Painting found in Italian museum wall is stolen Klimt

A painting found stashed inside a wall at an Italian museum has been confirmed as the stolen "Portrait of a Lady" by Austria's Gustav Klimt, prosecutors said on Friday, two decades after the artwork went missing. The century-old painting was discovered concealed in an external wall by gardeners at the Ricci Oddi Gallery of Modern Art in Piacenza, northeast Italy, last month. "It is with no small emotion that I can tell you the work is authentic," prosecutor Ornella Chicca told reporters.

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Democrats release new debate qualification thresholds

Instead of just meeting a polling and donor threshold as required for previous debates, candidates now have an alternate way to participate

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Delta plane slides off taxiway amid winter storm; airlines issue travel advisories into weekend

Airlines are issuing travel waivers on account of a winter storm headed for much of the northern U.S. this weekend.

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Teens filmed 'fist bumping' after stabbing man to death

Two teenagers were filmed bumping fists shortly after they had stabbed an 18-year-old man to death in an unprovoked attack in London.

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Parnas communicated with Nunes aide about Ukraine, documents show

Lev Parnas, the indicted associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani who worked as his envoy in Ukraine, communicated with a top aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) about an effort to find damaging information on former Vice President Joe Biden, documents released Friday night by House Democrats revealed.The evidence shows Derek Harvey, a former White House official and top aide to Nunes, communicated extensively with Parnas and sought to speak with Ukrainian prosecutors who were giving Giuliani information about Biden, reports The Washington Post. The documents corroborate Parnas' own claims about Nunes' office's involvement in the scheme.Parnas has said President Trump and his associates were working to push Ukraine into announcing an investigation into Biden. The messages, the Post writes, "indicate Nunes' office was aware of the operation at the heart of impeachment proceedings against the president — and sought to use the information Parnas was gathering." Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, did not comment on the documents.Read more at The Washington Post and NBC News.More stories from theweek.com Trump is getting the band back together The Patriots only have one option French officials warn of violence from subgroups in protest movement

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U.S. sanctions Iranian commander over Mahshahr killings

The U.S. State Department said on Saturday it had imposed sanctions on a general of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who commanded units blamed for a massacre of protesters in November. The U.S. State Department has said previously it had received videos of the Revolutionary Guards opening fire without warning on protesters in Mahshahr county in southwest Iran.

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Liberia souring on George Weah at two-year mark

Dominic Kpadeh heaves a hammer over his head to crack a half-tonne rock in a northern suburb of Liberia's capital Monrovia, knowing his hard labour earns him far less than a year ago. Stories such as Kpadeh's are common in Liberia, where rampant inflation has left many people struggling and increasingly turning their anger on President George Weah. A former football icon whose goals for AC Milan and Paris St Germain dazzled fans, Weah came to power in January 2018, promising to invest in education and create jobs.

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A Climate Show Was Canceled. Then Came the Finger-Pointing.

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Starr Chamber: The Sequel

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Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr join Trump impeachment defense team

The legal team representing President Trump in his Senate impeachment trial will include some familiar faces, especially for regular viewers of Fox News.

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Khamenei: Iran gave U.S. 'slap on face', calls missile strikes 'day of God'

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a Friday sermon that Iran's missile strikes on U.S. targets in Iraq this month delivered a "slap on the face" to the United States, showing the Islamic Republic had divine support. During a spike in tension, Iran launched missiles at U.S. targets on Jan. 8 in response to a U.S. drone strike on Jan. 3 that killed Qassem Soleimeni, a powerful Iranian general who was close to Khamenei.

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Evelyn Yang, Andrew Yang's wife, said she was sexually assaulted by her OB-GYN during pregnancy

Evelyn Yang, the wife of 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang, says she was sexually assaulted by a doctor during her first pregnancy.

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Docs Show Parnas Helping Nunes Aide Set Up Interviews With Ex-Ukrainian Officials

