President Trump claimed “all these investigators” are Democrats — an overstatement — and incorrectly said that Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, served under President Obama for eight years.
President Trump addressing the National Rifle Association Leadership Forum on Friday in Dallas.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times
President Trump said
“So you have all these investigators; they’re Democrats. In all fairness, Bob Mueller worked for Obama for eight years.”
the facts
This is exaggerated.
At least nine of the 17 lawyers on the team led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, have donated to Democratic campaigns, according to Federal Election Commission records. One has previously identified as a Democrat in a blog post.
Three others are registered as Democrats, The Washington Postand PolitiFact have reported. But the political affiliations of the remaining four lawyers are unclear.
A spokesman for the special counsel’s office confirmed the names of the lawyers who are on the team.
Mr. Mueller is a registered Republican and Mr. Trump’s characterization of his work history is not entirely accurate.
A Republican president, George W. Bush, chose Mr. Mueller to lead the F.B.I. for a 10-year term that began in 2001. Mr. Mueller was asked to stay on by President Barack Obama in 2011. Two years later, Mr. Mueller retired from the F.B.I. after having served under Mr. Obama for around four and a half years.
And Mr. Mueller was appointed to lead the Russia investigation by the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, also a Republican.
Linda Qiu is a fact-check reporter, based in Washington. She came to the Times in 2017 from the fact-checking service PolitiFact.@ylindaqiu
WASHINGTON — President Trump knew about a six-figure payment that Michael D. Cohen, his personal lawyer, made to a pornographic film actress several months before he denied any knowledge of it to reporters aboard Air Force One in April, according to two people familiar with the arrangement.
How much Mr. Trump knew about the payment to Stephanie Clifford, the actress, and who else was aware of it have been at the center of a swirling controversy for the past 48 hours touched off by a television interview with Rudolph W. Giuliani, a new addition to the president’s legal team. The interview was the first time a lawyer for the president had acknowledged that Mr. Trump had reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the payments to Ms. Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels.
It was not immediately clear when Mr. Trump learned of the payment, which Mr. Cohen made in October 2016, at a time when news media outlets were poised to pay her for her story about an alleged affair with Mr. Trump in 2006. But three people close to the matter said that Mr. Trump knew that Mr. Cohen had succeeded in keeping the allegations from becoming public at the time the president denied it.
Ms. Clifford signed a nondisclosure agreement, and accepted the payment just days before Mr. Trump won the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Trump has denied he had an affair with Ms. Clifford and insisted that the nondisclosure agreement was created to prevent any embarrassment to his family.
Mr. Giuliani said this week that the reimbursement to Mr. Cohen totaled $460,000 or $470,000, leaving it unclear what else the payments were for beyond the $130,000 that went to Ms. Clifford. One of the people familiar with the arrangement said that it was a $420,000 total over 12 months.
Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, has known since last year the details of how Mr. Cohen was being reimbursed, which was mainly through payments of $35,000 per month from the trust that contains the president’s personal fortune, according to two people with knowledge of the arrangement.
One person close to the Trump Organization said people with the company were aware that Mr. Cohen was still doing “legal work” for the president in 2017, but declined to say more about what Mr. Weisselberg knew. Another person familiar with the situation said that Mr. Weisselberg did not know that Mr. Cohen had paid Ms. Clifford when the retainer payments went through.
If Mr. Weisselberg was involved in directing the use of the funds to silence Ms. Clifford, it could draw Mr. Trump’s company deeper into the federal investigation of Mr. Cohen’s activities, increasing the president’s legal exposure in a wide-ranging case involving the lawyer often described as the president’s “fixer” in New York City.
In interviews on Wednesday and Thursday, Mr. Giuliani insisted that the president had reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 hush payment — and then paid him another $330,000, if not more — which was in direct conflict with the longstanding assertion by Mr. Trump and the White House that he did not know about the hush money or where it came from.
In an interview with The New York Times on Friday, Mr. Giuliani sought to clarify his statements by saying that he did not know whether Mr. Trump had known that some of the payments to Mr. Cohen had gone to Ms. Clifford. “It’s not something I’m aware of, nor is it relevant to what I’m doing, the legal part,” Mr. Giuliani said.
A lawyer for the Trump Organization declined to comment, and a spokeswoman for the organization did not respond to an email about Mr. Weisselberg.
The president has said that he would view any investigation into his finances or those of his family as “a violation,” though he was referring to the investigation into Russia by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III; the investigation into Mr. Cohen is being run by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.
The payment to Ms. Clifford is a part of that investigation. The circumstances surrounding it had become all the murkier this week after Mr. Giuliani gave an explanation of how the funds to Ms. Clifford were accounted for that contradicted all those that came before it.
