of human rights committed by that regime.”In 2014 a report from a government truth commission concluded that more than 400 people were killed or disappeared and many more tortured under Brazil’s military junta which also censored media and culture, forcing many into exile.Cid Benjamin, a journalist who was part of an armed leftwing group that opposed Brazil’s dictatorship, described Bolsonaro’s comment as “one more stupidity”. Benjamin was jailed and tortured after participating in the 1969 kidnapping of the American ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick – who was later released unharmed – and spent a decade in exile.Benjamin said Brazil’s amnesty law, under which nobody was ever tried for dictatorship-era human rights abuses, enabled Bolsonaro to play down the cruelties of the military regime. “In Argentina it would be impossible for someone who defends the dictatorship to be elected president,” he said.Set to take office on 1 January, the far-right leader has already drawn three of his government picks from the military, including General Fernando Azevedo e Silva as defence minister.Asked about Orbán’s tough anti-migrant measures – he closed Hungary’s borders to migrants in 2015 – Bolsonaro preferred to discuss the situation in his own country.“I was against our last immigration law [in 2017] which made Brazil a country without borders. We cannot allow the indiscriminate entry of all those who come here, only because they wanted to come.”Thousands of Venezuelan migrants fleeing a political and economic crisis have crossed the border into Brazil over the past year. In August residents of the Brazilian border town of Pacairama trashed migrant camps used by Venezuelans and more than a thousand fled back across the border.Oliver Stuenkel, a professor of international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, said Bolsonaro was borrowing a narrative used by authoritarian leaders like Orbán.“The non-native population in Brazil is tiny, it’s less than 1%,” Stuenkel said. “It’s much more about projecting the narrative that it is a very dangerous world out there and it is important to have a strong leader to protect against these threats.”Stuenkel likened it to Donald Trump. “There will be a never ending series of provocative comments,” he said. “These kind of comments crowd out of the space for actual debate.”Last week Bolsonaro announced the appointment as foreign minister of Ernesto Araújo, a fervent admirer of the US president. In an article Araújo said German Nazism and Italian fascism were leftwing movements that “enslaved a genuine national feeling”. Topics Jair Bolsonaro Brazil Americas news

(Reuters) - U.S. health officials on Thursday said they will spend $350 million in four states to study ways to best deal with the nation’s opioid crisis on the local level, with a goal of reducing opioid-related overdose deaths by 40 percent over three years in selected communities in those states. FILE PHOTO: HHS Secretary Alex Azar testifies before a Senate Appropriations Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies Subcommittee hearing on the proposed budget estimates and justification for FY2020 for the Health and Human Services Department on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., April 4, 2019. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas/File PhotoThe National Institutes of Health will award grants to research sites in Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York and Ohio, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said at a news conference to unveil the plan. They will go to the University of Kentucky, Boston Medical Center, Columbia University and Ohio State University. Prescription opioid pain treatments and drugs like heroin and the more potent fentanyl were responsible for 47,600 U.S. deaths in 2017, according to government figures, with only a small decline last year, according to provisional data. The plan calls for the research centers to work with at least 15 communities hard hit by the crisis to measure how integrating prevention, treatment and recovery interventions can reduce overdoses. They are expected to look at how behavioral health, unemployment and the criminal justice system contributes to the crisis, and measure the effectiveness of various prevention and treatment methods, such as distributing anti-overdose drugs to schools, police and other first responders. “The most important work to combat our country’s opioid crisis is happening in local communities,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said. “We believe this effort will show that truly dramatic and material reductions in overdose deaths are possible, and provide lessons and models for other communities to adopt and emulate,” Azar said. He said planned funding for the study will not be affected by any NIH budget cuts. “We are in such a period of crisis that we need to know in real time what is working and what is not working,” said Dr. Alysse Wurcel from Tufts Medical Center in Boston, who is a member of the opioid working group at the Infectious Disease Society of America. The study is being carried out in partnership with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which provides support for local prevention, treatment and recovery support services. Reporting by Manas Mishra, Tamara Mathias and Aakash Jagadeesh Babu in Bengaluru; Editing by Bill BerkrotOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

This past year has seen repeated debates over how the news media cover white supremacist groups. Readers have slammed media profiles of white supremacist leaders for “normalizing” them, while some questioned why news outlets were covering fringe racist groups at all.As part of the joint project by WNYC’s On the Media and Guardian US on how to improve coverage of white supremacists, here is a look at some of the best reporting on white nationalists and neo-Nazis over the past year, from classic follow-the-money stories to investigations of lesser-known, extremely violent groups. Over just a few months, people associated with the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen have been charged in connection with five murders. Another member pleaded guilty to possession of explosives. ProPublica obtained hundreds of thousands of online chat messages from Atomwaffen discussions, part of an investigation into the group’s leaders and its “Hate Camp” weapons training sessions. Following the investigation, and scrutiny from other news organizations, at least four companies, including YouTube, took steps to bar Atomwaffen from using their platforms and services. ProPublica previously investigated the Rise Above Movement, identifying the group’s core members and examining why the violent racist group had drawn little scrutiny from law enforcement. In Ohio, a mother and grandmother watch their son become a neo-Nazi, and struggle to figure out what to do, or what they should say to change his mind. Huffington Post obtained the “style guide” for a prominent neo-Nazi website, which gave the site’s writers explicit guidance on how to use humor and irony to make their support of genocide seem chill and self-deprecating. “Remember this the next time you find yourself wondering if perhaps they don’t mean it quite like that,” the Huffington Post noted. “Because they always, always do.” A deeply reported profile of a neo-Nazi internet troll, showing how an unstable teenager who coordinated cruel harassment of his high school girlfriend went on to stage coordinated “troll storms” against political targets, including a Jewish woman and her family in Montana. In early 2017, Michael Peinovich, the host of an antisemitic podcast, was doxxed, his real name made public, along with the fact that his wife was Jewish. The heart of this New Yorker profile of Peinovich are interviews with his grieving, furious father, who was still trying to make sense of his son’s radicalization. Alt White: How the Breitbart Machine Laundered Racist Hate, BuzzFeed, October 2017A meticulous investigation, based on emails, video and documents, into how Breitbart and rightwing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos “smuggled Nazi and white nationalist ideas into the mainstream”. In the wake of the investigation, conservative donor Robert Mercer announced that he was selling his stake in Breitbart and severing all ties with Yiannopoulos. “I was mistaken to have supported him,” Mercer wrote. A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof, GQ, August 2017 Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, one of America’s most virtuosic nonfiction writers, spent months in South Carolina interviewing white supremacist Dylann Roof’s mother, father, friends and former teachers, as well as family members of the nine people he murdered at a historic black church in Charleston. Charlottesville: Race and Terror, Vice News Tonight, August 2017 This award-winning documentary, released immediately after the violence in Charlottesville, showed Americans exactly what had occurred, and documented the extreme views of the men who were marching. BuzzFeed profiled William Regnery II, a conservative multimillionaire who never graduated from college and “floundered” when he tried to run the family business, but who has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars, and perhaps more, into supporting white nationalist political organizing. “My support has produced a much greater bang for the buck than by the brothers Koch or Soros, Inc.,” Regnery told BuzzFeed. “I just like living around people with whom I’m most comfortable, and that’s white.”White nationalist Richard Spencer was soliciting tax-exempt donations to support his advocacy for a white ethno-state. But he wasn’t filing the paperwork correctly. Over the course of a year, the Los Angeles Times repeatedly scrutinized his nonprofit’s compliance with tax regulations, finding that the IRS had stripped Spencer’s organization’s tax-exempt status for paperwork failures, and that the organization had broken Virginia nonprofit law. “Can I just hire you to do this for me?” Richard Spencer asked the Los Angeles Times reporter investigating his compliance with nonprofit tax rules. The answer: No. Topics The far right features

