| Nonstop violence as Baltimore nears record homicide rate Posted: 25 Dec 2019 04:24 AM PST  Baltimore could wrap up 2019 with its highest per-capita homicide rate on record as killings of adults and minors alike for drugs, retribution, money or no clear reason continue to add up and city officials appear unable to stop the violence. With just over 600,000 residents, Baltimore's homicide rate would reach approximately 57 per 100,000 residents if the death toll reaches 342. "It's a major concern for me, not just as a hopeful man but as a citizen of Baltimore who grew up in inner city Baltimore," said Carmichael "Stokey" Cannady, a reformed drug dealer turned community activist who wants to be mayor.
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| Khashoggi's fiancee says execution of those convicted would conceal truth Posted: 24 Dec 2019 02:47 AM PST  The fiancee of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi described the sentencing of five people to death in relation to the killing as unfair and invalid, adding that their execution would further conceal the truth. Khashoggi disappeared after going to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018, to obtain documents for his planned wedding. A U.N. investigator accused Riyadh of making a "mockery" of justice by exonerating senior figures who may have ordered the killing.
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| Fired FBI official says government withholding evidence in suit Posted: 25 Dec 2019 12:50 AM PST  Andrew McCabe says his firing is part of President Trump's plan to rid the agency of leaders he perceives as disloyal to him.
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| A major Jewish group slammed Rudy Giuliani for saying George Soros, who survived the Holocaust, is 'hardly a Jew' Posted: 24 Dec 2019 02:03 AM PST  The Anti-Defamation League said comments from Giuliani — Donald Trump's lawyer — about George Soros could serve as a dog-whistle to anti-Semites.
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| Study Finds Immigration Will Shift Electoral College in Favor of Democrats Posted: 23 Dec 2019 09:15 PM PST  As the 2020 census approaches, the Center for Immigration Studies conducted the study to predict what the Electoral College map will look like after the counting is done.
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| At least 11 people have died in the Philippines after drinking coconut wine — a potent beverage about 4 times stronger than regular wine Posted: 24 Dec 2019 11:03 AM PST  Lambanog is made from distilled coconut sap and usually contains between 40% and 45% alcohol, making it much stronger than beer and regular wine.
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| World's tallest geyser breaks eruption record, stunning Yellowstone visitors, scientists Posted: 24 Dec 2019 03:39 PM PST  Steamboat Geyser in Yellowstone National Park blew past its yearly eruption record in 2019, shooting up water 47 times, indicating an active period.
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| U.S. considers sending Mexican migrants to Guatemala Posted: 24 Dec 2019 09:34 PM PST  The Trump administration is weighing the possibility of sending Mexican asylum-seekers to Guatemala, which has seen hundreds of thousands of its own citizens trek north in the past year.
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| The Surveillance State Quietly Lost a Major Court Case Posted: 24 Dec 2019 01:31 AM PST  Republicans are publicly howling at the U.S. surveillance panopticon now that it ensnared Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. But it's hard to believe they'll do much to actually constrain it. When they controlled Congress, whatever Trump-prompted hesitancy Republicans had about the government's broadest and most intrusive activities dissolved when it was time to renew the authorities underlying them for another five years. They joined congressional Democrats in resurrecting those authorities, continuing an act of genuine bipartisanship that ravenously eats away at Americans' freedom.Relief may come instead from the courts. A little-noticed ruling earlier this month from a federal appellate court took a modest step toward curbing the FBI's practice of searching—warrantless—for Americans' data inside the National Security Agency's dragnets ostensibly aimed at foreigners. Congress may be disinclined to close what's known as the "backdoor search provision," but there's a renewed chance the courts might. In September 2011, authorities arrested Albanian citizen and Brooklyn resident Agron Hasbajrami at Kennedy Airport. Hasbajrami had a one-way ticket to Turkey and, prosecutors said, a plan to continue on to Pakistan to pursue jihad. Facing federal charges, Hasbajrami asked prosecutors if evidence against him derived from warrantless surveillance. In secret, they had collected Hasbajrami's emails through surveillance resulting from Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which permits the NSA to collect massive amounts of internet communications and associated data, including from Americans' international conversations, all without judicial approval or individual suspicion. Once obtained, the feds applied for a FISA warrant on Hasbajrami, thereby laundering their illicit surveillance for use in prosecuting him. Send The Daily Beast a TipThe government, following a practice of not revealing how such surveillance impacts criminal prosecutions, deceitfully neglected to tell Hasbajrami how they got his emails in the first place. As a result, Hasbajrami pleaded guilty in 2012 and began serving a 16-year sentence for material support to terrorism. But after the 2013 revelations of mass surveillance Edward Snowden provided to The Guardian and The Washington Post, the Justice Department revealed to Hasbajrami that it had lied to