Assad strikes back in Aleppo

The Daily Beast reports: Over the course of the last three days Syrian rebels suffered their worst defeat in four years as forces loyal to dictator Bashar al-Assad managed to sack a third of eastern Aleppo.

In a fortnight, at least 500 people have been killed and 1,000 more wounded as Russian and Syrian warplanes pounded the city from the sky while a consortium of Syrian soldiers and Iranian-built militias stormed it on the ground.

The assault came from east and west in an apparent effort to bisect rebel territory, which is already geographically isolated from the rest of the province.

First to fall on Saturday was the Hanano Residence neighborhood, a dense complex of apartment buildings and once a great prize for rebels who stormed it in 2012. That was followed Sunday by Jabal Badro and Al-Sakhour, where a chemical weapons attack killed six the week before.

One humanitarian activist from the city described the current situation to The Daily Beast as “a total catastrophe.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump is more dangerous than ‘the Blob’

With the ascent to power of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and following 9/11 the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, foreign-policy realists succeeded in promoting the virtues of the national interest — to the detriment of internationalism.

For some years, progressives, antiwar activists, and traditional conservatives have found common cause in opposition to interventionism.

In some ways, Donald Trump’s election is part of that trend.

For that reason, an academic such as John Mearsheimer who sees himself as being outside the foreign policy establishment, sees potential promise in a Trump presidency but he fears the power that remains entrenched in Washington, that has been referred to derisively as “the Blob” by President Obama’s close adviser, Ben Rhodes.

Mearsheimer warns:

The foreign-policy community, which has deep roots and cuts across both of the major political parties, will go to enormous lengths to tame the new president and make sure he sticks with liberal hegemony.

Should it prevail, there will be more terrorism, more failed attempts to spread democracy, more lost wars, and more death and destruction across the greater Middle East.

But there’s a glaring problem with this analysis: it makes no mention of the fact that even before he takes office, it’s clear from his own campaign statements and from the first appointments he has made, that Donald Trump and his administration are Islamophobic to the core.

It’s not without reason that Trump’s election was instantly being celebrated by jihadists across the world.

“This guy is a complete maniac. His utter hate towards Muslims will make our job much easier because we can recruit thousands,” Abu Omar Khorasani, a top ISIS commander in Afghanistan, told Reuters.

Never since 9/11 must the United States have appeared as such an appealing target for terrorism.

Trump is a ticking time-bomb and it seems like just a matter of time before a terrorist plot, either executed or thwarted, sets him off.

And what happens then?

How is a president who gets triggered by a mild rebuke from the cast of Hamilton going to react to some barbaric act provocation?

Where will Trump’s famous counterpunch land? And how much or little will the president actually understand before he feels driven to take what he proudly brands as “decisive action”?

That’s what most of us have reason to fear and what the terrorists eagerly await, confident as they must be that Trump’s overreaction will have the potential to cause even more harm than Bush and Cheney’s overreaction to 9/11.

But to listen to Mearsheimer and some other realists, you’d think that we should be more concerned about the debatable influence of “the Blob” than we are about Trump’s reactivity.

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The incarceration industry was having a tough time. Then Trump got elected

James Surowiecki writes: Going into Election Day, few industries seemed in worse shape than America’s private prisons. Prison populations, which had been rising for decades, were falling. In 2014, Corrections Corporation of America, the biggest private-prison company in the U.S., lost its contract to run Idaho’s largest prison, after lawsuits relating to understaffing and violence that had earned the place the nickname Gladiator School. There were press exposés of shocking conditions in the industry and signs of a policy shift toward it. In April, Hillary Clinton said, “We should end private prisons.” In August, the Justice Department said that private federal prisons were less safe and less secure than government-run ones. The same month, the department announced that it would phase out the use of private prisons at the federal level. Although most of the private-prison industry operates on the state level (immigrant-detention centers are its other big business), the news sent C.C.A.’s stock down by thirty-five per cent.