Apple’s financial results for the September-ending quarter are important, but not as important as the success of the launch of its new iPhone X phone in the current holiday quarter.Apple’s numbers and executive comments Wednesday point to good news on both counts, however. The company reported a better-than-expected September-ending quarter with 12% revenue growth, and it also forecast a record revenue in the holiday quarter, between $84 and $87 billion.That aggressive revenue forecast suggests very strong sales of Apple’s new iPhone X smartphone. The better-than-expected earnings and its forecast sent the company’s shares to record levels in late trading, and toward a $900 billion market capitalization.The forecast comes amid worries over Apple’s ability to meet demand for the new device. For weeks, reports have come in saying that suppliers are having trouble pumping large numbers of the technologically complex “X” off the assembly line. This, it’s said, is caused by low yield rates of the lasers that do the X’s facial recognition function.Asked about the iPhone X supply-and-demand issues, chief executive Tim Cook was vague during a call with analysts Wednesday. “The ramp of the iPhone X is going well and we have been able to increase week by week in what we’re outputting,” Cook said, suggesting, at least, that the yield situation is improving. “We are working to get the phones into the hands of buyers as soon as possible,” he said.The iPhone X goes on sale in stores this Friday. Starting at $999, it’s the most expensive iPhone ever.Aside from the worries about iPhone X supply levels, the company also has had to worry about the possibility that the fancy new iPhone X would enrapture consumers so much that nobody would want to buy the other phones the company launched this fall–the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus.The earnings report suggests that so far Apple has managed to balance interest in the two phones nicely.“Apple managed to thread the needle on iPhone sales between the giant interest in the iPhone X and what the company had to ship, which was iPhone 7 and 8,” Patrick Moorhead, of Moor Insights & Strategy, wrote in an email to Fast Company. “And the company sold those phones at a constant ASP, too, indicating the lack of deep discounts.”Cook said that after the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus went on sale during the last part of September, the phones quickly become the best-selling iPhones and remained that way for the remainder of the quarter.There will likely still be plenty of buyers left to trade up to the iPhone X in the next few months, even with the new phone’s high price tag. “We price according to the value we’re providing,” Cook told analysts Wednesday. “We’re not just trying to provide the most expensive device out there.”

Donald Trump on Tuesday waded further into the race row he sparked with a weekend attack on a senior black congressman and the city of Baltimore, as black leaders boycotted an event the president attended in Virginia.The US president said those who stayed away were acting “against their own people”, while claiming, as he left the White House to fly to the event, that his denigration of Baltimore was “helping” his political standing.Trump went to Jamestown, Virginia, on Tuesday to commemorate 400 years of democracy in the US at an event to mark the first meeting of a representative legislative assembly in the western hemisphere. That took place on 30 July1619, when George Yeardley convened the assembly as governor of the new British colony.Next month will mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first African slaves in America, when the first slave ship docked, also in Virginia. Trump remarked upon the “horrors of slavery” in a speech on Tuesday.Yet just hours earlier he had returned to Twitter to continue his attack on leading Democratic congressman Elijah Cummings. Trump called Cummings and the civil rights advocate Al Sharpton, who are both African American, racists. He also attacked other leaders of color in personal terms.The latest volley continued an attack he began against Cummings on Sunday when he called the legislator a “brutal bully” and said his congressional district was both “a disgusting, rat- and rodent-infested mess” and “the worst-run and most dangerous [district] anywhere in the United States”.The remarks followed Trump’s exhortations to four congresswomen of color earlier in July that they should “go back to where they came from”, even though they are US citizens.On Tuesday, senior Democratic politicians, including Virginia’s house Democratic leader and Democratic caucus chair, and every member of the Virginia legislative black caucus stayed away during Trump’s speech in Jamestown.Virginia’s Democratic governor Ralph Northam, who was almost forced out of office over his own controversy involving blackface, said: “We know our diversity is our strength, and we welcome immigrants, refugees and all who like those who stood on spot 400 years ago, come to Virginia in search of a better life.“Our doors are open and our lights are on. No matter who you are, no matter who you love and no matter where you came from, you are welcome in Virginia.”Trump was undeterred. The legislators who boycotted his visit were acting “against their own people”, Trump said.The black caucus disagreed, and said their absence was because “the participation of the president is antithetical to the principles for which the caucus stands”.They said: “The commemoration of the birth of this nation and its democracy will be tarnished unduly with the participation of the president. Who continues to make degrading comments toward minority leaders, promulgate policies that harm marginalized communities, and use racist and xenophobic rhetoric.”The Pulitzer prize-winning historian Jon Meacham, who earlier in July compared Trump to Andrew Johnson, the 17th president of the United States whose racism played a part in his impeachment, was among those to speak at the event, before Trump.Meacham said: “Extremism, racism, nativism, xenophobia and isolationism, driven by fear of the unknown, tend to spike in periods of stress. A period like our own. As we gather here faith in representative institutions is ebbing. Reflexive partisanship is the order of the day.”Before departing for the event, Trump spoke to reporters outside the White House and claimed he is “the least racist person that there is anywhere in the world”.He said: “The African American people have been calling the White House. They have never been so happy as [sic] what a president has done.” An hour later, a Quinnipiac poll revealed that 80% of black people think Trump is racist.Pundits have disagreed on whether Trump is speaking from the gut or whether his comments represent a clear strategy to consolidate his base and win over enough white swing voters to achieve re-election in 2020.On Tuesday, a Virginia state legislator heckled Trump in Jamestown, shouting: “You can’t send us back.” Topics Donald Trump Virginia Race Democrats news

