Chris Hedges's Blog, page 444

New Strategy: Democrats Go All-In on Health Care in Midterms

PHOENIX—In a windowless conference room, Republican Senate candidate Martha McSally was asking executives at a small crane manufacturing company how the GOP tax cut has helped their business when one woman said: “I want to ask you a question about health care.”

Marylea Evans recounted how, decades ago, her husband had been unable to get health insurance after developing cancer, forcing the couple to sell some of their Texas ranch to pay for his treatment. Now she was worried about Democratic ads saying McSally, currently a congresswoman, supported legislation removing the requirement that insurers cover people with pre-existing medical conditions.

“It’s a lie,” McSally said quickly, accustomed to having to interrupt a discussion of the tax cut to parry attacks on health care. But she had voted for a wide-ranging bill that would have, among other things, undermined protections for people with pre-existing conditions and drastically changed and shrunk Medicaid.

The exchange demonstrated how Democratic arguments about health care are resonating with voters in the final weeks before the midterm elections. While Democratic enthusiasm this year has largely been fueled by anger toward President Donald Trump, candidates have targeted their messaging to focus more on health care.

It’s the subject of the greatest share of political ads on television now, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, and a top issue in campaigns from Virginia to Arkansas to California — and especially in Arizona, where Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema has made it the foundation of her Senate campaign against McSally.

“Democrats believe that health care is the issue that’s going to deliver them the majority,” said Nathan Gonzalez, editor and publisher of the nonpartisan Inside Elections. “In 2016, Democrats learned that going all-in against Trump was not the right strategy, so they’re trying to be more specific.”

The Democratic furor around health care comes from Trump’s push to repeal the President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. House Republicans voted for a bill that would have rolled back parts of “Obamacare.” But the Senate never took up the bill, and its own attempt to reverse the health care law failed by one vote.

This year, the Trump administration supported a group of GOP attorneys general who filed a lawsuit arguing “Obamacare” is unconstitutional. The administration singled out protection for pre-existing conditions as unsustainable.

Democrats are effectively performing political judo on the GOP, who accused them over four election cycles of messing up voters’ health care with Obamacare and vowed a hasty repeal once they were back in power. Now that the GOP tried and failed to change health care, Democrats are pouncing.

“You see in every survey, whether it’s a Senate race in a red state or a House race in a purple district, health care is the No. 1 issue,” said Patrick McHugh of Priorities USA, a major Democratic campaign group. “One party wants to actually expand health care coverage and reduce costs, and the other party campaigned claiming they did, but when they got into power, they did not.”

In Missouri, Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill is defending her seat by highlighting that her Republican challenger, state Attorney General Josh Hawley, signed onto the lawsuit over pre-existing conditions. In Michigan, Democrat Elissa Slotkin aired an ad showing her mother dying of cancer and called incumbent Republican Rep. Mike Bishop’s vote for the GOP health bill “dereliction of duty.” In Arizona, Democrat Hiral Tipirneni, a physician, is running against Republican Rep. Debbie Lesko after shocking the political world by barely losing an April special election for the seat on a health care platform.

Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster, notes that health care is a perennial Democratic base issue but acknowledges it appears especially potent this year. However, he said, Republicans have a possible counter — pushing back against some Democrats’ support for a single-payer system that would require higher taxes.

“That, as a pushback message, tests very well,” Bolger said.

Republicans have used it in races where Democratic challengers have backed the policy — such as against Katie Porter, an attorney challenging Republican Rep. Mimi Walters in Southern California, or against social worker Kara Eastman, who’s leaned heavily on single payer in her challenge to Rep. Don Bacon in Nebraska. The GOP has even levied the charge against Democrats who haven’t supported a single-payer program, like Abigail Spanberger, who’s challenging Rep. David Brat in Virginia.

Gonzalez said the GOP responses show they’re fighting on Democrats’ turf and keeping the GOP from cashing in politically on the growing economy.

“Democrats believe that health care is the antidote to Republican talk about the economy,” he said.

The Arizona Senate contest provides a microcosm of the issue. Democrats started hitting McSally on health care with an ad barrage from a dark-money group during the GOP primary and have not let up, accusing her of trying to gut protections for pre-existing conditions and charge older people more for health insurance. Sinema mentions the issue everywhere she goes. In an interview with the Spanish-language Univision network Wednesday, she called it “the centerpiece of my campaign.”

At a recent appearance to rally volunteers in Scottsdale, Sinema was introduced by Leslie Foldy, a 64-year-old court reporter. “I’ve had diabetes since high school. I’ve been taking insulin shots … for the past 47 years,” Foldy said.

Sinema picked up the theme and ran with it. “We have a chance to elect a United States senator who understands Leslie’s struggles to make sure she gets access to the important medication she needs and that she’s not discriminated against because of having a pre-existing health condition,” she said. It was a dig at the GOP health bill that McSally supported for containing what she calls an “age tax” — a provision allowing insurance companies to charge people ages 50 to 64 who buy insurance on health exchanges rates five times higher than younger consumers. Under the ACA, the limit is three times higher.

In an interview, Sinema described her health care agenda as mainly a fight to preserve popular parts of Obamacare. She said she didn’t like everything about the bill and noted she’d sponsored bills delaying or repealing some of its funding mechanisms — taxes on medical devices and health insurance.

McSally instead focuses on the shortcomings of the law, blaming it for driving up health premiums for small businesses and other consumers and arguing Republicans are just trying to make things better. She bristles at the “age tax” attacks because she wrote an amendment adding $90 billion in subsidies for older consumers to protect against higher insurance rates. Although the GOP health bill did contain provisions that weakened the ACA’s protections of pre-existing conditions, McSally calls pre-existing conditions “a line in the sand” that she’ll protect.

