Veterans who served alongside the Kurds say Trump set a dangerous precedent abandoning American allies

Veterans who served alongside the Kurds discuss the future of American foreign relations, as Turkish President Erdoğan visits the White House

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Authorities are searching for a woman after finding her husband's corpse in a bedroom freezer

Authorities are searching for a woman after finding her husband’s corpse in a freezer in a bedroom inside her Missouri home, where it may have been stored for nearly a year. Barbara Watters of Joplin, Mo., was charged Wednesday with abandonment of a corpse, a felony that is punishable by up to four years in prison.

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The Latest: Report of several protesters killed in Bolivia

Protesters in Bolivia say several people were killed when security forces opened fire on a demonstration, but the interim government and security officials have not confirmed the report. Many details of the violence in the central town of Sacaba remained unclear on Friday. Police had said earlier they were targeted by protesters with lethal weapons.

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Tempers flare over rebuilding of Notre-Dame spire

The French army general charged with overseeing the rebuilding of Paris' fire-mangled Notre-Dame, has caused astonishment by publicly telling the cathedral's chief architect to "shut his mouth" in a sign of tension over the monument's future look. General Jean-Louis Georgelin and chief architect Philippe Villeneuve are at odds over whether to replace the cathedral's spire -- which was toppled in the April 15 blaze -- with an exact replica, or mix things up with a modern twist.

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Pope compares politicians who rage against gays to Hitler

Pope Francis said on Friday politicians who rage against homosexuals, gypsies and Jews remind him of Hitler. "It is not coincidental that at times there is a resurgence of symbols typical of Nazism," Francis said in an address to participants of an international conference on criminal law. "And I must confess to you that when I hear a speech (by) someone responsible for order or for a government, I think of speeches by Hitler in 1934, 1936," he said, departing from his prepared address.

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Dominic Thiem Makes a Habit of Winning

