Author Archives: News Sources

Aleppo exiles describe how life continued through years of bombing

The Guardian reports: The Aleppo Thaer al-Halabi left behind was a ghost town filled with the shadows of friends lost to war and the shattered dreams of a different Syria.

Still, the parting resembled physical pain. He was born in Aleppo, in a house in the old town with a courtyard shaded by vines, where his family had lived for over a century. He raised a family and built a career there, and then, for four years, gambled everything he had on the possibility of taking down Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

“When we were forced to leave Aleppo it had already been destroyed completely. You didn’t see a city, only ghosts, in a ghost city,” said the 57-year-old engineer turned opposition politician.

“I am very sad I have left our city, it’s at the centre of our hearts, part of our bodies. But because we need freedom we cannot live there.”

Halabi said he was jailed three times by the government before the war, so when the uprising against Assad first turned into armed rebellion and rebels took half of Aleppo, he didn’t think twice about joining them. “We had freedom for four years,” he said.

Aleppo, which was Syria’s cultural and economic hub before the conflict, became a byword for devastation far beyond the country’s borders, after years of brutal air raids to try to oust rebels.

In the early years of the fighting, life in rebel-held areas was not all horror and violence. There was a local council set up to govern, schools still operated. People went to work when they were not severed from their offices by the frontline, or set up new businesses and tried to ignore the war.

“Life went on amid the bombing,” said Sara, a 47-year-old teacher who also stayed in Aleppo until the enclave’s final days. “There were schools, businesses, shops, there were goods and people, entertainment, everything.”

For the young in particular, rebel-held Aleppo offered the wild liberties of an unfiltered web. “On the other side of the city was regular Syrian government that block everything they don’t want,” said Halabi’s son, the activist and journalist Rami Zein.

“On our side of the city it felt like you are in a place open to the world. Before the siege it was a great city, you had everything you need, could bring everything you need from the border [with Turkey], all kinds of trade, everything was there.”

As the war intensified though, death and destruction touched growing numbers of families. Aleppo became notorious for the horror of barrel bombs, dropped from helicopters on civilian areas to spread death and fear. [Continue reading…]

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Trump intervention fails to block UN resolution demanding Israel cease constructing settlements in Palestine

The Washington Post reports: The U.N. Security Council on Friday passed a resolution demanding Israel cease Jewish settlement activity on Palestinian territory in a unanimous vote that passed with the United States abstaining rather than using its veto as it has reliably done in the past.

The resolution said settlements are threatening the viability of the two-state solution, and urged Israelis and Palestinians to return to negotiations that lead to two independent nations.

This marked the first time in more than 36 years that the Security Council passed a resolution critical of settlements. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: The vote was approved with 14 members voting in favor, with the U.S. abstaining. It was followed by a loud, lengthy applause.

The vote comes amid international political jostling and takes place a day after Egypt withdrew its draft of the resolution following pressure from Israel and President-elect Donald Trump.

The Obama administration has used its veto powers on the Council only once, in 2011, to block a similar resolution on Israeli settlements, while the U.S. had vetoed more than 40 resolutions critical of Israel up until 2011.

In 2009 the U.S. under the George W. Bush administration abstained from a vote on an Israel-Palestine resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, but said it agreed with the overall objectives of that measure.

The resolution on Friday is co-sponsored by New Zealand, Malaysia, Venezuela and Senegal, in reaction to the abrupt canceling of the vote on Thursday, which diplomats said infuriated U.S. and European diplomats because it was viewed as interference in foreign policy by Mr. Trump.

Diplomats at the U.N. had said for months that they hoped to pass a resolution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before U.S. President Barack Obama leaves office, because of perception that Mr. Trump’s administration would block any action that criticized Israel. [Continue reading…]

In an interview on the PBS Newshour, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes explained the administration’s abstention at the UN by saying that this was a “resolution entirely consistent with our policy.”

Since that’s the case, why did the U.S. not join all other members of the UN Security Council by voting in favor?

There’s some irony in the symbolism here: When President Obama took his final stand on Middle East politics, it was to abstain.

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Blaming terrorist attacks on refugees isn’t going to make Europe safer

Alexander Görlach writes: It didn’t take long for Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany to exploit the Berlin terrorist attack for political gain. “These are Merkel’s dead,” tweeted AfD leader Marcus Pretzell on Monday.

