U.S. President Donald Trump rallies with supporters in Toledo, Ohio, U.S. January 9, 2020. REUTERS/Jonathan ErnstWASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said on Friday Iran probably had targeted the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and was aiming to attack four U.S. embassies when its top general, Qassem Soleimani, was killed in a U.S. drone strike. “We will tell you probably it was going to be the embassy in Baghdad,” Trump said in a clip of an interview on Fox News. “I can reveal that I believe it would have been four embassies.” Reporting by Lisa Lambert, Editing by Franklin PaulOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The loss of family reunion rights for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children will leave them with “no options” except taking dangerous routes and using smugglers, charities in France and Greece are warning.The prime minister, Boris Johnson, faced criticism after he told parliament he had dropped a promise to replace the EU law that allows child refugees stranded in Europe to reunite with family members in the UK after Brexit.Clare Moseley, the director of Care4Calais, said the news was devastating for those working with young asylum-seekers.“I’m so shocked. This will have a massive impact. Just yesterday I was with an Afghan boy whose mother is dead, his father is in the UK, there is nowhere else that boy should be. The idea that he won’t have that right to join his father at all is horrific. How could anyone think there is anywhere else that boy should be?“We have many very young Afghan boys here. Some are under 13. Nearly all the young people here are trying to reach family in the UK. That is the only reason anyone would put up with the horrible conditions here.”Authorities in Dunkirk and Calais have recently used force to keep the area clear of tents, leaving nowhere for migrants to shelter. Hundreds, including children, sleep rough with no toilets or running water.Bastien Roland, a lawer supporting young asylum seekers in northern France, said family reunion was a way to persuade vulnerable children to enter the official asylum system.“We have very young children here in Calais who we worry are being exploited by adults. The family reunion law offers a chance to persuade a young person who is sleeping outside to enter the official system. It is a really key tool to get them out of the jungle. Without family reunion children will put themselves in danger. They will risk injury and death to get to the UK. ”On Europe’s southern border, in Greece, frontline workers say there needs to be far larger numbers of children brought to the UK.Sandy Protogerou, the head of the charity Safe Passage in Greece said: “There is no space for these children in Greece, the situation here is horrible. We just recently found a Syrian boy who was trying to go through the Greek asylum system in order to apply to join his brother in the UK. Instead he had been placed in a terrible place, like detention, with really bad conditions.“Without family reunion there will be no option for a boy like him. He comes from a war zone so he would have no option but to use smugglers to keep moving forward to find his brother.Even for children who do not have family in other EU countries, she says, “staying here in Greece isn’t proper, there is no space, conditions are horrible, too many minors have arrived over the summer”.Conditions on the Greek islands for migrants are reported to be catastrophic, as rising numbers of arrivals have put pressure on already overcrowded camps.More than 50,000 migrants arrived in Greece by sea over 2019. About 17,000 were under 18, 2,600 of them travelling without adults.On a visit to the Greek islands last month, the UN high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi, called for Europe to do more, particularly for unaccompanied minors.“Europe has to get its act together,” he said after visiting Lesbos. “[It] has to have a new system that is based on sharing, responsibility sharing. There is a children on-the-move emergency in this country that needs to be tackled.”The Home Office admitted in September that family reunion would end immediately if there was a no-deal Brexit. But until the latest announcement, campaigners believed that the EU law would be replaced during negotiations for a post-Brexit Britain.A petition started by two former volunteers from Calais asking the Home Office to save family reunion has gained an extra 25,000 signatures since Johnson made the announcement on Thursday. There are now 125,000 signatures on the petition , which was started in September after the Guardian reported that family reunion would end if there was a no-deal Brexit. Topics Refugees Boris Johnson Brexit Migration Greece France Europe news

The Trump administration has slapped sanctions on the son of Nicolás Maduro, in the latest attempt to tighten the screws on Venezuela’s embattled leader.The move by the US treasury department freezes any US assets belonging to the president’s son – Nicolás Maduro Guerra, or Nicolasito – and bars Americans from doing business with him.“Maduro relies on his son Nicolasito and others close to his authoritarian regime to maintain a stranglehold on the economy and suppress the people of Venezuela,” said the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin.Like his father, Nicolasito is tall and portly; at 29 years old, he is one of the youngest political figures in Maduro’s inner circle.He is allegedly a major player in Venezuela’s gold trade. According to Manuel Ricardo Cristopher Figuera, a former spy chief who recently fled to the US, an assistant of Nicolasito set up a company to buy gold from miners and sell it to Venezuela’s central bank at inflated rates.Little is known about Nicolasito’s personal life, although he is understood to be married with two children. His Twitter biography describes him as an economics graduate and a flautist in the world-famous Sistema network of youth orchestras, although government critics have expressed doubt over both claims.His political career appears to have taken off soon after his father was elected president in 2013, when at the age of 23 he was appointed as the head of Venezuela’s body of inspectors, fueling accusations of nepotism.In 2014 he was also named as director of the Venezuelan School of Cinema, again prompting incredulity about his credentials. “Maduro’s son knows nothing [about cinema]” the feted Venezuelan playwright José Tomás Angola said at the time. “What he does know is how to steal a camera.”Since 2017 Nicolasito has sat on the constituent national assembly – the loyalist body set up to sideline the opposition-held national assembly.When Donald Trump floated the possibility of a military intervention to oust President Maduro, Nicolasito responded with a speech threatening a Venezuelan invasion of the United States. “The rifles will reach New York, Mr Trump!” he boomed, looking at the camera. “We will reach and take the White House!”In a country beset by economic collapse and intense food shortages, Nicolasito prompted outrage in March 2017 when he was filmed at a society wedding in Caracas, dancing to Arabic music while being showered with dollars. He brushed the incident off as “gossip”.The US has sanctioned more than 100 Venezuelan officials and insiders accused of corruption, human rights violations and drug trafficking, including Maduro himself and his wife, Cilia Flores. Topics Venezuela Americas US foreign policy news

The Trump administration’s top envoy for Iran just put assassination back on the table when he said the US will take out the successor to slain Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani — if the successor continues along the path of killing Americans.That forceful message, delivered by Brian Hook during an interview with the Asharq al-Awsat newspaper in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, serves as a stark warning to Tehran — and could conceivably increase tensions with the US.If new Quds Force Commander Esmail Ghaani “follows a similar path of killing Americans, he will meet the same fate,” Hook said. “The president has made clear for years that any attacks against American personnel or interests in the region will be met with a decisive response.” “This is not a new threat,” Hook continued. “I think the regime now understands that they cannot attack America at will, and expect to get away with it. So we will hold the regime and its proxies accountable for any attacks on Americans, or on American interests in the region.”Since the Iranian response — which accidentally resulted in the downing of a Ukrainian passenger jet — the chance of a full-blown war with Iran has tamped down. But Hook’s comment could make tempers flare, as the Trump administration has now openly threatened to kill another key member of Iran’s military. Hook is right to note that Trump has been consistent regarding his red line — the US responds forcefully when an American is killed — but stating it so brazenly and explicitly in these terms is a whole other matter.“It’s wildly inappropriate and dangerous for an American diplomat to openly threaten individual assassinations of Iranian military commanders,” Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, told me. “There is a rhetorical and substantive difference between promising tough, decisive US responses to any attacks on Americans vice specific threats to kill individual commanders — especially from a State Department official.”The White House and Pentagon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on whether or not taking Ghaani out, should Iran kill an American, is official US policy.An unintended consequence of Hook’s interview, perhaps, is that it elevates Ghaani’s stature. Being a clear American target could give him more cachet among his troops and some regime officials. That’d be quite a development for the secretive military leader who now has to come out of the shadows to take over for Soleimani, a high-profile military leader for two decades.Ghaani, like Soleimani, fought in the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, joining the newly formed Quds Force. But the now 62-year-old has remained a largely unknown figure, though he has been a prominent member of the Iranian military for years. That longevity seemingly brought him close to his predecessor. “We are children of war,” Ghaani once said of Soleimani, according to Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency. “We are comrades on the battlefield and we have become friends in battle.”One thing is clear, though: He’s not a fan of America. “If there were no Islamic Republic, the US would have burned the whole region,” Ghaani has said.So far, Ghaani has remained somewhat elusive and not as public as Soleimani was. He may still be biding his time before taking on the public mantle he’s expected to assume. The new commander, then, will likely continue Soleimani’s policy of trying to export Iranian influence throughout the Middle East and thwart American aims in the region. Whether or not Hook’s warning will deter him from going a step too far, though, will only be known with time.