New documents turned over to the House Judiciary Committee on Friday night include messages between Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas and Derek Harvey, an aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA). The Daily Beast was first to report that Parnas helped arrange meetings and calls in Europe for Harvey in 2018 to help the lawmaker's investigative work, and it appears the practice continued into 2019.The exchanges between Parnas and Harvey, which span several months in early 2019, show the two arranging several meetings and phone calls to discuss two claims that have been central to Trumpworld’s dirt-digging mission in Ukraine and the president’s subsequent impeachment: supposed corruption by former Vice President Joe Biden and a plot against Trump by Ukrainian officials during the 2016 election. “We need to set a time for Skype w your four people,” Harvey wrote in an April 2019 message to Parnas, apparently referring to former Ukrainian officials claiming to have information on Biden. “It looks like we can get all the interviews set up for Tuesday or Wednesday whatever works better for you,” Parnas wrote back.“Wednesday would be best here,” Harvey wrote. “It allows me to prep a staff lawyer to assist. Any suggested line of questions? Full names of who we will interview?”Parnas responded, “Sounds good will put together there (sic) names and questions that I recommend.”Parnas then sent Harvey a list of names including several widely discredited former Ukrainian officials who were shown to be in close contact with Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, for a dirt-digging mission against Biden that is at the heart of the impeachment. In addition to setting up interviews and arranging meetings, the messages between Parnas and Harvey also show the two exchanging several news articles critical of Biden and his son Hunter. In another message in March, Harvey appeared to task Parnas with doing research on claims the Ukrainian government worked with Hillary Clinton’s allies in 2016 to find compromising information on then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a conspiracy theory frequently espoused by Trump and his allies. Harvey also mentioned Parnas “working through (John) Solomon,” a former columnist at The Hill who had been in contact with Nunes, Giuliani, and Parnas. The Daily Beast reported that Solomon sent a version of his article last year to Parnas and Trumpworld lawyers Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing before it was published on the The Hill's website.A lawyer for Parnas, Ed MacMahon, told The Daily Beast previously that his client aided Nunes in arranging meetings and calls in Europe in 2018. Congressional records show Nunes, Harvey, and two of Nunes' other aides went to Europe in late 2018 for four days, using over $63,000 of government funds for the trip.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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After India's Amazon snub, Modi's party slams Bezos-owned Washington Post

Pakistan court jails dozens of Islamists over Asia Bibi protests

A Pakistani court has sentenced more than 80 Islamists to 55 years in prison each after protests linked to the 2018 acquittal of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, one of their senior leaders told AFP. The sentence -- an unusually harsh one in Pakistan, where blasphemy is an extremely sensitive issue -- was announced by a lower court in the garrison town of Rawalpindi on Thursday, said Pir Ejaz Ashrafi, a senior leader of the Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan (TLP).

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Trump Trial to Open With Questions Unanswered on Ukraine ‘Favor’