After initially appearing to back Mr. Giuliani’s assertions in a series of Twitter messages on Thursday, Mr. Trump reversed course on Friday, after a series of headlines suggesting that the president had lied about knowing of the hush payment. In remarks to reporters on Friday, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Giuliani and said he would eventually “get his facts straight.”
“Virtually everything said has been said incorrectly, and it’s been said wrong, or it’s been covered wrong by the press,” Mr. Trump told reporters, though he excused Mr. Giuliani by explaining he had “just started a day ago.”
In a written statement later in the day, Mr. Giuliani said that he had not been “describing my understanding of the president’s knowledge.” And he reversed a previous suggestion that the payment to Ms. Clifford was motivated by the election. Mr. Giuliani said on Friday that the payment was personal in nature and “would have been done in any event, whether he was a candidate or not.”
While some White House officials had insisted that Mr. Trump was pleased with Mr. Giuliani’s performance on Fox News in an interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, two people close to the president painted a different picture. They said that Mr. Trump was displeased with how Mr. Giuliani, a former New York mayor, conducted himself, and that he was also unhappy with Mr. Hannity, a commentator whose advice the president often seeks, in terms of the language he used to describe the payments to Ms. Clifford.
The nature of the payments is significant because of campaign finance laws that regulate who may contribute to candidates and how much they can give.
If Mr. Cohen or others paid to silence Ms. Clifford primarily out of fear that a public airing of her story would have harmed Mr. Trump’s election prospects — rather than to keep it from his family for personal reasons — then the payment would most likely be viewed as an illegal campaign expenditure. Mr. Giuliani told The Times on Friday that the issue was “primarily” about keeping Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, from being embarrassed by the claim, which Mr. Trump has maintained was false.
But if investigators determine that the hush payment was in effect a campaign expenditure, then how the funds were distributed could take on added legal significance. Mr. Cohen had been careful to say that neither the campaign nor the Trump Organization was involved in the deal or any effort to reimburse him.
Under campaign finance law, Mr. Trump would have been within his rights to pay Ms. Clifford himself as a way to protect his presidential prospects — though he would have had to have formally made note of it in his public campaign filings, which had no accounting of the payment. If he directed Mr. Cohen to pay it on his behalf, then that could qualify as an illegal, coordinated campaign expenditure, even if Mr. Trump later paid him back.
Any involvement by the Trump Organization would further complicate the legal picture, given that American election law is strictest of all when it comes to corporate involvement with political campaigns. Businesses are not allowed to donate directly to campaigns or to coordinate with them.
Ms. Clifford’s lawyer, Michael J. Avenatti, has been arguing for months that Mr. Trump’s company was more involved in the arrangement than Mr. Cohen had been letting on.
After filing a lawsuit on Ms. Clifford’s behalf seeking to get out of the deal — which he has called invalid — Mr. Avenatti showed that Mr. Cohen had used his Trump Organization email at one point in arranging the payment. He also pointed to a secret document in California that a Trump Organization lawyer filed to force Ms. Clifford into arbitration this year.
At the time, the Trump Organization said that the lawyer, Jill A. Martin, who works in California, had acted in a personal capacity to help Mr. Cohen, who needed assistance with the initial arbitration filing from someone licensed in the state. The Trump Organization had said that “the company has had no involvement in the matter.”
In an interview, Mr. Avenatti said that any indication that still more executives at the Trump Organization knew about the effort to reimburse Mr. Cohen for the payment to Ms. Clifford could lead to further investigation of the Trump family business.
“There’s no question it opens up another avenue of inquiry into the depths of the involvement of the Trump Organization,” he said.
“The reason why the president endorsed me and asked me to run is he wants somebody who can help him get his agenda done, not somebody who’s going to vote against him,” Mr. Renacci said as he sat in a booth at a chicken-wing restaurant here.
Mr. Renacci, with an estimated net worth of at least $34 million, according to Roll Call, boasts of a long and varied business career, with involvement in nursing homes, Harley-Davidson dealerships, a Chevrolet dealership and partial ownership of an arena football team. A quiet, casual demeanor helped ingratiate him with working-class voters in his district south of Cleveland even as he held on to the traditional Chamber of Commerce Republican vote.
“Businessmen and businesswomen have different styles,” he conceded. “I’m more the quiet style.”
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In Tuesday’s primary, Mr. Renacci faces competition for Trump voters who might again be drawn to someone who presents himself as an insurgent. Credit Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
He has lent $4 million to his Senate campaign.