Donald Trump’s victory changed all that: within days, C.C.A.’s stock had jumped forty-seven per cent. His faith in privatization is no secret, and prison companies aren’t the only ones rubbing their hands. The stock price of for-profit schools has also rocketed. Still, the outlook for private prisons is particularly rosy, because many Trump policies work to their benefit. The Justice Department’s plan to phase out private prisons will likely be scrapped, and a growing bipartisan movement for prison and sentencing reform is about to run up against a President who campaigned as a defender of “law and order.” Above all, Trump’s hard-line position on immigration seems certain to fill detention centers, one of the biggest money spinners for private-prison operators. [Continue reading…]

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How U.S. money is backing the Philippines’ bloody war on drugs

BuzzFeed reports: [President Rodrigo] Duterte is perhaps the most brutal leader to sweep to power in this year’s global populist wave, and his bloody campaign against drug users and dealers remains overwhelmingly popular in his country, even as the US and other Western governments have criticized its violence. He won election in a landslide earlier this year after vowing to kill 100,000 criminals and feed their bodies to fish in Manila Bay.

On the surface, the relationship between Duterte and the Obama administration has been strained, though the Philippines remains one of the largest recipients of US aid, including for its much criticized police force. The US president scrapped a meeting with Duterte this fall after Duterte called him a “son of a whore,” and the State Department has expressed worry about reports of extrajudicial killings.

“We’re very concerned — deeply concerned, I would say — about reports of extrajudicial killings of individuals suspected to have been involved in drug activity in the Philippines,” a US State Department spokesman said in August.

But a BuzzFeed News investigation has found that despite those statements of concern, the US continued to train and provide equipment to police units on the front lines of the anti-drug campaign. The State Department sent millions of dollars in aid to programs for police departments across the country even as the death toll from the drug campaign climbed by hundreds each month, according to government documents as well as current and former US and Philippine officials. Critics say this raises questions as to whether the State Department violated a US law that forbids aid dollars from benefiting police units engaged in gross human rights violations like extrajudicial killings. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq gives militias official status despite abuse claims

The Washington Post reports: The Iraqi parliament passed a law Saturday making militia units, including ­Iranian-backed groups accused of human rights abuses, an official part of the country’s security forces.

Lawmakers passed the measure 208 to 0 in a session that was boycotted by most Sunni politicians, who opposed an initiative that extends the influence of powerful Shiite groups that many Iraqi Sunnis view with suspicion.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi praised the law, saying that it gave due to fighters who had proved themselves a key part of Iraqi defenses since the onslaught by Islamic State militants in 2014.

“Those heroic fighters, young and old, need our loyalty for the sacrifices they have made,” a statement issued by Abadi’s office said. “This is the least we can do.”

But the measure, which also legitimizes smaller Sunni tribal groups that have fought alongside Iraqi forces since 2014, threatens to inflame sectarian tensions that could surge anew after the defeat of the Islamic State. It could also complicate Iraq’s military cooperation with the United States and other Western partners. [Continue reading…]

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Is Erdogan’s rise unstoppable?

Ali Bayramoglu writes: Ever since coming to power in November 2002, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has won all elections he contested, almost always by increasing his popular support. In terms of achievement, however, Erdogan’s image and policies have not followed a steady trend. While his first decade in power was marked by reformist policies, the past five years have seen an ever-strengthening tilt toward authoritarianism. As a result, the same fundamental question has kept popping up: How does Erdogan manage to sustain his popular support and electoral success while facing so many accusations of authoritarianism and projecting such a nondemocratic image?

Ankara’s authoritarian policies have clearly peaked in the aftermath of the July 15 coup attempt. The record of the past four months is plain as day. The clampdown on Kurdish politicians and the liberal opposition — proceeding along with the purge of putschists, the suspension of freedoms, the drive to establish a political hegemony over the state and the arbitrariness in the justice system — have all reached unprecedented levels, coupled with a security-centered approach on the Kurdish question, a hard-line regional posture marked by military interventions and an increasingly fragile economy. So is Erdogan’s popular support going down this time?

According to public opinion polls, not only has he not suffered any decline in support, but he has seen his power and popularity increase. Metropoll’s October survey found that voter support for Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has reached 53%, a 3.5 point increase from the 49.5% vote the party won in the last general elections a year ago. Another respected polling company, A&G, puts the AKP’s voter support at 55%. Erdogan’s personal popularity has also risen. His approval rate has increased 10 points from the pre-putsch period, keeping above 50% in the past four months, according to Metropoll. [Continue reading…]

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Dino-killing asteroid may have punctured Earth’s crust

Live Science reports: After analyzing the crater from the cosmic impact that ended the age of dinosaurs, scientists now say the object that smacked into the planet may have punched nearly all the way through Earth’s crust, according to a new study.