“We’ve all got people in our lives who struggle with chronic disease,” McSally said. “It’s personal for all of us. The Democrats are taking this line of attack because they know health care is personal.”

Mattis Pushes Closer Ties to Vietnam Amid Tension With China

WASHINGTON — By making a rare second trip this year to Vietnam, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is signaling how intensively the Trump administration is trying to counter China’s military assertiveness by cozying up to smaller nations in the region that share American wariness about Chinese intentions.

The visit beginning Tuesday also shows how far U.S.-Vietnamese relations have advanced since the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War.

Mattis, a retired general who entered the Marine Corps during Vietnam but did not serve there, visited Hanoi in January. By coincidence, that stop came just days before the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive in 1968. Tet was a turning point when North Vietnamese fighters attacked an array of key objectives in the South, surprising Washington and feeding anti-war sentiment even though the North’s offensive turned out to be a tactical military failure.

Three months after the Mattis visit, an U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, made a port call at Da Nang. It was the first such visit since the war and a reminder to China that the U.S. is intent on strengthening partnerships in the region as a counterweight to China’s growing military might.

The most vivid expression of Chinese assertiveness is its transformation of contested islets and other features in the South China Sea into strategic military outposts. The Trump administration has sharply criticized China for deploying surface-to-air missiles and other weapons on some of these outposts. In June, Mattis said the placement of these weapons is “tied directly to military use for the purposes of intimidation and coercion.”

This time Mattis is visiting Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s most populous city and its economic center. Known as Saigon during the period before the communists took over the Republic of South Vietnam in 1975, the city was renamed for the man who led the Vietnamese nationalist movement.

Mattis also plans to visit a Vietnamese air base, Bien Hoa, a major air station for American forces during the war, and meet with the defense minister, Ngo Xuan Lich.

The visit comes amid a leadership transition after the death in September of Vietnam’s president, Tran Dai Quang. Earlier this month, Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party nominated its general secretary, Nguyen Phu Trong, for the additional post of president. He is expected to be approved by the National Assembly.

Although Vietnam has become a common destination for American secretaries of defense, two visits in one year is unusual, and Ho Chi Minh City is rarely on the itinerary. The last Pentagon chief to visit Ho Chi Minh City was William Cohen in the year 2000; he was the first U.S. defense secretary to visit Vietnam since the war. Formal diplomatic relations were restored in 1995 and the U.S. lifted its war-era arms embargo in 2016.

The Mattis trip originally was to include a visit to Beijing, but that stop was canceled amid rising tensions over trade and defense issues. China recently rejected a request for a Hong Kong port visit by an American warship, and last summer Mattis disinvited China from a major maritime exercise in the Pacific. China in September scrapped a Pentagon visit by its navy chief and demanded that Washington cancel an arms sale to Taiwan.

These tensions have served to accentuate the potential for a stronger U.S. partnership with Vietnam.

Josh Kurlantzick, a senior fellow and Asia specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in an interview that Vietnam in recent years has shifted from a foreign and defense policy that carefully balanced relations with China and the United States to one that shades in the direction of Washington.

“I do see Vietnam very much aligned with some of Trump’s policies,” he said, referring to what the administration calls its “free and open Indo-Pacific strategy.” It emphasizes ensuring all countries in the region are free from coercion and keeping sea lanes, especially the contested South China Sea, open for international trade.

“Vietnam, leaving aside Singapore, is the country the most skeptical of China’s Southeast Asia policy and makes the most natural partner for the U.S.,” Kurlantzick said.

Vietnam’s proximity to the South China Sea makes it an important player in disputes with China over territorial claims to islets, shoals and other small land formations in the sea. Vietnam also fought a border war with China in 1979.

Traditionally wary of its huge northern neighbor, Vietnam shares China’s system of single-party rule. Vietnam has increasingly cracked down on dissidents and corruption, with scores of high-ranking officials and executives jailed since 2016 on Trong’s watch.

Sweeping economic changes over the past 30 years have opened Vietnam to foreign investment and trade, and made it one of fastest growing economies in Southeast Asia. But the Communist Party tolerates no challenge to its one-party rule. Even so, the Trump administration has made a focused effort to draw closer to Vietnam.

When he left Hanoi in January, Mattis said his visit made clear that Americans and Vietnamese have shared interests that in some cases predate the dark period of the Vietnam War.

“Neither of us liked being colonized,” he said.

Saudi Stocks Plunge After Trump Warning on Khashoggi

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Saudi Arabia warned Sunday it will respond to any “threats” against it as its stock market plunged following President Donald Trump’s warning of “severe punishment” over the disappearance of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi.

Trump made a point of visiting the kingdom on his first overseas trip as president and has touted arms sales to Saudi Arabia. But both the White House and the kingdom are under mounting pressure as concern grows over the fate of the veteran journalist, who hasn’t been seen since he entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.

Already, international business leaders are pulling out of the kingdom’s upcoming investment forum, a high-profile event known as “Davos in the Desert.”

“The kingdom affirms its total rejection of any threats and attempts to undermine it, whether by threatening to impose economic sanctions, using political pressures or repeating false accusations,” the statement published by the state-run Saudi Press Agency read. “The kingdom also affirms that if it receives any action, it will respond with greater action, and that the kingdom’s economy has an influential and vital role in the global economy.”

The statement from the world’s top oil exporter came after the Tadawul exchange in Riyadh dropped by 7 percent at one point during the week’s first day of trading, with 182 of its 186 listed stocks showing losses by the early afternoon. The market clawed back some of the losses, closing down 3.5 percent for the day.

Turkish officials say they fear Saudi agents killed and dismembered Khashoggi after he entered the consulate, saying they have audio and video recordings of it that they have not released. The kingdom has called the allegations “baseless,” but has offered no evidence the writer ever left the consulate.