Two leading Democratic presidential candidates – Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke – have said in separate interviews that they consider Donald Trump to be a white supremacist.Asked whether she considered the president to be a white supremacist, Warren on Wednesday offered an unequivocal “Yes”, the New York Times reported.“He has given aid and comfort to white supremacists,” the Massachusetts senator and 2020 runner said. “He’s done the wink and a nod. He has talked about white supremacists as fine people. He’s done everything he can to stir up racial conflict and hatred in this country.”Earlier in the day, O’Rourke, the former congressman for the El Paso district, who has spoken out strongly about the president’s track record of using racist rhetoric, went a step further.When he was asked directly about whether Trump was a white supremacist, in an MSNBC TV interview, he replied without hesitation: “He is.”The comments mark a significant escalation in 2020 Democrats’ accusations against the president, and it’s unclear who if anyone from the sprawling field will join the pair in their description.Frontrunner Joe Biden said in a speech on Wednesday that Trump had “fanned the flames of white supremacy”. That was his strongest condemnation of the president yet but stopped short of calling Trump himself a white supremacist.Speaking in El Paso, where Trump was visiting victims of the shooting at the weekend and meeting first responders, O’Rourke launched a fierce attack and predicted that racist rhetoric will fuel more massacres.He pointed out that perpetrators of some recent mass shootings have echoed Trump’s outspoken and repeated remarks condemning migrants arriving in the US via the border with Mexico as, variously, an infestation and an invasion.“It will happen again because what happened in El Paso is not an isolated incident,” he told MSNBC.“There are very real consequences to his words and his tweets and the racism that he fans. At a rally in Florida in May when he said [of migrants coming to the US], ‘How are we going to stop these people?’ someone yells ‘Shoot them’ and the crowd roars their approval and he laughs,” O’Rourke added.He further cited the president saying he wanted more immigrants from Nordic countries, not places like the Caribbean, Central America and Africa.“And he talked about who he wants to keep out, with walls and cages and militarization, and torture and cruelty, and we in El Paso have borne the brunt of all that – but we in El Paso are standing up to all of that right now,” he said. Topics Donald Trump Elizabeth Warren Beto O'Rourke Race US politics Joe Biden news

In Iraq and Syria, even with its territory greatly diminished, the Islamic State has persisted. Months after Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared “final victory” over the group in 2017, three Iraqi provinces have witnessed an uptick in attacks.Still, the violence there is less devastating than it once was. The group once routinely hit Baghdad with attacks that could kill more than 150 people at a time. Now it tends to carry out smaller suicide attacks, hit-and-runs, ambushes and targeted executions, especially of village chiefs, who are known as moktars.Mr. Knights, who tracks these low-level assassinations, estimates that more than three moktars are killed or wounded every week in Iraq, undermining official declarations that the militants have been vanquished.“That means that 14 times a month, the most important person in the village is killed or seriously injured by ISIS,” he said. “Under those circumstances, do those people feel like they have been liberated? Stopping this type of targeted violence is the real challenge, and it’s much harder than clearing cities of ISIS fighters.”Throughout cleared areas, Islamic State members are believed to have melted back into the population. They move and hide in cells made up of a handful of fighters, and occupy a network of safe houses, analysts say. In Syria, some believe these fighters are awaiting the departure of American forces before attempting a rebound.If they do, they will pose a different type of threat.The forces that drove the Islamic State from its lands were equipped to liberate occupied cities, not fight a dispersed, clandestine force. Their vehicles and weapons were designed for engaging the enemy frontally in heavy combat, not for rooting out individual fighters in hiding.“It’s evolved back into an insurgent movement far faster than security forces can evolve into a counterinsurgency,” Mr. Knights said.

Not everyone at the conference who criticized Mr. Trump’s rhetoric was an enthusiastic Democratic voter.David Zumaya, a board member of the San Diego County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said he was independent-minded, and that former President George H.W. Bush was the last president he was “crazy about.” But Mr. Zumaya, who said he had supported neither Mr. Trump nor Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent in 2016, suggested that to support the president now would be difficult, and a “disgrace to my ethnicity, because of his attacks toward Latinos.”Earlier Monday, Ms. Warren and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York were among the candidates who called on Mr. McConnell to bring lawmakers back into session to vote on gun safety measures, and in her speech at UnidosUS, Ms. Klobuchar hit that theme too, urging Washington to act. In a CNN interview, Ms. Gillibrand called Mr. Trump’s suggestion that gun measures be tied to immigration reform “absurd.”“He’s linking the issue of basic, common-sense gun reform, that we should be going back into the Senate today to vote on, with this issue of immigration because, again, he continues to try to demonize people seeking asylum,” she said.By Monday afternoon, one more high-profile Democrat had weighed in.“No other nation on Earth comes close to experiencing the frequency of mass shootings that we see in the United States,” former President Barack Obama said in a statement posted to Twitter. He called on the public to push for tougher gun laws and urged law enforcement and internet companies to work to reduce the influence of groups that espouse hate.

The southern border wall, as it is euphemistically known, between the United States and Mexico has come to represent much more than a line on a map. Since the 2016 US presidential campaign, it has assumed the status of an all-consuming ideological crusade for Donald Trump. Propelled into power on spittle-flecked chants of “Build the wall!”, Trump exploited the potency of a simplistic slogan calculated to incite fear and loathing. Migrants fleeing violence or seeking a better life in the US were reframed through Trump’s racist prism as an unstoppable torrent of dark-skinned psychopaths and spongers. Only a wall – Trump’s wall – could save America.Words have consequences. And so do walls. The latest atrocity in El Paso, when an avowed white supremacist drove for 10 hours to a supermarket used by Latino families in order to murder and maim, was explicitly motivated by Trump’s baleful, anti-immigrant rhetoric. He was also a big fan of Trump’s wall, which Trump himself has rhapsodically described as ‘‘an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall”.Yet despite its Ozymandian ambition, the “beautiful wall” has stuttered and stumbled, still more frenzied rallying cry than bricks and mortar reality. Geography and logistics quietly conspire against it – America’s border with Mexico is nearly 2,000 miles long, for a start. Incendiary talk of spiralling migrant numbers is also misleading. The number of people detained on the border has fallen from 82,000 per month under George W Bush’s administration to around 40,000 under Trump. This figure is rising, but even when migrant numbers were at historic lows, Trump persisted with his inflammatory hyperbole, characterising the situation on the border as a national security crisis.In a country founded on the premise of immigration, such mendacious pearl-clutching is deeply discomfiting. Yet for successive US governments, building border barriers has long been seen as an easy way of making presidential incumbents appear tough and vote-winning. Trump’s virulent wall mania is simply the exceptionally thin end of a historic political wedge.At the end of July, the US Supreme Court narrowly ruled by five votes to four that funding of $2.5bn could be released to build sections of Trump’s wall in California, Arizona and New Mexico. However, this falls far short of the estimated $25bn required to build a barrier along the entire length of the border. The wall’s final physical form also remains as yet undetermined. Invitations to tender design proposals resulted in a shortlist of eight 30ft-high steel and concrete prototypes, which underwent “breachability” tests by the US Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP). None met the CBP’s operational requirements, though they did provide “valuable data” that could be used in future barrier designs. So far, Trump’s wall remains an expensive mirage.The response of architects to this unedifying sequence of events has veered wildly between supine complicity and impotent outrage. When the initial request for design proposals was issued, dozens of prominent American architecture and engineering firms threw their hats in the ring, eager for a tilt at the multibillion-dollar project. If nothing else, it showed that concerns raised on Trump’s accession about professional collusion with the administration’s partisan agenda were prescient and well-founded.For American architects, the invitation to participate in designing a border wall struck a particularly raw nerve. Historically, the profession has proved willing to comply with political schemes that discriminated against marginalised communities and concretised systemic inequalities. During the second world war, American architects were engaged in the design of Japanese internment camps. In the federal highway projects that followed, architects and engineers created new infrastructure that invidiously targeted minority communities for “slum” clearance. And as cities were reshaped, many mass housing schemes served to profit developers by breaking anti-discrimination laws, yet architects often chose to disregard their wider social responsibilities. Now comes Trump’s wall.Trump would not be the first or last potentate to obsessively fixate on a wall. History is full of walls and wall builders. Picked over by archaeologists, their crumbling carcasses are doleful monuments to antique hubris. But the wall is always with us, reinventing itself for the modern era, parcelling up the globe into neat nation states and enclaves. Lines on a map effectively turn land into territory and people into citizens. Cartography is a political tool. Walls are merely the most visible manifestation of a larger apparatus of militarised surveillance and technology employed to defend territory and keep people in their place.Some sense of this brute physicality and absurdity is conveyed in the group exhibition Walls of Power, part of the 2019 Arles photography festival. In theory, the fall of the Berlin Wall, pixellated into a million souvenir chunks, heralded a new era of global openness, transparency and mobility. In practice, it was marked by a furore of barrier-building. Of the 66 physical barriers currently in existence between nation states, 50 were built after 2000. More recently, Europe has rushed to consolidate its border infrastructure in response to the flow of refugees and migrants from Syria and Africa. Images of young men clinging to border fences in the Spanish enclave of Melilla in Morocco show human desperation – and defiance – at its most extreme.In 2015, Hungary erected a 110-mile border fence topped with concertina wire along its southern border. Despite criticism from the EU for breaching its legal obligations to process and resettle people, the Hungarian government refused to cooperate or demolish the fence, sending the EU a bill for €400m, which it claimed was half the construction cost. The EU declined to pay. Hungary’s right-wing premier, Viktor Orbán, has also claimed “ethnic homogeneity” is vital for his country’s economic prosperity. Like Trump’s wall, Orbán’s fence shores up a manifestly toxic and reactionary vision of national identity.Closer to home, Britain helped to fund the “Great Wall of Calais”, a border barrier designed to deter migrants from hitching rides across the Channel on trains and lorries. And in Belfast, the so-called “peace walls”, put in place during the Troubles to separate nationalist and unionist communities, still endure, casually cutting through roads, housing estates and back yards. At the last count, Belfast had 97 individual barriers, many of which are now tourist attractions, absorbed into city’s fabric in the same way as the Berlin Wall or Nicosia’s Green Line became an unremarked part of daily life.Beyond the geopolitics of borders are the more prosaic manifestations of walled neighbourhoods and gated communities, which categorise people by more intricate denominators of status, class, race, faith and age. With exquisite irony, Americans describe it as “forting up”. From the domestic compound to Trump’s wall, the dread of the world outside our gates casts an increasingly long shadow. Walls of Power: Man-Made Barriers Throughout Europe is at the Maison des Lices, Arles, France, until 25 August Topics Architecture The Observer US-Mexico border US supreme court Trump administration Calais Immigration and asylum features

