Chris Hedges's Blog, page 440

China’s Economic Growth Slows Amid Trade Battle With U.S.

BEIJING — China’s economic growth slowed further in the latest quarter, adding to challenges for its communist leaders as they fight a tariff battle with Washington.

The world’s second-largest economy expanded by 6.5 percent over a year earlier in the three months ending in September, government data showed Friday. That was down from 6.7 percent for the quarter ending in July and 6.8 percent for the year’s first three months.

Forecasters expected China’s economy to cool after Beijing tightened credit controls last year to rein in a debt boom. But the slowdown has been more abrupt than expected, prompting Chinese leaders to reverse course and encourage banks to lend.

“China’s slowdown is a little sharper than expected, but basically fits our narrative for the economy,” said Bill Adams of PNC Financial Services Group in a report.

Beijing’s debt controls and “trade uncertainties” are “taking a bite out of economic momentum,” Adams said.

China’s leaders express confidence their $12 trillion-a-year economy can survive the conflict with U.S. President Donald Trump. But export industries have begun to suffer from American tariff hikes of up to 25 percent on Chinese goods.

Economic performance was “stable overall,” but “we must also see the number of external challenges has increased significantly,” said a government spokesman, Mao Shengyong.

“Downward pressure has increased,” Mao said at a news conference.

Retail spending, factory output and investment in factories and other fixed assets weakened.

Retail sales rose 9.1 percent over a year earlier in the first nine months of the year, down 0.1 percent from the first half, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Growth in factory output decelerated to 6.4 percent for the first nine months of 2018, down 0.3 percentage points from the first half. Investment rose 5.4 percent in the first three quarters, down 0.6 percentage points from the first half.

Beijing has rejected U.S. pressure to scale back industrial development plans Washington says are based on stealing or pressuring foreign companies to hand over technology. American officials worry they might threaten U.S. industrial leadership.

The conflict with Washington has prompted communist leaders to step up the pace of a marathon effort to encourage self-sustaining growth driven by domestic consumption and reduce reliance on exports and investment.

Beijing has cut tariffs, promised to lift curbs on foreign ownership in the Chinese auto industry and taken other steps to rev up growth. But leaders reject pressure to scrap plans such as “Made in China 2025,” which calls for state-led creation of Chinese champions in robotics and other technologies.

Washington, Europe and other trading partners complain those plans violate Beijing’s market-opening commitments.

Beijing has responded to previous downturns by flooding the state-dominated economy with credit, but that has swelled debt. The ruling Communist Party has told banks to step up lending, especially to private entrepreneurs who generate China’s new jobs and wealth, but has avoided a full-scale stimulus. Forecasters say it will take the measures some time to work their way through the economy.

There are signs government support is “starting to gain traction,” but “more easing will still be needed in order to stabilize growth,” said Julian Evans-Pritchard of Capital Economics in a report.

“We doubt the latest pick-up in infrastructure spending will be enough to prevent the economy from cooling further in the coming quarters,” said Evans-Pritchard.

Washington has raised tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods and Trump says he might extend penalties to almost all imports from China. Beijing responded with its own tariff hikes on $110 billion of American imports but is running out of goods for retaliation due to their lopsided trade balance.

Forecasters say if threatened tariff hikes by both sides are fully carried out, that could cut China’s 2019 growth by up to 0.3 percentage points.

September exports to the United States rose 13 percent despite the tariff hikes, down slightly from August’s 13.4 percent. The country’s politically volatile trade surplus with the United States widened to a record $34.1 billion.

Chinese exporters of lower-value goods such as clothes say American orders fell off starting in April as trade tensions worsened. But makers of factory equipment, medical technology and other high-value goods express confidence they can keep their market share.

Trade accounts for a smaller share of the economy than it did a decade ago but still supports millions of jobs.

On Thursday, the Commerce Ministry promised official help for companies that have suffered due to the American import controls.

“In general, the impact is limited,” said a ministry spokesman, Gao Feng. “Governments at all levels will also take active measures to help enterprises and employees cope with possible difficulties.”

Have Democrats Forgotten About This Summer’s Immigration Debacle?

The controversy over President Donald Trump’s immigrant family separation policy this summer made major headlines for weeks, generated mass protests in Washington, D.C., and in cities around the country, and fomented “occupations” in front of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices, calling for the abolishment of the agency. Heart-rending audio recordings of children who were separated from their parents were played repeatedly on news shows and during protests. The family separation scandal was one of several reasons cited by crowds that showed up to protest Trump in London during a state visit to the U.K. Now, just weeks before a critical midterm election, there’s nary a headline about family separation. And Democrats, who are poised to win a majority in the House, are not hammering nearly hard enough on the issue. In fact, they’re playing defense.

To be fair, the protests and uproar over family separation worked to an extent. The Trump administration was forced to reverse its so-called “zero-tolerance” policy that it used as a justification for wrenching children away from their parents. Then began the arduous process of reuniting those families that had been separated. But to this day, months after the egregious practice was ended, hundreds of children remain separated from their parents. Records show that 244 children are in U.S. custody for a variety of reasons, including ICE’s policy of arresting potential guardians who come forward to claim the children.

In spite of the fact that family separation is no longer routine, disturbing reports have emerged of children who were being held in certified facilities around the country being moved in the middle of the night into a “tent city” in the middle of the Texas desert. The Tornillo facility is not even licensed to hold children. The number of immigrant children in U.S. custody has now swelled to more than 13,000—the largest number ever, and five times greater than at the same time last year. According to The New Yorker, “Shelters have become overcrowded not because more children are fleeing north than in years past but mainly because the Trump Administration has made it more difficult to release them.”

Now the Trump administration is considering a frightening new policy to traumatize immigrants—the obscure sounding “binary choice,” which, according to The Washington Post, means that the government will “detain asylum-seeking families together for up to 20 days, then give parents a choice—stay in family detention with their child for months or years as their immigration case proceeds, or allow children to be taken to a government shelter so other relatives or guardians can seek custody.”

The trauma that immigrants have experienced for years is deeply felt. Jose Antonio Vargas, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and arguably the most well-known undocumented immigrant in the U.S., told me in an interview, “There is a mental health crisis facing immigrant communities in this country.” Vargas’s new book is called “Dear America, Notes of an Undocumented Citizen,” and is written in three parts, titled, “Lying,” “Passing” and “Hiding.” He told me, “I wanted to understand what the cost of all of this for me has been. … I’ve never felt safe and that was hard to admit to myself.”

Vargas reflected on the current federal government approach to immigration, which in many ways is a continuation of what happened under President Barack Obama, and in other ways is so much worse, saying, “We’ve been trying to figure what the worst-case scenario is. And we’re now living through the worst-case scenario.” He sees Trump as “The manifestation of every nonsensical, ineffective, inhumane immigration policy we’ve had in this country since the ’90s.” He added, “This is definitely the worst time.”