him. Hasbajrami argued that he had been denied critical information underlying his decision to plead guilty—as well as a shot at arguing his prosecution was unconstitutional—withdrew his plea, and sought to suppress the ill-gotten evidence. The case made its way to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which issued its ruling on Dec. 18. Judges in the case did not deal anything close to a death blow to Section 702. But, in a first for a federal appellate court, the judges found that warrantlessly searching through the NSA's Section 702 databases, as the FBI and the CIA are permitted to do, "could violate the Fourth Amendment, and thus require the suppression of evidence." Considering themselves without sufficient information to rule on the merits, they instructed the district court to investigate whether "such querying was reasonable." That's a far cry from stopping either the NSA's warrantless mass collection of internet data or the FBI's warrantless searches of what the NSA collects. It's uncertain what the district court will ascertain. But the appellate-court ruling is a step toward judicially mandated constraints on, at least, the downstream effects of such surveillance, and those effects include locking people up, so civil libertarians took what they could get. "Critically, the court holds that the government does not have carte blanche to amass Americans' emails and phone calls and search through them at will," noted the ACLU's Patrick Toomey, who submitted a brief in the case. The ruling comes after the secret spy panel known as the FISA Court ruled that the FBI's use of the backdoor search provision is overbroad, abusive and illegal. On one single day in December 2017, according to the court, the FBI conducted 6,800 searches through NSA databases of ostensibly foreign information using Americans' Social Security numbers. More broadly, the FBI's searches, the court found, were not "reasonably designed" to find evidence of crime, but were instead fishing expeditions. The total number of Americans surveilled remains unknown. The revelation that the FBI abused the backdoor-search provision made no political impact, as it concerned millions of Americans not named Donald Trump and its major effects will be felt by Muslims. Along with the Hasbajrami ruling, it highlights how the erosion of Americans' privacy, at scale, occurs with vastly fewer safeguards than the process to surveil Carter Page, a Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser who had been proximate to Russian intelligence for years.The FBI had to detail for the FISA Court why it believed Page was a legitimate target for foreign-agent surveillance and do so every 90 days for as long as it wished the surveillance to continue. In practice, Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz found, the applications to the FISA Court on Page contained material flaws, such as the omission of evidence that undercut the government's basis for the surveillance. As egregious as the FBI's manipulation of that process was in Page's case, no such process applies for surveillance under Section 702, which affects orders of magnitude more people. The director of national intelligence and the attorney general merely submit annual guidelines to the FISA Court purporting to describe how the mass surveillance will unfold. The government needs neither probable cause nor reasonable suspicion that any of the millions of people caught in the NSA dragnet committed any wrongdoing—only confidence that the supposed "target" of the surveillance is reasonably believed to be a foreigner overseas. Nor does the FBI require any judicial approval for any of its searches for Americans' data in the NSA digital storehouses. The appellate court in the Hasbajrami case called it "programmatic pre-clearance" for surveillance on a scale unthinkable even a generation ago. This sort of surveillance has proven a fixture of contemporary American life, however undetected it typically goes. Attempts at modifying it or abolishing it, launched by the civil-libertarian minorities of both parties, typically fall short. A recent effort at abolishing a highly abused domestic phone-data surveillance program wrapped into the PATRIOT Act was obviated by a Congressional budget deal that kept that and three other expiring PATRIOT provisions alive until March. One of the few consistent congressional opponents of overbroad surveillance is Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the intelligence committee who has fought the backdoor-search provision since its inception. "I'm glad some of my pro-surveillance colleagues are now interested in protecting Americans against unnecessary government surveillance. But anyone who has concerns about warrants overseen by a judge should be far more worried by backdoor searches of vast numbers of Americans' communications—searches performed without any court order whatsoever," Wyden told The Daily Beast. "When Sen. [Rand] Paul and I tried to reform this program last year, these same members voted against even modest reforms to protect Americans' rights. Let's be sure that protecting civil liberties applies to all Americans, not just Donald Trump and his cronies."Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet 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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| US national security adviser warns UK about China's Huawei: 'They are just going to steal wholesale state secrets' Posted: 24 Dec 2019 08:04 AM PST  The US has urged Britain not to allow China's Huawei into its 5G telecommunications networks, claiming it would "steal wholesale state secrets".Robert O'Brien, the US national security adviser, said the the presence of the telecoms giant would represent a direct threat to Britain's domestic and foreign intelligence agencies – MI5 and M16.
