Jeff Van Drew Switches Parties, Pledging ‘Undying Support’ for Trump

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Democrats May Save Us Yet

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The Sidney Awards

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Senate Opens Door to New Options in Your 401(k)

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Trump Highlights Support for Black Colleges: Campaign Update

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump is seeking to appeal to African American voters by highlighting funding for historically black colleges and criminal justice reform, even as polls show he faces an uphill battle.As part of the effort, White House advisers on Thursday said Trump pushed Congress to provide $75 million for his First Step program, which gives inmates a personalized assessment and recidivism reduction program. “The president’s leadership on this issue is fundamentally changing the future of our criminal justice system,” Jared Kushner, a White House senior adviser and the president’s son-in-law, said in a statement.Separately, the Trump administration has sought to highlight legislation permanently restoring annual funding to historically black colleges and universities, though that effort hit a snag. The White House planned an event Tuesday for black university leaders to celebrate the president signing the bill -- only to have the ceremony scuttled by last-minute legislative maneuvering that left Trump without anything to sign. He ended up inviting guests to the Oval Office for a private meet and greet instead. On Thursday, he signed the legislation and issued a statement celebrating the bill.Trump alluded to the aborted event during his rally in Michigan on Wednesday night, saying the “only bad thing” about the bill is that the university leaders wouldn’t come lobby him each year any more.Trump won about 8% of the black vote in 2016, and Democrats have sought to capitalize on the president’s polarizing rhetoric on race. Last month, his campaign created a group, “Black Voices for Trump,” to advocate for the president’s re-election -- after a September poll by the Associated Press and NORC at the University of Chicago showed that 92% of African Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of race relations.Warren Staff Say Backers List Had Errors (5:05 p.m.)Elizabeth Warren’s campaign said it made a mistake by including Democratic donor and political activist Ed Buck, who’s facing criminal charges over the death of two men, in a list of endorsements she received from alumni of Barack Obama’s administration and campaign.On Wednesday, Warren released a list of about 200 former Obama staffers who signed on to support her 2020 bid. Buck was on the list, even though he is being held without bail on charges involving the death of two men who fatally overdosed at his Los Angeles home in 2017.The Warren campaign said someone added fake names to the list that was being compiled by volunteers who used to work for Obama. The volunteers caught most of them, but missed Buck, the campaign said.“This was a mistake considering Ed Buck was not staff or an alum,” campaign representative Chris Hayden said in a statement. “This was put together via Google Doc by some Obama alums and they caught some non-staff that populated the list but obviously they missed one. They are removing it.” -- Misyrlena EgkolfopoulouBloomberg Offers Public Health-Insurance Option (2:27 p.m.)Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg would create a “Medicare-like” public health-insurance option, rejecting the progressive notion of government-run health insurance that replaces private coverage.Bloomberg’s campaign said it’s still figuring out how much his plan would cost, but estimated about $1.5 trillion over 10 years, offset partly by cost savings from capping out-of-network charges and negotiating prescription drug prices. Some revenue would come from a forthcoming tax plan, and he intends to raise enough money to pay for the policy proposals, the campaign said.The former New York mayor’s plan is similar to those proposed by Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and other 2020 candidates who oppose the government-run system championed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Elizabeth Warren is proposing a public option for the first three years of a Warren presidency until she can enact Medicare-for-all.Bloomberg’s plan would create a public option run by the government but funded by consumer premiums to cover people, including those in states that didn’t expand Medicaid. It would also build on the Affordable Care Act in part by expanding subsidies, and Bloomberg would increase enrollment efforts rather than reinstate the law’s individual mandate.Bloomberg has said a Medicare-for-all system would cost trillions of dollars and “bankrupt us for a very long time.” He’s advocating a “practical, achievable plan” to move toward universal coverage and lower costs.“We don’t need Medicare-for-All proposals that are more likely to re-elect Donald Trump than to expand coverage,” Bloomberg said while discussing his plan in Memphis, Tennessee, on Thursday.Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News. -- Mark NiquetteBiden Tops All Other Democrats in National Poll (7:18 a.m.)Former Vice President Joe Biden remains the top pick nationally for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.Biden was backed by 28% of voters surveyed. His closest rivals were Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders -- the top choice of 21% of respondents -- and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was favored by 18%. Biden, Warren and Sanders were the only three candidates to win double-digit support.Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg garnered 4% support, behind South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who drew 9%, and Senator Amy Klobuchar, who registered 5%.Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.The poll of 410 registered voters who said they would participate in a Democratic caucus or primary was conducted Dec. 14-17 and has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 4.84 percentage points. -- Kathleen MillerBooker to Air His First TV Ad During Debate (7 a.m.)Cory Booker didn’t make the cut for the Democratic debate Thursday, but he still wants voters to hear his message thanks to a television ad that will be broadcast during the event.The campaign commercial, entitled “Together,” centers on Booker’s intention to stay in the race even though he won’t be on the debate stage at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. It will appear in the four early voting states -- Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada -- and in New York City, Washington and Los Angeles.“You’re only going to see this ad once because I’m not a billionaire,” Booker says. “I won’t be on tonight’s debate stage, but that’s OK because I’m going to win this election anyway.”To be eligible to take part in the sixth Democratic debate, candidates had to receive donations from 200,000 individuals and reach 4% in four polls approved by the Democratic National Committee or 6% in two-DNC approved polls of early states. Booker obtained the donor minimum but did not reach 4% in any DNC-approved polls by the deadline. -- Emma KineryCOMING UPBiden, Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer will participate in the final Democratic presidential debate of 2019 in Los Angeles on Thursday.(Michael Bloomberg is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)\--With assistance from Emma Kinery, Kathleen Miller, Mark Niquette and Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou.To contact the reporters on this story: Justin Sink in Washington at jsink1@bloomberg.net;Jennifer Jacobs in Washington at jjacobs68@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, John HarneyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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Erdogan says 50,000 Syrians fleeing Idlib to Turkey

