Chris Hedges's Blog, page 44

Fighting Rages as Libya Force Pushes Toward Key Western City

CAIRO — Officials from Libya’s two rival governments said fighting erupted Sunday as the country’s east-based forces advanced toward the strategic western city of Misrata, further eroding a crumbling cease-fire agreement brokered earlier this month.

The clashes came just hours after the United Nations decried “continued blatant violations” of an arms embargo on Libya by several unspecified countries. The violations fly in the face of recent pledges to respect the embargo made by world powers at an international conference in Berlin last week.

Libya is divided between rival governments based in its east and west, each supported by various armed militias and foreign backers.

The weak but U.N.-recognized government is based in the capital, Tripoli, and led by Prime Minister Fayez Sarraj. It is backed by Turkey, and to a lesser degree Qatar and Italy. Rival forces based in the east and loyal to military commander Khalifa Hifter receive support from the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, as well as France and Russia.

Hifter’s forces were advancing some 120 kilometers (around 75 miles) east of Misrata, near the town of Abugrein, according to the media office of militias allied with the Tripoli government. It said clashes were still taking place in the outskirts of Abugrein.

A spokesman for forces allied with the Tripoli government, Mohamed Gnounou, said in a statement posted online that Hifter’s repeated violations made the cease-fire “useless.”

An official with Hifter’s forces said they have wrested control of two towns, Qaddaheya and Wadi Zamzam, on their way to Abugrein. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

Ahmed al-Mesmari, a spokesman for Hifter’s forces, told a press conference that their offensive on Abugrein was a “limited, pre-emptive strike to achieve certain targets” after they received intelligence that the Tripoli-allied militias were preparing to attack in the area. He did not elaborate.

Misrata is Libya’s second largest city and home to militias who oppose Hifter and have been extremely important in Sarraj’s defense of the capital. Hifter’s forces have laid siege to Tripoli since last April.

Jalel Harchaoui, a Libya expert at The Netherlands Institute of International Relations, said Hifter’s swing toward Misrata was a tactic calculated to draw away the Misratan militias defending the capital toward their hometown. He said it had a “good chance of succeeding” and weakening the U.N.-supported government’s defenses in Tripoli as a result.

Hifter’s forces captured Sirte earlier this month, a major below to the Tripoli-based administration. Sirte is located about 370 kilometers (230 miles) east of Tripoli.

The nationwide truce, brokered by Russia and Turkey, marked the first break in fighting in months, but there have been repeated violations.

Also on Sunday, the U.N. support mission in Libya, UNSMIL, said two civilians were wounded when two Grad missiles hit Tripoli’s only functioning airport, Mitiga. The airport was shut down earlier this month following a similar attack, with Hifter’s forces saying they would impose a no-fly zone over the terminals’ area.

Late Saturday, the UNSMIL released a statement saying “several (countries) who participated in the Berlin Conference” have been violating the arms embargo.

“Over the last ten days, numerous cargo and other flights have been observed landing at Libyan airports in the western and eastern parts of the country providing the parties with advanced weapons, armored vehicles, advisers and fighters,” the U.N. statement said.

Turkey has sent troops in support of the Tripoli government but the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reiterated that the deployment consists of “trainers and educators” and not a combat force.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks Syria’s civil war, says hundreds of Turkey-backed Syrian rebels have arrived in Libya and joined the fighting on the side of the Tripoli-based government.

U.S. officials said Hifter’s recent push came with the aid of hundreds of Russian mercenaries. U.N. experts said in a report earlier this month that Sudanese armed groups from the Darfur region also joined the fighting recently on both sides.

The Berlin summit participants were from Algeria, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Turkey, Republic of Congo, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and United States plus representatives of the United Nations, African Union, European Union and Arab League.

The peace push followed a surge in Hifter’s offensive against Tripoli, which threatened to plunge Libya into chaos rivaling the 2011 conflict that ousted and killed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

Earlier this month, powerful tribal groups loyal to Hifter also seized several large oil export terminals along the eastern coast as well as southern oil fields. The closure of Libya’s major oil fields and production facilities has resulted in losses of more than $255 million in the six-day period ending Jan. 23, the country’s national oil company said Saturday.

2020 Is Off to a Terrifyingly Hot Start

The year is less than four weeks old, but scientists already know that carbon dioxide emissions will continue to head upwards – as they have every year since measurements began – leading to a continuation of the Earth’s rising heat.

And they warn that the rise will be steeper than usual, partly because of the devastating bush fires in Australia.

The warning is a reminder that global heating and climate change create their own positive feedbacks: more numerous and calamitous forest fires surrender more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, which helps raise temperatures, accentuate droughts and heat extremes, and create conditions for even more catastrophic forest fires.

The news is that the proportion of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will peak at 417 parts per million (ppm) in the next 11 months, but settle to an average of just over 414 ppm. This represents a predicted 10% increase on the previous year’s rise, and a fifth of that can be pinned on blazing eucalypts in New South Wales.

Atmospheric scientists began keeping meticulous records of CO2 levels in the atmosphere in 1958. The average for most of human history – until the Industrial Revolution and the mass exploitation of coal, oil and gas – was no higher than 285 ppm.

The warning, from the British Met Office, comes hard on the heels of an address by America’s President Trump – who has previously claimed that climate change is a hoax – at Davos in Switzerland. He told the World Economic Forum (WEF) to disregard those he dismissed as “prophets of doom.”

n fact he was addressing an organisation that had only recently issued its own warning that “severe threats to our climate” accounted for all the identified top long-term risks that face the modern world.

The WEF Global Risks Report warned of extreme weather events with major damage to property, infrastructure and loss of human life. It also pointed to other hazards: among them the failure of attempts to mitigate or adapt to climate change by governments and industry; human-induced environmental damage; and to biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, all of which are inseparable from the climate crisis.