In May, the European Union’s sweeping new privacy regulations built to protect users and their data went into effect. Called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, the new rules mandate that technology companies give users more control over how their data is used, improve the safeguards of user data, and give users an easy way to request and access all the data a company has about them.In Europe, GDPR compliance is the law and any tech company that does not comply can face incredibly high penalties. But the law does nothing to offer Americans enhanced privacy protections and data controls. Which is why Facebook placed 1.5 billion international users on a figurative boat and shipped them to America so they weren’t covered by GDPR rules.But though American lawmakers haven’t taken the steps to enact GDPR-like legislation on this side of the Atlantic, some tech companies have stepped up and implemented some of the benefits of the legislation over here. Earlier this year, Google, Facebook, and Instagram either rolled out or improved upon tools that allow users to request all the information the companies have about them. Apple introduced a similar data transparency tool for EU users in May, but American users were left out in the cold (though they could email Apple and request their information).Apple did, however, promise that its new transparency feature would become available to Americans later in the year–and now it’s here.Seeing your stuffApple’s new Data and Privacy tool allows U.S.-based users to see exactly what information Apple holds about them. This includes information like payment details; contacts and calendar events; purchase history through Apple.com, the iTunes Store, the App Store, and the iBooks Store; and more.To access the new tool, navigate to apple.com/privacy and then click on the “Manage Your Privacy” link in the upper toolbar. On that page, scroll down to the heading “Take charge of your data” and click the “Visit your Data and Privacy page” link. There you will find the new data and privacy portal that you can sign in to to request everything the company holds on you.Once you submit a request for your data, Apple’s software will run security verification checks to make sure it is, in fact, you requesting your data. Once those checks come back positive, it will email a zip file containing all the data the company holds on you.What’s remarkable to European users I’ve spoken with who have previously requested their data from Apple is just how little information the company retains compared to other tech giants such as Facebook and Google. Where each of those companies holds tens of gigabytes on the average user, Apple’s equivalent is measured in megabytes.This speaks to the fact that Apple has very strict data minimization and data use limitation policies for its users in place. And the company can afford these user privacy protections, because its business model–selling hardware–doesn’t rely on amassing troves of data about you such as your browsing history, where you checked in for lunch, or the television shows you like. For other tech companies that operate on advertising models, such information is priceless.Check out Apple’s redesigned privacy siteWhile Apple’s initiative to bring greater data transparency to U.S. users is welcome, most people will probably get little benefit from requesting to see the data Apple holds on them–unless you count the sigh of relief when they see how little there is.But we live in an age where digital privacy is quickly becoming one of the most important issues of this generation. That necessitates that we all do a better job at educating ourselves and our families about the importance of data protection and online privacy.That’s why I recommend that every Apple customer take the time to check out the company’s new privacy pages. Educating yourself about how your data is collected, what is retained, and the tools you have to manage it will help you make more informed choices about maintaining your privacy in the future. This isn’t something only Apple users should do. Users of Google’s products should inform themselves of their privacy and data policies (which include Android as well), and users of Facebook and Instagram should educate themselves on the same.Most Apple users I’ve talked to have little knowledge of the scores of privacy and data protections and tools built into the latest iOS and MacOS releases. There are simply too many to cover here, but they’re all thoroughly detailed on Apple’s redesigned privacy pages.Apple’s privacy work in 2018 isn’t over yet. Next week, CEO Tim Cook will head to Brussels, where he will keynote the 2018 International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners. It’s the first time that a CEO will be a keynote speaker at Europe’s preeminent privacy regulators conference. And just last week, Apple filed a seven-page brief with the Australian Parliament arguing in favor of increasingly strong encryption technologies that further protect user privacy–something the governments of many countries around the world want to weaken.

Not everyone at the conference who criticized Mr. Trump’s rhetoric was an enthusiastic Democratic voter.David Zumaya, a board member of the San Diego County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said he was independent-minded, and that former President George H.W. Bush was the last president he was “crazy about.” But Mr. Zumaya, who said he had supported neither Mr. Trump nor Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent in 2016, suggested that to support the president now would be difficult, and a “disgrace to my ethnicity, because of his attacks toward Latinos.”Earlier Monday, Ms. Warren and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York were among the candidates who called on Mr. McConnell to bring lawmakers back into session to vote on gun safety measures, and in her speech at UnidosUS, Ms. Klobuchar hit that theme too, urging Washington to act. In a CNN interview, Ms. Gillibrand called Mr. Trump’s suggestion that gun measures be tied to immigration reform “absurd.”“He’s linking the issue of basic, common-sense gun reform, that we should be going back into the Senate today to vote on, with this issue of immigration because, again, he continues to try to demonize people seeking asylum,” she said.By Monday afternoon, one more high-profile Democrat had weighed in.“No other nation on Earth comes close to experiencing the frequency of mass shootings that we see in the United States,” former President Barack Obama said in a statement posted to Twitter. He called on the public to push for tougher gun laws and urged law enforcement and internet companies to work to reduce the influence of groups that espouse hate.

