Big Time News Blog: 01/15/20

Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Delivery of the articles set the stage for the Senate to start the trial.

By BY MICHAEL D. SHEAR from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/371IK4M

Zion Williamson Seems Just Days From His Official N.B.A. Debut

By BY SOPAN DEB from NYT Sports https://ift.tt/2QUGzue

Are Americans Ready to Elect a Woman President?

By BY MICHELLE COTTLE from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/2NvgEHz

Bailout Up to $500 Million Proposed for Taxi Drivers Trapped in Loans

By BY BRIAN M. ROSENTHAL from NYT New York https://ift.tt/2FRbtx5

Some Democrats should recuse themselves from the trial, a senator said.

By BY EMILY COCHRANE from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/36ZcZsX

They Were Going to Build a Wall at Hudson Yards. Then Came the Backlash.

By BY AZI PAYBARAH from NYT New York https://ift.tt/36Y4ZZh

Syria says its air defenses intercept attack on airbase

Syria’s air defenses confronted an aerial “aggression” from Israel that targeted an air base in the country's center late Tuesday, state media reported quoting a military official. The official quoted by the state news agency SANA said the attack targeted the T-4 air base in Homs province shortly after 10 p.m. local time. Israel has carried out dozens of airstrikes on Syria over the past years but it rarely comments on what it targets.

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Sanders-Warren Clash on Women Elevates Acrimony in Iowa Debate

(Bloomberg) -- Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren tried unsuccessfully to calm the waters Tuesday after a spat involving elitism, sexism and insinuations of lying, in a wide-ranging debate where the top candidates each enjoyed strong moments without yielding a clear winner.The clash between the progressives looms over a tight race 20 days before the Iowa caucuses after a recent Des Moines Register/CNN survey showed Sanders, Warren, Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg bunched up in a five-point spread at the front of the field.It was hard to see how anyone on stage at Drake University in Des Moines dramatically bettered their position heading into the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses. That’s good news for Sanders, who led one key Iowa poll, and Biden, who topped a second survey. Warren and Buttigieg, struggling to gain altitude in Iowa, held their own with crisp performances while taking some hits from rivals.When moderators raised the Sanders-Warren dispute, the uncomfortable smiles from the two candidates captured the feelings of many progressives who want the two to work together to block a moderate like Biden from winning the nomination.But both held to their contradictory stories about what happened in a private 2018 meeting between them. Sanders insisted he “didn’t say” a woman couldn’t win the presidency in 2020. Warren said she “disagreed” when Sanders told her that, before trying to pivot away by saying, “Bernie is my friend, and I’m not here to fight with Bernie.”Neither of the two wanted to prolong the topic, and yet it framed the early part of the debate and allowed each of the candidates — four men and two women — to lay out their cases to become the nominee. The spat dredged up old hostilities among mainstream Democratic figures who believe Sanders damaged Hillary Clinton in 2016 and potentially cost her the election.The tension between the two was evident afterward when Warren walked up to Sanders to talk, but declined to shake his hand when he offered it.”Bernie should have let this go,” former Clinton 2016 aide Jennifer Palmieri wrote on Twitter. She later added: “What we will likely remember most from this night is @ewarren and her well litigated exchange with @BernieSanders on electability. This is very tricky terrain for women candidates and she came out the winner.”President Donald Trump sought to fuel the divisions as he held a rally in Milwaukee at the same time as the debate. “She said that Bernie said a woman can’t win,” he said. “I don’t believe that Bernie said that. I really don’t. It’s not the kind of a thing he’d say.”And Warren tried to seize the moment to make her case to lead a majority-female party.“Look at the men on this stage — collectively they have lost 10 elections. The only people on this stage who have won every election they’ve run in are the women,” she said, drawing heavy applause and referring to herself and Senator Amy Klobuchar. Tom Steyer completed the six-person debate stage.The spat caused Sanders supporters to light up Twitter this week with the anti-Warren hashtags RefundWarren and ITrustBernie. It was clear Tuesday those animosities would linger.“Who does Warren think she will win over with this sexism attack on Sanders? I can promise you she has just rendered herself completely unacceptable to most Sanders supporters,” progressive commentator Krystal Ball tweeted during the debate.Other Democrats had a different view.“It’s not just about what may or may not have been said in this conversation. Bernie came into this race with a bit of a legacy — the Bernie Bros were known to have been horrible to women online,” Karen Finney, a former Clinton 2016 aide, said on CNN before the debate Tuesday, using a pejorative to describe Sanders’ most fervent backers.“The Bernie Bros, again — they’re pretty obnoxious. And they’re very sexist and misogynistic,” she said, adding that there are “a lot of women feeling pretty raw from 2016.”Charles Chamberlain, the chair of the liberal group Democracy for America, pleaded with the two to play nice.“Especially given how close the race remains just 20 days ahead of the first contest, it’s critical that progressives focus our fight for the Democratic nomination against candidates supported by the corporate wing, instead of fighting each other,” he said in a statement issued in the middle of the debate.Klobuchar, who desperately needs Iowa to catapult into the top tier, had an unremarkable night as she offered herself as a pragmatic Midwesterner.Michael Bloomberg, who is skipping the early states and polling fifth nationally, didn’t qualify for the debate under Democratic National Committee criteria because the billionaire is self-funding his campaign. He’s the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.(Adds one paragraph after sixth paragraph about post-debate chat between Sanders and Warren)To contact the reporter on this story: Sahil Kapur in Washington at skapur39@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Larry LiebertFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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Iran crown prince predicts regime will collapse within months