Even the fifth set of global risks was environmental: these included earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and geomagnetic storms.

And, the WEF said, time to address these threats was running out. “The political landscape is polarised, sea levels are rising and climate fires are burning. This is the year when world leaders must work with all sectors of society to repair and invigorate our systems of co-operation, not just for short-term benefit, but for tackling our deep-rooted risks,” said Borge Brende, president of the WEF.

And as the WEF issued its own doom-laden warnings, scientists at two great US research agencies confirmed those fears. The space agency NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration examined their separate datasets to pronounce 2019 the second warmest year since global records began, and to confirm that the decade just ended was also the warmest since records began.

Relentless increase

“Every decade since the 1960s has been warmer than the one before,” said Gavin Schmidt of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The British Met Office – working from yet another set of data – agreed that 2019 had been 1.05°C above the average for most of human history, and that the last five years were the warmest since records began in 1850.

And only days beforehand, Chinese scientists had taken the temperature of the world’s oceans to find them warmer than at any time in recorded history. The past 10 years had been the warmest decade for ocean temperatures worldwide.

In 2019, they write in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, a partnership of 14 researchers from 11 institutes around the world had measured from the surface to a depth of 2000 metres to find that the global ocean – and 70% of the planet is covered in blue water – is now 0.075°C warmer on average than it was between 1981 and 2010.

Measured in the basic units of heat-energy, this means that the seas have soaked up 228,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of heat.

100 seconds to midnight

“That’s a lot of zeros indeed. To make it easier to understand, I did a calculation,” said Lijing Cheng, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who led the study.

“The amount of heat we have put into the world’s oceans in the last 25 years equals to 3.6 billion Hiroshima atomic bomb explosions. This measured ocean warming is irrefutable and is further proof of global warming. There are no reasonable alternatives aside from the human emissions of heat-trapping gases to explain this heating.”

On 23 January the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that it had moved the hands of its symbolic Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds from midnight – the closest they have ever been to the time chosen to represent apocalypse.

The reason? “Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers – nuclear war and climate change – that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond”, say the scientists.

“World leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode.”

 

Sanders Takes Commanding Lead in New Iowa Poll

Sen. Bernie Sanders has a strong lead over his Democratic rivals among likely voters in Iowa, according to a new New York Times/Siena College poll released Saturday, just over a week out from the state’s caucuses.

The Vermont senator had the backing of 25 percent of respondents—a six-point surge since the Times-Siena poll from late October.

Support for Former Vice President Joe Biden and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg is unchanged since the last poll, with Biden at 17 percent and Buttigieg at 18 percent in each.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s 15 percent put her in fourth place in the new poll, a drop from the 22 percent that put her at the top of the Demcratic pack in October.

Download the crosstabs from this morning’s NYT/Siena College Poll in Iowa (follow the link)!

NY Times/Siena College Poll of Likely Iowa Democratic Caucus Participants – https://t.co/IsdJx3LPjl

— SienaResearch (@SienaResearch) January 25, 2020

The support captured by Sanders from younger likely Iowa caucus goers blows away his rivals.

Sanders had 40 percent of support from those under 30. Warren and Buttigieg came in distant second for that age group, with each getting 16 percent. Biden had 10 percent, and no other candidate scraped double digits.

For those aged 30-44, Sanders was again in the lead with 31 percent. Trailing well behind at 19 percent, Warren and Buttigieg tied for second place, and Biden followed with 14 percent.

Biden bested his rivals with voters over 65, nabbing 32 percent with Buttigieg a distant second at 17 percent.

The survey of 584 voters was conducted Jan. 20-23 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.8 percentage points.

A possible factor in Sanders’ lead in the new poll, progressive journalists John Nichols and Krystal Ball suggested on Twitter, could be senator’s rejection of President Donald Trump’s march to war with Iran

Pundits have routinely underestimated how much voters care about issues of war and peace. https://t.co/bCAchOVUes

— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) January 25, 2020

As the Times reported, “the race remains up for grabs” — 39 percent said they could be persuaded to caucus for a different candidate. Still, another good sign for Sanders’s supporters was the Iowa poll out earlier this month from Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom that put him in the lead with 20 percent, a five-point surge in support from November.

Sanders, on Twitter, said Saturday that it was not a moment for complacency.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” he said. “It’s going to be a tough fight and we can’t take anything for granted. Knock on doors. Make phone calls. Do everything you can.”

Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses are Feb. 3.

The Failure to Deliver Reparations

“Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition”
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In July 2019, on a stage cluttered with nine other Democratic presidential candidates, Marianne Williamson broke with her normal jargon of cosmos to present a plan for reparations to black Americans. After translating 40 acres and a mule into a modern-day equivalent, she proposed from $200 billion to $500 billion for reparations programs, along with some “deep truth telling” in America. Her reference to “truth telling” likely refers to this nation’s deep and long history of racial inequality. The liberal media exploded with praise over Williamson’s rare and sobering policy talk in this moment. Though she will not be president in 2020, her call for reparations revealed a larger national conversation reignited by a variety of contributing factors, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s unabashed racism.

In June 2019, Congress held a hearing on reparations with testimony from activists and experts in support of a bill (HR 40) to establish a bipartisan commission to study and develop reparation proposals. The last congressional hearing on reparations was in 2007 when former Rep. John Conyers introduced the bill in the House to no avail. Twelve years later, with Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s sponsorship, the bill got another chance. Ta-Nehisi Coates delivered a blistering speech, acknowledging an unresolved past, stating, “We recognize our lineage as a generational trust, as inheritance, and the real dilemma posed by reparations is just that: a dilemma of inheritance. It is impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.” Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell commented, “I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea.”