I found her likable; him, not so much. But likability is not what this is about.Bottom line, I came away from the hearings feeling no more confident than I had the day before of who was being truthful. It was high drama but it was also a wash. What happened Thursday should not prevent Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Senators are within their rights to vote against the nomination out of philosophical differences. But to vote on the basis of a belief in things unseen and unproved is a road to national ruin.What’s the alternative? Democrats demanded an F.B.I. investigation at Thursday’s hearing and now, thanks to Jeff Flake, they’ve been joined by Senate Republicans. I’m all for it, though I doubt it will uncover anything definitive. It could have been completed, with much greater thoroughness, weeks ago if Dianne Feinstein hadn’t concealed Blasey’s allegation from the Judiciary Committee for much of the summer — a remarkably cynical ploy suggesting motives other than honest truth-seeking.A stronger argument against Kavanaugh’s nomination is that we should not elevate to the Supreme Court a nominee over whom there will always be this dark pall of suspicion.I’m sympathetic to this argument, too. If Kavanaugh were to step aside in exchange for a deal in which Donald Trump nominates conservative federal judge Amy Coney Barrett and Democrats agree to vote on her nomination before the midterms, the country might find a chance for compromise, closure, and even a moment of grace.But that’s not likely to happen. And if suspicion based on allegation — even or especially “believable” allegations — becomes a sufficient basis for disqualification, it will create overpowering political incentives to discover, produce or manufacture allegations in the hopes that something sticks. Americans have a longstanding credulity problem — 9/11 trutherism; Obama birtherism; J.F.K. assassination theories; the “deep state” — so the ground is already fertile.

As Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests draw increasingly harsh denunciations from Beijing – which says the demonstrations show signs of “terrorism” – fears are growing of a military crackdown by China.Such concerns are not unfounded. They have been stoked by widely publicized anti-riot drills by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Hong Kong garrison, with about 6,000 troops. And across the border in Shenzhen, thousands of People’s Armed Police, the PLA’s paramilitary force tasked with quelling domestic unrest, conducted drills last week.“Should the situation in Hong Kong deteriorate further into unrest uncontrollable” by Hong Kong’s government, “the central government will not sit on its hands and watch,” Liu Xiaoming, China’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, told a London news conference on Thursday. “We have enough solutions and enough power within the limits of the basic law to quell any unrest swiftly.” Thomas Peter/Reuters Military vehicles are parked on the grounds of the Shenzhen Bay Sports Center in Shenzhen, China Aug. 15, 2019. Hong Kong’s protests erupted in June as millions of residents took to the streets to oppose a bill that would allow the extradition of criminal suspects to China. Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam suspended the bill, but protester demands have since grown to include its complete withdrawal, an independent inquiry into police brutality, amnesty for arrested protesters, and democratic electoral reforms.At this critical juncture, China watchers envision three possible scenarios with vastly different consequences for the future of Hong Kong and the region: A military intervention by Beijing with extremely heavy costs. An attrition strategy involving intensifying coercion and repression of dissent by Hong Kong authorities – the most likely scenario. A negotiated resolution between the Hong Kong government and the protesters – the best-case scenario. Under Hong Kong’s Basic Law, which governs the “one country, two systems” framework by which the former British colony reverted to Chinese rule in 1997, China has two options for intervening militarily in Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s government could ask for assistance from the PLA garrison to maintain order, and in that case the Chinese military must follow Hong Kong law. Or, China’s government could declare a state of emergency exists in Hong Kong “that endangers national unity” and apply national laws, allowing for a PLA deployment.Beijing’s condemnations of what it calls a small group of foreign-backed “black hands” and “extreme radicals” waging “terrorism” laid the groundwork for justifying such an emergency. Warning signs for Trump in a famous swing countyStill, the military option would have major practical drawbacks as well as devastating consequences for Hong Kong.Hong Kong’s young and agile protesters describe themselves as moving “like water” and could melt away from PLA formations, laying low or “going to sleep,” as some protesters say.“All this raises very complicated logistical questions beyond the unseemly appearance of Chinese troops invading this modern New York-like city and trying to control what local people are doing there,” says Michael Davis, a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and a former law professor at the University of Hong Kong.If some protesters did stand up against Chinese troops and were injured or killed, China’s leaders would be condemned for waging another crackdown along the lines of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crushing of pro-democracy protests.Chinese President Xi Jinping knows “repeating a June 4, 1989 Tiananmen-type massacre ... would be a disaster for him ... his leadership, his people, and certainly for Hong Kong,” says Jerome Cohen, faculty director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at New York University School of Law and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Using force would show the ‘Chinese dream’ is a nightmare,” he says, referring to Mr. Xi’s trademark slogan on China’s future. “But if push comes to shove, he’ll use force.”Even without bloodshed, analysts say a Chinese military intervention would greatly undermine Hong Kong’s status as an Asian financial hub that serves as a vital business conduit between China and the world – likely leading to an exodus of international companies.“It would signal the death knell for Hong Kong’s autonomy under the one country, two systems framework,” says Thomas Kellogg, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Asian Law. Beyond economic costs, the intangible benefits for culture and politics of having a uniquely autonomous, relatively free space within China would be lost, says Professor Kellogg.By effectively ending Hong Kong’s semi-autonomous status, Beijing would sacrifice any credibility it might have in persuading Taiwan to reunify with mainland China under a similar formula. “A failure to resolve the situation successfully in Hong Kong will put to an end for all time ... any thought people in Taiwan might have of integration with the mainland under one country, two systems,” Professor Cohen says.Moreover, the United States and other countries could revoke the special status they accord Hong Kong.Given such major drawbacks, many analysts say Beijing and Hong Kong authorities will persist instead with an attrition strategy aimed at wearing down the protesters.This more likely scenario would see an intensified response by Hong Kong’s 30,000-strong police force, including arrests as well as an escalation of punishments for protesters.Yet with Hong Kong police already facing charges of being overaggressive, and of arresting some innocent bystanders, this strategy could fuel more protests and public discontent.“This could backfire,” says Victoria Tin-bor Hui, associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. “They have hurt so many other people who are not hard-core protesters, the majority of the population is very angry,” says Professor Hui, a native of Hong Kong.Hong Kong authorities – and indirectly Beijing – can also exert influence over local political bodies, institutions, and businesses to pressure the public and curtail demonstrations.Still, with a late July survey showing broad public support for key demands of the protesters – more than 70% of respondents said the government should formally withdraw the extradition bill and investigate police abuses – many analysts say a negotiated resolution would be the most effective way to diffuse tensions.Under this scenario, an independent group of Hong Kong civilian leaders – such as representatives from business, law, education, and other sectors – would have to step forward, say observers. This group would have to work imaginatively to persuade both the Hong Kong government and the protesters to enter into negotiations.So far, the Hong Kong government has not indicated it is receptive to such talks. The protesters, many of whom are students, have deliberately chosen to be anonymous and leaderless as a form of protection. Both sides would have to compromise. Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. “Hong Kong should adopt the approach of a free and open government in addressing this crisis ... they need to show some degree of political accountability,” says Professor Kellogg.For example, if the government formally withdrew the extradition treaty and agreed to an independent investigation of police abuses, “it would diffuse the conflict and most Hong Kong people would want to see the protest wind down,” says Professor Davis. “It is the lack of democracy that has produced a government that is very poor at defending Hong Kong’s autonomy. It is a festering sore, and these steps need to be taken now.”