When President Donald Trump publicly claimed earlier this month that he had seen intel showing Iran’s now-deceased top military leader Qassem Soleimani was plotting attacks on “four [American] embassies,” senior officials in Trump’s national security apparatus shook their heads. They weren’t sure exactly why the president leaned on that particular talking point, and scrambled in the following days to formulate answers to a barrage of questions from the media on exactly what the president had meant. Other officials wondered aloud whether the president had misrepresented the intelligence. “There were definitely questions [at the time, internally] about whether he had just made it up on the spot,” recalled one White House official.It turns out Trump—technically—didn’t get his eyebrow-raising claim out of nowhere, The Daily Beast has learned. According to three sources familiar with the matter, the president had simply seized on a small part of what he’d heard in private briefings, exaggerated that aspect of the intelligence, then began sharing the inflated intel to the American public during his post-Soleimani victory lap. In doing so, President Trump generated yet more confusion and discord among the national security brass that had already struggled to sell the American people on its case for the strike that just brought Iran and the United States to the precipice of all-out warfare. For weeks the Trump administration had struggled to get on message in talking about why the U.S. decided to strike Soleimani and what it would do in the future to manage any diplomacy with Tehran. Trump’s embassy claim didn’t help, officials said.“There were definitely questions about whether Trump had just made it up on the spot.”— White House officialThe White House did not comment on the record for this story.Shortly before he began announcing to the media and rally-goers that the Iranian general was planning assaults on multiple U.S. embassies, the president received briefings at the White House from both national security officials and communications staffers. The purpose of some of these meetings were to prepare Trump on how best to talk to the press regarding his administration’s justifications for killing Soleimani. The president received a briefing shortly before he entered the Roosevelt Room Jan. 9 and said Iran was “looking to blow up our embassy.” According to two people familiar with this briefing, Trump was told the pre-strike intelligence showed that Iran could lash out against American assets in the region. The president was again told this in a subsequent briefing that day, one of these sources added. However, embassies were a part of a long list of American outposts and bases potentially under threat from Iran but sources familiar with those internal briefings do not remember the number four ever being specified, and they certainly do not recall any imminent danger to those embassies.When administration officials briefed Trump, they mentioned possible targets for Iranian assaults; they were not discussing intel on what anyone in the regime was actively plotting against U.S. interests, the sources noted.However, the moment he heard the word “embassies,” Trump immediately chimed in, interrupting the meeting to grill his briefers on that issue, according to one U.S. official. From there, he began to treat this possible threat as a near-certain danger. Trump received another intelligence briefing shortly before his interview with Fox’s Laura Ingraham Jan. 10 where he repeated the claim that Iran probably would have attacked four embassies. When the president started publicly trotting out his claims of “four embassies,” national security aides were dumbfounded. The Washington Post reported earlier this month that Trump’s “four embassies” talking point clashed with intelligence assessments from Trump’s own officials. CNN also reported that security officials at the State Department weren’t even notified of an imminent danger to any specific set of four American embassies.“The president seized on a small part of what he’d heard in private briefings, exaggerated that aspect of the intelligence, then began sharing the inflated intel during his post-Soleimani victory lap.”Secretary of Defense Mark Esper himself admitted during an interview on the CBS Sunday show Face the Nation that while “the president said that he believed that it probably could have been attacks against additional embassies,” Esper personally “didn’t see [a specific piece of evidence] with regard to four embassies.”Esper added, “What I’m saying is I shared the president’s view that probably, my expectation is they were going to go after our embassies.”At that point, the U.S. embassy in Baghdad had of course already been stormed by an Iranian-supported militia, but that was prior to Soleimani’s death.Senior Trump administration officials have canceled several of their past scheduled briefings with Congress on specific threats to U.S. embassies pre-Soleimani strike. Briefers were also supposed to delve into more detail about what exactly U.S. intelligence said prior to the strike. The administration has held two briefings so far with both the House and the Senate, but sessions left lawmakers frustrated and overwhelmingly uninformed. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rescheduled his briefing on the embassy threats with the House Foreign Affairs committee for next week.But people close to Trump say his embassy fixation lies in his obsession with avoiding the kind of catastrophes that befell his predecessors Barack Obama and George W. Bush. President Trump, who has long bashed Obama for the 2012 Benghazi attack and Bush for the Hurricane Katrina response, is particularly concerned with opening himself up to accusations of having suffered “Trump’s Benghazi” or “Trump’s Katrina,” according to two sources who’ve spoken to the president about this. “Multiple times I’ve heard him talk about how you don’t want a Katrina moment,” said a former senior White House official. “You can’t do anything about what weather is going to do, but you can certainly manage the response and the optics of what you’re doing in addition to the substance of what you’re doing.”With Trump’s shambolic, even scandalous, handling of the response and relief efforts to the hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico, this president seems to have already had his “Katrina.” He is, however, determined not to experience a direct parallel to Benghazi. Indeed, on New Year’s Eve, the president took to Twitter to enthusiastically brand the embassy attack that occurred on his watch “The Anti-Benghazi!” UPDATE 1/21/20: The story has been updated to clarify the timing of one of Trump's intelligence briefings on Iran.

Langan Insulation LLC and its co-owner pleaded guilty today in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for their roles in schemes to rig bids in violation of the antitrust laws and engage in criminal fraud on insulation contracts, bringing the total to five convictions in this ongoing investigation, the Department of Justice announced. According to court documents, from October 2011 until March 2018, Langan Insulation LLC, located in North Haven, Connecticut, and Thomas F. Langan, of East Haven, Connecticut, conspired with other insulation contractors to rig bids and engage in fraud on contracts for installing insulation around pipes and ducts on construction projects at universities, hospitals, and other public and private entities in Connecticut. The conspirators discussed prices and agreed on bids that inflated prices to their customers by approximately 10 percent. In order to conceal their actions, the conspirators perpetrated the bid-rigging and fraud schemes using phones for which the registration masked the identity of the users and an encrypted disappearing messaging app.“Today’s two guilty pleas, from a company and its senior executive, underscore our ongoing efforts to hold companies and individuals accountable for engaging in bid rigging and fraud,” said Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. “We will aggressively pursue and hold accountable those individuals and entities who inflict millions of dollars in harm, particularly on vulnerable institutions, such as taxpayer-funded schools and hospitals, and other businesses.”“This collusive scheme defrauded hospitals, universities and businesses across New England of millions of dollars,” said U.S. Attorney John H. Durham for the District of Connecticut. “The guilty pleas today demonstrate that the Department of Justice will seek to hold both individuals and companies accountable for rigging bids. I thank the FBI, DCIS, and the Antitrust Division for their ongoing efforts to bring the participants in this conspiracy to justice.”“Today is another example to show that individuals who engage in fraud schemes of any kind will not be tolerated,” said Special Agent in Charge Brian C. Turner of FBI’s New Haven Field Office. “The FBI, along with DOJ and our law enforcement partners, will remain diligent in combatting fraud and collusion so that justice is served.”“Bid rigging and other violations of antitrust laws seriously damage the integrity of the U.S. Defense Department's procurement process,” said Special Agent in Charge Leigh-Alistair Barzey of the Department of Defense OIG’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS), Northeast Field Office. “The guilty pleas announced today are the direct result of a joint investigative effort and demonstrate the DCIS’ ongoing commitment to work with the USAO-CT and the FBI to investigate and prosecute individuals and companies that engage in criminal conduct that undermines the competitive bidding process.”The antitrust charge announced today carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a criminal fine of $1 million for individuals, and a criminal fine of $100 million for corporations. The fraud conspiracy charge carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a criminal fine of $250,000 for individuals, and a criminal fine of $500,000 for organizations. The fines for the antitrust and fraud conspiracy charges may be increased to twice the gain derived from the crime or twice the loss suffered by the victims of the crime, if either of those amounts is greater than the statutory maximum fine. In addition to their guilty pleas, Langan Insulation LLC and Thomas F. Langan have agreed to pay restitution to the victims.The ongoing investigation is being conducted by the Antitrust Division’s New York Office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut, the FBI’s New Haven Division, and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service. Anyone with information in connection with this investigation is urged to call the Antitrust Division’s New York Office at 212-335-8000, or visit http://www.justice.gov/atr/contact/newcase.html.

closeVideoPreview clip: Trump tells Laura Ingraham ‘four embassies’ were targeted in imminent threat from IranPresident Trump told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham in an exclusive interview that the imminent threat from Iran that provoked the United States to kill Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani involved planned attacks on four U.S. embassies.President Trump told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham in an exclusive interview Friday that the imminent threat from Iran that provoked the United States to kill Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani involved planned attacks on four U.S. embassies.Asked specifically what was targeted, Trump revealed: “We will tell you that probably it was going to be the embassy in Baghdad.”Pressed on whether large-scale attacks were planned for other embassies, the president said: “I can reveal that I believe it probably would’ve been four embassies.”The full interview with the president will air Friday night at 10 p.m. ET on Fox News' “The Ingraham Angle.”The American embassy in Baghdad had already been attacked on New Year’s Eve when demonstrators stormed the compound to protest American airstrikes against Iran-backed militia members.But there has been confusion over whether additional attacks were being planned at the embassy after Trump told reporters Thursday that the U.S. killed Soleimani because “they were looking to blow up our embassy.”The administration has repeatedly said that that strike was an act of self-defense to prevent what it has described as an “imminent threat” against U.S. interests and troops.Earlier Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was grilled on the specifics of that threat as reporters quizzed him on what “imminent” meant.“We had specific information on an imminent threat and that threat stream included attacks on U.S. embassies. Period. Full stop,” he said. When later asked what he meant by imminent, he responded: “It was going to happen.”During Friday's interview with Ingraham, the president was also asked about whether the Iraqi backlash to the Soleimani strike could lead to U.S. troops leaving Iraq.“I’m OK with it,” Trump said before dismissing recent calls from Iraqi officials to begin planning for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. “That’s what they [the Iraqis] say publicly. They don’t say that privately,” Trump said.VideoAlso during the interview, the president responded to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's announcement that Democrats will send impeachment articles to the Senate next week – after delaying the move for several weeks in a failed attempt to extract concessions from Republicans.“I think it’s ridiculous,” Trump said. “She should have sent them a long time ago. It just belittles the process ... Nancy Pelosi will go down as the least successful speaker of the House in the history of our nation. She has done nothing."After former national security adviser John Bolton said this week he would be willing to testify in the impeachment trial if called, Trump expressed concern about the precedent it would set. Asked if he would invoke executive privilege to stop it, Trump said, “Well, I think you have to for the sake of the office.”Fox News’ Adam Shaw contributed to this report.