In an interview to be aired Sunday, Trump told CBS’ “60 Minutes” that the consequences of Saudi Arabia being involved would be “severe.”

“There’s something really terrible and disgusting about that, if that was the case, so we’re going to have to see,” Trump said. “We’re going to get to the bottom of it and there will be severe punishment.”

However, Trump in the same interview said: “As of this moment, they deny it and they deny it vehemently. Could it be them? Yes.”

Other stock exchanges in the Mideast saw far less volatility Sunday. U.S. markets have been rattled by rising interest rates, signs of a slowdown in the global economy and the U.S.-China trade dispute.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has aggressively pitched the kingdom as a destination for foreign investment. But Khashoggi’s disappearance, and suspicions he may have been targeted over his criticism of the crown prince, have led several business leaders and media outlets to back out of an upcoming high-profile investment conference in Riyadh.

Trump also said “we would be punishing ourselves” by canceling arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which his administration touted on his first overseas trip. The sale is a “tremendous order for our companies,” and if the kingdom doesn’t buy its weaponry from the United States, they will buy it from others, he said. Trump said he would meet with Khashoggi’s family.

American lawmakers in both parties have been more critical of Saudi Arabia, with several suggesting officials in the kingdom could be sanctioned if they were found to be involved in Khashoggi’s disappearance and alleged killing.

Khashoggi, who was considered close to the Saudi royal family, had become a critic of the current government and Prince Mohammed, the 33-year-old heir apparent who has shown little tolerance for criticism.

As a contributor to the Post, Khashoggi has written extensively about Saudi Arabia, including criticism of its war in Yemen, its recent diplomatic spat with Canada and its arrest of women’s rights activists after the lifting of a ban on women driving.

Those policies are all seen as initiatives of the crown prince, who has also presided over a roundup of activists and businessmen.

Trump has repeatedly criticized Saudi Arabia and King Salman over rising global oil prices. Benchmark Brent crude now trades above $80 a barrel and U.S. gasoline prices have risen ahead of the midterm elections.

Earlier this month, Trump suggested Saudi Arabia’s king “might not be there for two weeks” without U.S. military support.

___

Associated Press writer Malak Harb contributed to this report.

What Middle Eastern Media Is Saying About Khashoggi’s Fate

According to the invaluable BBC Monitoring press surveys of Middle Eastern newspapers, the coverage of the alleged murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has differed enormously from country to country.

In Lebanon, which has a diverse and somewhat free press, former journalist and current cabinet member Paula Yaqoubian told al-Jadid TV, “I hope that Khashoggi is being detained and hasn’t been killed; but things are pointing towards murder. If this is confirmed, thank God for Hariri coming out [of Saudi Arabia] safe.”

She was referring to Prime Minister Saad Hariri, who was kidnapped last year by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman on a visit to Saudi Arabia. The prince took his whole family hostage, implicitly threatening his wife and children, and forced Hariri to read a resignation letter on television. The Lebanese president, Michel Aoun, however, refused to accept the resignation, saying it had to be tendered on Lebanese soil to be valid. Eventually the intervention of French president Emmanuel Macron succeeded in freeing the Hariris. Yaqoubian is saying that MBS might well have murdered and chopped up Hariri the way he did Khashoggi. She is in Hariri’s Future Party.

Although Hariri serves as prime minister in a sort of national unity government with the pro-Iran Hizbullah party-militia, he is not pro-Iran, and that a cabinet member from his party has spoken so openly against Saudi Arabia, a long-time patron of the Hariri family, Lebanese Sunnis, signals how seriously people in Beirut are taking the Saudi action.

Tunisia has the freest press in the world, and its media have reported on Khashoggi’s fate, taking an at least slightly negative tone toward Saudi Arabia.

Most media in Egypt, ruled by a military junta and allied closely with Saudi Arabia, has attempted to defect blame from crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman onto Turkey itself, onto Iran or even onto Qatar, the object of a Saudi blockade. Much of the Egyptian press is a fact-free zone when it comes to anything touching on the Egyptian dictatorship or its allies, and there isn’t the slightest reason to doubt that the Saudis were behind the slaying.

Mohammed Bin Salman has targeted Iran for boycott. It in turn has been scathing on the Saudi slaying.

Hamid Baeidinejad, the ambassador to Britain of Iran, complained that Saudi Arabia has been shielded from criticism (he was implicitly blaming the UK and the US), allowing Riyadh to “stoke terrorism” and commit “human rights violations.”

Baeidinejad said in a Tweet of 12 October, “For far too long, Saudi Arabia has been shielded from criticism of its breeding of terrorism and grotesque human rights violations . . . Now, it appears that even Saudi critics are murdered – in broad daylight, and abroad.”

Quoting a report by Turkish daily Yeni Safak, Iran’s domestic outlets said Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s personal bodyguards were directly involved in the alleged murder of Khashoggi.

Further, newspaper Jomhuri-e Eslami (centrist) quoted Hakan Cakil, the Turkish Ambassador to Lebanon, as asserting that bin Salman “has offered to pay $5b in bribes to President Erdogan to drop the investigation into Khashoggi’s fate.”

BBC Monitoring also reported, “Iran’s representative in the UN General Assembly First Committee, said that Saudi Arabia is a “Kingdom of Terror”, with even journalists not being safe from its terror activities.”

 

We Can Feed the World and Halve Emissions—but There’s a Catch

The hopeful news is that by mid-century a well-fed world may be able to feed everyone alive, while halving the gases causing global warming. There’s just one snag: for most of us it would mean an almost meatless diet.