The biggest challenges to establishing a modern reparations program have been the dilemma over who will receive them given how much time has passed since slavery’s abolition, how they will be funded, and whether or not they are “a good idea.” Proposals like Williamson’s may seem like a pipe dream, but she touches on why a discussion of reparations is still relevant and urgent today. The nation’s failure to deliver reparations to black Americans is more than a stain on the past. One hundred and fifty-six years after abolition, black people are incarcerated at a rate nearly six times that of whites, and in 2013 the median wealth of white households was 13 times greater than that of black households. Nothing in history is a coincidence, and these disparities, accruing over generations, are the result of structural racism and white supremacy that can be traced back to the institution of slavery in America.

If reparations were to be fulfilled, what should they look like today? Should they be a cash payout to individuals or something that benefits specific communities? And which communities? Columbia professor and feminist legal scholar Katherine Franke’s book, “Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition” proposes answers to these questions. Rather than engaging in an abstracted discussion on the moral exigencies of reparations, Franke provides a historical record in which reparations were almost made possible in the antebellum and postbellum South, and therefore not the subject of mere folklore. “Forty acres and a mule” was a watered-down promise never fulfilled because President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, chose to instead provide amnesty, by returning confiscated and abandoned plantation land, to the rebel Confederates—the losing side.

Click here to read long excerpts from “Repair” at Google Books.

Franke recreates a narrative from archival research of two emancipated communities in the South during the Civil War. In both cases, white plantation owners fled because their land had been confiscated by Northern troops during the war. The enslaved people, newly freed from their masters, knew the land intimately and stayed to continue to farm or create other paths toward their own self-sufficiency. Franke refers to these freed communities as “utopian experiments in Black emancipation.” Northern generals overseeing the transition of plantation lands to freed people — specifically freed black men — understood that granting property ownership, a right bestowed exclusively to free white men, was at the heart of citizenship and therefore emancipation. Franke’s references to these emancipated communities as “experiments” and “utopian” suggest what could have been, but also an impossibility.

In Port Charles, part of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, Brigadier-General Rufus Saxton assumed governorship in 1862. He supported plans to reallocate land to the newly freed population, and orchestrated a system in which freed people would have access to purchase designated land at lower market values. According to Franke, Northern whites were also looking to score big in the global cotton market. Empire building was in the works, and the benevolent whites wanted a committed, knowledgeable labor force. Quoting Saxton, Franke writes:

Their attachment to place is a marked trait in the negro character and in my humble opinion the enforcement of a law of this kind would be the means of establishing them in permanent homes, would secure the careful cultivation of the lands allotted to them, and consequently their own independence; and in addition would furnish a large supply of willing laborers, who could be hired to cultivate the purchased lands[.]

Saxton’s plan arguably may not have been utopian or radical regarding the debt owed for slavery, but he did propose a plan “breaking up the old plantations that would serve as a model for the rest of the South.” He convinced Lincoln to instruct South Carolina tax commissioners

to put up for auction the 60,000-odd acres that they had reserved […] with the instructions that those who had resided on the land for the last six months or were currently cultivating the land had a preferred right to purchase up to forty acres of land at a price of one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre.

The tax commissioners’ office, however, did not agree with Saxton or Lincoln and did not respect freed peoples’ land purchases and claims. Ultimately, the two land auctions resulted in majority purchases from Northern land sharks, ensnaring many freed people in a contract labor system. Once Johnson entered the presidency, he stole the land that freed people were able to purchase to provide amnesty to rebel Confederates.

In Davis Bend, Mississippi, Franke considers another “utopian experiment in Black emancipation.” Unlike Port Charles, the freed people of Davis Bend did not have to answer to any white overloads. They had more direct control because Northern troops didn’t have the capacity for oversight, and Admiral David Porter thought it best for the plantation to become an “independent Black colony.” Franke expresses awe over the self-governance achieved by this community. They had their own court system, the Freedmen’s Court, that she describes as “unique and remarkable.” This court system replicated white courtrooms except that they were free of whites. In Davis Bend, Franke sees a radical experiment in racial segregation and in the potential for freedom where black people self-govern contingent on being completely free of white people.

Reading Franke’s account of the past is important and exhilarating. In looking back at these radical, utopian experiments in American history, she places black people as central players in the Civil War, emancipation and American empire. She refuses a reductive characterization in which black people are relegated to either the vanquished or the victors. This dichotomy reinforces a mythology that this nation relies on to refuse black people the same humanity as white people; the same mythology that refuses to acknowledge and imagine black people beyond slaves then and beyond a surplus population today. The freed people Franke writes about were farmers — women, children, and men. They were yoked, like all Americans, to a rapacious capitalist empire that exceptionalized the rights of property-owning white men. Their paths to a more complete freedom after emancipation were compromised by white supremacy. In Franke’s retelling of this past, black people are negotiating in complex ways their own paths to self-sufficiency and autonomy in the wake of a war that equipped them with nothing but the status of freedom.

Franke writes, “Crimes against humanity should not have a statute of limitations.” The lessons learned from Port Charles and Davis Bend are not just about the past possibilities of reparations that were once a reality, but about the possibilities to develop a plan for today, to finally redress what Franke refers to as “the failed, or incomplete abolition of slavery.” For 156 years after abolition, black people have not had equal access to property ownership — a wealth generator — and a basic human right — housing. Freedom is an abstraction if you don’t have the basic material conditions necessary to live. Franke writes:

As Dr. King’s Poor People’s campaign made clear a hundred years later, fighting only for a right to be equal under the law is a mere reform movement. Radical change must include a demand for the redistribution of resources. Most rights are meaningless if you are too poor to exercise them, so in important respects in the space between being freed and being free lies economic justice.