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| Russia Wants "A Sixth-Generation Strategic Bomber" By 2040 Posted: 24 Dec 2019 05:39 AM PST  Moscow talks big, but will it actually come to pass?
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| 9 Buildings That Prove Sustainable Architecture and High Design Are a Perfect Pair Posted: 25 Dec 2019 05:00 AM PST |
| British teen who died on school trip to New York City named by police Posted: 24 Dec 2019 07:44 AM PST  U.S. authorities have named the British schoolgirl who died last week on a trip to New York City. The New York Police Department identified the 17-year-old student as Anastasia Uglow, according to Bristol Live.
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| Pope offers hope against darkness in Christmas Day message Posted: 25 Dec 2019 03:52 AM PST  Pope Francis offered a Christmas message of hope Wednesday against darkness that cloaks conflicts and relationships in large parts of the world from the Middle East to the Americas to Africa. The traditional "Urbi et Orbi'' ("to the city and to the world'') Christmas message has become an occasion for popes to address suffering in the world and press for solutions. Francis was flanked by Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino, president of the papal council for migrants, and Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, the pope's official almsgiver.
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| Philippine typhoon Phanfone ruins Christmas for travelers, evacuees Posted: 24 Dec 2019 11:19 PM PST  Christmas turned to chaos for many holiday observers in the central Philippines as a typhoon with strong winds and heavy rains destroyed homes, cut off power and stranded travelers, disaster officials said on Wednesday. Typhoon Phanfone, rated category 2 by Tropical Storm Risk, was packing maximum sustained winds of 120 km per hour (75 miles per hour) with gusts up to 150 kph when it made landfall in the eastern province of Samar on Tuesday, weather and disaster officials said. More than 4,000 people have been evacuated in the Eastern Visayas region of the central Philippines, disaster officials said, although no deaths have been reported.
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| Cartoon Muslims in India publicity blitz after deadly protest Posted: 23 Dec 2019 11:40 AM PST  India's ruling party launched a video with animated Muslim characters on social media Monday in a publicity blitz aiming to bust "myths" around a new citizenship law that has sparked deadly protests. The law has stoked concerns that Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government wants to marginalise India's Muslim minority. Twenty-five people have died in protests so far, but demonstrations took place Monday in Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi with no violence reported.
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| House lawyers leave door open to new articles of impeachment Posted: 24 Dec 2019 07:54 PM PST  In a federal appeals court filing, House lawyers said testimony from Don McGahn could provide new evidence President Trump committed additional impeachable offenses.
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| Rivet Joint and Cobra Ball: The Electronic Spy Planes Watching For North Korea's “Christmas Gift” Posted: 24 Dec 2019 05:52 AM PST  How the U.S. military can study Kim's latest ICBM, IRBM or whatever other presents he has for America.
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| Rudy Giuliani claims Soros is 'hardly a Jew' in rambling new interview Posted: 23 Dec 2019 01:55 PM PST  Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has stirred anger online by claiming he is "more of a Jew" than 89-year-old Holocaust survivor George Soros.
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| New Boeing 737 MAX documents show 'very disturbing' employee concerns: U.S. House aide Posted: 24 Dec 2019 09:56 AM PST  Boeing Co documents under review by a U.S. congressional panel appear to point to a "very disturbing" picture of commentary from the planemaker's employees over the grounded 737 MAX aircraft, a congressional aide said on Tuesday. The documents were submitted to the House of Representatives transportation infrastructure committee and the Federal Aviation Administration on Monday, the same day Boeing announced the firing of chief executive Dennis Muilenburg amid a crisis over the handling of the aftermath of two fatal crashes. The best-selling 737 MAX has been grounded since March.
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| Pete Buttigieg says he's sticking with campaign messaging despite new criticisms Posted: 23 Dec 2019 02:09 PM PST  Buttigieg wrapped a trip around central Iowa days after a Democratic primary debate where candidates went after him on fundraising and experience.