Our enduring fascination with America is born of a mixture of vanity and self-interest. As we turn up our noses at its vulgarities – the Louis Theroux world of guns, religious fundamentalism, and the mountebank President Trump – we also defer to its political and popular cultural might.It’s to America that academics and pundits look for news from the future. But it’s not the first place that jumps to mind when we think about the working class. That’s changed a bit in the Trump era, with many blue-collar voters rallying to his cause. But the conditions of the working poor are not widely understood or appreciatedTwo new books may help shift that perception. American Overdose is written by the veteran Guardian foreign reporter Chris McGreal. It’s a detailed and compelling account of the spread of opioid addiction across the so-called rust belt, said to be the deadliest drug epidemic in American history. US consumers, writes McGreal, account for 80% of the world’s opioid painkillers.The book focuses largely on West Virginia, in particular the town of Williamson. It has a population of 3,191 , but earlier this year it was announced that just two of its pharmacies had dispensed more than 20m prescription painkillers in the course of a decade. That’s roughly 6,500 pills per resident.How those astonishing figures came to be is a complex story of corrupt doctors, poor drug regulation, mendacious big pharma, ruthless marketing and a depressed and alienated working class, largely white and, certainly by their own lights, politically and socially neglected. It’s a tale littered with deaths, suicides, familial destruction and homelessness, and it starts, as with so many tragedies, with good intentions.For many years there had been a prohibition on morphine in the US (and in the UK), which, doctors protested, prevented terminally ill cancer patients from receiving pain-free palliative care. But what might work for someone in the last weeks of their life isn’t necessarily appropriate for ongoing pain management for chronic conditions. However, owing to aggressive proselytising by several influential doctors, some of whom were later employed by the pharmacological industry, restrictions on opioids were lifted for both the terminally and the chronically ill.That’s when a former undertaker, gay escort and fraudster called Henry Vinson latched on to a commercial opportunity. He rented a warehouse in Williamson, hired several unscrupulous doctors, and began dispensing huge quantities of opioids, in particular OxyContin, a slow-release and extremely powerful drug. OxyContin was produced by Purdue Pharma – which misled the public over the drug’s addictive qualities – and it made billions of dollars. The company has since been the subject of multiple law suits.In many ways, McGreal’s book reads like a white-collar The Wire, with a cast of characters determined to exact as much money as possible regardless of the human cost.That the large majority of its victims were white was not due to any kind of racial targeting; but that they hailed disproportionately from the impoverished towns of Appalachia, where OxyContin was known as “hillbilly heroin”, does account for why so little interest was taken in their plight by the authorities.These are the people, as Sarah Smarsh writes in Heartland, who are often referred to as “white trash”, the American version of “chavs”, that underclass whose suffering, because it’s not the result of racism, and because it can often breed racism, does not fit into the modern rubric of worthy causes.Smarsh writes: “If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn’t racism, what less articulated problem was afoot?”Smarsh is from Kansas, and grew up in a family built on a long line of single mothers. She and the people she knew as a teenager – the kinds of people casually consigned to the designation “trailer park” – lived lives that felt cut off from the successful version of America, “distasteful” to a middle class that was embarrassed by the economic failings of people from “their own race”. As she puts it: “The middle-class-white stories we read in the news and saw in movies might as well have taken place on Mars.”It’s a good premise for the examination of a prejudice – class – that dare not speak its name in America, and increasingly in the UK. But Smarsh’s book never coheres into either a vivid memoir or a damning indictment of America’s growing social divisions. It tries to do both without fully achieving either.The problem is partly because Smarsh, now an academic and journalist, adopts a sentimental structure of addressing the book to the daughter she might easily have had (but didn’t) as a teenager. And it’s partly because the story’s terrain – poor girl works hard and makes good – is dense with cliches, many of which Smarsh doesn’t make enough effort to avoid.There’s a self-romanticising element to the prose that can read like a Bruce Springsteen lyric – all Chevy Caprices and wide-open highways – and men tend to be characterised as either women-beating thugs or salt-of-the-earth heroes. Perhaps because she’s theoretically talking to a nonexistent young daughter, she is also prone to simplistic analysis, such as: “Economic inequality is one cultural divide that causes us to see one another as stereotypes, some of which allow the powerful to make harmful decisions in policy and politics.”However, she makes a strong case that it’s both wrong and counterproductive to dismiss the white working class of America’s heartlands as Trump-supporting deplorables.If American progressives really want to fight populism, the battlefront is not going to be Brooklyn coffee bars or campus safe-spaces. Liberal America is going to have to look to the country’s interior and re-engage that large stratum of society that feels – because it has been – left behind.• American Overdose by Chris McGreal is published by Guardian Faber (£12.99). To order a copy for £9.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99• Heartland by Sarah Smarsh is published by Scribe (£14.99). To order a copy for £13.19 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99 Topics Society books Book of the day Opioids crisis Opioids Class issues Pharmaceuticals industry Drugs reviews

The sound and fury that now accompany the release of any new U.S. economic data signify something less than even the data themselves would suggest. Each release of gross-domestic-product data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis is probed for evidence of the trade conflict’s effects. Yet even the best methods of interrogation will yield at least some untruths: Within months, the BEA itself will almost certainly consider this initial “advanced” GDP data to be wrong. Each quarter’s initial GDP estimate is typically revised by the BEA twice within three months, and four times within five years.Meanwhile, as last quarter’s growth rises and falls by percentage points, the future of democracy hangs in suspense. The advanced GDP numbers are ephemeral, but the broader consequences of the trade battle will prove more lasting.China’s response to U.S. trade actions appears to reflect a cynicism about the efficacy of democracy. Beijing’s strategy appears calibrated to exploit the fact that the American people elect the head of their government, by attempting to influence how the American people will vote. In effect, it seems to be gambling on its ability to turn American democracy against itself.At the center of China’s responses are the tit-for-tat tariffs intended to hurt American farmers, a constituency that tends to support President Donald Trump and to live in crucial swing states. These tariffs appear designed to deliver political pain in the U.S., not to produce any economic benefit for China. China’s other political meddling, as Vice President Mike Pence recently laid out, includes attempts at interference in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. Recent targets of Chinese Communist Party influence campaigns also include state and local governments, Congress, academia, think tanks, and the business community.Now, according to Trump, China may be simply sitting and waiting for the clock of America’s own democracy to tick until he faces reelection.The strategy that China now seems to be displaying in the U.S. can be deployed to punish elected leaders around the world for any number of reasons. China could utilize a variation of this strategy in a confrontation over any issue a country with an elected leader might have with Beijing, from trade abuses to human-rights violations.If the U.S. is ultimately perceived to have lost the trade conflict, the leaders of democracies around the world will take notice. They will learn that confronting Beijing risks provoking a campaign of democratic destabilization—one that was successful elsewhere. They will need to weigh that risk against the potential rewards. China could point to the U.S. trade conflict to remind democracy’s leaders of this peril. And if any such leaders defiantly forged ahead, Beijing could draw on a playbook sharpened from its U.S. experience.