In spite of the widespread horror among Americans for the family separation policy, Democrats have not fixated on the issue and have instead laid it at Trump’s feet. Trump and the Republicans have wielded the hard-fought confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court as a major victory. But before that victory, they suffered a horrendous moral defeat in their willingness to subject families to wrenching pain and life-long trauma—so much for being a party of “family values.”

In a recent interview with Politico, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi outlined her first order of business as speaker if her party takes the House: campaign finance reform. After that, she said the party’s leadership planned on working toward lowered drug prices, gun control and a bill protecting the so-called Dreamers—a narrowly defined group of young undocumented people who won limited protections against deportation under Obama, but who represent a small percentage of all undocumented immigrants. She made no mention of the family separation scandal at all, and no pushback against the xenophobic scapegoating of immigrants by Republicans ahead of every election.

And yet Republicans have been regularly slamming Democrats on immigration—the very issue that ought to signify the party’s downfall after what transpired this summer! The New York Times obtained a copy of a memo circulated by liberal groups such as the Center for American Progress. It warns Democrats against making immigration a campaign issue. Claiming that Democrats are for “open borders” and “sanctuary cities” everywhere, Republicans are using the Trump playbook to make false or exaggerated claims. And Democrats are folding, just as they have done before.

For example, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who until recently appeared to be in danger of losing his seat to challenger Beto O’Rourke, has attacked his rival on immigration. A slickly produced commercial for Cruz cites a number of undocumented immigrants who apparently committed crimes despite multiple deportations, and juxtaposes this with O’Rourke’s pro-immigrant position. In a border state this plays well, despite the large number of Texas Latino voters, and Cruz has now surged ahead of O’Rourke by several points in the polls. Where are the Democratic commercials playing the audio recordings of children crying for their parents traumatized for what will likely be a lifetime, or the video footage of children marching into a concentration camp-like tent city in Tornillo, Texas? Where are Democratic exhortations for Americans to vote with their hearts against the inhumanity that Trump and the Republicans have unleashed on a vulnerable population?

This summer’s debacle, during which months of negative headlines blasted Trump for his cruelty, should have been the proverbial nail in his party’s coffin. Immigration should have been the weapon with which Democrats bludgeoned Republicans. But because the liberal party is once again unable or unwilling to articulate a critical issue and effectively lay cruel immigration policies at the feet of Trump and the Republicans, the GOP’s anti-immigrant hysteria may reign supreme. The winners will be Trump and his party. The losers, as always, will be immigrants and the rest of us.

Data Suppression Is the GOP’s Latest Anti-Voter Tactic for the Midterms

As early voting has begun across America and seen record turnouts, the big question is: Will people voting for Democrats surmount the obstacles that the GOP has built in red-run states to achieve winning popular vote majorities?

Those obstacles began with extreme gerrymanders in 2011 for state legislative and U.S. House districts. They continued with newly crafted red super-majorities passing strict voter ID laws. And now, in the finale to 2018’s midterms, a new tactic is emerging that can be described as data suppression.

In short, in a handful of red-run states with change-making races, voter information that would normally add people to registration rolls is not being readily processed. That scenario creates a likely prospect of Election Day ambushes, starting with surprised people whose names are not in poll books, and then rippling outward as they fill out provisional ballots while others are delayed in line.

Versions of this voter data suppression gambit can be found in Arizona, Missouri and Georgia. These states have tight federal races—and in Georgia, one of the most-watched gubernatorial contests. In all of these red-run states, registration information affecting enough voters to possibly swing outcomes has become stuck in opaque bureaucratic pipelines.

Let’s look at these states and two others where voter information-driven tactics have surfaced—North Carolina and North Dakota.

Arizona

The state has 3.6 million voters, with 150,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats, according to the latest figures. It has competitive House races and a tight Senate race, where the polling average from RealClearPolitics.com places Democrat Kyrsten Sinema 0.3 percent ahead of Republican Martha McSally. If half of Arizona’s registered voters end up casting a ballot in November—a reasonable estimate in what’s forecast to be a record year—that means every 18,000 votes are 1 percent of the popular vote. That scenario translates into about a 5,400-vote lead by Sinema.

What’s Arizona’s data suppression ploy? Its motor vehicle agency is not forwarding change of addresses for 384,000 people getting driver’s licenses to the state’s voter registration database. Of that figure, 63,000 are people who apparently moved to a new county, meaning they have to completely re-register to vote.

It’s a safe bet that a sizable number of affected individuals have no idea what’s going on—and won’t until they try to vote. Voting rights groups sued to force this red-run state to update its statewide voter database. A federal judge sided with Arizona officials (who said they will fix this problem in 2019). Nonetheless, Arizona’s intransigence is a perfect example where barriers surrounding vetting voter data will impact and shape its 2018 electorate.

Missouri

A counterpoint to what’s unfolding in Arizona can be found in this state of roughly 4.5 million voters. Here, too, if midterm turnout is half of that electorate, then every 22,500 votes equates to 1 percent of the popular vote. In Missouri’s very tight Senate race, RealClearPolitics’ poll average has Republican challenger Josh Hawley ahead of the incumbent Democrat, Claire McCaskill, by 0.4 percent, which is approximately a 10,000-vote lead.

What is Missouri’s data suppression ploy? It’s like Arizona, and involves updated information on 200,000 voters submitted to that state’s motor vehicle agency. Notably, a federal judge this month ordered Missouri to deliver that information to election officials. Whether it will do so in time (in a manner that doesn’t impede big numbers of 2018 voters) remains to be seen—despite what looks like a victory for voting rights advocates. That skeptical take is because big state bureaucracies are not exactly speedy.

How all this plays out will not really be known until Election Day because Missouri only has limited early voting options, where tell-tale signs of snafus would first appear. Similarly, pro-voting rights litigators this week won another court ruling by overturning some elements of the state’s new and stricter voter ID law. But the late date of that ruling has led some election officials to say it will likely cause poll worker confusion, leading to voting delays.

Once again, hurdles surrounding the vetting of voter information may impede participation in close contests on Election Day.

Georgia

The governor’s race in this state of 6.9 million voters is a microcosm of this past decade’s partisan voting wars. The Republican, Secretary of State Brian Kemp, has a national reputation for aggressively purging voters, and for delaying the processing of registrations from new voters. This is especially true for the tens of thousands of voter applications submitted through a non-profit created by the Democratic contender in the governor’s race, ex-House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams. RealClearPolitics’ poll average has Kemp leading Abrams by 2 percent, which, if the midterm turnout is 50 percent, equates to about 70,000 votes.