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| Donald Trump spends Christmas Eve railing against impeachment Posted: 25 Dec 2019 01:02 AM PST  * President claims Democrats 'in real doubt' about evidence * Trump tells troops he has yet to buy a present for Melania * US and China to have signing ceremony for trade deal, Trump saysDonald Trump has launched fresh attacks on the congressional architects of his impeachment, even as the standoff intensified between Democrats in the US House and Republicans in the Senate over the president's impending trial, and appeared set to last well into the new year.And on a less grave note, Trump revealed in a video conference with US troops to deliver Christmas greetings that, despite it being the morning of 24 December, he had not yet bought his wife her Christmas present.And as for North Korea's warning of a "Christmas gift" for America amid stalled nuclear weapons talks, Trump said the US would "deal with it".Then he left for his golf course.On Tuesday, Christmas Eve, Trump accused the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, of uncertainty over the articles of impeachment, voted on in Washington last week, that charge the president with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.On Monday House lawyers signaled in court filings that they were mulling an additional article of impeachment against Trump relating to obstruction of justice during the Trump-Russia investigation. They demanded that the former White House counsel Don McGahn testify and requested the release of grand jury material from the investigation.The current articles of impeachment center on Trump pressuring Ukraine to investigate the president's US political rivals, chiefly 2020 candidate Joe Biden, in return for crucial US military aid to the former Soviet republic."Everything we're seeing … suggests that they're in real doubt about the evidence they've brought forth so far not being good enough, and are very, very urgently seeking a way to find some more evidence," the president tweeted early on Tuesday.Trump continued: "The only way to make this work is to ... mount some kind of public pressure to demand witnesses, but McConnell has the votes and he can run this trial anyway he wants to."Trump's effort to recapture the conversation came after Pelosi last week triggered a showdown with the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, by delaying the official delivery of the two impeachment articles from the House to the Senate in an attempt to negotiate terms for the resulting congressional trial. McConnell has already declared that he has no intention of being an "impartial juror".Speaking to reporters in Florida on Tuesday, Trump said of Pelosi: "She's doing a tremendous disservice to the country" and claimed Democrats "had no evidence at all" about presidential misconduct.Other Republicans protested about possible moves for additional articles of impeachment."Democrats are treating impeachment as an open bar tab, tweeted the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham. "Time to cut them off, take their car keys away (put GOP in control of the House), and end this insanity."Article 1 of the United States constitution gives the House of Representatives the sole power to initiate impeachment and the Senate the sole power to try impeachments of the president. A president can be impeached if they are judged to have committed "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" – although the US Constitution does not specify what "high crimes and misdemeanors" are. The formal process starts with the House of Representatives passing articles of impeachment, the equivalent of congressional charges. A simple majority of members need to vote in favour of impeachment for it to pass to the next stage. Democrats currently control the House.The chief justice of the US Supreme Court then presides over proceedings in the Senate. The president is tried, with senators acting as the jury. For the president to be found guilty two-thirds of senators must vote to convict. Republicans currently control the Senate.Two presidents have previously been impeached, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Andrew Johnson in 1868, though neither was removed from office as a result. Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 before there was a formal vote to impeach him.Martin BelamAt the weekend, Schumer said that emails released on Friday showing that military aid to Ukraine was suspended 90 minutes after Trump demanded "a favor" from Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy only strengthened his party's demands for more documentation.With Congress out of action until early January, there is no sign of a resolution to the impeachment impasse or a date for the trial."We'll find out when we come back in session where we are," McConnell said. On Monday, he told Fox News the delay in sending the articles to the Senate was "absurd" and predicted Pelosi would back down "sooner or later". He added he had "not ruled out" calling witnesses to the eventual trial.Meanwhile, on Tuesday morning, Trump spoke by video link from his Mar-a-Lago resort with US troops stationed around the world, calling them "tremendous warriors". He at first joked that they could decline a pay rise due to them in January, before adding: "You've earned it."When one soldier asked Trump what he had bought first lady Melania Trump for Christmas, the president revealed that he is behind on his shopping."That's a tough question," he said. "I got her a beautiful card … A lot of love. We love our family, and we love each other. We've had a great relationship, hopefully like you do with your spouses."Then he added: "I'm still working on a Christmas present. There's a little time left. Not much, but a little time left."The president also said he and China's president, Xi Jinping, will