On 8 October global scientists said the world must make “rapid and far-reaching changes in all aspects of society” to keep global warming from reaching unacceptably dangerous levels.  They included the food we eat as one sector demanding radical change.

Bang on cue, a report by a separate group of scientists says the 10 billion people expected to be living by 2050 could enjoy sustainable food supplies – while emissions of the greenhouse gases that are warming the Earth fall by more than 50%.

But, for this to happen, the rich world would have to pay a high price, while the poorest people still faced malnutrition and hunger.

Less animal protein

The report says Westerners need to make a drastic switch away from meat and dairy products, cutting their consumption of beef by 90% and eating five times more beans and pulses than they do today to stave off hunger. Similar though slightly less radical changes are in prospect for people in other prosperous countries.

The researchers who wrote the report, published in the journal Nature, say it is the first to quantify how food production and consumption affect the planetary boundaries that define a safe operating space for humanity, and beyond which the Earth’s vital systems could become unstable.

“No single solution is enough to avoid crossing planetary boundaries. But when the solutions are implemented together, our research indicates that it may be possible to feed the growing population sustainably,” said Marco Springmann of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food and the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the study.

Many of the solutions we analysed are being implemented in some parts of the world, but it will need strong global coordination and rapid upscale to make their effects felt.

“Without concerted action, we found that the environmental impacts of the food system could increase by 50-90% by 2050 as a result of population growth and the rise of diets high in fats, sugars and meat. In that case, all planetary boundaries related to food production would be surpassed, some of them by more than twofold.”

A global shift towards healthy and more plant-based diets, halving food loss and waste (about a third of the food produced is lost before it can reach consumers), and improving farming practices and technologies, is needed to feed 10 billion people sustainably by 2050, the study says. Adopting these options cuts the risk of crossing global environmental limits on climate change.

But there will be other advantages too, the researchers say – reductions in the use of agricultural land and freshwater, and in the pollution of ecosystems through the over-use of fertilisers.

The study, funded by EAT as part of the EAT-Lancet Commission for Food, Planet and Health and by Wellcome’s “Our Planet, Our Health” partnership on Livestock Environment and People, combined detailed environmental accounts with a model of the global food system that tracks the production and consumption of food across the world. With this model, the researchers analysed several options that could keep the food system within environmental limits.

Multiple gains

They found that climate change can be checked enough only if diets change to include more plant-based food and reductions in meat and dairy products. Adopting more of these plant-based “flexitarian” diets globally could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than half and cut fertiliser application and the use of cropland and freshwater by between a tenth and a quarter.

But dietary changes alone will not be enough, the researchers say. They argue that improved agricultural management and technology will be essential too. Increasing yields from existing cropland, balancing fertiliser application and recycling and improving water management could, with other changes, reduce those impacts by around half.

A significant contributor to food insecurity is the deterioration and loss of soil. By one calculation, a third of the world’s arable land has been lost to erosion or pollution over the last 40 years. Restoring lost soil quality helps to increase harvests and slow warming.

The report says the world will have to halve wasted food to keep within environmental limits. If that happened worldwide, it would reduce environmental impacts by up to 16%.

Healthy eating

EAT is a science-based global platform for food system transformation founded by the Stordalen Foundation, Stockholm Resilience Centre and Wellcome.

Fabrice de Clerck, its director of science, said: “Tackling food loss and waste will require measures across the entire food chain, from storage and transport, over food packaging and labelling, to changes in legislation and business behaviour that promote zero-waste supply chains.”

“Many of the solutions we analysed are being implemented in some parts of the world, but it will need strong global coordination and rapid upscale to make their effects felt,” said Dr Springmann.

“When it comes to diets, important aspects include school and workplace programmes, economic incentives and labelling, and aligning national dietary guidelines with the current scientific evidence on healthy eating and the environmental impacts of our diet.”

Freed Pastor Prays for Trump in Oval Office Visit

WASHINGTON — Freed American pastor Andrew Brunson fell to one knee in the Oval Office and placed his hand on President Donald Trump’s shoulder in prayer on Saturday, asking God to provide the president “supernatural wisdom to accomplish all the plans you have for this country and for him.”

Trump welcomed Brunson to the White House to celebrate his release from nearly two years of confinement in Turkey, which had sparked a diplomatic row with a key ally and outcry from U.S. evangelical groups.

Brunson returned to the U.S. aboard a military jet shortly before meeting the president. He was detained in October 2016, formally arrested that December and placed under house arrest on July 25 for health reasons.

“From a Turkish prison to the White House in 24 hours, that’s not bad,” Trump said.

Brunson’s homecoming amounts to a diplomatic — and possibly political — win for Trump and his evangelical base. Coming on the heels of the confirmation of a conservative justice to the Supreme Court, Brunson’s return is likely to leave evangelical Christians feeling good about the president and motivated get to the polls in the Nov. 6 midterm elections.

Brunson appeared to be in good health and good spirits. When he asked Trump if he could pray for him, the president replied, “Well, I need it probably more than anyone else in this room, so that would be very nice, thank you.”

Brunson left his chair beside Trump, kneeled and placed a hand on the president’s shoulder. As Trump bowed his head, Brunson asked God to “give him supernatural wisdom to accomplish all the plans you have for this country and for him. I ask that you give him wisdom in how to lead this country into righteousness.”

He continued: “I ask that you give him perseverance, and endurance and courage to stand for truth. I ask that you to protect him from slander from enemies, from those who would undermine. I ask that you make him a great blessing to this country. Fill him with your wisdom and strength and perseverance. And we bless him. May he be a great blessing to our country. In Jesus’ name, we bless you. Amen.”