Franke proposes a reparations program that would give working-class black communities control over their housing through community land trusts, limited equity cooperatives, resident-owned communities, and community benefits agreements. In her view, property ownership is “the central right on which all others rest.” To imagine a solution that de-commodifies housing, giving rights to tenant owners rather than real estate developers, does not seem radical, ambitious, or impossible. It’s easy to think this is the right thing to do considering real estate’s well-documented racist history. It’s hard to say, though, if it’s the best thing to do. Collectivized land ownership has potential shortcomings. Regardless, Franke’s focus on property ownership and housing pushes beyond standard calls for affirmative action and education as wholesale solutions to racialized poverty in the United States.

Franke’s approach in how we will fund these reparations is compelling, calling on one generation to relinquish some of its inherited wealth. For Franke, baby boomers and their beneficiaries are easy targets because of the racial inequality of real estate from which baby boomers reaped the benefits. She cites an “estimated $59 trillion […] will be transferred from 93.6 million American estates from 2007 to 2061, in the greatest wealth transfer in US history,” and argues that the beneficiaries, her generation, “ought to renounce some of this racially tainted land and fortune and redirect this bounty to the cause of racial justice in our communities.” In short, this generation would pay for her proposed housing plan with money from estate taxes that would be transferred into a trust. In justifying this proposal she identifies the “white innocence” this nation has relied on to protect the privileges and gains of white people at the expense of black people. White innocence — white peoples’ denial of their privilege, and the distance they wish to take from former plantation owners — has foreclosed conversations about how we establish who owes what to whom for slavery’s damage.

A modest housing plan will not likely persuade McConnell, and others who don’t see the value in reparations, any more than Williamson’s $500 billion plan would. Their rejection has never managed to silence the perennial national conversation that some form of reparation is due. Whether or not Franke offers the best approach, especially compared to other plans, is worth a deeper investigation than this book provides. She acknowledges her housing plan would be a first step in a long process necessary to repair the damage caused by slavery. In spite of this, the implications of “Repair” are far reaching. First, Franke’s engagement with the archive challenges historical amnesia and ignorance. Reparations are not the topic of folklore. They are an unfulfilled promise that could have been actualized during Lincoln’s presidency if not prematurely terminated. The conversation on reparations has yet to be resolved. Second, Franke argues for a platform of economic justice where housing is a human right and at the heart of inequality. For Franke, housing means access to homeownership, which would establish protection from displacement and a “source of wealth creation.”

After reading “Repair,” one is left to believe that denial is at the core of this nation’s failure to deliver reparations. We selectively embrace some history and discard the rest; we’ll extoll the Founding Fathers but forget settler colonialism. Franke’s clear-eyed vision momentarily suspends the noise from political roadblocks. A collectivized land ownership program could be the beginning of completing the incomplete abolition of slavery. Property ownership was once foundational to reparations and “the utopian experiments” that Franke gloriously resurrects in “Repair,” so why not now? Isn’t it time black emancipation move beyond mere utopia?

This review originally appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books .

 

Xi Calls Situation Grave as China Scrambles to Contain Virus

BEIJING — China’s leader on Saturday called the accelerating spread of a new virus a grave situation, as cities from the outbreak’s epicenter in central China to Hong Kong scrambled to contain an illness that has infected more than 1,200 people and killed 41.

President Xi Jinping’s remarks, reported by state broadcaster CCTV, came at a meeting of Communist Party leaders convened on Lunar New Year — the country’s biggest holiday whose celebrations have been muted — and underlined the government’s urgent, expanding efforts to control the outbreak.

Travel agencies have been told to halt all group tours, the state-owned English-language China Daily newspaper reported, citing the China Association of Travel Services.

Millions of people traveling during the holiday have fueled the spread of the outbreak nationwide and overseas after it began in the city of Wuhan in central China. The vast majority of the infections and all the deaths have been in mainland China, but fresh cases are popping up.

Australia and Malaysia reported their first cases Saturday — four each —and Japan, its third. France confirmed three cases Friday, the first in Europe, and the U.S. identified its second, a woman in Chicago who had returned from China.

In the heart of the outbreak where 11 million residents are already on lockdown, Wuhan banned most vehicle use, including private cars, in downtown areas starting Sunday, state media reported. Only authorized vehicles would be permitted, the reports said.

The city will assign 6,000 taxis to neighborhoods, under the management of resident committees, to help people get around if they need to, China Daily said.

In Hong Kong, leader Carrie Lam said her government will raise its response level to emergency, the highest one, and close primary and secondary schools for two more weeks on top of next week’s Lunar New Year holiday. They will reopen Feb. 17.

Lam said direct flights and trains from Wuhan would be blocked.

In a sign of the growing strain on Wuhan’s health care system, the official Xinhua news agency reported that the city planned to build a second makeshift hospital with about 1,000 beds. The city has said another hospital was expected to be completed Feb. 3.

The new virus comes from a large family of what are known as coronaviruses, some causing nothing worse than a cold. It causes cold- and flu-like symptoms, including cough and fever, and in more severe cases, shortness of breath. It can worsen to pneumonia, which can be fatal.

China cut off trains, planes and other links to Wuhan on Wednesday, as well as public transportation within the city, and has steadily expanded a lockdown to 16 surrounding cities with a combined population of more than 50 million — greater than that of New York, London, Paris and Moscow combined.

China’s biggest holiday, Lunar New Year, unfolded Saturday in the shadow of the virus. Authorities canceled a host of events, and closed major tourist destinations and movie theaters.