It has been a year since a pro-gun, anti-indigenous far-right former army captain took power in Brazil and began sending shockwaves through the country’s government and society.In those 12 months, Jair Bolsonaro – who is openly homophobic and allied to Brazil’s hardline religious right – has declared war on film-makers, journalists and the environment; put a conspiracy theorist in charge of the foreign service; and greenlit a new era of police repression and rainforest destruction.Here, six prominent Brazilian voices from the arts, media, diplomacy and the Amazon offer their thoughts on Bolsonaro’s dramatic first year as president.“It has been such a tough year – above all when it comes to public security. We feel really afraid of the intensifying repression of the black population and the increasing militarisation of the favelas. The number of black people being murdered in poor communities has increased, as has the number of indigenous leaders being killed. “But it’s important to remember how many people have resisted and how many [resistance] movements exist. “If there’s a positive side to this government, it’s that issues of race and gender have never been talked about so much. This is now a mainstream debate in a country like Brazil – a country founded on the myth of racial democracy that denied the existence of racism for so long. This debate already existed. But now people are discussing and speaking out about these issues like never before.“Bolsonaro has thrown wide open things that social movements have been talking about for centuries and people are starting to wake up. In 2020, the struggle goes on.”“This year confirmed our worst fears about the Bolsonaro government’s relationship with the press. We’ve seen it take an increasingly hostile stance, not just towards journalists but also critical and independent media outlets.“There hadn’t been any kind of censorship since the end of the military dictatorship [in 1985] – and now we’ve started to see a gradual erosion of freedom of expression. The other day I was talking to Nicaraguan and Venezuelan colleagues and they told me: ‘Four years ago, we were going through exactly what you’re going through. This is how it begins.’“Every time you write a critical piece, you become a target for Bolsonaro supporters. I’d never been a target before – even when covering conflicts. I didn’t even feel like a target in Syria. But here, it’s personal. “The aggressive messages and the fake news never stop. This is our new normal – especially for female journalists. I’ve become used to being called a whore. Each time I’m about to publish an article that’s critical of the government, I prepare myself because I know the next day will be hell.”“The last time I felt ashamed of Brazil was in the late 1960s.“I was going up the escalators near the London School of Economics and I opened a magazine and it had a story about a Brazilian student who had been killed and tortured by the dictatorship. I had the impression everyone on the underground was looking at me.“Now, again, I feel ashamed – for many reasons, but especially by what is being done in foreign policy. In 50 years I’ve never seen anything like what is happening in Brazilian diplomacy today. Not even during the military government.“Terrible things happened back then in Brazil. But our diplomacy was more skilful, more cautious and sought dialogue whenever possible. Now it has embarked upon an all-out ideological war against everything that is not western or Christian – according to their conception.“I feel sorry for my colleagues in the foreign service because I know some of them are being forced to do what they do because it’s their only job.“It’s not very different from the US state department under Trump – only more exaggerated, more ridiculous. And of course Trump has 4,000 nuclear weapons – he can do whatever he wants.” “The way the president is behaving is disastrous. So for me, this has been a disappointing year given the positive expectations I had before the elections.“There are two different people: Captain Jair Bolsonaro is someone I highly respect [and] miss greatly… But President Jair Bolsonaro is a disappointment for the way he has betrayed his country and much of what he promised in the campaign.“He started to see himself as a some sort of mythological entity, blessed by God. He became extremely arrogant and wouldn’t listen to anyone.“You can agree with him about 99 things. But if you disagree on one and argue or try to offer another point of view, you are seen as a traitor. His administration became a sect of fanatics – and I’m not a fanatic.“[Bolsonaro] is surrounded by radicals [and] is scared of everything. He is constantly afraid of being betrayed. That’s why he’s aggressive. He’s scared of journalists. He is scared of politicians.”“Indigenous people in Brazil feel a lot more fear under this president. This year, many illegal miners have entered our land. They pollute our rivers and kill our fish. Our people are starting to get malaria again.“Bolsonaro is a garimpeiro [illegal miner]. He wants more land and fewer Indians. After he took power in January, he attacked us and said he no longer wants to recognise indigenous reserves. “He calls us lazy and says we produce nothing. That’s exactly the argument the illegal miners use.“I don’t know the president personally, but I don’t like what I hear of him on TV and read in the newspaper. He thinks in a military way. The military doesn’t care about the land or indigenous people.“That is bad for him and bad for us because he is president. He sets the direction of Brazil.“In our culture, we don’t damage the river and trees. We care for the forest. But the miners just bring destruction. Who is getting rich from this? It’s not regular Brazilians in the cities. It’s politicians who are selling the wealth of Brazil to foreigners. “I hope people outside can understand this and help us to defend ourselves and preserve nature.”“For Brazilian cinema, 2019 represented a gigantic pause. Nothing advanced. Everything was suspended. This is a massive loss for an industry that employed more than 300,000 people. It’s not just a cultural loss, it’s an economic loss too. So many families no longer have a way of supporting themselves.“The new government admits it wants to filter the content being produced with public money. But Brazil’s constitution outlaws censorship. You can’t decide which films can and can’t be made with public funds. There’s a committee responsible for selecting projects according to artistic qualities, the artists involved, the producer – not the themes being portrayed. “I think it’s an attempt to restrict the content of films. But our country is still a democracy where things work in a certain way. No leader – a mayor, a governor, or president – has the right to impose their personal tastes on the entire population.“It makes no sense to obstruct a major industry that creates tax revenues, jobs and helps promote the name of our country around the world.“I don’t know if it’s about Bolsonaro’s tastes, how he sees things or the people in his government. But he himself has said the government wants to control what will be made and what won’t – and this is censorship.” Topics Jair Bolsonaro Americas features

The seventh Democratic presidential debate is scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 14, at 9 p.m. Eastern, hosted at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez may move it, however, if the event interferes with a yet-unscheduled Senate impeachment trial for President Donald Trump. To qualify, the candidates needed to meet polling and fundraising minimums: They needed to either secure 5% support (or more) in at least four national or early-voting-state polls approved by the DNC, or receive 7% (or more) in two early-voting-state polls. (The early states are Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina.) They also needed to have received funds from 225,000 unique donors, with a minimum of 1,000 unique donors per state in at least 20 different states. The deadline is 11:59 p.m. Friday. Here’s who has made the cut as of Friday morning: Former Vice President Joe Biden Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders Billionaire Tom Steyer Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren Businessman Andrew Yang, who qualified for the sixth debate, looks to be notably absent from the seventh. Steyer was added to the mix late Thursday after surging in polls in two early voting states, Nevada and South Carolina. By one measure ― television ads ― he and billionaire former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg have outspent every other candidate many times over, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis. As of Friday, Steyer had spent $78 million airing 32 TV ads, while Bloomberg had spent $110 million on seven TV ads, the outlet reported. Biden, to compare, has spent $1.8 million on 10 TV ads so far. Moderating the next debate will be CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Abby Phillip, teaming up with The Des Moines Register’s Brianne Pfannenstiel. Download Calling all HuffPost superfans! Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter Join HuffPost

Switching from deterrence to compellence is a high-risk move. Deterrence is about preventing behavior; compellence is about changing behavior, a much more difficult business, since keeping the status quo by threats is generally easier than changing the status quo by force. The target of compellence must either comply or inflict more pain in return.The Iranians, however, chose neither to fold nor to fight. They took a narrower path, opting for a more calibrated response by launching ballistic missiles that damaged U.S. bases but avoided human casualties. In so doing, the Iranians accomplished several objectives.Second, Iran showed that it was willing to roll with changes in the rules of the game. As Leon Panetta said on Meet the Press the day after the Iranian strikes, the Obama administration never considered taking out Soleimani, because the risk of war simply wasn’t worth it. Likewise, Iran had avoided the use of ballistic missiles against any other state since the Iran-Iraq War. The Americans showed that they were willing to kill senior Iranians. The Iranians showed in return that they were willing to use ballistic missiles, and that next time they might not be targeted to miss.Third, the strikes were a signal to Iraq, and to other nations in the region, that association with the Americans does not confer some magical immunity. Indeed, they demonstrated that allying with the U.S. is a risk in itself.A related point is that Iran wisely avoided inflicting U.S. casualties, which would have united even skeptical Americans behind Trump and likely would have forced him to act. (The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, claims that the Iranians had intended to inflict casualties. This is hard to believe, given the pattern of the damage, and contradicts other sources in the administration.) Even advisers who might have earlier tried to sway Trump away from killing Soleimani would have been unable to argue against a significant military response.Finally, instead of inflicting casualties, the Iranians gave the Americans a plausible way out of a crisis Trump created. They made their point, and then signaled to American decision makers (or at least to those who understand how to read such signals) that they were willing to let the exchange stop. Obviously, this was in Iran’s interest; an escalation to all-out war would lead to an Iranian loss, if by “loss” we mean greater casualties before the termination of hostilities. But Tehran was betting that, absent immediate U.S. deaths, Washington does not have the stomach for a bigger fight, and it was right.Following the U.S. retaliation against Soleimani, the Iranians were faced with the tasks of restoring their own credibility as a military opponent and averting further U.S. action. They accomplished both, at least for now. The U.S. bid for compellence failed; the Iranian attempt to restore deterrence succeeded. Tom Nicholsis the author ofThe Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters.