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday that 50,000 people were fleeing Syria's northwestern region of Idlib to Turkey, and slammed Muslim nations for not supporting his plans to resettle refugees in other parts of north Syria. Turkey currently hosts some 3.7 million Syrian refugees, the largest refugee population in the world, and fears another influx from the Idlib region, where up to 3 million Syrians live in the last significant insurgent-held swathe of territory.

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'Spouting Russian propaganda': Nadler calls out Gohmert

Chairman Nadler accused Rep. Louie Gohmert of "spouting Russian propaganda on the floor of the House" ahead of the impeachment vote on Wednesday.

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Former Sri Lankan minister arrested over 2016 road accident

Sri Lankan police arrested a former cabinet minister on Wednesday over a 2016 traffic accident in which a young man riding a motorcycle was seriously injured, state media reported. The former minister has called the government's decision to reopen a criminal case that had been closed politically motivated. A court ordered Patali Champika Ranawaka detained pending an investigation.

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Trump impeachment: More stonewalling likely as White House says Senate can’t subpoena senior advisers

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has already rejected Democrats' call to hear from several witnesses at Donald Trump's upcoming impeachment trial, but it may not matter if Democrats can find enough Republican votes to allow witness testimony.Even in the event that the Senate decides to hear from the witnesses requested by Democrats - including White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, office of management and budget official Michael Duffey, Mulvaney aide Robert Blair, and former national security advisor John Bolton - the White House intends to continue blocking them from testifying.

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Gunman attacks Russian security service HQ in Moscow, kills employee

A gunman opened fire on the headquarters of Russia's FSB security service in central Moscow on Thursday evening in a rare shooting incident that the FSB said had left at least one of its employees dead. The attack happened shortly after President Vladimir Putin had delivered his annual news conference and while he was speaking at a Kremlin event designed to celebrate the work of the security services. The FSB suspected the attack may have been planned to coincide with Putin's evening speech, a source close to the FSB told Reuters.