Brunson, originally from Black Mountain, North Carolina, had lived in Turkey with his family for more than two decades and led a small congregation in the Izmir Resurrection Church. He was accused of committing crimes on behalf of Kurdish militants and to aid a Pennsylvania-based Muslim cleric, Fethullah Gulen, accused by Turkey of engineering the failed coup. He faced up to 35 years in jail if convicted of all the charges against him.

Administration officials cast Brunson’s release as vindication of Trump’s hard-nosed negotiating stance, saying Turkey tried to set terms for Brunson’s release but that Trump was insistent on Brunson’s release without conditions. Trump maintained there was no deal for Brunson’s freedom, but the president dangled the prospect of better relations between the U.S. and its NATO ally.

“We do not pay ransom in this country,” Trump said.

Where previous administrations kept negotiations over U.S. prisoners held abroad close to the vest, Trump has elevated them to causes célèbres, striking a tough line with allies and foes alike.

Trump thanked Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had resisted the demands of Trump and other high-level U.S. officials for Brunson’s release. Erdogan had insisted that his country’s courts are independent, though he previously had suggested a possible swap for Brunson.

The U.S. had repeatedly called for Brunson’s release and, this year, sanctioned two Turkish officials and doubled tariffs on steel and aluminum imports citing in part Brunson’s plight.

Trump said the U.S. greatly appreciated Brunson’s release and said the move “will lead to good, perhaps great, relations” between the U.S. and fellow NATO ally Turkey, and said the White House would “take a look” at the sanctions.

Trump asked Brunson and his family which candidate they voted for in 2016, saying he was confident they had gone for him. “I would like to say I sent in an absentee ballot from prison,” Brunson quipped.

Evangelical voters overwhelmingly voted for the president despite discomfort with his personal shortcomings, in large part because he pledged to champion their causes, from defending persecuted Christians overseas to appointing conservative justices to the Supreme Court. In the space of seven days, less than a month from the midterm elections, Trump delivered on both fronts.

Prominent evangelical leaders such as Tony Perkins have championed Brunson’s case, as has Vice President Mike Pence. First word of Brunson’s arrival back on American soil Saturday came from Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. Perkins tweeted just after noon that he had landed at a military base outside Washington with Brunson and his wife, Norine.

Erdogan said on Twitter that he hoped the two countries will continue to cooperate “as it befits two allies.” Erdogan also called for joint efforts against terrorism, and he listed the Islamic State group, Kurdish militants and the network of a U.S.-based Muslim cleric whom Turkey blames for a failed coup in 2016.

Relations between the countries have become severely strained over Brunson’s detention and a host of other issues.

A Turkish court on Friday convicted Brunson of having links to terrorism and sentenced him to just over three years in prison, but released the 50-year-old evangelical pastor because he had already spent nearly two years in detention. An earlier charge of espionage was dropped.

Hours later, Brunson was flown out of Turkey, his home for more than two decades. He was taken to a U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, for a medical checkup.

“I love Jesus. I love Turkey,” an emotional Brunson, who had maintained his innocence, told the court at Friday’s hearing.

Brunson’s release could benefit Turkey by allowing the government to focus on an escalating diplomatic crisis over Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi contributor to The Washington Post who has been missing for more than a week and is feared dead after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Turkish officials suspect Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government, was killed in the consulate; Saudi officials deny it.

Trump maintained the two cases were not linked, saying Brunson’s release amid the Khashoggi investigation was “strict coincidence.”

Turkey may also hope the U.S. will now lift the tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminum imports, a move that would inject confidence into an economy rattled by high inflation and foreign currency debt.

But Brunson’s release doesn’t resolve disagreements over U.S. support for Kurdish fighters in Syria, as well as a plan by Turkey to buy Russian surface-to-air missiles. Turkey is also frustrated by the refusal of the U.S. to extradite Gulen.

___

Associated Press writer Zeynep Bilginsoy in Istanbul contributed to this report.

Did Saudi Writer Record His Slaying?

ISTANBUL—Turkish officials have an audio recording of the alleged killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi from the Apple Watch he wore when he walked into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul over a week ago, a pro-government Turkish newspaper reported Saturday.

The new claim published by the Sabah newspaper, through which Turkish security officials have leaked much information about the case, puts more pressure on Saudi Arabia to explain what happened to Khashoggi.

Related Articles





'I Love the Saudis': Trump Business Ties to Kingdom Run Deep



by

Also Saturday, Ankara’s top diplomat reiterated a call to Saudi Arabia to open up its consulate, from where Khashoggi disappeared, for Turkish authorities to search.

The writer, who has written critically about Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, vanished after he walked into the consulate on Oct. 2. The kingdom has maintained the allegations against it are “baseless,” though an official early on Saturday — on Khashoggi’s 60th birthday — acknowledged for the first time that some believe the writer was killed by the kingdom.

The disappearance has put pressure on President Donald Trump, who has enjoyed close relations with the Saudis since entering office.

On Saturday, Trump expressed concern about Khashoggi’s fate and lack of answers, so many days after the journalist disappeared.

“Our first hope was that he was not killed but maybe that’s not looking too good from what we hear but there’s a lot to learn, there really is,” Trump said at the White House while welcoming back American pastor Andrew Brunson, freed after nearly two years of detention in Turkey. He later said he anticipated speaking to the Saudi ruler Saturday or Sunday.

Turkish authorities recovered the audio from Khashoggi’s iPhone and his iCloud account, the newspaper said. The journalist had given his phones to his fiancée before entering the consulate.

The newspaper also alleged Saudi officials tried to delete the recordings first by incorrectly guessing Khashoggi’s PIN on the watch, then later using the journalist’s finger. However, Apple Watches do not have a fingerprint ID unlock function like iPhones. The newspaper did not address that in its report.

An Apple Watch can record audio and can sync that later with an iPhone over a Bluetooth connection if it is close by. The newspaper’s account did not elaborate on how the Apple Watch synced that information to both the phone and Khashoggi’s iCloud account.