However, Germany has been on the radar of Islamist terrorists for quite some time. So have Christmas markets: in 2000, four Algerians plotted to blow up the Christmas market in Strasbourg in France. In 2007, three terrorists were arrested in Germany for planned simultaneous car bomb attacks ― “the world will burn,” one reportedly said.

Terror arrived in Germany long before the Berlin incident. But it was the first in recent times that caused such significant casualties. This is very tragic, but to exclusively blame it on Syrian refugees defeats the purpose of trying to understand how to combat terrorism and prevent future attacks from happening. The suspect, Anis Amri, who was killed in a shootout with police near Milan today, was a Tunisian who came to Europe in 2011, entering through the Italian island of Lampedusa. This was back before the Syrian civil war had become the regional conflagration that it is today; it was also during the aftermath of the Arab Spring, when order in some countries in northern Africa was on the verge of collapsing. How many asylum seekers came to Europe then with bad intentions? How many of them were already eager and keen to become terrorists? The honest answer is: we don’t know.

But the right wing’s take on the Berlin attack is shortsighted. As a matter of fact, when southern Europe groaned under the pressure of refugees, the rest of the continent was indifferent about it. Europe’s refugee policy is flawed. The continent needs to get its act together: the regions around it may most likely remain in upheaval and turmoil for quite some time. Not having done so yet has nurtured the rise of anti-establishment activism, right-wing parties and xenophobic violence across the continent. [Continue reading…]

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Suspect in Berlin market attack was radicalized in an Italian jail

The Washington Post reports: He was the man nobody wanted.

When Anis Amri washed up on European shores in a migrant boat in April 2011, he landed on the windswept Italian island of Lampedusa already a fugitive. Sought in his native Tunisia for hijacking a van with a gang of thieves, the frustrated Italians would jail him for arson and violent assault at his migrant reception center for minors on the isle of Sicily.

There, his family noted, the boy who once drank alcohol — and never went to mosque — suddenly got religion.

He began to pray, asking his family to send him religious books. The Italian Bureau of Prisons submitted a report to a government ­anti-terrorism commission on Amri’s rapid radicalization, warning that he was embracing dangerous ideas of Islamist ­extremism and had threatened Christian inmates, according to an Italian government official with knowledge of the situation. The dossier was first reported by ANSA, the Italian news service.

The Italians tried to deport Amri but couldn’t. They sent his fingerprints and photo to the Tunisian consulate, but the authorities there refused to recognize Amri as a citizen. The Italians, officials there say, could not even establish his true identity. Italy’s solution: After four years in jail, they released him anyway — giving him seven days to leave the country. [Continue reading…]

Der Spiegel reports: When Amri submitted an application for asylum with the [German] Federal Office of Migration and Refugees (BAMF) in April 2016, he claimed he was an Egyptian and that he was being persecuted in Egypt. When asked follow-up questions by the agency, however, he demonstrated almost no knowledge of the country.

Research into BAMF’s database showed that he had been registered in Germany using multiple identities and dates of birth. Within a matter of only weeks, officials rejected Amri’s asylum application, saying it was “obviously unfounded.” However, they were unable to deport him because he lacked the necessary identification papers. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. government begins asking foreign travelers about social media

Politico reports: The U.S. government quietly began requesting that select foreign visitors provide their Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts upon arriving in the country, a move designed to spot potential terrorist threats that drew months of opposition from tech giants and privacy hawks alike.

Since Tuesday, foreign travelers arriving in the United States on the visa waiver program have been presented with an “optional” request to “enter information associated with your online presence,” a government official confirmed Thursday. The prompt includes a drop-down menu that lists platforms including Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube, as well as a space for users to input their account names on those sites.

The new policy comes as Washington tries to improve its ability to spot and deny entry to individuals who have ties to terrorist groups like the Islamic State. But the government has faced a barrage of criticism since it first floated the idea last summer. The Internet Association, which represents companies including Facebook, Google and Twitter, at the time joined with consumer advocates to argue the draft policy threatened free expression and posed new privacy and security risks to foreigners.

Now that it is final, those opponents are furious the Obama administration ignored their concerns. [Continue reading…]

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Trump would welcome a new nuclear arms race

The New York Times reports: President-elect Donald J. Trump on Friday welcomed a new nuclear weapons arms race, vowing in an off-camera interview with a television host that America would “outmatch” any adversary. The comment came one day after he said in a post on Twitter that the United States should “strengthen and expand” its own nuclear capabilities.