The former Interpol chief Meng Hongwei, who was detained on a visit to China in 2018, has been sentenced to more than 13 years in prison for bribery in a case that has shaken the international police organisation.Meng – a former vice-minister of public security in China – is among a growing group of Communist party cadres caught in President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, which critics say has also served as a way to remove the leader’s political enemies.He vanished during a visit to China from France, where Interpol is based, and was later accused of accepting bribes and expelled from the Communist party. His wife was granted political asylum in France last year, after saying she was afraid she and her two children would be the targets of kidnapping attempts.Meng was sentenced to 13 years and six months in prison and fined 2m yuan RMB (£223,000), said the Tianjin first intermediate people’s court on Tuesday.At his trial last June, he pleaded guilty to accepting $2.1m in bribes, after the court said he used his status and positions to “seek improper benefit”.The court statement on Tuesday said Meng had “truthfully confessed to all the criminal facts” and would not appeal against the decision. Topics China Asia Pacific Xi Jinping news

Underlying these passions is a deeply-rooted impetus for accountability that has informed the century-plus long struggle for representative government within Iran from the start. Cover-ups are part of the Islamic Republic’s DNA, and those officials who have gone public about the regime’s persistent use of violence against its own population or perversion of its own institutions have typically been detained and silenced.The rapid admission of official responsibility for the downing of Flight 752 is a rare exception. As the Iranian American human-rights lawyer Gissou Nia has explained, many Iranians are convinced that the tragedy would have been played very differently had the plane crash been purely a domestic affair. By contrast, a crash involving passengers of diverse nationalities, on an American-branded plane flown by a Ukrainian airline to a Canadian destination, involved the global community in the incident and forced Iran’s military to own up to its grievous error.Even still, Tehran does not yet seem inclined to hold its own commanders accountable. To date, the only apparent judicial actions related to the missile strike on the Ukrainian plane have been directed at those who helped to make the truth known to the world. Iran has reportedly arrested the person who leaked the video that helped open-source investigative journalists confirm the suspicions voiced initially by Canadian and American officials about the crash.Ultimately, there is little reason to believe that the public admission of fault by the Iranian military in the downing of the plane will lead to any kind of meaningful accountability from the ruling system itself. Iran’s security establishment is already dealing with the shock of losing one of its most influential figures in Soleimani. Moreover, it’s hardly obvious that responsibility for wrongfully shooting down Flight 752 should end with the military. After all, the Iranian media made a point to tout the role Khamenei himself played in overseeing the missile attack from a military operations center. His government’s official indifference toward the lives and well-being of Iranians contrasts starkly with the apparent precision and deliberation demonstrated by the Iranian military in avoiding American fatalities in Iraq and elsewhere.Real accountability for Flight 752 may have to come from the demonstrators whom Khamenei’s government is trying hard to banish. By the fifth day, their numbers had been thinned by a muscular police presence as well as the tear gas and episodic gunfire that has been deployed over the past few days. But whatever becomes of this latest unrest, it will not be the end of the challenges facing the Iranian leadership from its own citizenry.Grief and anger over the plane downing appear to have engaged a different constituency than those who rallied in November and in previous rounds of unrest over concerns about economic hardship and inequality. Then, the protesters were primarily poor young men, enraged and desperate about their lack of opportunities and the corruption that insulates the regime and its oligarchs from any consequences.

As the news came out Thursday of evidence that Ukraine International Airlines flight 752 had been shot down, perhaps accidentally, by an Iranian anti-aircraft missile, a debate broke out about who was responsible for the disaster. California congresswoman Jackie Speier told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “This is yet another example of collateral damage from the actions that have been taken in a provocative way by the president of the United States.” That was poorly put, and the Trumpist social media machine immediately kicked into high gear. And it is true that Iran must bear full responsibility for the 176 lives tragically lost on the doomed flight. Their forces fired the missile. That said, Speier’s larger point remains salient and worth considering. Had Donald Trump not ordered the Qassem Soleimani attack, it is virtually certain the Ukrainian flight would not have been shot down. Troops would have been at a different alert level. That means her use of the term “collateral damage” was on its face, accurate. This does not absolve the Iranians of one iota of the guilt they rightly must bear. And Donald Trump and his planners could not possibly have foreseen the specific circumstances that led to this tragedy.But what they could have and should have planned for is the cascading consequences of an action so profound as the killing of the leader of Iran’s most elite military forces, the second most powerful man in the country. Even casual observers know that Iran is the world’s largest state sponsor of terror. Iran even underscored this point in one of the first appearances of Soleimani’s successor, his long-time former deputy, Esmail Ghanni. He stood before flags not just of Iran and of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard but of Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hashd al-Shaabi, Hamas, Liwa Fatemiyun and Liwa Zaynabiyun, as well as the country’s air force.The message was that they had a reach that extended across the greater Middle East. The organizations whose flags were displayed were all Iranian proxies. Their operations covered Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Gaza, Afghanistan and Pakistan. While Iran’s immediate response to the Soleimani killing was measured with Tuesday’s missile attack on an Iraqi base that was preceded by hours with a warning the attack was coming in order to minimize the risk of casualties, they were simultaneously sending a message that their reach and their appetite for revenge was great. Indeed, this was also underscored on Thursday when a U.S. official told NBC’s Ken Dilanian that further retaliation for the attacks was expected, adding, “If I were a U.S. ambassador, I wouldn’t be starting my own car for the foreseeable future.”When both George W. Bush and Barack Obama contemplated the option of killing Soleimani, they resisted precisely because the aftershocks of such an attack might be so great… and so hard to predict. This is the key. The exact sequence of circumstances that led to the shooting down of the Ukrainian airliner were impossible to predict. But that tensions would rise, troops would be on alert, nerves would transform normal rules of engagement into hair trigger events, and that civilian as well as military lives would be at risk was entirely knowable. Soleimani had earned his status as a potential target. He was a very bad man with many lives on his hands including hundreds of Americans. But he also earned being treated with caution as he had been by past administration because the consequences of killing could be so complex and long-lasting that their net effect was beyond calculation. In a region primed for war already, taking such a risk was even more profound.The ability to predict the chain of events that might be initiated by the Soleimani attack was complicated further still by a host of other actions—many by or involving Trump and his administration that were still reverberating through the Middle East. Any planner’s mind would boggle trying to calculate the odds, the game-theory calculations and the complex geometry of the shockwaves of any of these actions—much less all of them at once. How would Trump’s pulling out of the Iranian nuclear deal struck by the Obama administration be impacted by the attack and how would it shape perceptions of the attack? That the Iranians would promise to increase uranium enrichment almost immediately after such an attack was perhaps predictable. But what about their underlying intentions? They have taken a prudent path with the other signatories of the agreement thus far. How much more fragile would that commitment become? What about the consequences of Trump’s apparent closeness to Iran’s top enemies? He gave the Saudis a free pass after they brutally murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He looked the other way as the Israelis ratcheted up pressure on and abuse of Palestinians. How would those relationships color the Iranian wariness? (Team Trump should also have calculated how the world at large would view the gross hypocrisy of not holding the Saudis accountable on Khashoggi and then saying that part of the rationale for the Soleimani killing was the death of an American contractor in Iraq.)What will the consequences in the region be as Trump’s actions alienate important groups within Iraq? The Iraqi parliament immediately asked for the U.S. to pull its troops out of Iraq. If the U.S. complies with that request, it would create a void. Who would fill it? ISIS? Or, as Strobe Talbott and Maggie Tennis argue is likely in Slate, Russia?In a region that has long been primed for war that planned or accidental military conflict or a spiral of escalating attacks, responses and possibly errors could produce profound and lasting instability, rising oil prices, unpredictable political shifts and opportunism among American rivals and adversaries—as well as divisions within American alliances.Past planners did this math. They said no. They said the risks outweighed the rewards. But Trump’s team is notorious for its broken planning process and its impulsive, internationally unsophisticated and impulse-driven president. What is more, of course, is that while past planners viewed this question in the context of geopolitics, Trump was only concerned with a potential short-term domestic benefit, distracting from his impeachment trial. That is why, of course, he didn’t see the issue as being as challenging as his predecessors had. To him every unknown was irrelevant. All he cared about was his momentary political standing. So the complex instantly became simple. And then, this week, in the wake of the brief break that followed the Iranian missile attack, when his team declared victory and said the matter was done and over with, it was their complementary effort to bury the risks that loom in the future, an effort to make simple what is impossibly complex. It was their effort to deny responsibility for what the responsible among them know was too difficult to anticipate. But history will not be so forgiving, nor will be the families of victims like those of the families of the passengers of Ukrainian Flight 752. They won’t care much who accepts responsibility or who shirks it. They certainly won’t care about any bump Trump might have hoped to achieve at the polls. All that will matter to them is a series of human consequences that spread out from here to the horizon, pain, suffering and loss that will be traceable in one way or another to the events of this past week.David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment, host of “Deep State Radio,” and CEO of The Rothkopf Group, an advisory firm providing services in the areas of technology, education, and culture to public and private clients from around the world, including the United Arab Emirates. He is also the author of Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.