The heir of Iran's deposed monarchy predicted Wednesday that the clerical regime will collapse within months and urged Western powers not to negotiate with it. Reza Pahlavi said that major protests which erupted in November and again this month, after the accidental downing of a Ukrainian passenger jet, reminded him of the uprising that ousted his father in early 1979. The 59-year-old heir to the Peacock Throne, who has not been to Iran since he was a teenager, cited as evidence what he called an easing of fear among protesters and the growing distancing of self-described reformists from the Islamic regime.

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AOC is sounding the alarm about the rise of facial recognition: 'This is some real-life "Black Mirror" stuff'

When facial recognition is implemented, the software makes it easy for corporations or governments to identify people and track their movements.

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The Sanders campaign addresses that tense post-debate moment with Warren

What did Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) say to each other during their tense post-debate exchange?That remains a mystery, but Sanders' campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, has provided a bit more information, telling The Washington Post on Wednesday that Warren approached Sanders after the Democratic debate to "raise a concern."This exchange between Sanders and Warren became one of the evening's most talked-about moments, primarily because Warren seemed to rebuff Sanders as he reached out for a handshake. The two then shared a few words that couldn't be heard on television but that appeared far from friendly. Although billionaire Tom Steyer was standing nearby, he told CNN he didn't really listen to the conversation.After Warren raised this unspecified concern, Sanders said "let's talk about that later," Shakir told the Post.> Warren didn’t shake Bernie’s hand. I’d love to know what they said to each other here. DemDebate pic.twitter.com/qW39igCH7A> > — philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) January 15, 2020Although Shakir didn't explain what Warren's "concern" was, one would assume their conversation had something to do with their ongoing dispute about a 2018 conversation in which Warren claims Sanders said a woman couldn't be elected president in 2020. Warren said during Tuesday's debate she "disagreed" when Sanders allegedly said this, although she wasn't directly asked whether he did.Sanders has said he did bring up during the conversation with Warren that President Trump, a "sexist," would "weaponize whatever he could" in 2020. But he has denied claiming a woman couldn't win, saying during the debate, "Anybody who knows me knows that it’s incomprehensible that I would think that a woman cannot be president of the United States."More stories from theweek.com John Bolton will reportedly reveal some of what he knows about Trump's Ukraine scandal in his upcoming book 'Okay Boomer' was just used in a Supreme Court argument for the 1st time The paradox of Trump's trillion-dollar deficit

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Merkel to seek end to Huawei dispute in her conservative camp: sources

Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet senior conservative lawmakers on Thursday to resolve a dispute in her own party over whether to bar China's Huawei [HWT.UL] from the country's 5G network rollout, party sources said. Merkel's conservatives are divided on whether to support a proposal by their Social Democrat junior coalition partners that, if approved, would effectively shut out the Chinese technology giant from the network. Handelsblatt business daily was first to report on Wednesday the planned meeting between Merkel and senior conservative lawmakers.