The president-elect escalated his comments about nuclear weapons with the show of bravado during a brief, off-air telephone conversation from his estate in Florida, according to Mika Brzezinski, a co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program.

“Let it be an arms race,” Mr. Trump said, according to Ms. Brzezinski, who described her conversation with the president-elect on the morning news program moments later. Mr. Trump added: “We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”


[Continue reading…]

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Did Russia just test an anti-satellite weapon?

The Daily Beast reports: Russia isn’t done screwing with the United States in 2016.

On Dec. 16, the Russian military reportedly tested what appears to be an anti-satellite weapon — a rocket that can boost into low orbit and smash into enemy spacecraft.

The test could be the latest sign of Russia’s intention, and improving ability, to threaten America’s hundreds of government and private spacecraft — and chip away at the United States’ military and commercial advantage in space.

It might also be the latest provocation from a Russian regime that increasingly denies any responsibility for its most destabilizing moves. That’s how Moscow can get away with hacking elections in the United States and other Western countries and invading Ukraine, among other attacks on global order.

The apparent anti-satellite (ASAT) test largely escaped public notice. The Washington Free Beacon was the first to report on the weapon’s trial, on Dec. 21 — attributing the information to unnamed U.S. government sources. CNN also pointed out the test, again citing anonymous U.S. officials.

Capt. Nicholas Mercurio, a spokesman for the 14th U.S. Air Force, which oversees space systems, declined to specifically comment on the reported Russian test. “We monitor missile launches around the globe,” Mercurio told The Daily Beast, “but as a matter of policy we don’t normally discuss intelligence specific to those launches.”

For the anti-satellite test, the Russians have a tidy cover story — that the rocket isn’t actually an anti-satellite weapon, or ASAT. Instead, it’s a meant for shooting down incoming ballistic missiles.

That is to say, the rocket that Russia tested on Dec. 16 could be a defensive rocket-killer, rather than an offensive satellite-killer. “My take is that it could be either,” Pavel Podvig, an independent expert on Russian strategic forces, told The Daily Beast via email. “It is difficult to say at this point.”

But in fact, there’s no meaningful difference between an anti-satellite weapon and a defensive missile-interceptor. The same basic hardware can do both jobs.

“The only difference between a hit-to-kill interceptor for missile defense and one for low-Earth-orbit ASAT is going to be in the software,” Jeffrey Lewis, who helps lead nonproliferation programs at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, told The Daily Beast via email. [Continue reading…]

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Following carbon dioxide through the atmosphere

 

NASA reports: A new NASA supercomputer project builds on the agency’s satellite measurements of carbon dioxide and combines them with a sophisticated Earth system model to provide one of the most realistic views yet of how this critical greenhouse gas moves through the atmosphere.

Scientists have tracked the rising concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide for decades using ground-based sensors in a few places. A high-resolution visualization of the new combined data product – generated by the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, using data from the agency’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite build and operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California – provides an entirely different perspective.

The 3-D visualization reveals in startling detail the complex patterns in which carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, decreases and moves around the globe over the course of September 2014 to September 2015. [Continue reading…]

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Aleppo’s ‘evacuation’ is a crime against humanity

Ben Taub writes: Last Thursday, as forces loyal to the Syrian government advanced through eastern Aleppo and despondent civilians there wondered whether they would be massacred, Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, stood in a sunlit courtyard in Damascus, dressed in a crisp blue suit, and compared his victory to the births of Jesus Christ and the prophet Muhammad. Just as our calendars count the years before and after those events, he explained, “I believe that we will talk about history — and not just the history of Syria but of the entire world — as before and after the liberation of Aleppo.” He rocked back and forth on his heels, waving his arms and raising his eyebrows, unable to conceal his excitement.

So, characteristically, an autocrat inflates his place in history. But, in this case, it’s worth acknowledging that Assad has a point: the significance of Aleppo’s collapse is far greater than its physical territory, its ancient history, and its former splendor. For more than four years, Western governments and the United Nations stood by, watching, as Assad and his backers ostentatiously ignored the laws of war, and residents of eastern Aleppo live-streamed their own extermination. Now, along with tens of thousands of civilians, the credibility of the powerful countries and institutions that could have helped them, but didn’t, lies in Aleppo’s rubble and blood.