The finding could shed light on how impacts can reshape the faces of planets and how such collisions can generate new habitats for life, the researchers said.

Asteroids and comets occasionally pelt Earth’s surface. Still, for the most part, changes to the planet’s surface result largely from erosion due to rain and wind, “as well as plate tectonics, which generates mountains and ocean trenches,” said study co-author Sean Gulick, a marine geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin.

In contrast, on the solar system’s other rocky planets, erosion and plate tectonics typically have little, if any, influence on the planetary surfaces. “The key driver of surface changes on those planets is constantly getting hit by stuff from space,” Gulick told Live Science. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump’s bogus claim that millions of people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton

The Washington Post reports: Angered by demands for a recount in the three states that gave him an electoral college victory, President-elect Donald Trump made a bold but unsubstantiated assertion in a tweet — that “millions of people” voted illegally in the presidential election. He suggested they voted for his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, who now leads in the popular vote by 2.2 million votes, and thus he actually also won the popular vote.


Winning the electoral college is all that counts in the presidential race. But losing the popular vote by such a substantial margin apparently gnaws at Trump. Is there any basis for his claim?

The simple answer is no. This is a bogus claim with no documented proof.

Our colleagues at Snopes.com and PundiFact have already examined this claim, back when it was hot in the right-wing blogosphere, not a statement made by a future U.S. president. The whole thing started with a few tweets by Gregg Phillips, a self-described conservative voter fraud specialist. [Continue reading…]

Politico adds: Election law experts quickly rejected Trump’s claims as farfetched.

“There’s no reason to believe this is true,” said Rick Hasen, a professor specializing in election law at the University of California, Irvine. “The level of fraud in US elections is quite low.”

Hasen added, “The problem of non-citizen voting is quite small — like we’re talking claims in the dozens, we’re not talking voting in the millions, or the thousands, or even the hundreds.”

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former senior trial attorney in the Voting Section of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, agreed that widespread fraud was unlikely.

“We know historically that this almost never happens,” he said. “You’re more likely to get eaten by a shark that simultaneously gets hit by lightning than to find a non-citizen voting.” [Continue reading…]

Ezra Klein writes: This tweet is an example of Trump’s most dangerous quality: his tendency to mobilize against a threatening, sometimes imaginary Other whenever he himself is under siege. There is no evidence of significant voter fraud from this election. But Trump is telling his supporters that voting fraud did in fact happen, and that they should therefore worry that their political power will be overwhelmed by illegal voters.

The nightmare scenario in 2016 was that Trump would refuse to accept the outcome of the election when he was a mere candidate. Imagine if he were to refuse to accept the outcome of the next election once he is the president, and after he has appointed loyalists to control America’s security apparatus.

Imagine this tendency of Trump’s emerging after a domestic terrorist attack. George W. Bush worked hard in the aftermath of 9/11 to tamp down Islamophobia in America — to ensure it was al-Qaeda (and, eventually, Saddam Hussein) who was blamed, not American Muslims. Who would Trump blame in the aftermath of a terrorist attack? How quick would he be to turn Americans against each other, to find an enemy who could absorb the public anger that might normally attach itself to him?

I’ve noticed a lot of people on Twitter seem to think Trump’s tweet is scary because it’s false, but the actually scary interpretation is that he believes it’s true, which he probably does. It seems likely that Trump got his “information” from conspiracy theorist site InfoWars.com, or someone else retweeting or rewriting InfoWars — a lot of weird things Trump says later prove to emerged in the pro-Trump, conspiracy theory-corners of the internet. The problem with Trump isn’t the lies he tells as much as it’s the information he chooses to believe. [Continue reading…]

In this regard, Trump is no different from his supporters and many of his opponents: the information he seeks out is information that is limited to that which appears to confirm his existing beliefs.

This is the trap that locks the majority of political opinion in self-reinforcing loops that inhibit the evolution of thought and the integration of new information.

Where thinking loses its capacity to adapt, it is reduced to mere repetition.