Temples locked their doors, Beijing’s Forbidden City and Shanghai Disneyland closed, and people canceled restaurant reservations ahead of the holiday, normally a time of family reunions, sightseeing trips and other festivities in the country of 1.4 billion people.

“We originally planned to go back to my wife’s hometown and bought train tickets to depart this afternoon,” said Li Mengbin, who was on a stroll near the closed Forbidden City. “We ended up canceling. But I’m still happy to celebrate the new year in Beijing, which I hadn’t for several years.”

Temples and parks were decorated with red streamers, paper lanterns and booths, but some places started dismantling the decor.

People in China wore medical masks to public places like grocery stores, where workers dispensed hand sanitizer to customers. Some parts of the country had checkpoints for temperature readings and made masks mandatory.

The National Health Commission reported a jump in the number of infected people, to 1,287. The latest tally, from 29 provinces and cities across China, included 237 patients in serious condition.

Of the 41 deaths, 39 have been in Hubei province, where Wuhan is the capital city. Most of the deaths have been older patients, though a 36-year-old man in Hubei died this week.

French automaker PSA Group says it will evacuate its employees from Wuhan, quarantine them and then bring them to France. The Foreign Ministry said it was working on “eventual options” to evacuate French citizens from Wuhan “who want to leave.” It didn’t elaborate.

The National Health Commission said it is bringing in medical teams to help handle the outbreak, a day after videos circulating online showed throngs of frantic people in masks lined up for examinations and complaints that family members had been turned away at hospitals that were at capacity.

The Chinese military dispatched 450 medical staff, some with experience in past outbreaks, including SARS and Ebola, who arrived in Wuhan late Friday to help treat many patients hospitalized with viral pneumonia, Xinhua reported.

Xinhua also said medical supplies are being rushed to the city, including 14,000 protective suits, 110,000 pairs of gloves and masks and goggles.

The rapid increase in reported deaths and illnesses does not necessarily mean the crisis is getting worse but could reflect better monitoring and reporting of the virus.

It is not clear how lethal the new coronavirus is or even whether it is as dangerous as the ordinary flu, which kills tens of thousands of people every year in the U.S. alone.

___

Associated Press researcher Henry Hou and video journalist Dake Kang contributed to this report.

Trump Lawyers Argue Democrats Just Want to Overturn Election

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s lawyers plunged into his impeachment trial defense Saturday by accusing Democrats of striving to overturn the 2016 election, arguing that investigations of Trump’s dealings with Ukraine have not been a fact-finding mission but a politically motivated effort to drive him from the White House.

“They’re here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history,” White House Counsel Pat Cipollone told senators. “And we can’t allow that to happen.”

The Trump legal team’s arguments in the rare Saturday session were aimed at rebutting allegations that the president abused his power when he asked Ukraine to investigate political rival Joe Biden and then obstructed Congress as it tried to investigate. The lawyers are mounting a wide-ranging, aggressive defense asserting an expansive view of presidential powers and portraying Trump as besieged by political opponents determined to ensure he won’t be reelected this November.

“They’re asking you to tear up all the ballots across this country on your own initiative, take that decision away from the American people,” Cipollone said.

Though Trump is the one on trial, the defense team made clear that it intends to paint the impeachment case as a mere continuation of the investigations that have shadowed the president since before he took office — including one into allegations of Russian election interference on his behalf. Trump attorney Jay Sekulow suggested Democrats were investigating the president over Ukraine simply because they couldn’t bring him down for Russia.

“That — for this,” said Sekulow, holding up a copy of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which he accused Democrats of attempting to “relitigate.” That report detailed ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia but did not allege a criminal conspiracy to tip the election.

From the White House, Trump tweeted his response: “Any fair-minded person watching the Senate trial today would be able to see how unfairly I have been treated and that this is indeed the totally partisan Impeachment Hoax that EVERYBODY, including the Democrats, truly knows it is.”

His team made only a two-hour presentation, reserving the heart of its case for Monday.

Acquittal appears likely, given that Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, and a two-thirds vote would be required for conviction and removal from office. Republican senators already eager to clear Trump said Saturday that the White House presentation had shredded the Democratic case.

Several of the senators shook hands with Trump’s lawyers after their presentation. The visitors’ galleries were filled, onlookers watching for the historic proceedings and the rare weekend session of Senate.

The Trump attorneys are responding to two articles of impeachment approved last month by the House — one that accuses him of encouraging Ukraine to investigate Biden at the same time the administration withheld military aid from the country, and the other that accuses him of obstructing Congress by directing aides not to testify or produce documents.

Trump’s defense team took center stage following three days of methodical and passionate arguments from Democrats, who wrapped up Friday by warning that Trump will persist in abusing his power and endangering American democracy unless Congress intervenes to remove him before the 2020 election. They also implored Republicans to allow new testimony to be heard before senators render a final verdict.

“Give America a fair trial,” said California Rep. Adam Schiff, the lead Democratic impeachment manager. “She’s worth it.”

In making their case that Trump invited Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election, the seven Democratic prosecutors peppered their arguments with video clips, email correspondence and lessons in American history. At stake, they said, was the security of U.S. elections, America’s place in the world and checks on presidential power

On Saturday morning, House managers made the procession across the Capitol at 9:30 to deliver the 28,578-page record of their case to the Senate.

Republicans accused Democrats of cherrypicking evidence and omitting information favorable to the president, casting in a nefarious light actions that Trump was legitimately empowered to take. They focused particular scorn on Schiff, trying to undercut his credibility.

Schiff later told reporters: “When your client is guilty, when your client is dead to rights, you don’t want to talk about your client, you want to attack the prosecution.”

The Trump team had teased the idea that it would draw attention on Biden and his son, Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukraine gas company Burisma, while his father was vice president. But neither Biden was a focus of Saturday arguments.