Consider Abdulkafi Alhamdo, a Syrian teacher and activist, who had taken Western politicians at their word and believed that documenting human-rights abuses mattered to the international community. He stayed in Aleppo under bombardment and siege, and broadcast his thoughts on Twitter, because he thought that if the world witnessed civilians suffering in Aleppo, it would come to their aid. Last Tuesday, Alhamdo filmed what he expected to be his final message, a warning to activists living in other repressive parts of the world. “Don’t believe anymore in the United Nations,” he said. “Don’t believe anymore in the international community. Don’t think they are not satisfied with what’s going on.” He sighed, and checked his surroundings. Pro-Assad militias were closing in. “This world does not like freedom, it seems. Don’t believe that you are free people in your countries anymore. No.” There was the sound of gunfire in the background. “I hope you can remember us.” [Continue reading…]

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Israel and Palestine won’t get a two-state solution under Donald Trump. But they may get something better

Haroon Moghul writes: Donald Trump’s nominee for US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, holds some surprisingly noxious views, even toward his fellow Jews. Never mind halting Israeli settlement construction, Friedman hails Jerusalem as the “eternal, undivided capital of Israel.”

In other words, he doesn’t believe in a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But while Friedman’s hawkish tendencies are sure to frustrate liberals in Washington and the rest of the West, the reality is that the two-state-solution ship sailed a long time ago.

Establishment policymakers in the West still believe that the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel is not only possible, but desirable. This stance conveniently ignores the fact that there’s little plausible chance a Palestinian state would survive. While I certainly wouldn’t want Friedman in charge of peace talks, he may inadvertently have pushed the reconciliation process in the right direction—the question is not whether we should implement a one-state solution, but rather what a potential one-state solution might look like. [Continue reading…]

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Robert Gates welcomes the prospect of ‘the U.S. not being so reliably passive’

David Ignatius writes: Bob Gates has worked in senior national security positions for the past five presidents, Republican and Democratic. So it’s noteworthy — and to me, encouraging — that he is advising President-elect Donald Trump, too.

Gates, a former defense secretary, CIA director and deputy national security adviser, spoke with me by telephone Wednesday about the advice he’s giving Trump and his team — and the opportunities and pitfalls ahead.

At the top of Gates’s to-do list is striking the right balance between improving relations with Russia and appearing too cooperative with a belligerent President Vladimir Putin.

“I think the challenge for any new administration would have been how to thread the needle — between stopping the downward spiral in U.S.-Russian relations, which had real dangers, and pushing back on Putin’s aggressiveness and general thuggery,” Gates said.

“If you only want to stop the downward spiral, you empower Putin to feel that he can do whatever he wants. I worry that if you don’t have pushback — let him know there are limits, and that the U.S. will react, militarily, if necessary — then the chance of being taken advantage of is larger.” [Continue reading…]

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After two months of fighting, ISIS still controls three-quarters of Mosul

Campbell MacDiarmid reports: On a clear and chilly day in mid-December, Iraqi counterterrorism service (CTS) troops were fighting to clear Islamic State fighters from the Karama and Sumer districts in eastern Mosul. Like many of the other 38 neighborhoods of eastern Mosul that CTS officers said they had retaken, Karama had previously been reported liberated numerous times in local media since early November, and fighting had been ongoing in Sumer for days. Meanwhile, beleaguered Iraqi Army 9th Division troops — one of the only Iraqi security forces (ISF) units inside Mosul — were withstanding another withering Islamic State counterattack after overextending themselves in the Wahda neighborhood the week before.

Above them flew an orchestra of airplanes from nine countries. Strike aircraft with names like Eagle, Raptor, Harrier, Hornet, Typhoon, and Apache patrolled the skies, 43 in total. Further filling the airspace were a dozen drones and other support aircraft, including E-3 and E-4 airborne command and control planes, EC-130H electronic attack aircraft, Italian C-27J electronic jammers, and a midair tanker fleet, which throughout the day delivered more than 430,000 gallons of gas to the warplanes in the sky.

“It really is unlimited capacity,” said Brig. Gen. Matthew Isler, the coalition air campaign’s deputy commanding general, after describing the air forces available to him. That day, the coalition reported targeting six Islamic State tactical units, four vehicles, four mortar systems, four buildings, three rocket-propelled grenades, two car bomb factories, two front-end loaders, two tunnels, a land bridge, a bridge, a supply cache, and 13 roads. The CTS finally secured the two districts later that day, Isler said, making the operation a success.