have a signing ceremony for the first phase of the US-China trade deal agreed to this month."We will be having a signing ceremony, yes," Trump told reporters. "We will ultimately, yes, when we get together. And we'll be having a quicker signing because we want to get it done. The deal is done, it's just being translated right now." Speaking in Beijing on Wednesday, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said both countries were in close contact."Both sides' economic and trade teams are in close communication about detailed arrangements for the deal's signing and other follow-up work," Geng told a daily news briefing. He did not elaborate.Beijing has not yet confirmed specific components of the deal that were released by US officials. A spokesman for China's commerce ministry said last week the details would be made public after the official signing.Pool reporters were invited to Mar-a-Lago to watch the president's video address and ask questions.Trump said Democrats "ought to look back on the last year to see how they've hurt this country".He added: "If you just go by what you see in the papers, it's incredible what's going on. We had dirty cops. We had people spying on my campaign. They did terrible things…it's very sad."This despite the report earlier this month of the Department of Justice watchdog Michael Horowitz that said that despite some serious errors along the way, his principal conclusion was that the FBI's initiation of the Trump-Russia investigation was justified and was not motivated by political bias against Trump, nor involved what the Trump administration has called "illegal spying".And the president said that in the face of any action over Christmas by North Korea, the US would "deal with it very successfully", while joking that maybe any such gift would be "a beautiful vase as opposed to a missile test".Later, for the third day in a row, Trump travelled by presidential motorcade to the nearby Trump International Golf Club.The Trumps attended Christmas Eve service at a Southern Baptist Convention-affiliated church before celebrating the holiday with dinner in the ballroom of his private club. The pastor of Family Church in West Palm Beach, Florida, Jimmy Scroggins, and his family greeted the Trumps as they arrived and took their reserved seats in the church's third pew.Attending Family Church was a change of pace for the Trumps, who had attended holiday services in the past at Bethesda-by-the-Sea, the Episcopal Church in Palm Beach at which they were married in 2005. The Trumps then returned to his private club for Christmas Eve dinner. Trump, less than a week after being impeached by the House, did not respond when asked by a reporter if he prayed for Nancy Pelosi at church, but he said: "We're going to have a great year."
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| Texas Man Strangled Sister Because He Was Embarrassed by Her Pregnancy, Cops Say Posted: 23 Dec 2019 07:46 PM PST  "Maybe it's the time to murder her."That's the thought that, according to police, popped into Eduardo Arevalo's head on Dec. 16 after an argument with his pregnant sister, Viridiana.An affidavit made public on Monday alleges that Eduardo approached his older sister as she sat on the couch in their home in a Dallas suburb called The Colony, crooked his right arm around her neck, and squeezed the life out of her.Then the 19-year-old tossed her in his car trunk, drove to a field, and dumped her body, police said. He allegedly returned a few days later to move the corpse to an alley—then capped off the grisly task with a stop at Whataburger.Police say the motive for the murder was embarrassment: Eduardo felt the 23-year-old had shamed the family with her pregnancy. "It would be better off that she wasn't here," he allegedly later told police.But at the time of Viridiana's disappearance, Eduardo hoped to make it look like a suicide, police said. The victim reportedly suffered from depression, and her brother allegedly manufactured a note in which she appeared to write about wanting to take her own life.That didn't add up for police, though, and they began to suspect Eduardo had a hand in Viridiana's death. Surveillance video near the alley where her body was found helped them crack the case. Then Eduardo confessed, they said."I murdered her, I murdered her," he allegedly told detectives. Despite the confession, Eduardo's brother, Diego Arevalo, told KXAS he believes he's innocent."It doesn't make sense that my brother would do something like this. He was either set up or something happened," Diego said."I know my brother, he wouldn't do something like this. He's very kind, very positive kind of guy, very motivated. He helped my family out, he helped my brothers, he even helped my sister out," he told KTXA.Eduardo Arevalo was charged with capital murder because his sister was eight months pregnant, and he was held on $1 million bail.Sgt. Aaron Woodard of The Colony police department told the Dallas Morning News that the case was a a difficult one for investigators."It's not what our officers and detectives wanted to be dealing with two days before Christmas," he said.Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet 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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| North Korea Is The One Country No Military Ever Wants To Fight Posted: 23 Dec 2019 10:59 AM PST  Millions could die.
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| This tiny transport aircraft is getting a makeover Posted: 25 Dec 2019 08:00 AM PST  Upgrades to the U.S. Air Force's C-21 fleet should wrap up in mid-2020.
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| Rain and fog delay last-minute holiday travelers Posted: 24 Dec 2019 09:01 PM PST  A record number of Americans are traveling this holiday season, and many of them are contending with bad weather.