MUMBAI, India (Reuters) - The Buddhist enclave of Ladakh cheered India’s move to hive it off from Jammu and Kashmir state, a change that could spur tourism and help New Delhi counter China’s influence in the contested western Himalayas. FILE PHOTO: The sun sets in Leh, the largest town in the region of Ladakh, nestled high in the Indian Himalayas, India September 26, 2016. REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton/File PhotoBeijing, though, criticized the announcement, made on Monday by the Indian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as part of a wider policy shift that also ended Jammu and Kashmir’s right to set its own laws. In a statement on Tuesday, China said the decision was unacceptable and undermined its territorial sovereignty. Ladakh is an arid, mountainous area of around 59,146 square kilometers (22,836 square miles), much of it uninhabitable, that only has 274,000 residents. The rest of Jammu and Kashmir is roughly 163,090 square kilometers (62,969 square miles) with a population of some 12.2 million. China and India still claim vast swathes of each other’s territory along their 3,500 km (2,173 mile) Himalayan border. The Asian rivals had a two-month standoff at the Doklam plateau in another part of the remote Himalayan region in 2017. “The fact that India took this move ... can be seen as one way that India is trying to counter growing Chinese influence in the region,” said Sameer Patil, a Mumbai-based fellow in international security studies at the Gateway House think-tank. In a statement, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said China contests the inclusion of what it regards as its territory on the Indian side of the western section of the China-India border. “India’s unilateral amendment to its domestic law, continues to damage China’s territorial sovereignty. This is unacceptable,” Hua said. In response to a question about Hua’s statement, Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman Raveesh Kumar said on Tuesday the Ladakh decision was an internal matter. “India does not comment on the internal affairs of other countries and similarly expects other countries to do likewise,” said Kumar, without directly mentioning China. Patil from Gateway House said monks he interviewed in Ladakh told him China-endorsed monks had been extending loans and donations to Buddhist monasteries in the area in an apparent bid to win influence. Reuters was not able to contact any monks in Ladakh. By announcing it would turn Ladakh into its own administrative district, the Indian government fulfilled a decades-long demand from political leaders there. Ladakh locals were tired of being hurt or ignored because of the many years of turmoil in the Kashmir Valley resulting from separatist militant activity and the Indian military’s moves to crush them. Local politicians and analysts expect the change to bring Ladakh out of the shadow of Kashmir, which has long been a flashpoint with Pakistan. It could also help the area pocket more government funding as it seeks to build up its roads and facilities to lure tourists. “We are very happy that we are separated from Kashmir. Now we can be the owners of our own destiny,” Tsering Samphel, a veteran politician from the Congress party in Ladakh, said on Tuesday. He added the area felt dwarfed by Jammu and Kashmir - which is a majority Muslim area - and that the regions had little in common culturally. In Ladakh’s city of Leh on Monday, members of Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party danced in the streets and distributed sweets, Reuters partner ANI reported. Ladakh will be governed by a centrally-appointed lieutenant governor, handing New Delhi stronger oversight over the area. However, while Ladakh will become a Union Territory, it will not have its own legislature - a sore point for some locals. “Hopefully we will be getting that also, slowly,” said Samphel, 71, adding that local politicians would put that demand to New Delhi. Ladakh’s economy, traditionally dependent on farming, has benefited from tourists visiting ancient monasteries and trekking up mountain peaks. P. C. Thakur, general manager of The Zen Ladakh hotel in Leh, hopes that dissociating from Jammu and Kashmir will further attract visitors. He expects the hotel’s occupancy to jump by up to 7 percentage points from an average of around 80-85% currently. “Next year will be good,” he said. (This version of the story corrects location of Doklam plateau in paragraph 4) Reporting by Alexandra Ulmer in Mumbai; Additional reporting by Michael Martina in Beijing; Editing by Martin Howell and Andrew CawthorneOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Monday negotiations have begun with three Pacific island nations to renew a national security agreement that would help Washington counter growing Chinese influence in the region. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Federated States of Micronesia President David Panuelo, Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine and Palau's Vice President Raynold Oilouch hold a news conference after their meetings in Kolonia, Federated States of Micronesia August 5, 2019. REUTERS/Jonathan ErnstUnder the terms of the deal, known as the Compact of Free Association, the U.S. military have exclusive access to airspace and territorial waters of the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau. In exchange, the small islands receive financial assistance. “Today, I am here to confirm the United States will help you protect your sovereignty, your security, your right to live in freedom and peace,” Pompeo told reporters in Pohnpei State, one of four members of the Federated States of Micronesia. “I’m pleased to announce the United States has begun negotiations on extending our compacts.... they sustain democracy in the face of Chinese efforts to redraw the Pacific.” Pompeo, who is the first U.S. Secretary of State to visit Micronesia, spoke after meeting the leaders of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau. The three tiny Pacific nations have gained greater strategic significance in recent years due a push by China into the region. During a visit to Sydney on Sunday, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper described China’s actions as both “aggressive” and “destabilizing”. Laying the foundations for negotiations, U.S. President Donald Trump in May hosted the leaders of the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau - a rare state visit for such small countries. The agreement is due to expire in 2024, and any lapse could have created a potential opening for China. “Federated States of Micronesia form part of the second island chain that China sees as a way of containing their strategic ambitions,” said Jonathan Pryke, director of the Pacific Islands program at the Lowy Institute, a Sydney think tank. “The relationship is a critical one, but China is increasing its pursuit of the region.” China has become the region’s biggest bilateral lender during the past decade, although U.S. allies including Japan, Australia and New Zealand have retained – and in some instances recently increased – their already significant aid programs to Pacific island economies. Reuters analysis of budget documents shows that most of China’s concessionary loans have flowed to those Pacific island economies with which it has strong diplomatic ties, including Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu. Countries that have retained ties to Taiwan - like Palau, Kiribati and Solomon Islands - have limited Chinese investment. Editing by Simon Cameron-MooreOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Updated Sept. 3, 2018 8:54 pm ET ... To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In