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Bloomberg Vows to Ban Flavored E-Cigarettes, Fight Tobacco

(Bloomberg) -- Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg vowed Wednesday to ban all flavored e-cigarettes and move to reduce tobacco use and nicotine exposure.The former New York mayor said the move was necessary to protect children who he says are targeted by tobacco companies with products designed to attract them.“Today one in four high school students are addicted to vaping and it’s a brand new thing. It’s so bad,” he said on ABC’s “The View.”President Donald Trump made a similar pledge after a wave of respiratory illnesses and deaths linked to vaping, but later stepped back from the move, allowing menthol flavored e-cigarettes and any liquid flavorings that are not in a cartridge to remain on the market.”President Trump promised to remove flavored e-cigarettes from the market back in September, but instead he has bent over backwards to protect the tobacco lobby’s profits,” Bloomberg said in a statement released by his campaign. “We need a leader who will stand up to the industry and protect our children’s health.”Bloomberg released a new television ad faulting the Trump administration’s e-cigarette policy. He said he would direct the Food and Drug Administration to prohibit the sale of all flavored e-cigarettes and all menthol-flavored tobacco products, raise the federal cigarette tax by $1 per pack and increase taxes on other products like cigars and chewing tobacco.Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.(Updates with quote in third paragraph)To contact the reporter on this story: Magan Crane in Washington at mcrane19@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Michael ShepardFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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A GOP lawmaker and Purple Heart recipient gave Congress the 2-minute silent treatment over Iran

Brian Mast, a bomb disposal expert who lost both his legs in Afghanistan, used the silence to focus on US soldiers killed by Iranian proxies.

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U.S. Army chief of staff: Russia's hypersonic missiles are not 'game changing'

The U.S. Army’s top officer said Tuesday during an appearance in Washington, D.C., that he isn’t worried by Russia’s growing arsenal of hypersonic missiles.

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Philippine lawyer to withdraw ICC complaint against Duterte

A Philippines lawyer who filed a complaint at the International Criminal Court (ICC) accusing President Rodrigo Duterte of murder in a bloody anti-drugs crackdown said on Tuesday he will no longer pursue the case. The complaint filed by attorney Jude Sabio in 2017 is one of several communications to the court calling for Duterte's indictment over thousands of alleged extrajudicial killings during his campaign against narcotics. "I fervently request that it be expunged or erased from the record, and that it should not be used in any way in the ongoing preliminary examination," Sabio said in a 28-page letter addressed to ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda.

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Ukrainian prosecutor offered Giuliani associate a quid pro quo: Biden dirt for firing U.S. ambassador

It appears there's another documented quid pro quo tied to President Trump's efforts to procure from Ukraine some sort of damaging information about potential 2020 Democratic rival Joe Biden — or at least make it appear such evidence might exist. In a cache of documents released late Tuesday by House impeachment investigators, Ukraine's top prosecutor offered to hand Biden-linked information over to Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani if Trump pushed out U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.The documents are from Lev Parnas, a Russian-speaking Giuliani associate who helped Giuliani's Biden dirt-digging efforts in Ukraine. In handwritten notes on Ritz Carlton Vienna stationary, Parnas mentioned getting Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky "to annouce [sic] that the Biden case will be investigated," and it appears Yuri Lutsenko, the prosecutor general at the time, was ready to play ball."Lutsenko wanted to get rid of Yovanovitch," The Washington Post explains, "in part because she had been critical of his office and supported a quasi-independent anti-corruption bureau he despised.""If you don’t make a decision about Madam — you are bringing into question all my allegations. Including about B," Lutsenko wrote Parnas in a March 2019 text message translated from Russian. "Madam" is a reference to Yovanovitch and "B" means either Biden or Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that hired Hunter Biden. After Parnas told Lutsenko a few days later that "soon everything will turn around and we'll be on the right course," Lutsenko texted he had "testimony about transfers to B" and "copies of payments from Burisma to Senaca," referring to a consulting firm founded by Hunter Biden and fellow Burisma board member Devon Archer.Lutsenko also complained that Parnas "can't even get rid of" an unidentified female "fool," to which Parnas replied that she is "not a simple fool" and "she's not getting away." Yovanovitch was abruptly pulled from her job in April 2019 after a smear campaign pursued by Giuliani. Zelensky replaced Lutsenko in late August.More stories from theweek.com John Bolton will reportedly reveal some of what he knows about Trump's Ukraine scandal in his upcoming book 'Okay Boomer' was just used in a Supreme Court argument for the 1st time The paradox of Trump's trillion-dollar deficit