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Syrian forces seize more rebel-held districts in Aleppo as assault gains momentum

The Washington Post reports: Syrian government forces seized full control of northeast Aleppo on Monday, shaving the shrinking island of rebel-held territory by a third and sending thousands of civilians into panicked flight.

The area’s recapture brings President Bashar al-Assad’s troops closer than ever to realizing their biggest victory of the five-year-old-war: retaking full control over the northern city of Aleppo.

Those reconquered neighborhoods in Syria’s commercial capital were among the first to throw off government control in 2012. On Nov. 15., government forces launched a final push to take them back, supported by Russian warplanes and Iranian-backed troops.

Monitoring groups said the rebels had lost a territory by Monday afternoon as district after district fell to government and Kurdish forces.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the northern Sakhur, Haydariya and Sheikh Khodr districts are now controlled by pro-Assad fighters while Kurdish militants — seemingly in coordination with government forces — have taken the Sheikh Fares neighborhood from rebels. [Continue reading…]

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Vladimir Putin’s expendable asset: Edward Snowden

Andrew Mitrovica writes: Surely, Snowden knows that the Doomsday clock is inching towards 12 o’clock not only for an insecure world, but for himself as well.

He knows that Trump’s pick for CIA chief, veteran congressman and rabid NSA cheerleader, Mike Pompeo, wants the “traitor” shipped back to the US quickly, tried perfunctorily, and executed swiftly.

“[Snowden] should be brought back from Russia and given due process, and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence,” Pompeo told a television host in February.

Apparently, the congressman’s Wild West-like notion of “due process” is meting out a “death sentence” to Snowden after what will certainly amount to a token show trial.

Of course, in February, the earth’s geopolitical axis was such that Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama weren’t sharing a shot of vodka or horseback rides in the rustic Russian countryside.

Snowden is expendable. If he’s part of the price Putin might be obliged to pay to win more than just Trump’s admiration.

In this frosty context, reminiscent of the Cold War, Snowden, the former NSA spook, was a welcomed, if not useful, asset to the Russian leader, who was a KGB spy himself in the bygone, but not forgotten, Soviet era.

While alarming, Pompeo’s predictable, politically charged rhetoric could be dismissed at the time as, well, predictable, politically charged rhetoric.

Eight months later, the geopolitical axis shifted unexpectedly and breathtakingly. Trump’s once inconceivable victory will reverberate – to borrow Donald Rumsfeld’s cockeyed vocabulary – in unknown and known ways.

Still, Snowden must know that the budding bromance between Trump and Putin – nurtured before, during and after an election that possibly saw Russia’s security services tilting the scales in the “Manhattan Mussolini’s” favour – will likely mean that Pompeo’s vengeful hopes could be realised sooner rather than later.

Snowden must also know that the Trump-Putin bromance is the natural consequence of the ties that bind: money and mutual authoritarian pathologies.

The pending rapprochement between these two temperamentally unalike, but otherwise like-minded figures – if it comes – will have other direct and perhaps immediate consequences for Snowden.

First, Snowden’s value to Putin as a real or symbolic slap to America’s haughty face will have run its profitable course. [Continue reading…]

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Combative, populist Steve Bannon found his man in Donald Trump

The New York Times reports: When Julia Jones arrived at her office in Santa Monica at 8 a.m. — by Hollywood screenwriter standards, the crack of dawn — she found Stephen K. Bannon already at his desk, which was cluttered with takeout coffees. They were co-writers on a Ronald Reagan documentary, but Mr. Bannon had pretty much taken it over. He had been at work for hours, he told her, writing feverishly about his political hero.

Today, with Donald J. Trump, whose election Mr. Bannon helped engineer, on the threshold of power, the 2004 film “In the Face of Evil” has a prophetic ring. Its trailer has an over-the-top, apocalyptic feel: lurid footage of bombs dropping on cities alternating with grainy clips of Reagan speeches, as a choir provides a soaring soundtrack. The message: Only one man was up to the challenge posed by looming domestic and global threats.

“A man with a vision,” the trailer says. “An outsider, a radical with extreme views.”

The Reagan presidency has been a recurring touchstone for Mr. Bannon since 1980, when as a 26-year-old Navy officer he talked his way into Mr. Reagan’s election night celebration. It was at an early screening of “In the Face of Evil” that he met fellow Reagan admirer Andrew Breitbart, the budding conservative media provocateur.