There’s widespread evidence that bias against mothers is a systemic problem beyond a few bad bosses. Research regularly shows that mothers are routinely viewed as less competent and committed to their jobs, despite evidence to the contrary. A study published in the American Journal of Sociology has found that in instances when job candidates were equal in every way except for a subtle indication that the candidate was a parent, being a mother reduced the chance that a candidate would be offered the job by 37 percentage points. The recommended salary for mothers who were offered the job was $11,000 less on average than for childless female candidates. (Researchers have found that this hiring and pay bias doesn’t affect fathers at all. In fact, fathers tend to make more money than their childless male counterparts.)The consequences of this kind of discrimination are enormous. In The Upshot, Claire Cain Miller highlighted a range of research showing that the earnings of women who have children during the prime childbearing years of 25 to 35 never recover relative to their husbands’. Childless women’s earnings generally stay close to that of men, and having a child leads to a big dip in short-term earnings and long-term salary trajectory. A lack of professional advancement for mothers as a result of bias, termed the “maternal wall,” often has a big impact on who makes it to top leadership positions. That in turn determines who’s setting policies that affect younger mothers who are coming up in the work force.So why aren’t more mothers speaking up more in public, #MeToo style, with messy rawness about the injustices they’ve experienced in the workplace? I have a few theories. Working mothers, because they have families to support, have more to lose and may be less willing to jeopardize their current jobs or professional status by speaking out. Mothers are still regularly judged negatively by our employers and society for charging ahead professionally after we have children. It doesn’t take much to internalize that sexism to convince ourselves that our kids are better off with a mother who doesn’t have a demanding job, which can lead us to being more resigned than fiery about being passed over for a promotion or not called back for a job interview. Or maybe working mothers are just plain tired.But it’s also noteworthy to me that we’ve never had a high-profile case or national discussion about discrimination against mothers, one that begins to raise in the collective consciousness the notion that this kind of discrimination is wrong and truly harmful. Were there ever to be an Anita Hill-style hearing, complete with egregious details, I believe it would be a game changer.If we haven’t heard much from mothers yet, I’m hopeful we’ll hear more soon. We are living in unprecedented times for women raising their voices, loudly. Mothers with young children are running for office in higher numbers than ever, challenging the conventional wisdom that voters aren’t comfortable with electing women with young kids at home. Some are even breast-feeding their babies in their campaign ads, which is an unmitigated triumph for normalizing nursing. If the dam of silence ever starts to break, I believe we’ll soon begin to hear a lot of mothers saying #MomsToo.

Investigators have raided the home of a longstanding friend and associate of the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, as well as addresses linked to Bolsonaro’s son and ex-wife, in the latest phase of a politically damaging corruption investigation embroiling his family.The operation – part of an embezzlement and money-laundering inquiry focusing on one of Bolsonaro’s three politician sons, Flávio – dominated Brazilian front pages on Wednesday and came as a major embarrassment to the rightwing populist who was elected promising to stamp out corruption.Officials from Rio de Janeiro’s public prosecutor reportedly descended on multiple addresses linked to Fabrício Queiroz – a friend of Jair Bolsonaro since the mid-1980s – and to Bolsonaro’s ex-wife, and his former father-in-law and sister-in-law.Documents and mobile phones were reportedly seized as 24 warrants were executed in the cities of Rio and Resende.The targets included a chocolate shop in Rio partly owned by Flávio Bolsonaro.The investigation is examining suspicions that the now senator Flávio Bolsonaro oversaw a corruption racket during his 15 years as a Rio congressman, with the collaboration of Queiroz, his then security chief and aide.Reports in the Brazilian press have also linked Flávio Bolsonaro to members of a notorious death squad one local broadsheet has called Rio’s “most lethal and secretive phalanx of hired guns”.Jair Bolsonaro’s opponents expressed delight at Wednesday’s raids – a sign, they speculated, that the net was closing in on a family with increasingly well-documented social ties to members of Rio’s mafia.“If Queiroz tells everything he knows about the Bolsonaro family, it’ll bring down the government,” tweeted Guilherme Boulos, a prominent leftist leader.Others are more cautious, pointing to the year-long delay in searching Queiroz’s house since the scandal broke in December 2018, on the eve of Bolsonaro’s inauguration.Bernardo Mello Franco, a columnist for the O Globo newspaper, said that tardiness had given Queiroz ample opportunity to hide any potential evidence.“The Bolsonaro family’s do-all is a retired police officer,” Mello Franco wrote. “With his experience, he knows exactly what this kind of operation is looking for.”Brazil’s far-right president made no immediate comment on Wednesday’s raids but his son lawyer’s claimed they represented “yet another attempt to destabilize Jair’s government”.Bolsonaro’s “enemies” were to blame, lawyer Fred Wasseff reportedly claimed, without specifying who those foes might be. Topics Brazil Jair Bolsonaro Americas news