Instead, Republicans argued that there was no evidence that Trump made the security aid contingent on Ukraine announcing an investigation into the Bidens and that Ukraine didn’t even know that the money had been paused until shortly before it was released.

Trump had reason to be concerned about corruption in Ukraine and the aid was ultimately released, they said.

“Most of the Democratic witnesses have never spoken to the president at all, let alone about Ukraine security assistance,” said deputy White House Counsel Michael Purpura.

Pupura told the senators the July 25 call in which Trump asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for the Biden investigation was consistent with the president’s concerns about corruption, though Trump never mentioned that word, according to the rough transcript released by the White House.

Pupura said everyone knows that when Trump asked Zelenskiy to “do us a favor,” he meant the U.S., not himself.

“This entire impeachment process is about the house managers’ insistence that they are able to read everybody’s thoughts,” Sekulow said. “They can read everybody’s intention. Even when the principal speakers, the witnesses themselves, insist that those interpretations are wrong.”

Defense lawyers say Trump was a victim not only of Democratic rage but also of overzealous agents and prosecutors. Sekulow cited mistakes made by the FBI in its surveillance of a former Trump campaign aide in the now-concluded Trump-Russia election investigation and referred to the multi-million-dollar cost of that probe.

“You cannot simply decide this case in a vacuum,” he said.

One of the president’s lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, is expected to argue next week that an impeachable offense requires criminal-like conduct, even though many legal scholars say that’s not true. Sekulow also said the Bidens would be discussed in the days ahead.

The Senate is heading next week toward a pivotal vote on Democratic demands for testimony from top Trump aides, including acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton, who refused to appear before the House. It would take four Republican senators to join the Democratic minority to seek witnesses, and so far the numbers appear lacking.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican ally of Trump’s, said he thought the legal team had successfully poked holes in the Democrats’ case and that the Democrats had “told a story probably beyond what the market would bear.”

He said he had spoken to Trump two days ago, when he was leaving Davos, Switzerland.

Asked if Trump had any observations on the trial, Graham replied: “Yeah, he hates it.”

___

Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Alan Fram, Andrew Taylor, Laurie Kellman, Matthew Daly and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.

Pompeo Lashes Out at Journalist; NPR Defends Its Reporter

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lashed out in anger Saturday at an NPR reporter who accused him of shouting expletives at her after she asked him in an interview about Ukraine. In a direct and personal attack, America’s chief diplomat said the journalist had “lied” to him and he called her conduct “shameful.”

NPR said it stood by Mary Louise Kelly’s reporting.

Pompeo claimed in a statement that the incident was “another example of how unhinged the media has become in its quest to hurt” President Donald Trump and his administration. Pompeo, a former CIA director and Republican congressman from Kansas who is one of Trump’s closest allies in the Cabinet, asserted, “It is no wonder that the American people distrust many in the media when they so consistently demonstrate their agenda and their absence of integrity.”

It is extraordinary for a secretary of state to make such a personal attack on a journalist, but he is following the lead of Trump, who has repeatedly derided what he calls “fake news” and ridiculed individual reporters. In one of the more memorable instances, Trump mocked a New York Times reporter with a physical disability.

In Friday’s interview, Pompeo responded testily when Kelly asked him about Ukraine and specifically whether he defended or should have defended Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv whose ouster figured in Trump’s impeachment.

“I have defended every State Department official,” he said. “We’ve built a great team. The team that works here is doing amazing work around the world … I’ve defended every single person on this team. I’ve done what’s right for every single person on this team.”

This has been a sensitive point for Pompeo. As a Trump loyalist, he has been publicly silent as the president and his allies have disparaged the nonpartisan career diplomats, including Yovanovitch, who have testified in the impeachment hearings. Those diplomats told Congress that Trump risked undermining Ukraine, a critical U.S. ally, by pressuring for an investigation of Democrat Joe Biden, a Trump political rival.

Yovanovitch, who was seen by Trump allies as a roadblock to those efforts, was told in May to leave Ukraine and return to Washington immediately for her own safety. After documents released this month from an associate of Trump’s personal attorney suggested she was being watched and possibly under threat, Pompeo took three days to address the matter and did so only after coming under harsh criticism from lawmakers and current and former diplomats.

After the NPR interview, Kelly said she was taken to Pompeo’s private living room, where he shouted at her “for about the same amount of time as the interview itself,” using the “F-word” repeatedly. She said he was not happy to have been questioned about Ukraine.

Pompeo, in his statement, did not deny shouting at Kelly and did not apologize. Instead, he accused her of lying to him when setting up the interview, which he apparently expected would be limited to questions about Iran, and for supposedly agreeing not to discuss the post-interview meeting.

Kelly said Pompeo asked whether she thought Americans cared about Ukraine and if she could find the country on a map.

“I said yes, and he called out for aides to bring us a map of the world with no writing,” she said in discussing the encounter on “All Things Considered.” “I pointed to Ukraine. He put the map away. He said, ‘people will hear about this.’”

Pompeo ended Saturday’s statement by saying, “It is worth noting that Bangladesh is NOT Ukraine.”

Nancy Barnes, NPR’s senior vice president of news, said in a statement that “Kelly has always conducted herself with the utmost integrity, and we stand behind this report.”

Turkish Leader Slams ‘Propaganda’ as Quake Deaths Rise to 29

ANKARA, Turkey — The death toll from a strong earthquake that rocked eastern Turkey climbed to 29 on Saturday night as rescue crews searched for people who remained trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings, officials said.

Speaking at a televised news conference, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said earlier in the day that 18 people were killed in Elazig province, where Friday night’s quake was centered, and four in neighboring Malatya. The national disaster agency later updated the total with seven more casualties.