In recent days, there has been a stream of credible reports showing Kemp is holding tens of thousands of recent registrations hostage. This is more data suppression, if you will, by not validating what’s submitted by eligible voters in a timely manner. Moreover, local officials, following a similar verification playbook, have been rejecting hundreds of early ballots in at least one non-white county. In both instances, voting rights groups have sued Georgia officials.

The big picture here is a schizophrenic voting rights tug-of-war. On one side is a state with record numbers of new voters. That is due in part to a GOP-run legislature instituting online registration several years ago and automatic voter registration in late 2016 for anyone getting a driver’s license. On one hand, 1.4 million voters have registered since November 2016. Yet on the other, Kemp’s watch has purged hundreds of thousands of registrations (668,000 last year), leaving about 250,000 new voters for 2018’s midterms, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Amid this mix of new voters are tens of thousands via the New Georgia Project, a voter drive launched by Abrams several years ago.

The common thread in these developments is a willful delay, if not mangling or rejection, of timely voter information.

Voting rights groups have sued Kemp (in his official capacity managing the election he’s running in) over the 53,000 pending registrations. They also have sued Kemp and Gwinnett County for rejecting 8.5 percent of early absentee ballots, where, again, a voter verification process has become a pathway to suppress turnout of an opponent’s likely base. Of the pending registrations, attorneys have noted in their complaint that less than 10 percent are white. (Kemp is white; Abrams is black.) The Journal-Constitution said that less than 40 percent of Gwinnett County voters are white.

And yet another eyebrow-raising example came in early October, when, two business days before the 2018 registration deadline, the computer system running Georgia’s online registration crashed, prompting the state to extend registration by two days.

Needless to say, these snafus and obstructions do not have to be part of the voting landscape—and in many blue-run states are not. It remains to be seen what will unfold in Georgia, but you can be sure that 2018’s voter suppression narrative is not finished.

North Dakota and North Carolina

Two more states are noteworthy with voter-information plays that are intended by the GOP to preserve or gain their power.

The first is North Carolina, where the Justice Department, acting on behalf of ICE—federal immigration authorities—sought access to every government record for registered voters (including driver’s license data) since 2010 in 44 counties in the most heavily Latino region of the state. After an outcry, the DOJ backed off and said it would seek the voter files in 2019. However, as former state Board of Elections senior officials said, the DOJ has signaled that it may investigate Latino families whose members dare to vote.

The second example is from North Dakota, where there is no state voter registration requirement and where 344,360 people voted in the 2016 presidential election. In its U.S. Senate race, Republican Kevin Cramer has an 8.7 percent lead over Democratic incumbent Heidi Heitkamp, according to RealClearPolitics’ polling average. If two-thirds of those 2016 presidential voters turn out in several weeks, that equates to 2,300 votes for every percentage point—giving Cramer roughly a 20,000-vote lead.

Last week, a GOP-appointed majority on the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to North Dakota’s new voter ID law—which requires residents to present an ID with a street address to get a regular ballot. As a dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted, “approximately 18,000 North Dakota residents” lack that form of ID. She was mostly referring to Native Americans who live on reservations and support Democrats. In other words, the Court refused to block a restrictive measure that, were it not in place, would make the state’s Senate race more competitive.

Big Data Abounds, Except in Verifying Voters

In all of these instances, obstructing the timely processing of voter registrations and other piled-on bureaucracy—namely adding ID requirements that have nothing to do with the legal basis to be an eligible voter—appear to be the GOP’s latest anti-voter tools.

Perhaps no one should be surprised that the GOP has found more moves to try to thwart its opponent’s base in battleground contests. But it is more than ironic that in an era dominated by big data, the latest Republican voter suppression tactic is obstructing the timely processing of basic voter-verifying information.

This article was produced by Voting Booth , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Pressure Turns to Mexico as Migrant Caravan Heads for Border

GUATEMALA CITY — As some 3,000 Hondurans made their way through Guatemala, attention turned to Mexico, after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened Thursday to close the U.S.-Mexico border if authorities there fail to stop them — a nearly unthinkable move that would disrupt hundreds of thousands of legal freight, vehicle and pedestrian crossings each day.

With less than three weeks before the Nov. 6 midterm elections, Trump seized on the migrant caravan to make border security a political issue and energize his Republican base.

“I must, in the strongest of terms, ask Mexico to stop this onslaught — and if unable to do so I will call up the U.S. Military and CLOSE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER!” Trump tweeted, adding that he blamed Democrats for what he called “weak laws!”

The threat followed another one earlier this week to cut off aid to Central American countries if the migrants weren’t stopped. Trump made a similar vow over another large migrant caravan in April, but didn’t follow through and it largely petered out in Mexico.

On Thursday, Mexico dispatched additional police to its southern border after the Casa del Migrante shelter on the Guatemalan side of the border reported that hundreds of Hondurans had already arrived there.

Mexican officials said the Hondurans would not be allowed to enter as a group and would either have to show a passport and visa — something few have — or apply individually for refugee status, a process that can mean waiting for up to 90 days for approval. They also said migrants caught without papers would be deported.

Marcelo Ebrard, who is set to become foreign relations secretary when President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador takes office Dec. 1, said Trump’s tweets need to be understood in the context of the upcoming U.S. midterm elections.

“The electoral process is very near, so he is making a political calculation,” Ebrard said in an interview with Radio Centro.

Trump’s stance, he said, was “what he has always presented,” adding he saw “nothing surprising in it.”

Still, the idea that Mexico could close its porous southern border — or that the United States would choke off the lucrative trade and other traffic between the two nations — strained the imagination.

“There would be huge economic impacts for both the United States and Mexico … but limited effect on illegal immigration,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute.

“The president certainly can slow down crossing at legal border crossings where about a million people cross each day. That would really hurt legal transit between the two countries and manufacturing and trade, which would affect American workers,” Selee said. “But it would have much less impact on illegal border crossings between ports of entry.”

Stephanie Leutert, director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin, said she interpreted the tweet to mean Trump could send troops not to ports of entry but elsewhere where the illegal crossings take place.

“If that’s the case, I don’t think Mexico should be too worried because in a sense … it’s the same kind of thing U.S. administrations have been doing for a long time,” Leutert said.

Like Guatemala and Honduras, Mexico is a country of many migrants, raising the question of whether the political will exists for a confrontation.

Lopez Obrador wants to avoid repression against migrants and also to avoid angering the United States. He said this week that Mexico would offer jobs to Central Americans. “Anyone who wants to work in our country … will have a work visa,” he said.

By Thursday, the caravan had dispersed a bit, with the youngest and strongest of the migrants walking ahead together, some boarding buses or trying to hitch rides. On a bridge leading out of the Guatemalan capital, Hondurans marched single-file behind a woman holding a baby in her arms as a school bus rumbled past.