Turkish officials have not answered queries from The Associated Press about Khashoggi’s Apple Watch.

Turkish officials say they believe a 15-member Saudi “assassination squad” killed Khashoggi at the consulate. They’ve also alleged that they have video of the slaying, but not explained how they have it.

Turkey may be trying to protect its intelligence sources through leaking this way, analysts say.

But Carrie Cordero, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for a New American Security who formerly worked on intelligence matters for the U.S. government, wrote recently that “the Turkish government may need to reveal sources it does not want to reveal if the Saudi Arabian government continues to deny involvement despite evidence Turkey has in its possession.”

Saudi Arabia has said it had nothing to do with Khashoggi’s disappearance, without explaining or offering evidence of how the writer left the consulate and disappeared into Istanbul with his fiancée waiting outside.

A Saudi-owned satellite news channel has begun referring to the 15-man team as “tourists,” without providing evidence to support the claim. It echoes how Russia has described the men who allegedly carried out the Novichok nerve agent poisonings in Salisbury, England, in March.

Early on Saturday, the state-run Saudi Press Agency published a statement from Saudi Interior Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Saud again denying the kingdom’s involvement. This time, however, it acknowledged for the first time that Saudi Arabia was accused of killing Khashoggi.

“What has been circulating in terms of supposed orders to kill Jamal (Khashoggi) are outright lies and baseless allegations against the Kingdom’s government, which is committed to its principles, rules and traditions and is in compliance with international laws and conventions,” Prince Abdulaziz said.

Omer Celik, a spokesman for Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, said that Khashoggi’s disappearance will be “investigated strongly.” A delegation from Saudi Arabia arrived in Turkey on Friday as part of a joint investigation into the writer’s disappearance.

“Such an act is an attack on all the values of the democratic world. It’s an act that will never be forgiven or covered up,” he said. “This is not an act that Turkey would ever consider legitimate. If there are people who committed this, it will have heavy consequences.”

However, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Saudi Arabia had not yet cooperated with Turkey on the search for Khashoggi. He said Turkish “prosecutors and technical friends must enter” the consulate “and Saudi Arabia must cooperate with us on this.”

Earlier in the week, Saudi Arabia had said it would open the consulate for a search but that is yet to happen. Cavusoglu said Turkey would share information with Saudi Arabia in the “joint working group” but stressed the Turkish investigation would continue separately.

Trump also said Saturday that “we would be punishing ourselves” by canceling arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The sale is a “tremendous order for our companies,” he said, and if the kingdom doesn’t buy its weaponry from the United States, they will buy it from Russia or China. Trump said that he would meet with Khashoggi’s family.

Separately, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke to Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, who had accompanied him to the Saudi consulate. The State Department released no details of the conversation.

In an interview Friday with the AP, Cengiz said Khashoggi was not nervous when he entered the consulate to obtain paperwork required for their marriage.

“He said, ‘See you later my darling,’ and went in,” she told the AP.

In written responses to questions by the AP, Cengiz said Turkish authorities had not told her about any recordings and Khashoggi was officially “still missing.”

She said investigators were examining his cellphones, which he had left with her.

On Saturday, Cengiz tweeted about a surprise party she had planned for Khashoggi’s birthday, “invited all his close friends to a restaurant on the #TheBosporus to celebrate his birthday but,” she said, adding the hashtags “WhereIsJamal” and “mydreamwaskilled.”

Global business leaders also are reassessing their ties with Saudi Arabia, stoking pressure on the Gulf kingdom to explain what happened to Khashoggi.

Khashoggi, who was considered close to the Saudi royal family, had become a critic of the current government and Prince Mohammed, the 33-year-old heir apparent who has shown little tolerance for criticism.

As a contributor to the Post, Khashoggi has written extensively about Saudi Arabia, including criticism of its war in Yemen, its recent diplomatic spat with Canada and its arrest of women’s rights activists after the lifting of a ban on women driving.

Those policies are all seen as initiatives of the crown prince, who has also presided over a roundup of activists and businessmen.

___

Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writers Zeke Miller and Darlene Superville in Washington and Suzan Fraser in Ankara contributed to this report.

Beto O’Rourke Shatters Senate Fundraising Record

Shattering a record for a U.S. Senate race previously set nearly two decades ago, Congressman Beto O’Rourke—the progressive Texas Democrat vying to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz—revealed Friday that he raised $38.1 million in the last quarter, more than three times Cruz’s $12 million from the same three-month period.

Unlike his opponent, O’Rourke doesn’t take money from political action committees (PACs), special interest groups, or corporations. In a video posted to Twitter on Friday, the candidate noted that his record-setting third-quarter haulcame from more than 800,000 unique contributions.

“It’s going to give us the resources we need to finish this campaign as strong as we possibly can,” he said. “We’re doing something absolutely historic—not just ensuring that we have the resources to run and to win, but to make sure that our democracy once again is powered by people and only people.”

You just raised a record-breaking $38.1 million in three months. From 802,836 contributions. No PACs, no special interests, no corporations. All people, all the time, everywhere, every single day. pic.twitter.com/IDMFNFwezB

— Beto O’Rourke (@BetoORourke) October 12, 2018

For context, NBC News noted that while a pair of Democrats in other competitive Senate races raised about $7 million each during the third quarter, O’Rourke raised even more from July to September than former President Barack Obama in the quarter before the 2008 Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary ($23.5 million) and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the third quarter of 2015 (about $30 million).

New York Times reporter Shane Goldmacher pointed out on Twitter that the congressman’s final fundraising figure for the quarter is also higher than the amount Republican Jeb Bush raised during his entire 2016 presidential campaign.