Some 1,243 people were injured, with 34 of them in intensive care but not in critical condition, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said.

On Saturday afternoon, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited the hardest-hit areas and attended the funeral of a mother and son killed in the quake. He warned people against repeating “negative” hearsay about the country being unprepared for earthquakes.

“Do not listen to rumors, do not listen to anyone’s negative, contrary propaganda, and know that we are your servants,” Erdogan said.

Various earthquake monitoring centers gave magnitudes ranging from 6.5 to 6.8. for the earthquake, which hit Friday at 8:55 p.m. local time (1755 GMT) near the Elazig province town of Sivrice, the Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD) said.

It was followed by 398 aftershocks, the strongest of them with magnitudes 5.4 and 5.1, the disaster agency said.

Emergency workers and security forces distributed tents, beds and blankets as overnight temperatures dropped below freezing in the affected areas. Mosques, schools, sports halls and student dormitories were opened for hundreds who left their homes after the quake.

“The earthquake was very severe. We desperately ran out (of our home),” Emre Gocer told the state-run Anadolu news agency as he sheltered with his family at a sports hall in Sivrice. “We don’t have a safe place to stay right now.”

While visiting Sivrice and the city of Elazig, the provincial capital located some 565 kilometers (350 miles) east of Ankara, Erdogan promised state support for those affected by the disaster.

“We will not leave anyone in the open,” the Turkish leader.

Earlier, a prosecutor in the capital Ankara announced an investigation into “provocative” social media posts. The Anadolu news agency reported that Turkey’s broadcasting authority was also reviewing media coverage of the quake.

At least five buildings in Sivrice and 25 in Malatya province were destroyed in the disaster, Environment and Urbanization Minister Murat Kurum said. Hundreds of other structures were damaged and made unsafe.

AFAD reported that 42 people had been rescued as search teams combed wrecked apartment buildings.

Television footage showed emergency workers removing a woman from the wreckage of a collapsed building 19 hours after the main earthquake struck.

A prison in Adiyaman, 110 kilometers (70 miles) southwest of the epicenter, was evacuated due to damage its more than 800 prisoners transferred to nearby jails.

AFAD said 28 rescue teams had been working around the clock. More than 2,600 personnel from 39 of Turkey’s 81 provinces were sent to the disaster site. Unmanned drones were used to survey damaged neighborhoods and coordinate rescue efforts.

“Our biggest hope is that the death toll does not rise,” Parliament Speaker Mustafa Sentop said.

Communication companies announced free telephone and internet services for residents in the quake-hit region.

Neighboring Greece, which is at odds with Turkey over maritime boundaries and gas exploration rights, offered to send rescue crews to assist the Turkish teams.

Erdogan appeared to reject the offer of outside assistance during his visit to the city of Elazig, telling reporters, “Our state does not need anything.”

Turkey sits on top of two major fault lines and earthquakes are frequent. Two strong earthquakes struck northwest Turkey in 1999, killing around 18,000 people.

A magnitude 6.0 earthquake killed 51 people in Elazig in 2010.

How Trump’s Trade Policies Failed Workers

Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “great negotiator” and author of The Art of the Deal, promised to use his bargaining skills to help the American worker.

Trump vowed to rewrite trade deals, stanch the offshoring of U.S. jobs and reinvigorate American manufacturing.

His behavior tells a different story. Both of the trade deals he produced so far—the original United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and the “phase one” agreement with China—failed American workers.

Bad trade costs millions of American jobs. Trump’s brand of deal-making won’t bring them back.

Make no mistake, Trump inherited real trade problems. For more than 20 years, politicians of both parties failed to fix a broken system.

Corporations exploited trade agreements to shift family-sustaining manufacturing jobs to Mexico, China and other countries that pay workers low wages and deny them the protection of labor unions. They made boatloads of money offshoring jobs, but in the process, they robbed U.S. workers of their livelihoods and hollowed out countless American communities, decimating their tax bases and exposing them to epidemics of crime and opioids.

Cheating compounded the job losses. China subsidizes its industries, manipulates its currency and then floods global markets with cheaply priced goods, severely damaging U.S. manufacturing in steel, aluminum, paper, furniture, glass and other products.

“Work just started to dwindle,” recalled Bill Curtis, who eventually lost his cloth-cutting job at a Lenoir, North Carolina, furniture factory swept under by cheap Chinese imports.

Trump made fair trade—and standing up to cheaters—a centerpiece of his 2016 campaign.

He railed against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which empowered corporations to shift more than one million manufacturing jobs to Mexico. He excoriated China for illegal trading practices that siphoned off more than three million American jobs, and he vowed to stop the bleeding.

The labor movement was prepared to work with him to achieve its long-sought goals. But as president, he let workers down. America needs a comprehensive trade solution, but Trump’s policy lacks vision.

The omission of enforceable labor standards in the original NAFTA enabled U.S. corporations to move manufacturing jobs south of the border and take advantage of Mexican workers.

Mexican workers make a few dollars an hour, much less than their U.S. counterparts, and they lack the protection of real labor unions. Companies make deals with protection unions to muzzle complaints about wages and dangerous working conditions. Workers have no voice, and U.S. corporations get rich gaming this system.

But Trump’s version of the USMCA also lacked specific mechanisms to enforce labor standards. Because he failed to deliver, labor unions and Democratic members of Congress stepped into the breach and did the hard work of fixing the deal so that it provides real protections for workers and jobs in all three countries covered by the agreement.

Congressional Democrats traveled to San Luis Potosi, Mexico, to visit a Goodyear plant that pays some workers less than $2 an hour, exposed them to hazardous conditions and fired dozens who dared to strike. Goodyear, which laid off workers in Virginia and Alabama while operating the low-cost Mexican plant, refused to let the Congress members through the door.