Juan Escobar, 24, said he had heard about Trump’s comments but said they would not dissuade the migrants from continuing their journey.

“Only God on high can stop us,” Escobar said.

Carlos Lopez, 27, said he was concerned by Trump’s threats, but “you have to keep fighting.”

Trump also warned that he prioritizes border security over even the recently struck trade deal to replace NAFTA, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA.

“The assault on our country at our Southern Border, including the Criminal elements and DRUGS pouring in, is far more important to me, as President, than Trade or the USMCA. Hopefully Mexico will stop this onslaught at their Northern Border,” Trump tweeted.

Analysts didn’t see the pact as being in imminent danger, though trade attorney Daniel Ujczo of Dickinson Wright PLLC said there is “a significant concern” Trump could hold the agreement hostage over future issues.

“Leaders around the world are skeptical that any deal with this U.S. administration is actually final,” Ujczo said, “particularly one such as the USMCA where the ink has not been put to the signature line.”

U.S.-bound migrant caravans have been going on for years — with traveling in numbers seen as offering protection from assaults, robberies, even shakedowns by police. They’re also a cheaper alternative to the $7,000 to $10,000 that smugglers, charge for passage to the border, Leutert noted.

Still, it wasn’t until this year that the caravans received widespread attention.

“There have been these caravans through the years, but they become prominent because the president tweets about them,” Selee said.

He predicted that, like the caravan in April, Mexico will respond with measures like granting asylum to some migrants who qualify while deporting others who don’t, perhaps not eliminating the caravan entirely but significantly reducing its size before it reaches the U.S. border.

But the direct, public pressure from Trump puts Mexico, already an uneasy ally the last two years, in an uncomfortable spotlight.

“Ironically, the way President Trump responds to these caravans makes it harder for the Mexican government to cooperate with the U.S. on immigration enforcement,” Selee said. “There is a lot of disposition in both the current and the incoming Mexican government to cooperate with the U.S. on some aspects of immigration control. But it becomes much harder when President Trump makes this a political issue in which he bashes Mexico.”

___

Orsi and Stevenson reported from Mexico City. Associated Press writer Paul Wiseman in Washington contributed to this report.

Trump Concedes Khashoggi Likely Dead, Threatens Consequences

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump acknowledged Thursday it “certainly looks” as though missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi is dead, and he threatened “very severe” consequences if the Saudis are found to have murdered him. His warning came as the administration toughened its response to a disappearance that has sparked global outrage.

Before Trump spoke, the administration announced that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had pulled out of a major upcoming Saudi investment conference and a U.S. official said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had warned the Saudi crown prince that his credibility as a future leader is at stake.

Pompeo said the Saudis should be given a few more days to finish and make public a credible investigation before the U.S. decides “how or if” to respond. Trump’s comments, however, signaled an urgency in completing the probe into the disappearance of the journalist, last seen entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.

The messaging underscored the administration’s concern about the effect the case could have on relations with a close and valuable strategic partner. Increasingly upset U.S. lawmakers are condemning the Saudis and questioning the seriousness with which Trump and his top aides are taking the matter, while Trump has emphasized the billions of dollars in weapons the Saudis purchase from the United States.

Turkish reports say Khashoggi, who had written columns critical of the Saudi government for The Washington Post over the past year while he lived in self-imposed exile in the U.S., was killed and dismembered inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul by members of an assassination squad with ties to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The Saudis have dismissed those reports as baseless but have yet to explain what happened to the writer.

Trump, who has insisted that more facts must be known before making assumptions, did not say on what he based his latest statement about the writer’s likely demise.

Asked if Khashoggi was dead, he said, “It certainly looks that way. … Very sad.”

Asked what consequence Saudi leaders would face if they are found to be responsible, he replied: “It will have to be very severe. It’s bad, bad stuff. But we’ll see what happens.”

Vice President Mike Pence said earlier in Colorado that “the world deserves answers” about what happened to Khashoggi, “and those who are responsible need to be held to account.”

In Istanbul, a leaked surveillance photo showed a man who has been a member of the crown prince’s entourage during trips abroad walking into the Saudi Consulate just before Khashoggi vanished there — timing that drew the kingdom’s heir-apparent closer to the columnist’s apparent demise.

Turkish officials say Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb flew into Istanbul on a private jet along with an “autopsy expert” Oct. 2 and left that night.

In Washington, Pompeo, who was just back from talks with Saudi and Turkish leaders, said of the investigations in Istanbul:

“I told President Trump this morning that we ought to give them a few more days to complete that so that we, too, have a complete understanding of the facts surrounding that, at which point we can make decisions about how, or if, the United States should respond to the incident surrounding Mr. Khashoggi.”

Although Pompeo suggested the U.S. could wait longer for results, an official familiar with his meetings in Riyadh and Ankara said the secretary had been blunt about the need to wrap the probe up quickly.

The official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the private meetings and spoke on condition of anonymity, said Pompeo told the crown prince that “time is short.” The official added Pompeo had warned him that it would be “very difficult for you to be a credible king” without a credible investigation. The prince is next in line for the throne held by his aged father King Salman.

Shortly after Trump and Pompeo met at the White House, Mnuchin announced that after consulting the president and his top diplomat “I will not be participating in the Future Investment Initiative summit in Saudi Arabia.”

The Saudis had hoped to use the forum, billed as “Davos in the Desert,” to boost their global image. But a number of European finance ministers and many top business executives have pulled out as international pressure on Riyadh has intensified over Khashoggi.

Pompeo said that whatever response the administration might decide on would take into account the importance of the long-standing U.S.-Saudi partnership. He said, “They’re an important strategic ally of the United States, and we need to be mindful of that.”

Lawsuit: Facebook Used Faulty Data to Convince Publishers to Go All In on Video

In 2016 and 2017, media companies were convinced video content was the wave of the future. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News, “We’re entering this new golden age of video.” Facebook’s vice president for Europe, Nicola Mendelsohn, concurred, telling a panel at a Fortune conference in 2016: “We’re seeing a massive increase, as I’ve said, on both pictures and video. So I think, yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say: Video, video, video.”

Companies acted accordingly. Barely two years after hiring multiple writers and editors to focus on long-form written content, MTV News laid off many of those much-heralded staffers, saying that while it was proud of its long-form content, the company was “shifting resources into short-form video content more in line with young people’s media consumption habits.” Outlets like Mic.com and others followed, hoping that video content was a magic bullet for lifting flagging page views and revenue.

A new lawsuit filed this week by a group of advertisers in California, however, claims that Facebook knew for years that its data on video was faulty, and, as Laura Hazard Owen reports in NiemanLab, “[the lawsuit] argues that Facebook had known about the discrepancy for at least a year—and behaved fraudulently by failing to disclose it.”