Suicide bombers have stormed Libya’s electoral commission in Tripoli, killing at least a dozen people in an attack claimed by Islamic State jihadists.The bloodshed comes as the international community pushes for elections it hopes will help calm the turmoil that has plagued the north African country since the 2011 ouster of dictator Muammar Gaddafi.Two armed assailants attacked the electoral commission building, shooting guards and officials before blowing themselves up, interior minister Abdelsalam Ashour told a news conference on Wednesday.The internationally backed Government of National Accord denounced “the cowardly suicide attack” and pledged its “commitment to the democratic process”.At least 12 people were killed and seven wounded, according to the health ministry.Two policemen were among those killed, the interior ministry said.Eyewitnesses earlier said shots and at least two explosions were heard, while black smoke could be seen rising from the commission headquarters.Isis issued a statement claiming the attack, which it said was in response to a call by its spokesman this month to target polling stations in the Middle East.The United Nations mission in Libya condemned the assault and extended condolences to victims’ families.“Such terrorist attacks will not deter Libyans from moving forward in the process of consolidating national unity and building the state of law and institutions,” it said on Twitter.France and Britain condemned the attack, which British foreign minister Boris Johnson called “despicable”.The US State Department issued a statement “strongly” condemning the bombings: “This terrorist attack against a key pillar of Libya’s fragile democracy only deepens the United States’ commitment to support all Libyans as they prepare for credible and secure elections.” Topics Islamic State Libya Middle East and North Africa Africa news

US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is taking questions from senators at the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings today (Sept. 5). Only somewhat deterred by the hecklers occasionally yelling over him, he’s responding in detail on all the hot-button issues—abortion, gun control, presidential powers, the environment, and more.Yet, somehow, simultaneously, he’s been evasive.Citing liberal judges at their confirmation hearings—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who said “no hints, no forecasts, no previews,” and Elena Kagan, who refused give “a thumbs up or thumbs down” on potential rulings—Kavanaugh is managing to be both responsive and dodge questions. “I liked her formulation,” he said of Kagan before refusing to be pinned down on hypotheticals.For some viewers, this might be infuriating, the ultimate sneaky lawyer move.Actually though, it’s a good thing.Because, as the justices before him and Kavanaugh today contends, an independent judiciary cannot trade responses and promises for votes, and must keep an open mind about every case. So though we may want to know just how they’ll decide matters, we should be pleased to hear Kavanaugh tell senator Dianne Feinstein, when asked about his views on a president’s obligation to respond to a subpoena, “I can’t give you an answer on that hypothetical.”The question arose in the context of a discussion of the 1974 case US v. Nixon, in which a sitting president, Richard Nixon, was subpoenaed for documents. “That holding is one of the four greatest moments in Supreme Court history…the court stood up for judicial independence in a moment of national crisis,” Kavanaugh told senators, adding that he thought the media has not given “a correct impression of my views in the news.”The reporting didn’t come out of thin air, of course. In a 1999 issue of the Washington Lawyer, he said, “Maybe Nixon was wrongly decided—heresy though it is to say so. Nixon took away the power of the president to control information in the executive branch by holding that the courts had power and jurisdiction to order the president to disclose information in response to a subpoena sought by a subordinate executive branch official. That was a huge step with implications to this day that most people do not appreciate sufficiently.”The sense is confirmed by a 2009 Minnesota Law Review article (pdf) in which Kavanaugh wrote that a sitting president should be immune from the distractions of civil and criminal litigation. Given Donald Trump’s current predicament—the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into possible Team Trump collusion with Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election—Kavanaugh’s position seems very favorable to the president.What could be better for the president than seating a justice who would refuse to prosecute the commander in chief? Indeed, Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar thinks this is why Trump picked Kavanaugh for the open seat on the court.Kavanaugh worked on the special counsel’s investigation of president Bill Clinton and served as an adviser to the George W. Bush administration for five years, a tenure that included the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Today he said his law review article isn’t an indication of how he’ll decide future cases about presidential investigations, calling it a product of “very deep thought” on his previous experiences, based on an insider and outsider view, both an understanding of what it’s like to investigate a president and to advise one in a time of national crisis.Kavanaugh insisted that his past writing isn’t an indication of decisions he’ll make on the court. “They were ideas for Congress to consider—they were not my constitutional views,” he told the senators. “I have only put out proposals for you all to consider.” Moreover, he argues that his personal views have nothing to do with how he decides a case. His allegiance isn’t to the president or anyone else, he said: “I owe my loyalty to the constitution.”Feinstein, in an effort to square Kavanaugh’s alleged admiration for the holding in Nixon with his later writing, asked him whether that means he’d approve a subpoena of a sitting president if appointed as a justice.“That’s a hypothetical question about what would be an elaboration of difference from Us v. Nixon’s precise holding…I can’t give you an answer on that,” he replied.Kavanaugh managed to answer in a way that might appease those who believe he is the nominee mostly because he’d protect Trump from the kind of “distracting” process he helped put Clinton through. He also avoided promising that he’ll approve investigations of the president should such a case arise while he’s on the bench.It seems like slippery political trickery. Yet he’s also not wrong when he insists that it’s not a judge’s job to decide hypothetical cases in advance or promise the public outcomes ahead of an appointment.Why bother with this confirmation process then? Why is Kavanaugh even talking at all if he won’t say anything that will help us make sense of how he’ll decide big cases? Confirmation hearings do provide some insight, offering the public an opportunity to see the prospective justice and hear him discuss his judicial philosophy—which is not the same as talking about specific cases. A discussion of legal principles is very different from partisan debate. Seeking and providing reassurances on specific cases and situations is a mistake, says Randy Barnett, who directs the Georgetown Center for the Constitution in Washington. He tells Quartz that senators should be probing the nominee on his judicial philosophy: “You don’t want nominees to commit to outcomes. Senators should be asking about clauses of the constitution, not the cases.”In this regard, Kavanaugh has been forthcoming, elaborating on his idea of what a good judge must do, including “resisting public pressure, political pressure, treating everyone equally no matter what station.” He repeated the refrain that he’d be “independent, make decisions based on law, not political pressure, not based on identity, no matter rich or poor, whatever station in life, race or gender, it’s all equal justice under law.”He’s even answered the executive-powers question, albeit in a roundabout way, saying, “No one is above the law in our constitution” and that the “executive is subject to the law.”Over and over, he has expressed his respect for precedent, the importance of maintaining a legal system that’s reliable, predictable, and meets the needs of the people all while adhering to constitutional principles. ”I don’t live in a bubble,” Kavanaugh said when asked his position on issues like women’s reproductive rights and gun laws.The nominee insists that he’d be part of “a team of nine” justices, and that litigants who’d come before him, whether they win or lose, would feel they got “a fair shake.”He points out cases where he decided against a Republican administration, like the 2012 Hamdan v. US, in which an “associate of Osama Bin Laden” involved in the Sept. 11 attacks was prosecuted before a military commission, writing the opinion finding this commission process unconstitutional. “Why did I rule for someone involved in Sept. 11? The law compelled it,” Kavanaugh said.“We don’t make decisions based on who people are but on the law. [Justice Anthony] Kennedy’s example of independence is what I try to follow,” Kavanaugh says. “I’m a pro-law judge. I’ve ruled for parties based on whether they have the law on their side. If you walk into my courtroom and you have the better legal arguments, you will win.” It’s hard to argue with such reasonable responses and not to be convinced by Kavanaugh’s rhetoric if you’re really listening to the answers and haven’t decided in advance.But the hearings are a strange political process for a job that’s meant to be apolitical and—after all is said and done—it’s still difficult to determine how Kavanaugh would decide key cases, given his previous political positions. And really, this is what everyone wants to know.It’s part of a peculiarly American and contradictory desire: The constitution and country prize an independent judiciary even as political factions want to seat judges to their liking—and hope judges won’t be swayed by the other side’s partisan views.