Arabic media, however, reported that Iraqi forces were still shelling Sumer after Isler had declared it secure, while maps made by media activists that coordinate with government security forces still list the neighborhood as under Islamic State control.

Day 57 of the operation to retake Mosul was in many ways just another day. Even with the international coalition pulling out all the stops in the air campaign, Iraqi troops are making grinding progress in tough urban fighting against a suicidal and surrounded enemy. Initial hopes of a quick and easy victory have been dashed, as a carefully calibrated Islamic State strategy of suicide bombing extracts a high toll on Iraq’s most effective fighting units for every district retaken. Two months into the offensive, an estimated 75 percent of the city remains under the jihadi group’s control. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin agree: Let’s revive the nuclear arms race

Philip Bump writes: Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a speech Thursday in which he praised his country’s military operations on behalf of the government of Syria and made a case for how Russia could be stronger moving forward.

“We need to strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces,” he said, according to an Agence France-Presse translation, “especially with missile complexes that can reliably penetrate any existing and prospective missile defense systems.” In other words, Russia needs to ensure that its arsenal of nuclear weapons can avoid interception by the enemy.

The primary enemy that might intercept those missiles is, of course, the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The language echoes old Cold War rhetoric: Our missiles must be able to serve as a deterrent to usage, by existing as a threat to enemies. If NATO and the United States felt confident that Russia’s incoming nuclear weapons could be stopped before reaching their targets, the weapons do not hold the same power for Russia.

You can’t have a new nuclear arms race, of course, without someone to run against. Enter President-elect Donald Trump.


On Wednesday, Trump tweeted about how he “met some really great Air Force GENERALS and Navy ADMIRALS,” a conversation during which the subject of nuclear weapons may have come up. It seems more likely, though, that Trump or someone on his team saw the Putin speech or was briefed on it, and Trump chose to respond with the comment above.

The trend since the late 1980s has been in the opposite direction, winding down the stockpiles of weapons held by the United States and Russia. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times, reporting on Trump’s tweet noted: “He did not elaborate.”

Indeed, such is the nature of Trump’s statements on Twitter, or “Twitter posts” as the paper refers to them, unwilling, as yet, to introduce into its style guide the phrase “tweet.” Maybe for the Times only birds are allowed to tweet — but I digress.

The problem with reporting on the views of a president or president-elect when those views are expressed in throwaway remarks is that that’s exactly what they are: throwaway remarks that may get revised, reversed, or deleted within minutes.

Plus, just because it says @realDonaldTrump, how do we actually know these are Trump’s words? How do we know it isn’t Barron Trump playing with his dad’s phone — or Ivanka or any of an unknown number of people who might have access to Trump’s Twitter account?

Wouldn’t it be better if the media, with the lead let’s say of the New York Times and the Washington Post, started boycotting Trump’s tweets?

Treat his tweeting for what it is — idle chatter.

When he has something serious to say he should get expansive and craft it into several sentences, or even a paragraph or two. He could even hold a press conference or give a speech.

Just because Trump has chosen to bypass the press by using Twitter, the press isn’t obliged to facilitate that move by treating his tweets seriously.

The Daily Beast gets responses from a few experts who will definitely have informed responses if or when Trump actually has something to say on nuclear issues.

“We’re treating him like he’s a normal human being whose utterances have symbolic meaning, but I don’t know,” said Jeffrey Lewis, Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “I don’t know that this is any particular window into his policy or future.”

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Berlin truck attacker was no lone wolf, German authorities say

The Daily Beast reports: Germany’s most wanted jihadist will spend his 24th birthday on the run.

Anis Amri, who turns 24 on Thursday, was named on Wednesday as the lead suspect in Monday’s deadly attack on a Berlin Christmas Market. He was reportedly identified from official documents left behind in the truck’s cab.

But German authorities also say the Tunisian man had ties to a notorious group of local ISIS sympathizers led by a man named Abu Walaa, who was arrested in November alongside four others accused of operating an ISIS recruitment network.

Der Spiegel, citing local officials, said that Amri and Abu Walaa were in “regular contact.”

If that’s the case, what first was considered to be a “lone wolf” attack in Germany — the first successful terrorist operation there since the 9/11 attacks — could instead be the work of an ISIS cell.