Owen reports that the signs were there even before the layoffs, and quotes a Wall Street Journal piece from 2016 that said Facebook “vastly overestimated average viewing time for video ads on its platform for two years by as much as 60 to 80 percent.”

Facebook, Owen notes, apologized in a blog post: “As soon as we discovered the discrepancy, we fixed it.”

Owen read the lawsuit to attempt to determine “whether people working in news organizations were fired based on faulty data provided by a giant platform that publishers believed they could trust.”

She writes that “[t]he lawsuit alleges that Facebook engineers knew for over a year” that the company’s metrics were ‘overstating the average time its users spent watching paid video advertisements,’ and that ‘multiple advertisers had reported aberrant results caused by the miscalculation (such as 100% watch times for their video ads.’ ”

“The suit alleges,” Owens goes on to explain, “that there was a long lag between the time that the engineers realized the metrics were faulty and the time that Facebook corrected them, due to understaffing on the engineering team,” and, as the suit itself notes:

Even once Facebook decided to correct the false metrics, it chose not to do so immediately. Instead, Facebook chose to continue disseminating false metrics for several more months while it developed and deployed a ‘no PR’ strategy designed to ‘obfuscate the fact that we screwed up the math.’ All the while, Facebook continued to reap the benefits from the inflated numbers.

Though Owen is cautious to say that we may never know the exact correlation between Facebook’s faulty data and news organizations’ hiring and firing decisions, based on her own analysis of the court documents, she concludes that:

What does seem clear now is that Facebook’s executives’ statements about video should not have been a factor in news publishers’ decisions to lay off their editorial staffs. But it’s hard not to conclude that publishers heard that rhapsodizing about the future and assumed that Facebook knew better than they did, that Facebook’s data must be more accurate than their own data was, that Facebook was perceiving something that they could not. That their own eyes were wrong.

Read Owen’s analysis, including excerpts from the court documents, here.

What the Mainstream Media Aren’t Telling You About Jamal Khashoggi

What follows is a conversation between Professor As`ad AbuKhalil and Sharmini Peries of the Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

SHARMINI PERIES: It’s the Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore.

We are just learning that Saudi Arabia will admit that it had something to do with the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and that he was killed in a botched up interrogation. Apparently, the plan was to interrogate and then abduct him from Turkey. CNN is reporting that the Saudis claim that the operation took place without clearance and transparency, and that those involved will be held responsible. Well, who is responsible? This was a rather quick investigation on the part of the Saudi investigative team that arrived in Istanbul only on the weekend. How did they so quickly come to such a conclusion? It appears that Saudis want this dealt with quickly, perhaps a part of their damage control plan.

This is now an opportunity for us here at The Real News to look further into Jamal Khashoggi. Who is he, who does he represent, why was he murdered? Our next guest writes: “It’s been odd to read about Khashoggi in Western media. David Hirst in The Guardian claimed Khashoggi merely cared about absolutes such as ‘truth, democracy, and freedom.’ Human Rights Watch’s director described him as representing ‘outspoken and critical journalism.’ ” With me is As’ad AbuKhalil. He’s a professor of political science at California State University. He’s the author of Bin Laden, Islam & America’s New “War on Terrorism” and The Battle for Saudi Arabia. He also runs a popular blog, titled The Angry Arab News Service. As’ad, good to have you with us.

AS’AD ABUKHALIL: Thank you for inviting me.

SHARMINI PERIES: All right, As’ad. Let’s start off with you telling us about Jamal Khashoggi, and what he stood for as far as journalism and ethics of journalism is concerned.

AS’AD ABUKHALIL: Well, I mean, he’s close to my age, so his name has been familiar to me since my early youthful days back in Lebanon. And in our progressive left-wing Marxist circles, he was always a symbol of reactionary advocacy on behalf of the Saudi regime and militant Salafi Islam. That’s what he stood for. The picture that is being painted in mainstream Western media is totally unrecognizable for anybody who bothers to read Arabic. Unfortunately, all the people who are commenting about the issue and commenting even about his record of journalism, so to speak, are people who have never read anything except in the Washington Post.

You cannot judge this man’s entire decades-long career of journalism by reading the English-language, edited articles he posted for the last year only. For much of his life, for the whole of his life mind this last year, this man was a passionate, enthusiastic, unabashed advocate of Saudi despotism. He started his career by joining bin Laden and being a comrade of bin Laden. There are pictures of him with weapons. He fought alongside the fanatic mujahideen, who were supported by the United States in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan among others, against the communist, progressive side in that war. And he was unrelenting in his advocacy on their behalf, as well as for his praise for bin Laden.

He got to be pretty close to bin Laden. That’s not being mentioned in the media as well. He only broke with bin Laden in the mid 1990s, what a coincidence. It was around the same time that the Saudi government broke with bin Laden. That tells you that he has been very consistently an advocate and loyal servant of the Saudi propaganda apparatus. Because when people say that he always cared about journalism, what journalism? There is no journalism under the Saudi regime. There’s only propaganda, crude and vulgar propaganda. And he excelled in the art of Saudi propaganda. He moved from one job to the other, and he was very ambitious early on. And he attached himself to various princes, because that’s how it works in Saudi Arabia.

He was close to Prince Turki al-Faisal, who was chief of foreign intelligence and the sponsor patron of bin Laden and the fanatical Islamists around the world. And he also was loyal to his brother, Prince Khalid al-Faisal, who owned Al Watan newspaper where he held his first editing job in that paper. In a recent interview he did only last year with a Turkey-based television station, in Arabic of course, he spoke about how his role was not only as an editor, but he was a censor. He was enforcer of the rigid dogmas of the Saudi government in the paper. And when people wrote he got trouble doing his job, it wasn’t for anything he wrote. He never wrote a word, never spoke a word against the wishes of the Saudi government. He got in trouble because some people in the paper were courageous, unlike him, and dared to challenge the orthodoxy of the government. That was the career of Jamal Khashoggi.

I also should say that for many years he continued, and he became a spokesperson for Prince Turki when he became ambassador in Washington, DC. And he got to be close to Western journalists because he was the man to go to. When they wanted to travel to Saudi Arabia, they wanted to interview this prince, that king, the crown prince, he was the fixer for them in that regard and that’s how they got to know him. And then, he attached himself to another prince, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who got in trouble with the new crown prince. That’s where his troubles started. He did not bet on democracy in Saudi Arabia, he bet on the wrong princes.

There princes he bet on fell out of favor, Prince Turki, as well as Prince Al-Waleed, later who wound up in Ritz in Riyadh last year. And for that reason, he had no prince. According to his own testimony, in an article that was written by David Ignatius who was close to him, he tried to be an advisor to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, but he wouldn’t take him as an advisor because he always was suspicious about his Islamist past, the fact that he was a member and later close to the Muslim Brotherhood. So, he became – spoke the language of democracy upon leaving the country.