Breitbart.com’s scorn for Muslims, immigrants and black activists drew a fervent following on the alt-right, an extremist fringe of message boards and online magazines popular with white supremacists, and after Mr. Bannon took control of the website in 2012, he built a raucous coalition of the discontented.

More quietly, Mr. Bannon systematically courted a series of politicians, especially those who share his dark, populist worldview: at home, a corrupt ruling class preying on working Americans; globally, “the Judeo-Christian West” in a “war against Islamic fascism.” They were views that placed him closer to the European right than to the Republican mainstream. [Continue reading…]

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Obama expands war with Al Qaeda and greatly extends Trump’s capabilities and authorities

The New York Times reports: The escalating American military engagement in Somalia has led the Obama administration to expand the legal scope of the war against Al Qaeda, a move that will strengthen President-elect Donald J. Trump’s authority to combat thousands of Islamist fighters in the chaotic Horn of Africa nation.

The administration has decided to deem the Shabab, the Islamist militant group in Somalia, to be part of the armed conflict that Congress authorized against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to senior American officials. The move is intended to shore up the legal basis for an intensifying campaign of airstrikes and other counterterrorism operations, carried out largely in support of African Union and Somali government forces.

The executive branch’s stretching of the 2001 war authorization against the original Al Qaeda to cover other Islamist groups in countries far from Afghanistan — even ones, like the Shabab, that did not exist at the time — has prompted recurring objections from some legal and foreign policy experts.

The Shabab decision is expected to be publicly disclosed next month in a letter to Congress listing global deployments. It is part of the Obama administration’s pattern of relaxing various self-imposed rules for airstrikes against Islamist militants as it tries to help its partner forces in several conflicts. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian rebels’ resistance ‘waning’ as thousands of people flee Aleppo

The Guardian reports: Signs that the dogged resistance to the Syrian Army and Russian airforce in eastern Aleppo may be crumbling have started to appear as thousands of people fled to areas under government control, either due to starvation, the continued air assault or the advance of Syrian troops.

The rebel troops retreated on Sunday, faced by the risk of being split into two due to Syrian army advances.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights initially said about 400 people from the Masaken Hanano neighbourhood sought refuge after it was captured by pro-government forces on Saturday, and that an additional 30 families fled to Sheikh Maqsoud, which is under Kurdish control.

However, the numbers fleeing the Syrian government advance has risen sharply, as up to 3,000 fled through the day. [Continue reading…]

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Half a million children are trapped in Syria, UN says

The New York Times reports: With violence escalating in Aleppo and elsewhere across war-ravaged Syria, the United Nations said Saturday that the number of children trapped in besieged areas had doubled in less than a year to half a million.

A report by Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, said the children were among hundreds of thousands of civilians in 16 areas under siege across the country who had been “almost completely cut off from sustained humanitarian aid and basic services.”

The report said some of these areas had received little or no aid in nearly two years, despite repeated efforts by international relief agencies to provide food and medicine. “This is no way to live,” Unicef’s executive director, Anthony Lake, said in the report.

The report estimated that 100,000 of the trapped children were among the civilians pinned down in eastern Aleppo, the insurgent-held portion of what had been prewar Syria’s commercial epicenter. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s stealth attack on Mitt Romney?

Politico reports: Top advisers to President-elect Donald Trump escalated their attacks on Mitt Romney on Sunday, catapulting their long-simmering frustrations on to TV news in an extraordinary public airing of grievances.

In a series of interviews on the Sunday political talk shows, Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump aide, argued firmly against tapping Romney for secretary of state, echoing internal skepticism among some in Trump’s inner circle.

“I’m all for party unity, but I’m not sure that we have to pay for that with the secretary of state position,” Conway said in an interview with CNN. “We don’t even know if Mitt Romney voted for Donald Trump.”

Conway said her comments reflected conservatives’ opposition to Romney, who was a frequent Trump critic during the presidential campaign. “It’s just breathtaking in scope and intensity,” Conway said of the opposition to Romney among Trump supporters, characterizing their reaction as “betrayal.”

The public Romney-bashing comes amid a behind-the-scenes battle for influence among Trump’s top aides, with Conway and incoming White House senior strategist Steve Bannon arguing that former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump loyalist, is the best pick for secretary of state. Meanwhile, Vice President-elect Mike Pence is said to be advocating for Romney, arguing that the former presidential candidate can be a bridge to centrist Republicans.

Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said transition was going smoothly despite the large shockwave rippling through Washington about Trump’s lobbying restrictions.

But some Republicans wondered aloud whether Conway’s comments might be orchestrated by Trump himself as part of a campaign to embarrass Romney, noting Trump’s penchant for headline-stealing public fights. Romney had called Trump “a con man, phony and fraud” during the campaign.

“Attacks on Romney not a solo act,” Republican political commentator Ana Navarro, a vocal Trump critic, tweeted. “Trump coordinated payback/humbling.” [Continue reading…]

By dangling the possibility of secretary of state in front of Romney and getting him to bite, Trump was able to show that outspoken critics can be turned in his favor when suitably enticed.

And if Trump is indeed now stoking the internal opposition to Romney, it is, as Navarro suggests, most likely an exercise in public humiliation.

Trump on the one hand gets to posture as magnanimous and pragmatic and at the very same time, exacts revenge.

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Potential conflicts around the globe for Trump, the businessman president

The New York Times reports: On Thanksgiving Day, a Philippine developer named Jose E. B. Antonio hosted a company anniversary bash at one of Manila’s poshest hotels. He had much to be thankful for.

In October, he had quietly been named a special envoy to the United States by the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte. Mr. Antonio was nearly finished building a $150 million tower in Manila’s financial district — a 57-story symbol of affluence and capitalism, which bluntly promotes itself with the slogan “Live Above the Rest.” And now his partner on the project, Donald J. Trump, had just been elected president of the United States.

After the election, Mr. Antonio flew to New York for a private meeting at Trump Tower with the president-elect’s children, who have been involved in the Manila project from the beginning, as have Mr. Antonio’s children. The Trumps and Antonios have other ventures in the works, including Trump-branded resorts in the Philippines, Mr. Antonio’s son Robbie Antonio said.

“We will continue to give you products that you can enjoy and be proud of,” the elder Mr. Antonio, one of the richest men in the Philippines, told the 500 friends, employees and customers gathered for his star-studded celebration in Manila.

Mr. Antonio’s combination of jobs — he is a business partner with Mr. Trump, while also representing the Philippines in its relationship with the United States and the president-elect — is hardly inconsequential, given some of the weighty issues on the diplomatic table.

Among them, Mr. Duterte has urged “a separation” from the United States and has called for American troops to exit the country in two years’ time. His antidrug crusade has resulted in the summary killings of thousands of suspected criminals without trial, prompting criticism from the Obama administration.

Situations like these are already leading some former government officials from both parties to ask if America’s reaction to events around the world could potentially be shaded, if only slightly, by the Trump family’s financial ties with foreign players. They worry, too, that in some countries those connections could compromise American efforts to criticize the corrupt intermingling of state power with vast business enterprises controlled by the political elite. [Continue reading…]

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Shootout raises fears over Russian ties to Hungary’s far right

Financial Times reports: When plain-clothes police officers came to Istvan Gyorkos’s house early one morning in late October in search of illegal guns, the increasingly paranoid 76-year-old neo-Nazi barricaded himself in.

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A bloody shootout ensued and a police officer was shot dead. Mr Gyorkos has been taken into custody and faces possible charges.

With previous arrests and convictions for gun violations and hate crimes, the moustachioed founder of Hungary’s neo-Nazi National Front movement (MNA) was often pictured in military uniform. He was known nationally for his fascist political views and, in his home town of Bony, the MNA staged regular paramilitary drills in the muddy hills behind his house and even invited townspeople to watch.

What was less well known was the far-right militia’s multiple ties to Russian secret services. “We don’t believe this attack was a plot orchestrated by the Russian government,” said Peter Kreko, director of Political Capital, a Budapest think-tank. “But there are strong suspicions Mr Gyorkos was supported by Moscow.”

In the wake of the October shootout, the police last week raided nine properties, uncovering MNA weapons stockpiles far larger and more sophisticated than expected, although their provenance is unknown.

While Russian support for far-right groups in Europe has been widely rumoured, the recent events in Hungary have brought to light new evidence of Moscow’s long-running attempts to cultivate far-right extremists. [Continue reading…]

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