They're the Quds Force officers who tracked and killed Iraqis working with the U.S.-led coalition, hunted those deemed hostile to Iranian influence through a council of assassins, and smuggled the spies, money, weapons, and secrets into Iraq that sowed chaos across the country during the American occupation. Qassem Soleimani first gained the attention of Western media through his role in instigating a campaign of covert violence against the U.S. in Iraq which cost the lives of over 600 American troops. But underneath the now famous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps icon, other officers managed the war that first made Soleimani notorious. For a period during the mid-2000s, one of those officers was Brigadier General Ahmed Foruzandeh, who rose to command the Ramazan Corps, part of the Guard’s elite Quds Force, after cutting his teeth in the unit running guerrilla warfare operations during the Iran-Iraq war.“Although Qassem Soleimani was the architect of that broader strategy, it was his lesser known lieutenants who ran and oversaw the operations,” Dr. Afshon Ostovar, a scholar at the Naval Postgraduate School, said. “Foruzandeh was one of the top Quds Force operatives in the field in Iraq, yet his name was hardly known at the time.” Declassified documents obtained by The Daily Beast through the Freedom of Information Act offer new details of Foruzandeh’s campaign of violence in Iraq during the latter 2000s. They show how Foruzandeh and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) funneled guns, money, and spies into Iraq and assassinated both Americans and Iraqis. And they offer hints that the man who helped Iran kill hundreds of Americans throughout the Iraq war may not have actually retired years ago as he let on, but continued to consult for his former boss long after the war ended.Iranian and American media alike have treated Foruzandeh’s old boss, the former Quds Force commander Soleimani, with something approaching hagiography. In profiles and obituaries, he’s cast as a legendary “shadow commander” possessed of superhuman abilities and cunning, a judgment not entirely supported by Soleimani’s colleagues. By contrast, declassified documents obtained by The Daily Beast and other sources paint a more prosaic picture of Foruzandeh. Like a number of Quds Force personnel, Foruzandeh’s career in Iraq drew on nothing more mystical than relationships and experience. “Foruzandeh was one of the top Quds Force operatives in the field in Iraq, yet his name was hardly known at the time.”His first brush with the world of covert operations in the Iran-Iraq war met with middling success and the guerrilla warfare effort he supported barely moved the needle in the conflict. But by the time the U.S. showed up on Iran’s doorstep, Foruzandeh had been carrying out guerrilla warfare and covert operations across the Iran-Iraq border for nearly 20 years with some of the same people and organizations. “They clearly have, one, home court advantage. Two, these guys have been doing special operations in the region for their entire adult life and they’re veterans of the brutal Iran-Iraq war,” Doug Wise, a former CIA officer and station chief in Baghdad, told The Daily Beast of Iranian Quds Force officers who worked on Iraq. “These guys are worthy adversaries. They’re not 10 feet tall. They have human and physical limitations but extraordinary experience in conducting the operations that they were required to conduct,” Wise said. “Big picture,” Col. Donald Bacon, then the chief of special operations and intelligence information for the coalition, said in a 2007 press conference, “the Ramazan Corps is the organization that does operations here in Iraq to—they use it to—they're the ones who transit in the weapons, the funding and help coordinate Iraqi militia extremists into Iran to get them training and then get them back into Iraq.”Ramazan was the Quds Force unit in charge of causing chaos in Iraq and, at least for a time, Foruzandeh was its commander. The unit, which dated back to the Iran-Iraq war, divided its forces between a handful of sub-commands along the Iraqi border. Foruzandeh had worked in Fajr command, based in Ahwaz, Iran, which handled operations in Basra and southern Iraq, working his way up to deputy commander of Ramazan.By 2007, as violence in Iraq peaked, intelligence reports surveyed Iranian covert operations in Iraq as the U.S. turned its attention away from the Sunni jihadist insurgency and towards the violence instigated by Iran and its proxies. The documents include raw reporting marked as "not finally evaluated intelligence" from sources whose motivations are described as "based on favorable experiences with U.S. forces and desire to rid Iraq of destructive foreign influences" but they track broadly with what U.S. officials have said about Ramazan Corps and its personnel.Taken together, they show a sprawling campaign of covert violence with Foruzandeh and the Ramazan Corps in charge.“These guys are worthy adversaries. They’re not ten feet tall. They have human and physical limitations but extraordinary experience ...”The documents spend considerable space detailing the elaborate process by which the Iranian-overseen “Golden Death Squad” targeted, approved, and carried out assassinations against Iraqis they viewed as obstacles. The unit, the report wrote, “consists of Iranian intelligence leadership that provide guidance and funding to Iraqis that are recruited from [Jaish al-Mahdi], Badr Corps, the Al-Fadilah Party, and other Shia Iraqi parties and militias that conduct assassination operations against former Ba'ath party members, Iraqis that are working with the [Coalition Forces], and Iraqis that are not supporting Iranian influence in Iraq.”Iranian officers shuttled Iraqi members of the assassination teams to Ahwaz, Iran, the headquarters of Ramazan’s Fajr command, for training. The 10-day long course included instruction from Iranian officers on “information collection to support the targeting of coalition forces in Iraq, assassinations, and the use of indirect fire systems such as Katyusha rockets and mortars.” Iran also trained its proxies in the use of “what is described as very sophisticated explosives that can penetrate [Coalition Forces'] armor,” an apparent reference to the notorious Iranian-made explosively formed projectiles which killed and maimed hundreds of American troops. When it came time to decide who would be killed, Quds Force officers set up a process for adjudicating assassination targets, giving Iraqi allies a role in the process, according to the documents. “Iraqis that are agents of the Iranians are allowed to produce lists of Iraqis that are to be assassinated,” it notes. “Most of these Iraqis that are authorized to make decisions regarding who is to be killed by the Golden Death Squad are members of the Iraqi government and security forces.” Meetings of the hit squad reportedly took place at the Basra governor’s office where members of Basra police intelligence would "routinely attend.”Iranian intelligence officers also nominated their own targets for assassination. Their names were handed to a member of the Iranian-backed Badr militia. The Iranian officer who passed the targets along—his name is redacted in the report—is described as “a Persian Iranian that is fluent in Iraqi Arabic and has a southern Iraqi accent due to the years he has spent in Iraq."Those slated for assassination included not just former Baathists but Iraqis who worked with the U.S.-backed coalition. The documents recount how one Quds Force officer, assigned to Ramazan’s Fajr command in southern Iraq, ran an Iraqi agent who photographed coalition informants for the IRGC. The unnamed Quds Force officer then “passe[d] the pictures to Iraqis that he tasks and funds to kill those identified by [redacted's] reporting and pictures."In at least one case, Foruzandeh reportedly intervened to help one of his militia allies after coalition officials arrested them. Mehdi Abdmehd al-Khalisi allegedly ran the Muntada al-Wilaya militia, a small, Iranian-backed Shiite militia implicated in the murder of a number of former Baathist officials and an attack on coalition troops. When coalition officials arrested al-Khalisi in 2005, senior Iraqi officials began pressuring the coalition to release him. A classified cable leaked by WikiLeaks show that informants told the U.S. that al-Khalisi had been communicating with Foruzandeh about attacks on British forces in Iraq’s Maysan governorate via encrypted telegrams as early as 2003. After his arrest, the cable says that an informant of “unknown reliability” reported that Foruzandeh “has authorized an expenditure of up to $500,000 for operations to secure Mr. al-Khalisi's release, and that senior [Iraqi Transitional Government] officials have received telephone calls from the Brigadier requesting assistance.” “Most of these Iraqis that are authorized to make decisions regarding who is to be killed by the Golden Death Squad are members of the Iraqi government and security forces.”Along with the assassinations came Iranian weapons and trainers. Reporting by the Long War Journal first sketched out Ramazan’s “rat lines” in Iraq and documents obtained by The Daily Beast note that the unit oversaw a “complex smuggling apparatus from Ahwaz, Iran into Iraq" that included "weapons, information, financial support, and Iranian intelligence officers." The money, guns, and Iranian personnel began their journey in Ahwaz and were handed off to smugglers at the border with Iraq.Iranian intelligence officers would vet smugglers for loyalty and to ensure that they had a "pre-existing relationship with the [Iraqi border police] because of their tribal relationship"—a relationship that nonetheless "usually involves a pre-arranged bribe." Once across the border, smugglers toting money, guns, and Iranian personnel were “typically met by a reception element that represents a Shia militia group that the operation support package was built for."In the ports of southern Iraq, Ramazan agents smuggled weapons via hidden compartments in the fuel tanks of fishing boats, according to the documents. As violent as Foruzandeh’s tenure in occupation-era Iraq war was, he wasn’t entirely averse to covert diplomacy. Ahmed Chalabi, the exiled Iraqi lobbyist who helped push the Bush administration to war in Iraq, met with Foruzandeh in the spring of 2004, according to a 2008 biography of Chalabi by journalist and former Daily Beast senior correspondent Aram Roston. At the time, Chalabi had transitioned from pro-war lobbyist to an Iraqi member of parliament and was seeking to accommodate himself to Iran’s newfound influence in Iranian politics. Some time after the meeting, the U.S. learned that Iranian intelligence had suddenly realized American spies were reading their cable traffic and had broken their codes. A few months later, American intelligence officials told The New York Times they believed Chalabi had walked into the Iranian embassy in Baghdad and blown the operation to the station chief of Iranian intelligence at the embassy. Chalabi denied any involvement in the leak but the incident led the Bush administration to end its relationship with him.Foruzandeh’s father worked for the Abadan oil company and when he left the company, his family of 13 sons and daughters moved to Khorramshahr, just across the border from Basra in Iraq. His son Ahmed was an early supporter of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, a stance which earned him a stint in prison at university—thanks to the ruling Shah’s secret police—and the revolutionary bonafides that came with it when the Shah’s government was ousted.In the early days of the Islamic Revolution, Foruzandeh worked with the IRGC to identify and arrest Arab dissidents in Khorramshahr opposed to the new government. His knowledge of the area, proven commitment to the regime, and background in underground work made him a natural fit for intelligence when the Iran-Iraq war started.“After Iraq's invasion, he was the intelligence chief of the Khorramshahr unit that later played a key role in re-taking the city from the Baathists in 1982,” Amir Toumaj, an Iran researcher who’s written extensively on the Quds Force, explained of Foruzandeh. “His biography states that he started developing a relationship with Hassan Bagheri around the time of Khorramshahr's fall and sent him reports,” Toumaj says. Bagheri, the founder of the Islamic Republic’s intelligence service, was killed during the war but went on to become one of Iran’s most famous “martyrs.” His brother, Mohammad, is now Iran’s highest-ranking military officer and it was those kinds of connections that would help pave Foruzandeh’s ascent to the highest ranks of the IRGC.Later in the war, Foruzandeh left his position in Khorramshahr’s 22nd Badr Brigade and joined the Ramazan Corps. The unit was designed to work with dissident groups in Iraq and carry out guerrilla operations behind enemy lines while the otherwise static style of trench warfare that characterized the Iran-Iraq conflict played out. At Ramazan’s Fajr headquarters, where Foruzandeh first worked, the unit carried out operations with Iraqi Shiite groups like the Badr Brigade, a group of exiled dissidents and former prisoners of war. The militia was originally “conceived by the Iranians as an adjunct to the IRGC-QF Ramazan Corps,” according to a 2005 State Department cable, and drew support from their political arm, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. During the Iran-Iraq war, radio broadcasts from Tehran hailed operations by the “Ramazan Headquarters” which claimed assassination attempts with “Iraqi mujahidin” on Saddam’s interior minister Samir al-Shaykhali in Baghdad, the “revolutionary execution” of a Ba’ath Party official in Baghdad’s Mansur neighborhood, and having set fire to one of Saddam’s Baghdad palaces "used for pleasure by Ba'ath party officials and senior officers of that regime.”Ramazan’s Fajr headquarters and the Badr Brigade didn’t do much to change the tide of the war. It ended in a bloody stalemate in 1988, more of exhaustion than because of guerrilla daring. One of the Ramazan Corps’s most valuable relationships actually lay farther north with Kurdish forces from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. The group carried out strikes deep into Iraqi Kurdish territory with Ramazan’s backing, including a 1986 raid on Iraqi oil infrastructure in Kirkuk (later memorialized in a cheesy Iranian action flick, Kirkuk Operation).But the relationships forged by Ramazan with Iraqi Shia militants would prove useful to both the Revolutionary Guards and Iran years down the road when groups like Badr took on an important role in Iraqi politics and security. When the war ended, both Ramazan Corps and Foruzandeh remained focused on Iraq, particularly during the Shia uprising against Saddam at the end of the Persian Gulf War. One Iranian news account put Foruzandeh in charge of working with Iranian-backed militias to support the uprising “in order to speed up the support of the Iraqi Mujahideen” because his unit, Ramazan’s Fajr headquarters, was closest to the revolt in Basra.There’s not much evidence about how Foruzandeh spent his time in the interim between America’s first two wars in Iraq. The most evidence available is a fragmentary report from Saddam-era intelligence documents captured by the U.S. after the war that shows Foruzandeh running an agent inside a camp for the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, an Iranian dissident cult group which fought on behalf of Iraq during the war and carried out a series of terrorist attacks in Iran.Not many senior Ramazan Corps veterans appear to have retired. Iraj Masjedi, another Quds Force Iraq veteran, took over as Iran’s ambassador in Baghdad in 2017. Abdul Reza Shahlai, who served in Iraq during the occupation alongside Foruzandeh, is now at 63 years old reportedly the top Quds Force officer in Yemen and was unsuccessfully targeted in a U.S. airstrike there the same night that special operations forces killed Soleimani.It doesn’t appear to be true.Another declassified intelligence document obtained by The Daily Beast offers hints that Foruzandeh may not have retired after all. The report, an account of senior Iranian officials’ participation in a museum project "documenting lessons learned from the Iran-Iraq war," suggests he kept at least a consulting role in Quds Force operations. In describing the background of officials present at the meeting, the report says Foruzandeh still dabbled in "management of personnel and logistic support to IRGC-QF external activities." Iran’s Khorasan province “has been recently added to his portfolio." Iran’s Khorasan province borders northwest Afghanistan and by 2013, the Obama administration had already been arguing for years that Quds Force officers were secretly supporting the Taliban in order to weaken U.S. and NATO forces in the country. There are some reasons to be skeptical of the declassified report. The sources claim that Foruzandeh was appointed a director of Iran’s Iran-Iraq war museum, but he’s not listed by the museum as an official or referred to as such in news accounts. It’s also dated around the same time Foruzandeh gave an interview to an Iranian news outlet announcing that he was working on a history project about his hometown’s role in the Iran-Iraq war.Still, other evidence suggests Foruzandeh was still in the irregular warfare business.“He believed that unless these forces received better training they would suffer severe casualties.”In 2014, one of Foruzandeh’s closest colleagues in the Quds Force, fellow brigadier general and Ramazan Corps veteran Hamid Taghavi, was killed by ISIS in Iraq. The death came as a surprise, not least because Taghavi was one of the highest-ranking IRGC officers killed in Iraq since the Iran-Iraq war. Like Foruzandeh, Taghavi was also supposed to have left active duty. Instead, he was in Iraq supporting a Shiite militia loyal to Iran, Sayara al-Khorasani, and organizing Iran’s fight against ISIS.“Commander Taghavi was retired. No one thought he’d go to Iraq and be able to play a role in the mobilization and organization of the [Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units militia],” Foruzandeh told a meeting of Ahwaz city officials after his death. Taghavi’s death hit Foruzandeh hard and he would break down in tears recounting his comrade’s life when talking to reporters. In one interview, Foruzandeh suggested he’d been in contact with Taghavi by phone shortly before his death and offered advice for his work standing up pro-Iranian militias after ISIS took Mosul“He came to the place where we were stationed,” Foruzandeh said without elaborating. “We told him about the situation in Iraq, the characteristics of the conflict, the various Iraqi groups, and the challenges that existed. The Iraqi forces had deficiencies that needed to be addressed.” Taghavi was concerned about Iranian-backed militias’ performance during operations in Jurf al-Sakhar, an Iraqi town captured by ISIS and taken back during a brutal operation coordinated by the Quds Force. “He believed that unless these forces received better training they would suffer severe casualties. The casualties these forces suffered were generally due to a lack of proper military training. They didn’t know how to move, what to do when they’re under fire from the enemy, how to provide cover when attacking, or even how to clear traps and contaminants from an infected area,” Foruzandeh recalled.One of the last public glimpses of Foruzandeh comes from an unlikely source: Facebook. Foruzandeh doesn’t appear to have a profile, but his acquaintances identified him in pictures during a 2016 visit to meet with Iraqi officials from Maysan Province. The photos show a grandfatherly Quds Force officer with his trademark scowl described as an “advisor” to Iran’s Supreme Leader, a tailored visiting dignitary in a place where decades before he was once a spry, hunted guerrilla in hand-me-down fatigues.