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China commissions first home-built aircraft carrier

President Xi Jinping attended the commissioning of China’s first entirely home-built aircraft carrier, underscoring the country's rise as a regional naval power at a time of tensions with the U.S. and others over trade, Taiwan and the South China Sea. The Shandong is the second Chinese aircraft carrier to enter service after the Liaoning, which was originally purchased as a hulk from Ukraine and entirely refurbished .

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Trump impeachment news – live: ‘Lawless criminal’ must be removed from White House by Senate, president’s former aide says after historic vote

Donald Trump has been impeached by the House of Representatives in a humiliating rebuke after being found guilty of abusing the power of his office in attempting to extort a political favour from Ukraine and obstructing the subsequent congressional investigation into his conduct.After eight hours of heated debate, Democrats and Republicans voted largely along party lines in the opposition-led lower chamber of Congress as the president himself raged into the abyss at one of his trademark rallies in Battle Creek, Michigan.

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Congress slashes funding for the Navy’s LCS sensors — again

Appropriators are set to slice 77 percent from the Navy’s mine countermeasures module, shuffling part of it to another section of the budget.

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Ukraine Tycoon’s Lawyer Says He, Not His Client, Lent to Parnas

(Bloomberg) -- Ukrainian billionaire Dmitry Firtash had no part in a disputed $1 million bank deposit to an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani, the Ukrainian’s lawyer said.But the statement issued by the lawyer on Wednesday also contradicted key defense claims that the Giuliani ally, Lev Parnas, wasn’t a party to the real-estate loan and therefore not under any obligation to disclose the funds to prosecutors.The lawyer, Ralph Oswald Isenegger, said that he, and not his client, was the source of the money. In a written statement, he said he paid five installments of $200,000 each in September to the bank account of Parnas’s wife, Svetlana.Parnas is a Ukrainian-born U.S. citizen who’s charged with seeking to launder foreign money into U.S. elections. He was allowed to await trial while detained at home, but prosecutors have sought to revoke his bail, asserting he failed to disclose his full financial picture and was a flight risk. Prosecutors have said the $1 million came from a Russian account, raising questions about the source of funding for efforts by Parnas, Giuliani and others to find information in Ukraine to aid President Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign.“This was a personal business transaction between myself and Lev and Svetlana Parnas,” Isenegger wrote. “The funds were entirely mine, and I was not acting in this matter at the request of or on behalf of any of my clients or indeed anyone else.”Parnas, through his lawyer, has said the cash was a loan for his wife to buy real estate and had nothing to do with him. Isenegger, in his statement, echoed the explanation that the deposit was a real-estate loan, but he undercut the assertions that it was unrelated to Parnas. “Lev and his wife Svetlana asked me if I could lend them one million dollars for purchasing a home in Florida,” the lawyer wrote.Isenegger and prosecutors in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment. In a statement issued through a spokesman on Wednesday, Firtash said he had no knowledge of the transaction. Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph Bondy, didn’t respond to a request for comment.The lawyer’s statement was the latest twist concerning the payment, which was first disclosed in court filings a week ago. Bondy, Parnas’s lawyer, has said the payment was a loan to Parnas’s wife, Svetlana. Svetlana Parnas is a stay-at-home mother, according to prosecutors. The loan was unsecured.Shortly after the loan was issued in September, some $200,000 of the proceeds were paid into an escrow account as an initial payment for a home in Boca Raton, Florida, that Svetlana Parnas was in contract to purchase, according to court filings. The sale price was $4.5 million, and the all-cash transaction was to be completed the following month. Prosecutors said they didn’t know where the balance of the money would come from, since Parnas and his wife had said their cash assets totaled about $450,000. The deal has since been abandoned.The payment was made just before Parnas said he wouldn’t comply with congressional subpoenas seeking information about the Trump administration’s activities in Ukraine that are now the subject of impeachment proceedings in Washington.Parnas had been working with Giuliani to dig up political dirt in Ukraine on Hunter Biden and his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s top Democratic rival in next year’s presidential election. He had also been hired as a translator by Firtash’s U.S. legal team.In October, the month after the loan was paid out, Parnas was arrested with a business associate, Igor Fruman, at a New York airport as they sought to leave the country with one-way plane tickets. Federal prosecutors in New York charged the pair with campaign finance violations including hiding the true source of financial contributions.Bondy said in a court filing last week that the funds didn’t belong to Lev Parnas, noting that they were wired into his wife’s account and distinguishing them from his own financial resources that he was required to disclose to the government.In court, Bondy said that Parnas didn’t disclose the loan on government forms “because it doesn’t ask him to disclose anything pertaining to his spouse” and that there was a “clear and unequivocal chain of communication” indicating that the loan was being given to her.But the statement by Isenegger, the Firtash lawyer, said that Lev Parnas was involved in procuring it and described him as a party to the transaction. He said that “Mr. Parnas” asked him to keep the deal confidential and that “neither Mr. Parnas nor his wife” has responded to his requests since he began seeking return of the funds.Prosecutors and the judge in the case, J. Paul Oetken of Manhattan federal court, expressed skepticism that the loan was extended only to Svetlana Parnas. The judge declined to revoke Parnas’s bail after a two-hour hearing Tuesday. But in his findings, he relied at least in part on the assertion that the money belonged to Svetlana Parnas.“There is nothing that clearly indicates that he had a duty to disclose his wife’s assets,” the judge said in his ruling from the bench. “There is certainly lots of suspicious information here about the fact that this was, as a practical matter and in reality, Mr. Parnas’s money as opposed to his wife’s, but I don’t think that that’s a clear and intentional misstatement such that bail should be revoked at this point.”To contact the reporter on this story: Christian Berthelsen in New York at cberthelsen1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, David S. Joachim, Peter JeffreyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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Doctor's report calls 77-year-old Biden 'healthy, vigorous'