Some context on @BetoORourke‘s $38.1 million raised in a quarter.

Jeb Bush’s entire 2016 presidential campaign raised $35.5 million.

— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) October 12, 2018

“The people of Texas in all 254 counties are proving that when we reject PACs and come together not as Republicans or Democrats but as Texans and Americans, there’s no stopping us,” O’Rourke added in a statement. “This is a historic campaign of people: all people, all the time, everywhere, every single day—that’s how we’re going to win this election and do something incredible for Texas and our country at this critical moment.”

While recent polls have shown O’Rourke trailing Cruz by eight or nine points, the race has garnered national attention, as the Democrat’s defense of professional athletes’ kneeling for the national anthem spread virally online, the Texas GOP’s attacks on him backfired spectacularly, and legendary musician Willie Nelson, in his first-ever political fundraiser, pledged his support for O’Rourke.

Although O’Rourke has consistently outraised Cruz, garnering small donations from Texans and progressives nationwide, the Republican incumbent and former presidential contender has the help of PACs and some deep-pocketed locals. As Politico outlined:

The Center for Responsive Politics has tracked over $5.3 million either supporting Cruz or opposing O’Rourke. The single biggest spender is the Texans Are PAC, whose single biggest funder is Lee Roy Mitchell and his wife, Tandy, who founded the Cinemark movie chain. Shipping magistrate Richard Uihlein, who has also funded insurgent Republicans across the country, is also a significant donor.

Club for Growth Action and End Spending Action Fund, two other Republican super PACs, have also both spent north of $1 million on the race.

Meanwhile, Politico noted, “There’s been a little over $300,000 in either pro-O’Rourke or anti-Cruz outside spending.”

The candidates debated each other in September. A second debate scheduled for later in September was postponed and has not been rescheduled, but they are set to face off again on Oct. 16. Cruz declined to participate in back-to-back town halls on CNN next week, but O’Rourke is slated to appear for the hourlong program on Oct. 18.

‘I Love the Saudis’: Trump Business Ties to Kingdom Run Deep

NEW YORK — He’s booked hotel rooms and meeting spaces to them, sold an entire floor in one of his buildings to them and, in desperate moments in his career, gotten a billionaire from the country to buy his yacht and New York’s Plaza Hotel overlooking Central Park.

President Donald Trump’s ties to Saudi Arabia run long and deep, and he’s often boasted about his business ties with the kingdom.

“I love the Saudis,” Trump said when announcing his presidential run at Trump Tower in 2015. “Many are in this building.”

Now those ties are under scrutiny as the president faces calls for a tougher response to the kingdom’s government following the disappearance, and possible killing, of one of its biggest critics, journalist and activist Jamal Khashoggi.

“The Saudis are funneling money to him,” said former federal ethics chief Walter Shaub, who is advising a watchdog group suing Trump for foreign government ties to his business. That undermines “confidence that he’s going to do the right thing when it comes to Khashoggi.”

Trump paid his first foreign visit as president to Saudi Arabia last year, praised its new young ruler and boasted of striking a deal to sell $110 billion of U.S. weapons to the kingdom.

But those close ties are in peril as pressure mounts from Congress for the president to find out whether Khashoggi was killed and dismembered after entering a Saudi consulate in Turkey, as Turkish officials have said without proof.

Trump said Friday that he will soon speak with Saudi Arabia’s king about Khashoggi’s disappearance. But he also has said he doesn’t want to scuttle a lucrative arms deal with the kingdom and noted that Khashoggi, a U.S. resident, is not a citizen. For its part, Saudi Arabia has called allegations it killed Khashoggi “baseless.”

The president’s links to Saudi billionaires and princes go back years and appear to have only deepened.

In 1991, as Trump was teetering on personal bankruptcy and scrambling to raise cash, he sold his 282-foot Trump yacht “Princess” to Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin-Talal for $20 million, a third less than what he reportedly paid for it.

Four years later, the prince came to his rescue again, joining other investors in a $325 million deal for Trump’s money-losing Plaza Hotel.

In 2001, Trump sold the entire 45th floor of the Trump World Tower across from the United Nations in New York for $12 million, the biggest purchase in that building to that point, according to the brokerage site Streeteasy. The buyer: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Shortly after he announced his run for president, Trump began laying the groundwork for possible new business in the kingdom. He registered eight companies with names tied to the country, such as “THC Jeddah Hotel Advisor LLC” and “DT Jeddah Technical Services,” according to a 2016 financial disclosure report to the federal government. Jeddah is a major city in the country.

“Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million,” Trump told a crowd at an Alabama rally on Aug. 21, 2015, the same day he created four of the entities. “Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”

The president’s company, the Trump Organization, said shortly after his 2016 election that it had shut down those Saudi companies. The president later pledged to pursue no new foreign deals while in office.

In a statement this week, the company said it has explored business opportunities in many countries but that it does “not have any plans for expansion into Saudi Arabia.”

Since Trump took the oath of office, the Saudi government and lobbying groups for it have been lucrative customers for Trump’s hotels.

A public relations firm working for the kingdom spent nearly $270,000 on lodging and catering at his Washington hotel near the Oval Office through March of last year, according to filings to the Justice Department. A spokesman for the firm told The Wall Street Journal that the Trump hotel payments came as part of a Saudi-backed lobbying campaign against a bill that allowed Americans to sue foreign governments for responsibility in the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Attorneys general for Maryland and the District of Columbia cited the payments by the Saudi lobbying firm as an example of foreign gifts to the president that could violate the Constitution’s ban on such “emoluments” from foreign interests.

The Saudi government was also a prime customer at the Trump International Hotel in New York early this year, according to a Washington Post report.