The Virginia governor on Wednesday said he was temporarily banning all guns and weapons from the area around the Capitol in Richmond ahead of a major gun rights demonstration set for next week.Ralph Northam, who is leading the push for stronger gun laws in his state, said he wants to avoid a repeat of violence that erupted at a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, when a march by white nationalists erupted into violence and led to the death of a counter-protester.Northam said on Twitter he had received credible intelligence from law enforcement agencies of threats of violence surrounding a lobby day against stricter gun laws planned for 20 January.“We support citizens’ rights to peacefully protest and express their views to their elected officials. But we must also keep the public, as well as those who work around Capitol Square, safe,” Northam said.The lobby day, organized by a Virginia gun rights group, is expected to attract tens of thousands of people to the state capital, including members of anti-government groups from other states. Northam said on Twitter that law enforcement intelligence suggested “militia groups and hate groups, some from out of state, plan to come to the Capitol to disrupt our democratic process with acts of violence”.A “substantial number” of the demonstrators “may be armed, and have as their purpose not peaceful assembly but violence, rioting, and insurrection”, the governor’s executive order read.A state official told the Associated Press that threatening social media posts, including a photo of an AR-15 rifle and text saying there were “great sight angles from certain buildings” near Capitol Square, had prompted the governor’s decision.The Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), the state gun rights group organizing Monday’s lobby day event, had previously asked supporters not to bring rifles and other long guns to the lobby day, citing concerns about the optics of gun owners toting AR-15s or AK-47s around the state Capitol. But the group had publicly anticipated that the event would attract “enough citizens armed with handguns to take over a modern mid-sized country”.Philip Van Cleave, the VCDL president, told the Guardian that the group was consulting its lawyers and exploring a legal challenge to the governor’s ban on weapons in Richmond’s Capitol Square. In the meantime, he said, the group would advise supporters who wanted to be armed to stay in the area outside of the immediate Capitol grounds.Because VCDL is expecting at least 50,000 supporters to show up to Monday’s event, and the group has been informed that the Capitol grounds will only be able to hold 10,000 people, there will probably be a large number of armed gun rights activists in the streets of downtown Richmond regardless, Van Cleave said.Asked about the threatening social media posts officials had cited, Van Cleave said that he himself had forwarded “between five and 10” concerning posts to Virginia law enforcement, including one aerial photo of the Capitol grounds that had been marked with potential locations for a sniper, but that he was not sure if any of the posts were credible threats.“Anybody can get an overhead shot from Google, and they can get a red pen and they can circle spots, and they might not know what they’re doing,” he said.The group was dealing with a deluge of false and distorted information about lobby day, he said, and it wasn’t clear how much of it was coming from “some keyboard warrior”.Asked how credible he thought any threats of violence related to the event might be, Van Cleave said, “I don’t know. I personally haven’t lost any sleep over it.”Since Democrats won control of Virginia’s state government in the November elections and promised to pass a slate of stricter gun laws, pro-gun activists across the state have organized a vigorous grassroots movement to protest against the new bills. More than 125 counties, cities and towns across the state have passed “second amendment sanctuary” resolutions, pledging to respect gun owners’ rights and to not enforce any state gun laws deemed to be unconstitutional.The local second amendment sanctuary movement has attracted hundreds and even thousands of supporters at local government meetings, drawing comparisons to the Tea Party movement. The rhetoric of some of these local activists has been intense, with calls of treason and tyranny, and open references to civil war. Lies, conspiracy theories and misinformation about Democrats’ proposed gun control bills have circulated widely, prompting outrage and threats of violence against Democratic politicians.This grassroots gun rights movement in Virginia has attracted attention from pro-gun activists across the country, some of whom have pledged to come to Virginia to stand with local activists on Monday, Van Cleave said. He said he was expecting buses of gun supporters from as far as Texas and Connecticut, and even some activists from the west coast, including California, Washington and Oregon.The movement has also been seized on by more extreme groups, including anti-government militias and white supremacists, who see the tensions in Virginia as a potential flashpoint that could lead to violent resistance and civil war, often referred to in online conversations as the “boogaloo”, according to an analyst at the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors extremists.The Oath Keepers, a national organization of current and former law enforcement and military officials described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as one of the country’s largest anti-government groups, called for members to travel to Virginia to attend lobby day and said they also intended to train local activists.A handful of the same extremists who attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 have also publicly suggested they might attend lobby day, the Daily Beast reported on Wednesday.The bill that sparked the most outrage from Virginia gun owners, a proposed ban on assault weapons that originally included language that would ban the “possession” of certain military-style guns, has already been withdrawn from consideration by its sponsor, the state senate majority leader, Richard Saslaw.Virginia Democrats have made some statements that have only increased tensions. In mid-December, Democratic congressman Donald McEachin publicly speculated that the governor might call in the national guard to enforce gun laws if local law enforcement officials refused, something that a spokeswoman for the governor said was not actually under consideration.Gun rights activists in Virginia also pointed to Northam’s response to a question in early November about whether he supported confiscating assault weapons from citizens who already owned them. Asked directly about confiscation, Northam “demurred”, the Washington Post reported at the time.“That’s something I’m working [on] with our secretary of public safety,” Northam was quoted as saying. “I’ll work with the gun violence activists, and we’ll work [on] that. I don’t have a definitive plan today.”Two days later, during a National Public Radio interview, Northam was again asked if he planned to confiscate assault weapons that Virginia citizens already owned.“No ma’am, not at this stage,” Northam said. “We’re looking at banning the sales of assault weapons ... that would be what we would start with.”The governor’s office clarified in a statement in early December that proposed assault weapon ban legislation, which had included language banning the possession of military-style weapons, would include a “grandfather” provision, allowing citizens who currently owned the guns to keep them. Topics US news US gun control Virginia news