Abu Walaa—whose real name is Ahmad Abdulaziz Abdullah—is an Iraqi-born preacher who serves a mosque in Hildesheim, about three hours from Berlin. The 32-year-old had styled himself as a sheikh who gives religious and marital advice, often in videos that never show his visage. iPhone and Android stores even offer an “Abu Walaa” app. A Facebook page devoted to the “sheikh,” featuring videos of him sermonizing in German and Arabic, has 25,000 followers. Only ever photographed or filmed from behind, and dressed in a hooded black cloak, he is known popularly as the “preacher without a face.” [Continue reading…]

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Schooled on Benghazi and Pizzagate, Trump team is heavy on conspiracy theorists

The Washington Post reports: In the early hours of July 10, District of Columbia resident Seth Rich was fatally shot near his home.

Police said the 27-year-old Democratic staffer was likely the victim of an attempted robbery. But Monica Crowley, a Fox News analyst who recently joined President-elect Trump’s national security team, suggested a different culprit: Hillary Clinton.

“Maybe, in fact, it wasn’t a robbery,” Crowley said Aug. 10 on “The O’Reilly Factor.” “Maybe there was something more sinister here … The question going forward, I think for Mrs. Clinton, for everybody here, is what else is out there? Who has it? Whose life may be in danger?”

This comment is typical of the perspective Crowley brings to her appointment as senior director for strategic communications for the National Security Council. But it’s not just her: many of Trump’s highest-level appointees have a history of publicly promoting conspiratorial, outlandish and fringe beliefs, particularly about Muslims, the Clinton family and the environment. The common link is they are often false narratives that remain unproven or take on stubborn life on the Internet despite being debunked by the mainstream media. [Continue reading…]

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Snowden still has contacts with Russian intelligence: U.S. House report

Reuters reports: Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden “has had and continues to have contact” with Russian intelligence services, according to a newly declassified U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee report released on Thursday.

The Pentagon found 13 undisclosed “high risk” security issues caused by Snowden’s release to media outlets of tens of thousands of the U.S. eavesdropping agency’s most sensitive documents, the report said.

If China or Russia obtained access to information on eight of the 13 issues, “American troops will be at greater risk in any future conflict,” said the report, which contained a table outlining the “issues”, but like large portions of the document, was blacked out.

Snowden criticized the report on Twitter, saying it was “rifled with obvious falsehoods” and presented no evidence that his disclosures were made “with harmful intent, foreign influence, or harm. Wow.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump may have a $300 million conflict of interest with Deutsche Bank

Bloomberg reports: For years, Donald Trump has used a powerful tool when dealing with bankers: his personal guarantee.

Now that guarantee — employed to extract better terms on hundreds of millions of dollars of loans to the Trump Organization — is at the center of a delicate loan-restructuring discussion at Deutsche Bank AG, which is under investigation on several fronts by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The bank is trying to restructure some of Trump’s roughly $300 million debt as part of an attempt to reduce any conflict of interest between the loan and his presidency, according to a person familiar with the matter. Normally, the removal of a personal pledge might lead to more-stringent terms. But there is little normal about this interaction. Trump’s attorney general will inherit an investigation of Deutsche Bank related to stock trades for rich clients in Russia — where Trump says he plans to improve relations — and may have to deal with a possible multibillion-dollar penalty to the bank related to mortgage-bond investigations.

Whatever terms a restructured loan might include, they will reflect the complex new relationship spawned between Germany’s largest bank and its highest-profile client. Ethicists say this concerns them. [Continue reading…]

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Cybersecurity firm finds evidence that Russian military unit was behind DNC hack

The Washington Post reports: A cybersecurity firm has uncovered strong proof of the tie between the group that hacked the Democratic National Committee and Russia’s military intelligence arm — the primary agency behind the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election.

The firm CrowdStrike linked malware used in the DNC intrusion to malware used to hack and track an Android phone app used by the Ukrainian army in its battle against pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine from late 2014 through 2016.

While CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC to investigate the intrusions and whose findings are described in a new report, had always suspected that one of the two hacker groups that struck the DNC was the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, it had only medium confidence.

Now, said CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch, “we have high confidence” it was a unit of the GRU. CrowdStrike had dubbed that unit “Fancy Bear.”

The FBI, which has been investigating Russia’s hacks of political, government, academic and other organizations for several years, privately has concluded the same. But the bureau has not publicly drawn the link to the GRU. [Continue reading…]

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