By BY CINDY SHMERLER from NYT Sports https://ift.tt/2QnegVm

Prince Andrew Says He ‘Let the Side Down’ When He Stayed With Jeffrey Epstein

By BY MEGAN SPECIA AND NEIL VIGDOR from NYT World https://ift.tt/2QriCuD

Republicans Thought Yovanovitch Would Be a Pushover. She Beat Them Up Instead

Nicholas Kamm / AFP/ Getty ImagesBefore she even spoke on Friday, President Donald Trump’s surrogates in Congress and conservative media expected Marie Yovanovitch to cry on command for the impeachment-hearing cameras. As she began testifying about the smear campaign that forced her from her ambassadorship in Ukraine, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) tweeted that impeachment wasn’t about her feelings. But for over five hours, the 33-year veteran diplomat left no doubt why she was there and what she endured, even as the president himself weighed in on Twitter seeming to intimidate her as she sat in front of the congressional panel. The president’s attack wasn’t the only attack she brushed aside. Yovanovitch methodically outplayed a series of Republican efforts to cast her firing as normal, the president’s behavior as unremarkable, and the harm she suffered as negligible–rather than the prelude to a shadow diplomatic effort to coerce Ukraine into aiding Trump’s reelection. Instead, she made it clear that she would have been an obstacle to the president’s pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had she remained in Kyiv. At one point, she told Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) that she would have opposed the summer 2019 suspension of $400 million in U.S. military aid and would never have asked Zelensky to pursue the conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. Asked to affirm that Trump was legitimately concerned about Ukraine corruption, she shot back, “That’s what he says.”Not much of Friday’s hearing, the second in the House impeachment inquiry, went the GOP’s way. The exception was Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT), who, knowing that Yovanovitch was fired before the pressure campaign on Zelensky proceeded, got her to concede she had no knowledge of criminal wrongdoing by Trump.Most of their attempts to discredit or dismiss her either fell flat or ended in retreat. Rep. Brad Wenstrup, an Ohio Republican, asked Yovanovitch to affirm that presidents get to select their ambassadors. In perhaps the most powerful line of the hearing, Yovanovitch replied, “I obviously don’t dispute the president has the right to withdraw an ambassador at any time for any reason, but what I do wonder is why it was necessary to smear my reputation.”Wenstrup quickly replied that wasn’t his question, pressed the sound on his mic off and sat back in his chair. When the Republicans’ counsel for impeachment, Steve Castor, put forward a series of public statements from 2016 from Ukrainians upset with candidate Trump, Yovanovitch frustrated a line of questioning meant to establish what Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the top Intelligence Committee Republican, called “Ukrainian election meddling.”“Those elements you’ve recited don’t seem to be a plan or plot of the Ukrainian government to work against President Trump. Those are isolated incidents,” she said. “I’ve come to learn public life can be quite critical. I’d remind, again, that our own U.S. intelligence community has conclusively determined” that Russia, not Ukraine, interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.Castor also walked into a trap by asking if Trump might have been justified in feeling Ukraine was against him based on internet-borne comments. Yovanovitch, whom Trump had just disparaged in a tweet, icily replied, “Well, sometimes that happens on social media.”Stewart, who called impeachment “nonsense,” implied it was appropriate for Trump to seek a Ukrainian investigation of Burisma, the national-gas firm that put Joe Biden’s son on its board. Yovanovitch responded that “we have a process for that” that Trump did not follow, one involving communication between the Justice Department and its Ukrainian counterpart under a mutual legal-assistance treaty. Stewart reiterated the question “regardless of the process,” although corruption definitionally routes around official channels in pursuit of private agendas. Similarly, when John Ratcliffe (R-TX) asked if it was a potential “conflict of interest” for Joe Biden to seek the firing of a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor in 2016–a central Republican defense of Trump–Yovanovitch rejected his premise. “I actually don’t,” she said. “I think the view was that Mr. [Viktor] Shokin was not a good prosecutor-general fighting corruption. I don’t think it had to do with the Burisma case.”Republicans attempted to approach Yovanovitch respectfully. They praised her service–even as they defended Trump for ending it prematurely–and gave prominence to Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) so as to avoid the optics of men attacking a woman. Yet they were at times dismissive of what Yovanovitch had described as a nightmare. Rep. Michael Conaway (R-TX), asked her basic questions about her post-ambassadorship gig at Georgetown University—how many classes does she teach? How many students does she have?—and the regard her diplomatic colleagues have for her, suggesting that she suffered no real harm after the president capped an assassination of her character by firing her.Later, Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) had the room laughing when he spelled out the upshot of that inquiry. “It’s like a Hallmark movie,” he said from the dais. “You ended up at Georgetown. This is all OK!”The ultimate sabotage to the GOP’s attempt to treat Yovanovitch as an impeachment sideshow was committed by Trump himself. With a series of tweets slamming Yovanovitch as she testified, the president did plenty of work to make her appearance even more relevant to the impeachment inquiry. The ambassador—and Democratic lawmakers—said Trump’s broadside was intended to intimidate not only her but future impeachment witnesses. It fueled talk of a whole new article of impeachment.Few Republicans felt compelled to justify the president’s tweets. Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), a reliable ally of the president, said Trump is allowed to defend himself and that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the Democratic floor general on impeachment, had cherry-picked tweets about the ambassador to read from the dais. As the hearing wrapped, Republicans maintained that Stewart’s line of questioning was the punch that would linger from the hearing. “This witness can’t shed any light on what Dems claim are their impeachable offenses, and can’t advance their narrative,” said a senior House GOP aide.But Democrats left with the impression they got even more than they’d wanted—that a witness initially pitched as someone who could flesh out the human impact of Trump’s Ukraine designs served many more purposes.“You know, it’s funny,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), “the more the day went on, I personally thought she became more and more enlightening for purposes of our inquiry.” The ambassador’s appearance met a rare ending for the staid hearing rooms of Capitol Hill. Schiff closed with a thundering statement, and before Yovanovitch could even rise from her chair, the crowd in the gallery erupted in a standing ovation.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Trump grants clemency to 2 Army officers accused of war crimes, restores rank to Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher

11/15/19 3:48 PM

F.A.A. Chief Urges Employees to Resist Pressure to End Max’s Grounding

By BY NATALIE KITROEFF AND DAVID GELLES from NYT Business https://ift.tt/2KqaJlu

Waters Close Over Venice

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Ray Cromartie: Death row inmate executed without testing DNA evidence ‘that could have proved his innocence’

A man has been executed in the US state of Georgia despite a request from his lawyers for DNA evidence which they claimed would clear him of murder.Ray Jefferson Cromartie​​ was convicted of the April 1994 shooting of shop worker Richard Slysz twice in the head at the convenience store in the city of Thomasville.