LONDON — After leading the British Broadcasting Corporation for seven years, Tony Hall said on Monday that he would resign this summer to become chairman of the National Gallery, an unexpected announcement that made no mention of the gender pay-gap scandal that has dogged the BBC in recent years.“If I followed my heart I would genuinely never want to leave,” Mr. Hall, 68, said in an email to BBC employees on Monday. “However, I believe that an important part of leadership is putting the interests of the organization first.”Explaining his decision to leave the post of director general, Mr. Hall pointed to a review of the BBC’s performance by lawmakers in 2022, and said that its charter would be up for renewal in 2027. He stressed the importance of having the same leader for both events.Mr. Hall joined the National Gallery’s board in November. “The National Gallery isn’t just about serving those who already love art, but reaching a wider audience and future generations,” he said in a statement released by the museum.Word of his resignation from the BBC comes less than a month after the broadcaster lost a high-profile court case over pay disparity: Samira Ahmed, a well-known female TV host, sued the broadcaster for 700,000 pounds, or about $915,000, in back pay after she learned a male colleague doing similar work was paid more than six times as much. In 2018, the BBC apologized to a former China editor, Carrie Gracie, and said it would provide backdated wages after she quit over unequal pay.The broadcaster has also faced charges of bias from the new Conservative government. Some lawmakers have taken aim at the BBC’s main source of funding: the £154 annual license fee charged to all television viewers across the country.“I think the BBC is in some turmoil over its election coverage,” Roy Greenslade, a professor of journalism at City University of London and a media commentator for The Guardian, said in a phone interview. “I don’t know whether that had any impact on Tony’s decision to go, but I’m sure he has picked up the unusual level of criticism.”Critics have asked for years why the BBC is allowed to use taxpayer money as it competes with private broadcasting companies. Before the general election in December, Prime Minister Boris Johnson questioned whether the model “still makes sense in the long term given the way that other organizations manage to fund themselves.”The broadcaster came under fire last year when it dropped a license-fee exemption for older viewers. Mr. Greenslade said the decision was a hasty one that he thinks Mr. Hall has always regretted.On the pay-gap front, the company conceded this month that in the past “our pay framework was not transparent and fair enough,” and said that it had made “significant changes to address that.”But over the weekend, it came under renewed criticism after The Financial Times reported that an employment consulting firm hired to help tackle its pay practices had a gender pay gap twice that of the broadcaster’s.And on Sunday, Sarah Montague, a prominent BBC radio presenter who formerly co-hosted Radio 4’s “Today” program, became the latest employee to discuss a pay disparity with male colleagues.“Last year after a long period of stressful negotiations, I accepted a settlement of £400,000 subject to tax and an apology from the BBC for paying me unequally for so many years,” she said on Twitter on Sunday, responding to reports that she had received £1 million.Claire Enders, the founder of the telecommunications and media research firm Enders Analysis, said the mounting criticism would make it an especially challenging time to take charge of the BBC.“The BBC produces extraordinary amounts of news and is bound to keep stepping on people’s toes,” said Ms. Enders in a phone interview. “That has to be done with a fresh voice.”The BBC chairman, David Clementi, described Tony Hall as an “inspirational leader” within Britain and internationally.The BBC’s board will choose the next director general. Mr. Clementi said it would advertise the role in the coming weeks.

A former Interpol chief accused of bribery was sentenced to 13-and-a-half years in jail by a Chinese court on Tuesday. Meng Hongwei, who was the first Chinese head of Interpol, vanished on a trip back to the country from France in September 2018. China later confirmed he had been detained as part of President Xi Jinping's drive against corruption.Meng has admitted to taking more than $2m (£1.6m) in bribes. The 56-year-old was also ordered by the Tianjin No 1 Intermediate People's Court to pay a fine of two million yuan ($289,540; £222,711).The court statement said Meng would not appeal against the verdict.Meng disappeared in September 2018 during a visit to China from France, where international policing agency Interpol is based. He was scheduled to serve as head of Interpol until 2020, but the organisation said he resigned as president days after his wife reported him as missing. Chinese authorities later confirmed he had been detained and, in October, said Meng was being investigated over suspected bribe-taking. China's new anti-corruption super agency Charting China's 'great purge' under Xi The Communist Party said Meng had abused his position for personal gain, misused state funds to finance his family's "extravagant lifestyle" and disregarded Communist Party principles.He was expelled from the party and stripped of all government positions, according to the party's watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI).Meng admitted his guilt in a trial last year. His wife, who is currently living in France under political asylum, has said the charges against him are politically motivated.Chinese President Xi Jinping has overseen a vast and ruthless anti-corruption campaign in which one million officials have been disciplined. Critics say this campaign has been used to great effect to silence some of his political rivals.

Multiple Democratic presidential contenders and former U.S. attorneys are calling for a new investigation into Brett Kavanaugh and the past FBI probe into his behavior as another accusation of sexual misconduct against the Supreme Court associate justice surfaced Saturday. Classmate Max Stier told two New York Times reporters that he saw Kavanaugh with his pants down at a drunken Yale University party where friends pushed Kavanaugh’s penis into the hands of a female student. The report was similar to an allegation lodged against Kavanaugh last year by former classmate Deborah Ramirez. Stier informed senators and the FBI of the incident during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, but it was never investigated, according to the Times. Since the piece was published on Saturday, the Times added an editors’ note to the article clarifying that the woman involved in the incident alleged by Stier declined an interview with the paper and “friends say that she does not recall the incident.” At the time of Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, Christine Blasey Ford publicly accused Kavanaugh of pinning her to a bed and trying to take off her clothes at a high school party, and she testified before senators at the confirmation hearings. Following the Times’ story, Democratic presidential contender Julián Castro called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment, tweeting Saturday: “It’s more clear than ever that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath.” He called Kavanaugh’s ascendence a “shame to the Supreme Court.” It’s more clear than ever that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath. He should be impeached.And Congress should review the failure of the Department of Justice to properly investigate the matter. https://t.co/Yg1eh0CkNl— Julián Castro (@JulianCastro) September 15, 2019 Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) echoed Castro’s accusation that Kavanaugh lied under oath to the United States Senate, adding that the majority of senators “didn’t care.” I don’t feel like we talk enough about the fact that Kavanaugh lied under oath to the United States Senate and the majority of United States Senators didn’t care. https://t.co/YY5OGMUqXb— Sean Casten (@SeanCasten) September 14, 2019 However, on Sunday, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), another 2020 presidential hopeful, noted that she was one of the senators at those hearings in which “Kavanaugh lied to the U.S. Senate and most importantly to the American people.” And she also called for his impeachment. I sat through those hearings. Brett Kavanaugh lied to the U.S. Senate and most importantly to the American people. He was put on the Court through a sham process and his place on the Court is an insult to the pursuit of truth and justice. He must be impeached.— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) September 15, 2019 Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, also addressed the latest allegations on Sunday. “Confirmation is not exoneration, and these newest revelations are disturbing,” she tweeted, adding that Kavanaugh ― and Trump ― should be impeached. Last year the Kavanaugh nomination was rammed through the Senate without a thorough examination of the allegations against him. Confirmation is not exoneration, and these newest revelations are disturbing. Like the man who appointed him, Kavanaugh should be impeached.— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) September 15, 2019 Yet another Democratic presidential hopeful, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), pushed for Kavanaugh to be impeached on Sunday afternoon. Yesterday, we learned of another accusation against Brett Kavanaugh—one we didn't find out about before he was confirmed because the Senate forced the F.B.I. to rush its investigation to save his nomination. We know he lied under oath. He should be impeached.— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) September 15, 2019 Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), another Democrat running for president, was asked about Castro’s tweet Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “My concern here is that the process was a sham,” she said of Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, noting she was on the Judiciary Committee and opposed his nomination. She did not call for his impeachment. Let us never forget what courage looks like. pic.twitter.com/2bRD8s8sda— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) September 15, 2019 Like Klobuchar, Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden did not explicitly call for Kavanaugh’s impeachment. But the former vice president said in a statement that the Times report raises “profoundly troubling questions about the integrity of the confirmation process that put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court in the first place.” NEW: Vice President Joe Biden on Justice Kavanaugh, doesn't call for impeachment:"We must follow the evidence to wherever it leads. Doing this the right way is critically important in getting the truth and restoring the American people’s faith in their government." pic.twitter.com/derwf0IS5S— Alexi McCammond (@alexi) September 16, 2019 Biden called for further investigation into whether the Trump administration and Senate Republicans pressured the FBI to ignore evidence or witnesses in their background investigation of Kavanaugh, according to a statement obtained by Axios. Former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance called Saturday for a “full congressional investigation” into Kavanaugh’s behavior and a probe into his past to “determine whether someone, and if so who, gave orders that kept the FBI from investigating credible allegations.” There must be a full Congressional investigation to determine whether someone, and if so who, gave orders that kept the FBI from investigating credible allegations & speaking to witnesses who reached out to them. We were told this was a full investigation. https://t.co/sp6JhfJZti— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) September 15, 2019 Another former U.S. attorney, Harry Litman, called the FBI investigation into Kavanaugh a “total con job.” NY Times find 7 people who heard about the Ramirez incident years before. But per WH instructions, and Senate R insistence, the FBI interviewed none of them or 18 other witnesses. The renewed background investigation was a total con job.https://t.co/MoeVUv0dce— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) September 14, 2019 This article has been updated with more information about the Times article and comments from Biden, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke and Warren. Download Calling all HuffPost superfans! Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter Join HuffPost