(Bloomberg) -- “Read the transcript!”That’s the rallying cry of President Donald Trump and supporters who say he did nothing wrong in the Ukraine impeachment saga.Democrats countered that the White House readout of Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president offers strong evidence of his guilt. The key line they point to is this: “I would like you to do us a favor,” Trump tells President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.With Trump set for trial starting Tuesday in the Senate after his impeachment in the House, that 16-minute call is Exhibit A for both the president and his opponents.Weeks of House testimony underscored that many of Trump’s aides and envoys were disturbed by the call and broader administration efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Democrat Joe Biden, including by withholding almost $400 million in assistance the ally desperately wanted to counter Russian aggression. Fiona Hill, the top National Security Council adviser on Russia at the time, said her boss, John Bolton, called the effort a “drug deal.”But the House proceedings didn’t answer all the questions about what happened. And even though the president blocked key witnesses from testifying and defied a subpoena for Ukraine-related documents, new allegations and evidence keep emerging.The impeachment debate ultimately revolves around whether the president’s request was an abuse of power -- co-opting a foreign power for political purposes -- or just an indelicate effort to get an ally to tackle corruption. Just this week, a nonpartisan congressional oversight agency ruled the aid freeze was illegal, a finding the White House immediately rejected.Here’s what’s still unknown going into the impeachment trial:Is there a ‘smoking gun’?Despite testimony from 17 witnesses in both private and public hearings, there’s still no ironclad proof that Trump personally ordered the aid to Ukraine withheld -- and an Oval Office meeting sought by Zelenkskiy unscheduled -- until the Ukrainian leader committed to the Biden investigation.Officials who could speak to that issue -- acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and Bolton -- effectively refused to testify in the House impeachment hearings. Bolton now suggests he’d be open to testifying in the Senate, but Trump has said he’ll claim executive privilege if his former aide tries.The accusation of a quid pro quo was actually bolstered by Mulvaney, who told reporters pressing him about the Ukraine allegations that, yes, the president was using foreign policy to pursue his domestic political needs.“We do that all the time with foreign policy,” Mulvaney said. “And I have news for everybody. Get over it. There is going to be political influence in foreign policy.”Mulvaney later said his comments were taken out of context, but the damage was done.Will new evidence be admissible?House Democrats chose not to challenge Trump’s refusal to allow key witnesses to testify, which could have tied up the impeachment process in the courts for months. Instead, they made the White House refusal to cooperate the core of the second article of impeachment referred to the Senate, calling it obstruction of Congress.But even as House Democrats were preparing to ceremoniously march those two articles of impeachment over to the Senate, information damaging to the president continued to emerge.Among the most explosive new revelations are claims by Lev Parnas, the indicted associate of Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who was running a parallel U.S. foreign policy when it came to Ukraine. With Parnas’s help, Giuliani pressed for months to get Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador in Ukraine, ousted.“President Trump knew exactly what was going on,” Parnas told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Wednesday night. “I wouldn’t do anything without the consent of Rudy Giuliani or the president.”The president says he doesn’t know Parnas, dismissing a series of photos of the two of them together as just the typical glad-handing all political leaders go through at public events.What is U.S. policy toward Ukraine now, and who controls it?One of the most revelatory themes of the impeachment trial was how Giuliani, claiming he was acting with Trump’s authority, wrested U.S. policy toward Ukraine away from the career diplomats and political appointees who were nominally in charge of it.Giuliani has shown no sign of backing down from his pursuit of Biden, and his attacks on Ambassador Yovanovitch: Soon after the impeachment hearings ended in the House, he flew back to Ukraine to press ahead with what he said were new lines of investigation.And while Pompeo insists he’s proud of U.S. policy and its focus on a strong partnership with Ukraine, the president’s own convictions haven’t changed a bit.“The tragedy is the president has not changed his view,” said Mark David Simakovsky, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “If anything, he’s dug in further.”How much did Russia know about -- and fuel -- Trump’s efforts?Intelligence experts were aghast when Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, revealed in his testimony that he had called Trump on an unsecured mobile phone line from a cafe in Kyiv. The conversation was loud enough for others at the table to listen in. And that was just one of several phone calls he made to the president discussing their strategy toward Ukraine.It’s highly likely Russia was tracking those calls -- as well as the many communications from Giuliani and his own associates -- and looking for an advantage in its standoff with Ukraine.“You have Rudy on an open line, Sondland on an open line,” said Andrew Weiss, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Russia must have been abundantly aware of how the Americans were cutting the Ukrainians free.”In addition to the unsupported allegation that Biden intervened in Ukraine to prevent a corruption investigation of his son -- who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company -- Giuliani and Trump have entertained a conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election to help Democrat Hillary Clinton. That’s the reverse of the finding by U.S. intelligence that Russia meddled to help Trump.It’s also widely accepted that Russians helped sow U.S. divisions over matters like race and gun violence heading into the 2016 campaign. Did they do the same with Trump and Ukraine looking ahead to 2020?How will it end?Impeachment supporters would need 67 votes in the Senate to convict Trump, which almost certainly won’t happen. No Republican in the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump, and while some in the Senate may agree to allow new witnesses like Bolton to testify, the threshold for convicting Trump for what the Constitution calls “high crimes and misdemeanors” is high.Regardless, Democrats say it’s their duty to carry forward, and they seem to hope that the case against Trump will help sway voters in November.“No president should be getting away with what the president, President Trump, has been getting away with,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who oversaw Trump’s impeachment, said Thursday after the articles against him were delivered to the Senate. The trial starts Tuesday.To contact the reporter on this story: Nick Wadhams in Washington at nwadhams@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, ;Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@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 leader's speech fails to quell plane anger

Some Iranians reacted angrily Friday to a speech by the country's supreme leader, which they said sought to downplay days of protests after a tension-filled month in the Islamic republic. "He didn't even try to calm the people and totally ignored the protesters," said one activist in Iran. Protests erupted after the Iranian government admitted to having accidentally shot down a Ukrainian jet on January 8, killing all 176 people on board.

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Migrants enter slowly at Guatemala-Mexico border after scuffles

Central American migrants entered Mexico from Guatemala in small groups on Saturday after brief clashes earlier in the day when dozens of people tried to force their way across the border and were pushed back by Mexican security forces.

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Town on edge in Colombia after 5 killed, 2 vehicles burned

A remote town was on edge Friday after at least five people were found shot to death, highlighting Colombia's struggle to bring peace to rural areas where drug crops are abundant and illegal armed groups are active. The killings happened overnight in an isolated part of the Jamundi municipality in southwestern Colombia and also left two vehicles incinerated, officials said. It was the third massacre in Jamundi in the past year.

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Ten charred bodies found in vehicle in violence-plagued Mexican state

Mexican prosecutors are investigating the discovery of a burned-out vehicle containing the charred bodies of 10 people in the southwestern state of Guerrero, authorities said late on Friday. Police made the grisly discovery on a country road in the municipality of Chilapa de Alvarez after locals saw the vehicle on fire and alerted authorities, state security spokesman Roberto Alvarez said in a statement published on Facebook.

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Watch live: SpaceX is about to blow up a rocket in a crucial test to show NASA that its spaceship ready to launch astronauts

Elon Musk's SpaceX is going to make one of its own rocket boosters explode to prove that its Crew Dragon spaceship is ready to send people to space.