The reason why they wanted to go after him, it had nothing do with his courage or anything like that. It’s because he was so central in the ruling media and political establishment, that his departure from the kingdom was not seen as dissent. He was not a dissenter, he was not a dissident. He never saw himself as one, or even an opposition figure. He spoke of himself as somebody who believed that the crown prince was doing the right thing but going about it the wrong way. I basically believe that he was seen by the government as a defector, that one of their own left the country and joined the enemies rank. And he was also having an audience with Western audiences from Washington DC, from one of the major mainstream newspapers. That was highly embarrassing to the ruling family.

In Arabic, I should mention, even in the last year on Twitter, he spoke a very different tone than what he wrote in The Washington Post. In Arabic, he spoke passionately about Palestine. Notice, he never spoke about Palestine in English, never spoke about that. In Arabic, he said, “We all are Trump” when Trump ordered the bombing of Syria. He never spoke like that in the Washington Post. So, he was an agreeable token writing for The Washington Post who never challenged the Western media and their coverage of the Middle East. And for that, he was quite agreeable to them. He never spoke about the Palestinians. I bet you, if he was advocating for the Palestinians or for the Islamist line that he called for in Arabic, he wouldn’t have lasted in his gig in The Washington Post.

SHARMINI PERIES: All right, As’ad. Tell us a little bit more about what you just said, which was that he backed the wrong prince. Why did he find himself on the wrong side of this prince, and some detail as to what the divide is?

AS’AD ABUKHALIL: That’s a very good question. And the thing is that the government of Saudi Arabia has changed in the last two years in a major way. For much of the history, since 1953 and the death of the founder, Saudi Arabia, even though it’s a despotic monarchy, is ruled by a collective leadership like the Politburo of the former Soviet Union. You have the royal family, and then you have the senior princes. Those are the ones with whom the king would consult on every matter. For that reason, as sinister and reactionary as Saudi policy was all these decades, but it was a result of a consensus within the royal family. For that, it exhibited signs of caution, reservation and deception always, because they were doing something in secrecy, and in public they were saying something entirely opposite.

Under the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, government has changed. There is no collective leadership. For the first time in the history of the monarchy, we have a sole, undisputed despot who does not allow not only dissent, but advisers. Everybody has to be yes-men, and of course all of them are men, around him. He subordinated all the princes, he ended all the factions representing different princes. So previously, no matter who was king, Jamal Khashoggi was able to move between the princes, to have one patron one day, another patron of another day. That always worked because they were part of the senior princes’ set-up.

Now, there is no set-up like that. All the other princes, even his own half-brother, is under house arrest. This guy doesn’t want to allow anybody to share government, he makes all the decisions. And in fact, we can say that was his death knell. Maybe this is why this is going to change the course of his history. I mean, he will most likely stay in power, but I would argue that his best days are behind him. He will never be as powerful as he has been for the last two years, because now he knows he cannot trust his own instincts. When he ruled entirely based on his instincts, he presumably made the decision to get rid of this guy. He did not think the repercussions were going to be big enough.

And I still argue he’s going to get away with it, and there’s not going to be a price to pay by Western countries, by Turkey or by the United States. I feel they are working on a cover-up story as we speak. But because he had no advisers, he made these decisions. And he is not somebody who is knowledgeable about the world. He does not know about foreign policy as much, and he calculated wrongly. And he is now in very awkward, embarrassing positions, and for that, he will be weaker than ever. And most likely, he will be compelled to bring in other princes, not to share power but at least to be around him when he contemplates making decisions.

SHARMINI PERIES: All right, As’ad. In your opinion, why is the Western media whitewashing Jamal Khashoggi in this way? Are they simply just not aware because they’re not reading Arabic, or is there something else at hand here?

AS’AD ABUKHALIL: That’s how Western media are. Whenever they choose a hero from among the natives, they want to make the natives to be in their own image. I mean, the best example would be the leader who is most beloved in the entire history of the Middle East in the 20th century by Western media and Western government. I’m talking about Anwar Sadat, the despot of Egypt from 1970 until his assassination in 1981. This guy was a notorious anti-Semite and a Nazi. He had Nazi background. And yet, all that was forgiven because he did the right thing when it comes to Israel.

This time, they had one of their own who wrote in The Washington Post, and they took that as an offense. And I also want to add, the Saudi regime is saying that this issue is used also by media and Democrats who do not like Trump as a way to embarrass him. And I think they are not farfetched on that line. I mean, it is not that the media has suddenly discovered that, lo and behold, there is a government which kills journalists. I mean, in the last few months, the Israelis have killed journalists who are wearing, literally, signs that they were press, they work for the press, and we saw no outcry.

But Jamal Khashoggi was seen as an inferior one of their own, as one of the natives who was agreeable. He never challenged their coverage of the Middle East, they liked that. They also liked that he never spoke about Palestine in the paper, never questioned assumptions about American foreign policy, and didn’t want to make it a big issue. In their conflict with the administration, was convenient. So, there is ulterior motive to what they are doing, and certainly I do not buy that the Washington Post or The New York Times, or even the U.S. Congress, suddenly have discovered to the horrors of the Saudi regime. It wasn’t about that.

SHARMINI PERIES: As’ad, what was Jamal Khashoggi’s position on Palestine? As you said, he only articulated it in Arabic, never in the English press. And we know that at this moment, there is a conflict within Saudi Arabia in terms of how the king might respond to the Palestinian question and how the current MbS is responding to it. And also, if you could also in the process highlight what this means in terms of the Saudi-Israeli-U.S. alliance that has been formed in order to manage the situation in the Middle East?

AS’AD ABUKHALIL: Well, I’ll begin with the last part of the question by saying I have no doubt that AIPAC is working very closely with the Saudi embassy in order to try to rescue the fortunes of incumbents in distress. And I’m sure AIPAC is going to clamp down in Congress to make sure that there’s not going to be legislation that would be in any way embarrassing to the Saudi royal family. I also want to say that there is no doubt that in his last year, that Jamal Khashoggi was rather duplicitous, that he spoke very different languages in Arabic and in English. He said one thing in the Washington Post, which you can’t read now, available on their website. But in Arabic, it was a different tune.

In Arabic, he spoke rather very respectfully about the royal family. He spoke about he wanted the Saudi royal family to sponsor and to lead the Arab uprising, or what he called the Arab Spring. He wanted Saudi Arabia to lead it. I mean, just imagine the repercussion of that, which is exactly what happened, which is Saudi Arabia led the counter-revolution, not the revolution of the Arab world. I also want to say that on Palestine, he was very unequivocal, very categorical. He spoke about there should be no compromise on the Palestinian question. He spoke against the deal of the century that is being prepared by this administration.