The newspaper cited an internal letter from the hotel’s general manager, who wrote that a “last-minute” visit in March by a group from Saudi Arabia accompanying Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had boosted room rentals at the hotel by 13 percent for the first three months of the year, after two years of decline.

Saudi Arabia has also helped on one of Trump’s key policy promises and helped the president’s friends along the way.

Last year, the kingdom announced plans to invest $20 billion in a private U.S.-focused infrastructure fund managed by Blackstone Group, an investment firm led by CEO Stephen Schwarzman. Blackstone stock rose on the news. Earlier this year, Trump unveiled a $200 billion federal plan to fix the nation’s airports, roads, highways and ports, tapping private companies for help and selling off some government-owned infrastructure.

Schwarzman, who celebrated his 70th birthday at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, accompanied Trump on his visit to Saudi Arabia.

Pope’s Canonization of Paul VI and Romero Is Both Personal and Political

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis will canonize two of the most important and contested figures of the 20th-century Catholic Church, declaring Pope Paul VI and the martyred Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero as models of saintliness for the faithful today.

Sunday’s ceremony is likely to be emotional for Francis, since he was greatly influenced by both men and privately told confidantes he wanted them made saints during his papacy. The two represent the epitome of the outward-looking church that Francis has championed, one that is close to the poor and fights injustice.

Paul VI and Romero also endured strong opposition from within the church in life and after death — a fate Francis is experiencing now amid the church’s burgeoning sex abuse and cover-up scandal.

These two towering figures will be canonized along with five others in a ceremony designed to show that holiness can be attained in all walks of life.

___

PAUL VI

When Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio delivered the 2013 stump speech to cardinals that got him elected Pope Francis, he made only one citation in the text: Pope Paul VI.

When later that year Francis issued the mission statement of his papacy, he based it largely on a 1975 text by Paul on evangelization, which Francis once called “the greatest pastoral document” of the modern church.

“One of the first things he told me when he was elected was that he hoped, he prayed to be able to canonize Paul VI,” said Francis’ former chief of staff, Cardinal Angelo Becciu.

Giovanni Maria Vian, editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, said Bergoglio matured as a priest, a Jesuit and a Christian while Paul VI was pope from 1963-1978.

“It’s understood that Paul VI is his pope,” Vian said.

Paul is perhaps best known for having presided over the final sessions of Vatican II, the tumultuous 1962-65 church meetings that modernized the Catholic Church and opened it up to the world, allowing liturgy to be celebrated in the vernacular rather than in Latin and calling for greater roles for the laity and improved relations with people of other faiths.

During his 15-year papacy, Paul VI ushered in other reforms as well, including that of the traveling papacy.

Paul stepped foot on each of the five continents, but two of his trips stand out most: In 1964, he traveled to the Holy Land and met with the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, a first since the schism that divided Christianity 1,000 years earlier.

A year later, Paul traveled to the United Nations, where he delivered the now-famous plea for peace as the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam escalated: “Never again war! Never again war!”

But it was Paul’s 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae” that marked his papacy, reaffirming the church’s opposition to artificial contraception.

Issued in an era of the contraceptive pill, the 1960s’ sexual revolution and alarm about overpopulation, the stark prohibition empowered conservatives but drove progressives away.

Even today, the document remains one of the most contested and ignored of papal encyclicals, with studies showing that most Catholics disregard it and use artificial contraception.

“It’s a text that isn’t rooted in reality, where life is absent and above all women are absent,” Monique Baujard, former head of family services at the French bishops’ conference, wrote last month in a Vatican’s women’s magazine.

___

ARCHBISHOP OSCAR ROMERO

Francis also longed to declare Archbishop Oscar Romero a saint, convinced that he was a true martyr who willingly gave up his life to stand with El Salvador’s poor and denounce the violence of the military dictatorship.

Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, was gunned down by right-wing death squads as he celebrated Mass on March 24, 1980, in a hospital chapel. The military had vehemently opposed his preaching against the army’s repression at the start of the country’s 1980-1992 civil war.

Almost immediately after his death, Romero became an icon of the South American left, with his image frequently appearing alongside the likes of Che Guevara and Salvadore Allende.

But that politicized fame cost Romero dearly as his saint-making cause wound its way through the Vatican. Conservative Latin American prelates, led by the late Colombian Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, feared Romero’s perceived association with liberation theology would embolden the movement which holds that Jesus’ teachings require followers to fight for social and economic justice.

“Romero found himself caught in a substantively political conflict between those who saw him as a revolutionary — which he absolutely wasn’t, since he was very gentle — and those who saw him equally as a revolutionary but in a negative sense,” said Romero biographer Roberto Morozzo della Rocca.

After the cause was held up for three decades, Pope Benedict XVI finally unblocked it in 2012 and Francis, history’s first Latin American pope, pushed it through to its final phases.

A few months after Romero was beatified in 2015, Francis denounced how Romero had suffered as a martyr twice — once when he was gunned down, and again when his own brother bishops “defamed, slandered and had dirt thrown on his name.”

Even earlier, though, Francis made clear he wanted to see Romero honored.

Romero’s former secretary, the Rev. Jesus Delgado Acevedo, revealed a private conversation he had with Francis — then Cardinal Bergoglio — in 2007 on the sidelines of a Latin American bishops’ conference in Brazil.

He recalled asking Bergoglio, then the archbishop of Buenos Aires, “Eminence, one day will Oscar Romero be canonized? Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo told me it will never happen.”

Delgado quoted Bergoglio as saying “Listen, if I become pope, the first thing I’ll do is send Lopez Trujillo to San Salvador” to make Romero a saint.

The remark was a clear dig at Lopez Trujillo, an arch-conservative affiliated with Latin American right-wingers, who has been publicly identified as the man who used his considerable power at the Vatican to scuttle Romero’s saint-making cause for years.