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| ByteDance Weighs TikTok Stake Sale Over U.S. Concerns Posted: 23 Dec 2019 07:05 PM PST  (Bloomberg) -- China's ByteDance Inc. created one of the country's rare global hits with the addictive video app TikTok. Now the U.S. government is threatening that success as officials in Washington warn the service presents a security threat.The Beijing-based company, led by Chief Executive Officer Yiming Zhang, is weighing a range of options to address those concerns, according to people familiar with the matter. Advisors are pitching everything from an aggressive legal defense and operational separation for TikTok to sale of a majority stake, said the people, asking not to be named because the discussions are private. Selling more than half the business could raise substantially more than $10 billion, one person said.ByteDance would prefer to maintain full control of the business if possible, given its soaring popularity and profit potential. It may argue that TikTok presents no security threat or that the U.S. has no legal standing over the business.ByteDance has considered selling a chunk of TikTok if necessary to protect the value of the business, the people said. The most likely sale scenario would be for the company to sell a majority stake to financial investors, one person said. Earlier investors include SoftBank Group Corp., Sequoia Capital and Susquehanna International Group.Talks about TikTok's future are preliminary and no formal decision has been made, the people said. A representative for the company said there have been no discussions about any partial or full sale of TikTok. "These rumors are completely meritless," the representative said.ByteDance has emerged as the world's most valuable startup on the explosive popularity of TikTok, where more than a billion, largely young, users share short clips of lip-syncing and dance videos. But with escalating tensions between China and the U.S., American politicians have warned the app represents a national security threat and urged an investigation. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., better known as CFIUS, has begun a review of ByteDance's 2017 purchase of the business that became TikTok, Bloomberg News reported in November."I remain deeply concerned that any platform or application that has Chinese ownership or direct links to China, such as TikTok, can be used as a tool by the Chinese Communist Party to extend its authoritarian censorship of information outside China's borders and amass data on millions of unsuspecting users," Senator Marco Rubio wrote in a letter to the Treasury Department, which chairs CFIUS.TikTok has said it strives to create a safe and positive online environment. "We are not influenced by any foreign government, including the Chinese government; TikTok does not operate in China, nor do we have any intention of doing so in the future," the company said in October.It's not clear whether U.S. regulators have authority in the case. CFIUS historically has reviewed foreign companies' investments in the U.S., including acquisitions, for national security concerns, but Musical.ly, the app that would become TikTok, was a Shanghai-headquartered business when ByteDance purchased it two years ago for about $800 million. ByteDance didn't seek CFIUS approval at the time, perhaps because it was a deal between two Chinese companies, even though the app had a substantial following in the U.S.ByteDance may have a legal argument that the U.S. committee doesn't have legal standing to force a divestiture, like it did in the case of the gay dating app Grindr. Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. acquired the U.S. app in January 2018, but in May CFIUS required the company to sell off the service no later than June 2020 because it could give foreigners access to sensitive data. ByteDance may also be able to argue that its data is less sensitive or that all operations and data could be quarantined in a separate U.S. subsidiary. The Trump administration broadened CFIUS' powers last year.The advantage to selling a stake quickly would be to reap profits from TikTok's success now, rather than risk a deterioration in value if the U.S. takes punitive measures. ByteDance prefers financial backers rather than strategic investors, like a music or media company, to avoid conflicts in the future, one person said.Though ByteDance has become synonymous with TikTok, its business goes well beyond the music-oriented video app. Zhang founded the business in 2012 as a laboratory for the country's leading artificial intelligence engineers to come up with innovative products. His first hit was a news app called Jinri Toutiao, or Today's Headlines, which spawned dozens of copycats from rivals.In China, Zhang is the rare entrepreneur who has kept his independence from the country's twin giants, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. Indeed, he built a reputation for raiding China's established tech giants for talent, paying premium compensation of $1 million or more a year.Toutiao became a model for how ByteDance could generate profit, creating a mobile experience that's a cross between Google and Facebook for would-be advertisers. The startup reached a valuation of $75 billion last year, according to CB Insights.TikTok was one of the most popular apps in the world last year with 656 million installs, according to Sensor Tower. It's on track to surpass that total this year, the research firm said. The U.S. has had about 124 million downloads.In October, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote to the acting director of National Intelligence, referring to TikTok as a "potential counterintelligence threat we cannot ignore." They said their concerns include the safety of data on the platform and possible foreign influence campaigns in the U.S."A company compromised by the Chinese Communist Party knows where your children are, knows what they look like, what their voices sound like, what they're watching and what they share with each other," Senator Josh Hawley said during a hearing