But the visit showed the importance of incorporating worker protections into the USMCA. Prominent Democrats, including Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal of Massachusetts and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. refused to pass the legislation until it represented a significant improvement over NAFTA.

Under the revised version of the USMCA, Mexico must follow through with promised labor reforms, such as giving workers the right to organize, or face enforcement actions. When Mexican workers join unions, their wages will rise, giving U.S. employers less incentive to relocate jobs.

In addition, the revised version makes it easier for the U.S. to initiate complaints against Mexican companies for trade violations, provides for multinational inspections of Mexican factories and gives the U.S. the authority to impose significant penalties and ultimately to block violators’ goods.

That’s real enforcement.

Congress passed the revised version of the USMCA, not Trump’s toothless version. The deal is far from perfect, but it’s a significant improvement over NAFTA.

Trump’s failure to follow through on labor standards in the USMCA showed his murky strategy on trade. His use of tariffs does, too.

In 2018, he slapped steel and aluminum tariffs on the whole world—alienating global trading partners—when the right approach would have been a strong, surgical strike against China’s dumping. While the tariffs had some positive effects, they’re no substitute for big-picture fixes Trump has yet to deliver.

On January 15, Trump unveiled “phase one” of a new trade deal with China. It’s little more than window dressing and an effort to defuse bilateral tensions during an election year.

The deal removes some tariffs on Chinese goods and theoretically commits China to purchasing $200 billion in pork, jets, energy and other U.S. products. It gives new market access to U.S. financial firms, allowing Wall Street to line its pockets. But it does nothing to address job loss.

The U.S. lost 3.7 million jobs to China since 2001, 700,000 of them during Trump’s presidency, and the trade deficit actually increased during the first two years of his term.

The loss of American jobs is no accident. It’s part of China’s policy to destabilize competitors and boost its own power.

China subsidizes its industries, giving companies raw materials, land and cash. Then the companies sell their products abroad at prices that U.S. companies—lacking government handouts—can’t match.

In addition, China allows its industries to overproduce and flood global markets, further driving down prices with gluts of steel, aluminum and other products. And it artificially depresses the value of its currency to encourage still more overseas sales.

These are the major problems that U.S. trade policy must address, but Trump’s phase-one deal doesn’t resolve any of them.

Instead, before announcing the phase one agreement, he backpedaled. He rescinded China’s designation as a currency manipulator.

Now, just like they did with the USMCA, labor unions and Democratic members of Congress must be ready to wade in and demand improvements to the China deal.

More jobs will disappear unless Trump pursues a cohesive trade strategy that prioritizes the American worker. Now, he’s just helping to perpetuate the broken system he bitterly criticized.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute .

Tom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

Recording Links Trump to Ouster of Ukraine Ambassador

NEW YORK—President Donald Trump can be heard in a taped 2018 conversation saying he wants to get rid of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, whose removal a year later emerged as an issue in Trump’s impeachment. The president was talking with a small group that included Lev Parnas, an associate of his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, according to a report Friday about the audio recording.

Trump demanded the removal of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch at an April 2018 dinner at his hotel in Washington, according to ABC News, which reported on the recording. The recording appears to contradict the president’s statements that he did not know Parnas, a key figure in the investigation.

ABC said a speaker who appears to be Trump says on the recording, “Get rid of her! Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. OK? Do it.”

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Parnas and associate Igor Fruman worked with Giuliani on a push to get Ukraine to announce it would investigate former Vice President Joe Biden. On the recording, the two tell Trump that the U.S. ambassador has been insulting him, which leads directly to the apparent remarks by the president.

The White House denied any suggestion of presidential wrongdoing.

“Every president in our history has had the right to place people who support his agenda and his policies within his administration,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said.

Yovanovitch, who was viewed as an obstacle to probes into Biden and his son, Hunter, was not recalled from her position until the following April. She said the decision was based on “unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives” that she was disloyal to Trump.

Parnas appears to say on the recording: “The biggest problem there, I think where we need to start is we gotta get rid of the ambassador. She’s still left over from the Clinton administration.”

He later can be heard telling Trump. “She’s basically walking around telling everybody ‘Wait, he’s gonna get impeached, just wait.”

House investigators have been working to document an almost year-long effort on the part of Parnas and Giuliani to have Yovanovitch removed from her post. Parnas and Fruman were recently indicted by the Southern District of New York on charges including conspiracy to commit campaign finance fraud. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Democrats seized on the recording as further evidence of Trump’s involvement.

“If this is additional evidence of his involvement in that effort to smear her, it would certainly corroborate much of what we’ve heard, but I’m not in a position yet to analyze that, not having looked at it,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., one of the House impeachment managers.

Parnas has done a series of interviews in recent days in which he has asserted that Trump was aware of the plan to remove Yovanovitch. Trump has distanced himself from Parnas, and the president’s supporters have questioned his credibility and motives.

“I don’t know Parnas other than I guess I had pictures taken, which I do with thousands of people,” Trump said last week. “But I just met him. I don’t know him at all. Don’t know what he’s about, don’t know where he comes from, know nothing about him. I can only tell you this thing is a big hoax.”

The Associated Press has not reviewed the recording. A request to Parnas and his lawyer for comment was not immediately answered.

The president is being tried in the Senate after the House impeached him last month, accusing him of abusing his office by asking Ukraine to probe the Bidens while withholding military aid from a U.S. ally at war with Russia. The second article of impeachment accuses Trump of obstructing Congress by refusing to turn over documents or allow officials to testify in the House probe.

Republicans have defended Trump’s actions as appropriate and are casting the process as a politically motivated effort to weaken him in his reelection campaign. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, and acquittal is considered likely.