He even said, in an interview that I listened to the other day, and this is from this year itself, 2018, he said that he believes that Jerusalem and its significance to Muslims and Arabs does not in any way count less than the two holy sites of Saudi Arabia. He was against normalization with the state of Israel. But now, we realize that he was not consistent in his life about these matters. Because apparently, he knew and had an ongoing friendship with an Israeli reporter with whom he would speak. And to her, he said that he would like the Iranian regime to collapse, and that would benefit the state of Israel. So, he was a man of many sides.

And the media and Human Rights Watch and all these Western outlets are trying to paint an image of a man who was uncompromising in search of truth, justice and almost the American Way, like Superman of the old TV serials. And in Arabic, Jamal Khashoggi always had an appeal among the Muslim Brotherhood, this was his audience. His political line was very close to that of Turkey. For that, he had a very close relationship with the Turkish government. And as we read, when he went into the consulate, he gave his fiancé the phone number of the key presidential adviser to Erdogan to call him if he is missing. And not every Arab journalist can call a close adviser of Erdogan at a moment’s notice.

SHARMINI PERIES: All right, As’ad. I thank you so much for joining us and presenting and providing us the counter-narrative to what we’re hearing in the mainstream press. I’ve been speaking with As’ad AbuKhalil. He’s a professor of political science at California State University, and he’s the author of The Battle for Saudi Arabia. I thank you so much for joining us.

AS’AD ABUKHALIL: Thank you very much and have a good day.

SHARMINI PERIES: And thank you for joining us here on The Real News Network.

 

The Tragic Anniversary in Afghanistan We Dare Not Acknowledge

This piece originally appeared on antiwar.com.

The absurd hopelessness was the worst part. No, it wasn’t the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) blowing limbs off my boys, or the well-aimed gunshot wounds suffered by others; it wasn’t even the horror of ordering the deaths of other (“enemy”) human beings.

No, for a captain commanding 100 odd troopers in Southwest Kandahar province at the height of the Obama “surge” of 2011, what most struck me was the feeling of futility; the sense that the mission was fruitless operationally, and, of course, all but ignored at home. After a full year of saturating the district with American soldiers, the truth is we really controlled only the few square feet we each stood on. The Taliban controlled the night, the farmlands, the villages. And, back in 2011, well, the U.S. had about 100,000 servicemen and women in country. There are less than 15,000 on the ground now.

It’s an uncomfortable, almost un-American, truth – there is nothing more that the US military can do for the foundering government of Afghanistan. And, as the war reached a lamentable 17th anniversary last week, now is the time to once again raise the alarm. Fact: this next year, teenagers born after 9/11 will begin to join the military and, eventually, fight in Afghanistan.

As if that’s not disturbing enough for the ostensible republic, consider this: the Afghan War is failing, failing worse than ever before. Along each line of effort – security, politics, and economics – the metrics point downward despite all the blood and treasure already sunk into America’s longest war.

Let’s begin with security, arguably the paramount measure of success in any war. For nearly two decades, one US commanding general after another has assured the American public that – with just a few extra troops and a little more time – he could achieve “victory” in Afghanistan. The US has tried many approaches: a “light footprint” counter-terror force (2001-08), a massive “surge,” or infusion of 100,000 troops (2009-13), and a shift to smaller advise and assist elements training the Afghans (2014-present). Nonetheless, after all that time and effort, the security situation is worse than ever.

The Taliban controls or contests more districts – some 44% – than at any time since the 2001 invasion. Total combatant and civilian casualties are forecasted to top 20,000 this year – another dreadful broken record. What’s more, Afghan Security Force casualties are frankly unsustainable – the Taliban are killing more than the government can recruit. The death rates are staggering, numbering 5,500 fatalities in 2015, 6,700 in 2016, and an estimate(the number is newly classified) of “about 10,000” in 2017.

The question at hand is this: what can (or should) the US military do that it hasn’t already tried? Despite all of its sustained commitment and sacrifice (to the tune of 2,416 dead as of early September 2018), the US military and its Afghan partners have not meaningfully stanched the tide of Taliban gains. So, what can some 15,000 U.S. troops accomplish in 2018 that 100,000 could not achieve in 2010-11?

Politically, there are serious questions about Afghan government legitimacy and effectiveness. As a recent US Congressional report concluded, “Afghanistan’s…political outlook remains uncertain, if not negative, in light of ongoing hostilities.” Recent trends indicate that the U.S.-backed federal government is fragmenting along ethnic and ideological lines. This should come as little surprise. The last two presidential elections – in 2009 and 2014 – have been wracked by allegations of fraud, and the Parliamentary elections (scheduled for October 2016) have been delayed until at least late 2018. Corruption, fraud, waste and abuse have also been rampant in Kabul. Without a legitimate, stable political partner, no external military force of any size can meaningfully “win.”

Finally, there are the strict economic limits of the entire enterprise. Simply put, the Afghan economy does not generate enough income to fund its annual expenditures or even pay its military. For 17 years now, the US has picked up the tab, to the tune of of $762 billion and counting. The economic bottom line is as simple as it is stark: The Afghan GDP, largely based on foreign aid and domestic revenue, is insufficient to even fund the security sector (which runs at $5 billion annually against $2 billion of domestic, annual Afghan revenue). This is an unsustainable formula for perpetual US involvement in the conflict. It just doesn’t add up!

Make no mistake, the departure of US troops from Afghanistan will be ugly; what comes next is difficult to predict. That said, Afghanistan has been at war with itself and others for 39 years – the US intervention is but a part of a war without any discernible end. There is no military solution to the Afghan War. An Afghan settlement to the ongoing Afghan conflict will be messy, but this is an inevitable, irreversible reality the US must accept and mitigate without a costly and futile indefinite intervention.

When announcing his “new” strategy in August 2017, President Trump candidly admitted that his “original instinct” was to pull out of Afghanistan. He was correct – and should consider following those sound instincts. Nonetheless, the US military remains in place and has even conducted a mini-“surge” of advisors this year.

It is time to end this intervention, extract the US military from an unwinnable war, and refocus those assets (of blood and treasure) on training for great-power conflict and genuine homeland defense.

So it is, and so the violence churns on. Last month, an Army Sergeant Major was shot to death by the very Afghan police officers he was there to train. This was a so-called insider attack – an occurrence more common than we’d like to admit. The Sergeant Major was the seventh American soldier killed this year.

And mark my words – there will be another. I’d hate to be the officer assigned to explain to a widow or mother, just what, exactly, he or she died for.

A Disney Heiress Reveals the 1 Percent’s Worst-Kept Secret

When the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed, Republicans celebrated with beers in the White House Rose Garden. President Trump promised help for financially struggling Americans, saying, “Congress has reached an agreement on tax legislation that will deliver more jobs, higher wages and massive tax relief for American families and American companies.”