in November. "All it takes is one knock on the door of their parent company, based in China, from a Communist Party official, for that data to be transferred to the Chinese government's hands whenever they need it."Even Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg called out TikTok, citing privacy and freedom of speech concerns after the Chinese firm allegedly scrubbed its platform of politically sensitive content, such as videos of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. TikTok, which has denied those allegations, announced in October it has formed a team that includes two former U.S. lawmakers to review its content moderation policy. It also said U.S. data is beyond the reach of China's government."We store all TikTok US user data in the United States, with backup redundancy in Singapore," it said in the October post. "Our data centers are located entirely outside of China, and none of our data is subject to Chinese law."ByteDance has been building TikTok's operations in the U.S., hiring hundreds and establishing American data centers to quarantine local information. It has also begun bringing on lobbyists in Washington, seeking to hire a U.S. policy chief and retaining the public affairs and lobbying firm Monument Advocacy, Bloomberg News reported last month.Zhang has hoped ByteDance would be able to retain full control of TikTok by splitting off the U.S. business operationally, one person said. But it's not clear whether that will be enough given the continued political pressure."While it tried to run its overseas operation independently from its China operation, given that the overseas operation is eventually held by the same entity that owns the China operation, it is hard to say that it is completely out of influence from the Chinese government," said Ke Yan, a Singapore-based analyst with Aequitas Research.A TikTok stake sale would likely push back any initial public offering for ByteDance. The company has considered an IPO in the U.S. or Hong Kong as soon as next year, but still needs to beef up its international operations and hire a chief financial officer. Selling equity in TikTok would provide the parent company with more cash and delay the need for a capital fundraising.Zhang and his investors would likely see benefits in buying more time for an IPO, given the U.S.-China trade war and recent stumbles by high profile startups such as WeWork and Uber Technologies Inc. SoftBank is a backer of all three companies and just engineered a bailout for WeWork.\--With assistance from Manuel Baigorri.To contact the reporters on this story: Zheping Huang in Hong Kong at zhuang245@bloomberg.net;Lulu Yilun Chen in Hong Kong at ychen447@bloomberg.net;Peter Elstrom in Tokyo at pelstrom@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Edwin Chan at echan273@bloomberg.net, Colum MurphyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Aid groups halt work in south Yemen after targeted bombings Posted: 24 Dec 2019 03:44 AM PST  A dozen humanitarian organizations in war-torn southern Yemen suspended their operations following a string of targeted attacks, the United Nations said, while the country's rebel-led health ministry announced on Tuesday that severe outbreaks of swine flu and dengue fever have killed close to 200 people since October. The suspension of aid work came after unknown assailants fired rocket-propelled grenades at three aid organizations in the southwestern province of Dhale over the weekend, according to the U.N. Humanitarian Office in Yemen, wounding a security guard and damaging several office buildings.
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| Venezuela arrests 11 after weekend raid of military outpost: Maduro Posted: 23 Dec 2019 04:29 PM PST  Venezuela has arrested 11 people in connection with a weekend raid of a remote military outpost in southern Bolivar state, but some suspects have fled across the border to Brazil with stolen weapons, President Nicolas Maduro said on Monday. Authorities have accused Brazil, Colombia and Peru - all adversaries of socialist Maduro who recognize opposition leader Juan Guaido as the rightful president - of complicity with the attack, in which one Venezuelan soldier was killed.
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| Jihadists on motorbikes kill 35 civilians in Burkina Faso raid Posted: 24 Dec 2019 04:40 PM PST  An attack by militants in northern Burkina Faso has killed 35 civilians, almost all of them women, the president said, one of the deadliest assaults in nearly five years of jihadist violence in the West African nation. Seven soldiers and 80 jihadists were also killed in the double attack on a military base and the town of Arbinda in Soum province. The morning raid was carried out by dozens of jihadists on motorbikes and lasted several hours before armed forces backed by the air force drove the militants back. The army said the attack was of a "rare intensity". "A large group of terrorists simultaneously attacked the military base and the civilian population in Arbinda," the army chief of staff said in a statement. "This barbaric attack resulted in the deaths of 35 civilian victims, most of them women," President Roch Marc Christian Kabore said on Twitter, praising the "bravery and commitment" of the defence and security forces. Remis Dandjinou, the communications minister and government spokesman, later said that 31 of the civilian victims were women. The president has declared 48 hours of national mourning. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but jihadist violence in Burkina Faso has been blamed on militants linked to both al-Qaeda and Islamic State groups. Burkina Faso, which borders, Mali and Niger, has endured regular jihadist attacks which have left hundreds dead since the start of 2015 when militant violence began to spread across the Sahel region. More than 700 people have been killed and around 560,000 internally displaced by the violence, according to the United Nations. Attacks have targeted mostly the north and east of the country, though the capital Ouagadougou has been hit three times.