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Protesters blare Christine Blasey Ford testimony and dress up as handmaids outside Kavanaugh speech

The scene outside the venue where Brett Kavanaugh was scheduled to give the keynote speech included protesters chanting and dressed as handmaids.

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The Latest: Hong Kong highway blocked after deadline passes

Protesters in Hong Kong have once again blocked a highway in an outlying area after the government did not meet their demand that it pledge to go ahead with local elections later this month. Traffic was backed up Friday evening after the protesters placed barricades back on the roadway. The protesters had allowed one lane of traffic to re-open in each direction and gave the government 24 hours to meet their demand.

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Jackie Speier erupts at reporter for The Hill

Angered by the testimony of ousted ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, California Rep. Jackie Speier upbraided a reporter for The Hill and ripped the outlet’s publication of columns by John Solomon, the conservative journalist whose work is at the center of what Yovanovitch described as a “smear campaign” against her. “I just find it reprehensible that any newspaper would just be willing to put that kind of crap out that is not — has no veracity whatsoever, and not check to see if it had any veracity,” said Speier, a Democrat serving in her seventh term in the House, according to audio of the exchange reviewed by POLITICO. Speier launched into her critique of The Hill after fielding a question from its senior staff writer Scott Wong about who her dream witness would be at the impeachment proceedings.

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Hong Kong protesters defy Xi with pro-democracy rallies

Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters defied a warning by China's President Xi Jinping and took to the streets again Friday, as the political turmoil seeped out to London, where a territorial minister was confronted by masked demonstrators. Protests have swept Hong Kong since June as many in the city of 7.5 million people have vented fury at eroding freedoms under Chinese rule. Violence has escalated, and tensions have spread overseas, sparking friction between China and Britain, which governed Hong Kong until 1997.

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There have been 366 mass shootings in the US so far in 2019 — here's the full list

As of November 14, 2019, there have been more mass shootings in the US than there are days. At least people have died in mass shootings this year.

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From 'Anonymous,' key excerpts from inside Trump White House on Putin, Hillary

Key excerpts from "A Warning," a book by an anonymous senior administration official about President Trump and his administration.

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‘No discipline. No plan. No strategy.’: Sen. Kamala Harris campaign in meltdown

As Sen. Kamala Harris crisscrosses the country trying to revive her sputtering presidential bid, aides at her fast-shrinking headquarters are deep into the finger-pointing stages. And much of the blame is being placed on campaign manager Juan Rodriguez.

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China envoy threatens Sweden over award to detained writer Gui Minhai

China threatened Sweden with unspecified "counter measures" if its culture minister attends a literary award ceremony on Friday for Gui Minhai, a Swedish citizen who was abducted in Thailand in 2015 and is now in detention in China. The case of Chinese-born Gui Minhai, who studied in Sweden in the 1980s and was based in Hong Kong when he published books critical of China's leaders, has soured relations between Sweden and China.

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'He essentially added an article of impeachment in real-time': Trump criticised by Fox News and Ken Starr for attacking Yovanovitch during hearing

Donald Trump’s tweets attacking Marie Yovanovitch during her powerful testimony before the House impeachment inquiry has turned into a lightning rod of the hearings — and even some prominent conservative sources have slammed the president’s comments.The tweet was highlighted by House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, who asked Ms Yovanovitch what she thought of him saying that “everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad”, before attacking her decades of experience.

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Trump Pardons Three Service Members in War Crimes Cases

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