But as a new, remarkably honest video by Abigail Disney, filmmaker, activist and heiress to the Walt Disney fortune shows, it’s not the American family struggling to put food on the table and pay rent that will benefit from these tax cuts.

“Greetings from the 1%,” Disney begins the video. “[W]e in the 1% got a great Christmas present last year,” she says, “I don’t know if you remember—it was called a very big tax break.”

“I didn’t need it,” Disney continues, “but the Republicans gave it to me anyway. And I hear [that] if the Republicans do well in these midterms, they want to give me another one; an even bigger one, in fact.”

Lawmakers promised higher wages and job security for the middle class. Instead, she says, the rich got money they didn’t need, which they are spending on new yachts and other luxury items.

If the Republicans retain control of Congress in November, Disney warns, they’ll only go further:

“So anyway, 1%-ers are doing better than they ever have been doing, and guess what? You are paying for all of it.”

Watch the video below:

This Disney heiress is here to tell you exactly what the 1% did with Trump’s tax cuts

Spoiler: They didn’t create more jobs and increase salaries pic.twitter.com/8Ou21x1GMG

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) October 12, 2018

19 Dead, More Than 50 Wounded in Crimea College Shooting

MOSCOW — The Latest on the deadly explosion at a college in Crimea (all times local):

9:40 p.m.

Officials in Crimea say the casualty toll at a vocational school shooting in Kerch now stands at 19 dead and more than 50 wounded, many of them severely.

Sergei Astrankin, the director of emergency medicine for Crimea, was cited by Russian state television as saying the death toll from Wednesday’s attack had risen to 19. The shooter, who committed suicide afterward, apparently was not included in that number.

Crimea’s regional chief, Sergei Aksyonov, told the state news channel Rossiya-24 that 53 people were wounded in the Kerch attack, 12 of whom are now in serious condition.

___

8 p.m.

Russian officials says an 18-year-old student attacked his vocational school in Crimea, going on a rampage that killed 17 students and left more than 40 people wounded before killing himself.

One student says the shooting Wednesday went on for at least 15 minutes.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, the nation’s top investigative agency, said the attacker was caught on security cameras entering Kerch Polytechnic College in the Black Sea city of Kerch and firing at students. It identified him as Vladislav Roslyakov. It said all the victims died of gunshot wounds.

Sergei Aksyonov, the regional leader in Crimea, said the fourth-year student at the school had acted alone and killed himself in the school’s library after the attack.

___

3:45 p.m.

Russia’s top investigative body says it has identified the man who opened fire in a college in a Crimean town, killing 18 people and wounding more than 40.

The Investigative Committee said an 18-year old student identified as Vladislav Roslyakov arrived at the vocational college in Kerch early Wednesday afternoon with a rifle and opened fire. The investigators said all the victims have died of gunshot wounds.

The investigators had earlier put out a statement saying an improvised explosive device went off in the college..

The investigators cited CCTTV footage showing that the man opened fire on people and later killed himself. The investigators said they will now treat the incident as a mass murder and not as a terrorist attack.

___

3:40 p.m.

Russian President Vladimir Putin says the attack on a college in Crimea was a tragedy and offered condolences to the victims’ families.

Putin, speaking Wednesday after talks with his visiting Egyptian counterpart Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, said investigators are looking into the circumstances of the attack and its motives.

He promised that the government will do everything necessary to help those wounded.

The top official in Crimea said 18 people were killed and over 40 wounded in Wednesday’s attack on the vocational college in the city of Kerch in eastern Crimea. He said a student of the college was the sole attacker and killed himself.

___

3:35 p.m.

The top official in Crimea says 18 people have died and more than 40 have been wounded in an attack on a college in the Black Sea peninsula launched by one of its students.

Sergei Aksyonov, the regional leader in Crimea, said that the student killed himself after the attack. He didn’t name the man, saying only he was a local resident and was acting alone.

Aksyonov’s statement follows Russian officials’ report that an explosive device ripped through the college in Kerch in eastern Crimea in a suspected terrorist attack.

Russian media reported that an unidentified gunman or gunmen attacked the college. Russian officials wouldn’t confirm those reports.

___

3:20 p.m.

The top Russian official for Crimea says the attacker at a Crimean vocational college was a student at the school who has killed himself.

The comments by Sergei Aksyonov were the latest in a series of shifting explanations by Russian officials as to what killed 13 people and wounded 50 others Wednesday at the college in the Black Sea city of Kerch.

Aksyonov said on state television that the attacker was a fourth-year student at the vocational school who killed himself after the attack. He didn’t name the man, saying only that he was a local resident.

Russia’s top investigative agency says an explosive device rigged with metal fragments caused the carnage at the school. Yet Russian news media reported that at least some of the victims died in an attack by an unidentified gunman or gunmen.

___

2:55 p.m.

Russia’s top investigative agency says an explosive device rigged with metal fragments has killed 13 people at a college in Crimea.

The Russian Investigative Committee’s spokeswoman, Svetlana Petrenko, said the device went off Wednesday in the canteen of a vocational college in the Black Sea city of Kerch. She said most of the victims were students and more than 50 people were injured as a result of the explosion.

Yet Russian news media, however, reported that at least some of the victims died in an attack by an unidentified gunman or gunmen. Russian officials wouldn’t confirm those reports.

Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, told reporters that officials are looking into a possible terrorist attack. He did not elaborate.

___

1:50 p.m.

The Kremlin says the blast at a college in Crimea that killed at least 10 people could have been a terror attack.

Authorities say that at least ten people have been killed and more than 50 injured as a result of the explosion at a vocational college in the Black Sea city of Kerch.

Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, told reporters that officials are looking into a possible terrorist attack. He did not elaborate.

Peskov said Putin has instructed investigators and intelligence agencies to conduct a thorough probe and offered condolences to the families of the victims.

___

1:45 p.m.

Russia’s counter-terrorism agency says the blast that killed 10 people at a college in Crimea was triggered by an explosive device.

The National Anti-Terrorism Committee said in a statement that the blast at the vocational college in the city of Kerch in eastern Crimea was caused by an unidentified explosive device.

It said about 50 others were wounded, but gave no further details.

Earlier, emergency officials said the blast was caused by a gas canister explosion.

The head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, and Russia’s health minister, have headed to the area.

Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, a move that triggered Western sanctions.

___

1 p.m.

Russian news agencies say that up to 10 people may have been killed and at least 40 others wounded by a natural gas explosion at a college in Crimea.

The gas canister explosion is said to have occurred Wednesday at the vocational college in the city of Kerch in eastern Crimea, according to local emergency officials.

The Interfax news agency cited local officials as saying up to 10 people might have been killed and about 40 others might have been injured by the blast.

The cause of the explosion wasn’t immediately clear.

Russia has annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, a move that triggered Western sanctions.