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| See This Plane? Meet Russia's Very Own 'A-10 Warthog' Posted: 24 Dec 2019 05:00 PM PST  Meet the Su-25
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| Vietnam seizes two tonnes of ivory and pangolin scales Posted: 23 Dec 2019 11:17 PM PST  Vietnam seized more than two tonnes of ivory tusks and pangolin scales hidden inside wooden boxes shipped from Nigeria, state media reported Tuesday. The bust comes at the end of a year of big wildlife seizures destined for communist Vietnam, a hotbed of the illicit but lucrative trade in animal parts from elephants, pangolins, tigers and rhinos. Authorities in northern Hai Phong city found 330 kilograms (730 pounds) of ivory and 1.7 tonnes of pangolin scales after checking three container shipments from Nigeria, according to Hai Quan Online, the official mouthpiece of Vietnam's customs department.
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| Two strong earthquakes hit central Colombia Posted: 24 Dec 2019 12:48 PM PST  Two strong quakes, of magnitude 6.0 and magnitude 5.8, struck central Colombia, the US Geological Survey has said.Buildings shook as the quakes hit.
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| Queen Elizabeth Calls on U.K. to Reconcile in Christmas Address Posted: 23 Dec 2019 04:01 PM PST ![Queen Elizabeth Calls on U.K. to Reconcile in Christmas Address]( "Queen Elizabeth Calls on U.K. to Reconcile in Christmas Address") (Bloomberg) -- Queen Elizabeth II will urge Britons to "overcome long-held differences" less than two weeks after a bitterly-fought general election offered an end to three-and-a-half years of political deadlock over Brexit.The monarch will use her annual Christmas Day message to pay tribute to veterans of D-Day, the 1944 operation which led to the liberation of western Europe. Describing events to mark the invasion's 75th anniversary, she will urge people to adopt the spirit of reconciliation shown as "those who had formerly been sworn enemies came together in friendly commemorations," according to extracts of the address released by her office."By being willing to put past differences behind us and move forward together, we honor the freedom and democracy once won for us at so great a cost," she will say. "The path, of course, is not always smooth, and may at times this year have felt quite bumpy, but small steps can make a world of difference."The message comes as the U.K.'s political paralysis since the 2016 Brexit referendum appears to have ended. Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservatives won a large majority on Dec. 12 after promising to get Britain out of the European Union by the end of January.The first vote on Johnson's proposed Brexit deal comfortably passed in the House of Commons on Friday, and Members of Parliament are scheduled to resume debate on the legislation in early January.This is not the first time the Queen has called for unity. In her 2018 address, the monarch urged the British people to be respectful of one another while referencing "deeply-held divisions." She did not explicitly mention Brexit then, nor is she expected to this year.To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Ritchie in Edinburgh at gritchie10@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Thomas Penny, Alex MoralesFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Notre Dame rector: Fragile cathedral might not be saved Posted: 25 Dec 2019 01:24 AM PST  The rector of Notre Dame Cathedral says the Paris landmark is still so fragile that there's a "50% chance" the structure might not be saved, because scaffolding installed before this year's fire is threatening the vaults of the Gothic monument. Monsignor Patrick Chauvet said restoration work isn't likely to begin until 2021 — and described his "heartache" that Notre Dame couldn't hold Christmas services this year, for the first time since the French Revolution.
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| One of the US Army's mascots — a Cold War-era M48 Patton tank — got fixed up just in time for the holidays Posted: 24 Dec 2019 09:50 AM PST  A Cold War-era M48 Patton tank that's been a monument for the US Third Army and US Army Central underwent restoration at Fort Knox this fall.
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| Tulsi Gabbard, encouraged by Trump, may seek spoiler role Posted: 24 Dec 2019 12:34 PM PST  Tulsi Gabbard, the House member from Hawaii who is running for president, may mount a third-party White House bid that could have a major impact on the 2020 election. One person who is welcoming that prospect is President Trump.
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| Former national security adviser John Bolton says Trump is not 'exerting maximum pressure' on North Korea Posted: 23 Dec 2019 12:57 PM PST  John Bolton said if North Korea makes good on its threat for a provocation, the Trump administration should admit "the policy's failed."
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