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Fewer Americans are binge-drinking, but those who do are drinking more per session

New CDC data shows binge-drinking is declining, but American adults who do drink heavily are consuming 12% more alcohol per session.

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Republicans Melt Down as Evidence of Trump’s Guilt Piles Up

If you doubt Republicans are facing immense pressure these days, consider Sen. Martha McSally’s behavior. Asked by respected, mild-mannered CNN reporter Manu Raju if she would consider new evidence during the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump, the vulnerable senator from Arizona snapped back: “You’re a liberal hack—I’m not talking to you. You’re a liberal hack.”Regardless of whether new post-House impeachment revelations are introduced in the Senate trial, the drip-drip-drip has created a lose-lose proposition for Republicans who face tough electoral crosswinds in 2020. They can defend the indefensible, or they can risk invoking the wrath of their president. (Clearly, McSally has decided her best bet is to avoid the latter.)But as evidence mounts, McSally also risks alienating Arizonans who elected a maverick named John McCain and aren’t looking to send a Trump toady to Washington. Kellyanne Conway Melts Down Under Grilling by Fox NewsAs the Senate heads toward the formal impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump on Tuesday, text messages and documents provided by Lev Parnas, as well as a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report showing that the White House broke the law by withholding funds from Ukraine, cast a pall over Republican efforts to pretend this is merely a witch hunt. Of course, Republicans who do not face these crosswinds have different incentives. Trump can lose the popular vote and still win the Electoral College, by narrowly holding Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by the skin of his teeth. He does that, potentially, by holding his base. But that would be cold comfort for Republicans trying to hold Senate seats in places like Maine (Collins) and Arizona (McSally), and also states like Colorado and North Carolina. With a different leader, these vulnerable senators might be afforded the opportunity to subtly distance themselves from this president. But Donald Trump demands complete loyalty and attempts to walk the line between appeasing the Trump-loyal GOP base and wooing suburban swing voters are being made impossible by fellow Republican senators like Rand Paul, who, in the words of Politico, is “vowing to squeeze vulnerable GOP incumbents” if they support procedural motions to allow for the calling of witnesses during Trump’s impeachment trial. “If you vote against Hunter Biden, you’re voting to lose your election, basically. Seriously. That’s what it is,” Paul said Wednesday. “If you don’t want to vote and you think you’re going to have to vote against Hunter Biden, you should just vote against witnesses, period.” With friends like these...For now, at least, the pressure campaign seems to be working. Partisanship is a powerful drug, and when the heat is turned up, more often than not, politicians revert to the safe confines of their base for protection. This explains why McSally, a vulnerable Republican who can’t afford to be seen as a Trump quisling, is suddenly acting… like Trump! It also explains why, presented with revelations of what might be rightly seen as blockbuster evidence that Marie Yovanovitch was under surveillance by Trump and Rudy Giuliani’s henchmen in Ukraine, moderate Maine Sen. Susan Collins’ first reaction was to... blame Congress!Neither McSally nor Collins have, in the past, been considered particularly Trumpy. That’s why their defensive behavior is especially revealing. Despite the constant revelation of new, damning evidence as the impeachment trial kicks off, Republicans have cast their lot with this president and his base. This was recently driven home to me by the analysis of a man I once considered to be a straight-shooting, center-right journalist. Though largely subsumed by an avalanche of news about Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas, the arrest of Michael Avenatti, and the final Democratic primary debate before the Iowa caucuses, a comment made by Fox News’ Brit Hume deserves more attention: “Let's assume… just for the sake of discussion, that John Bolton comes in and he says, 'Yeah, the president wanted the Bidens investigated and he withheld the aid for a time to try to get that done.’ I don't think very many Republican senators are going to say that they think Trump did that or that he's guilty of that."This, of course, was an amazing admission. Put aside the fact that Hume doesn’t seem outraged by any of this. His analysis (correct, I think), is that even if John Bolton (John Bolton!) testifies that Trump used the power and prestige of the presidency (not to mention our tax dollars) to extort the president of Ukraine into announcing an investigation into the Bidens, that most Republican senators wouldn’t believe it—or wouldn’t care. Now ask yourself, how does that analysis comport with the oath that senators took on Thursday, which states that “in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, president of the United States, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws: So help me God”?Yeah...I suppose it’s possible that at least four Republicans will, in fact, vote to allow witnesses, and that one of those witnesses will reveal something that is so explosive that 20 Republicans, having taken that oath, are forced to finally, reluctantly, cut Trump loose. It just seems hard—almost impossible—to imagine what in the world could be so horrible. Martha McSally and Susan Collins are proof positive that even the “thoughtful” Republicans are so desperate to defend this president that they are taking a page out of his playbook of projection and prevarication. Trump corrupts! 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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