Joe Biden is "healthy, vigorous" and "fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency," according to a doctor's report released Tuesday by the 77-year-old former vice president. Dr. Kevin O'Connor, who has been Biden's primary care physician since 2009, writes in a three-page note that the Democratic presidential candidate is in overall good shape — he’s trim, exercises and keeps his cholesterol at healthy levels with the use of a statin medication. Since 2003, Biden has had episodes of atrial fibrillation, a type of irregular heartbeat that's potentially serious but treatable.

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Saudi Arabia, Pakistan snub Malaysia's Muslim summit

KUALA LUMPUR/RIYADH (Reuters) - Leaders from many Islamic nations including Turkey and Iran gathered in Malaysia on Wednesday to tackle issues that have agitated Muslims worldwide, but the summit was snubbed by Saudi Arabia and its close ally Pakistan. At a welcome dinner, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said the Kuala Lumpur Summit would aim to "do something" to improve the lives of Muslims and overcome Islamophobia. "We need to find a way to address our shortcomings, our dependency on non-Muslims to protect ourselves against the enemies of Islam," said Mahathir, 94, the world's oldest head of government and one of its most outspoken.

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House Democrat calls on McConnell to recuse himself and threatens mistrial

Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., has called on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to recuse himself from the impending impeachment trial over his admission that he would not be an “impartial juror” and his claim that a trial would be politically motivated.

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Postal worker accused of selling crack out of mail truck on delivery routes

Darcy Spangler, 52, appeared in Ashtabula Municipal Court in Ashtabula, Ohio, on Wednesday on charges of trafficking in drugs, court records show.

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Israel strikes Gaza after rocket attack: military

Israeli warplanes attacked an arms plant in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip early Thursday, after Palestinian militants in the enclave fired a rocket at Israel,the army said. "Overnight, a rocket was launched from the Gaza Strip at Israeli territory," an English-language army statement said. There were no immediate reports of casualties in the overnight rocket attack or the air strike that followed.

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Thomas Elsaesser, Film Scholar With a Broad View, Dies at 76

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California Prosecutor Finds No Crime in Santa Anita Horse Racing Deaths

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