All of that makes his embrace of Mr. Trump an imperfect fit. For one thing, Mr. Trump pledged to drain the swamp, and Mr. Renacci, who was first elected to the House nearly eight years ago, is testing just how long someone can be in Washington before becoming part of what must be drained.
In fact, not too long ago, Mr. Renacci wanted out of Congress entirely. He had been running for governor, but he switched to the Senate race after Josh Mandel, the Republican state treasurer, dropped out of the contest.
“This is a guy that doesn’t work the room,” said David B. Cohen, a political-science professor at the University of Akron. “It’s unclear whether he really enjoys what he does for a living right now.”
In Tuesday’s primary, Mr. Renacci faces competition for Trump voters who might again be drawn to someone who presents himself as an insurgent. His main opponent is Mike Gibbons, a wealthy investment banker who speaks admiringly of Mr. Trump’s agenda and raised money for him when he was running for president.
“I’m an outsider, and I’m blunt, and I tell the truth,” Mr. Gibbons said at a rally outside Cincinnati on Thursday, where he appeared with Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky. (“The establishment is all behind the other guy,” Mr. Paul said of Mr. Renacci, not meaning it as a compliment.)
In an interview, Mr. Gibbons said Mr. Renacci simply did not connect with people and could not beat Mr. Brown. At the rally, he was unsparing. “One of the best things I have going for me is when Jim Renacci speaks to a group, I get more votes,” he said to laughs. “I’d like to increase his speaking engagements.”
Another complication is the issue of trade.
Mr. Brown voted against the North American Free Trade Agreement as a House member and even wrote a book called “Myths of Free Trade.” When Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on imported steel and aluminum this year, Mr. Brown cheered him on.
Mr. Renacci, by contrast, has voted for trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama, as well as to give President Barack Obama enhanced trade-negotiating power.
“The trade issue has been difficult for Renacci because he is really your typical big-business Republican,” Professor Cohen said. “Trump’s more populist tone on issues like trade dovetails really well with Sherrod Brown’s position on trade and other populist issues that Brown has been advocating for decades.”
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If Mr. Renacci makes it past the primary, he will face another, more difficult test against Senator Sherrod Brown in the general election. Credit Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
Asked about trade, Mr. Renacci struggled. He suggested that Mr. Brown was focused on protecting steelworkers at the expense of other industries, like farming and manufacturing — precisely the criticism leveled at Mr. Trump. He then suggested that the president is coming around to his views.
“What he’s doing is he’s listening, learning and then he’s going to lead, so in the end I think the tariff policies and programs will change,” Mr. Renacci said of Mr. Trump. “In the end, he’ll get closer to what Ohio needs.”
Mr. Renacci’s embrace of Mr. Trump carries an obvious risk: turning off voters who see a risk that he would simply be a rubber stamp.
“Our president’s great, but he’s not always right,” said Carolyn Robey-Warren, the president of Ohio Carry, a gun rights group that endorsed Mr. Gibbons. She brought up an episode this year when Mr. Trump met with lawmakers after the school shooting in Parkland, Fla.
“When President Trump came out and said, ‘Take the guns first; we’ll worry about due process later,’ we want the guy that’s going to say, ‘Hold on now,’” she said. “And we’re afraid Jim Renacci will say, ‘Yes, sir.’”
Mr. Brown is one of 10 Democratic senators who are running in November in states won by Mr. Trump, though the Ohio race is not generally seen as one of the Democrats’ most imperiled seats.
In a western Ohio county along the Indiana border that Mr. Trump won with 80 percent of the vote, Mr. Renacci previewed in an interview how he planned to turn voters against Mr. Brown. He described the senator as a career politician and someone far too liberal for the state that he represents.
“I’ve said all along Sherrod probably could represent Massachusetts very well,” he said. “Probably represent New York, maybe. Maybe even California. But his votes don’t represent Ohio.”
Preston Maddock, a spokesman for the Brown campaign, responded, “While Congressman Renacci finds new ways to help himself get ahead, Sherrod is fighting for Ohioans every day — including working with this administration and his Republican colleagues in the Senate when it’s best for Ohio workers.”
And then there is Mr. Renacci’s bearhug embrace of Mr. Trump, right down to his Twitter rants.
“The one thing I hear a lot is, ‘I love the president; I just wish he wouldn’t tweet as much,’” he said. “And my answer is, if you love the president, you got to love everything about him, including that.”
Mr. Giuliani’s verbal strikes began on Wednesday night when he appeared with Sean Hannity on Fox News and declared that the F.B.I.’s office in New York — with which he worked closely during his time as United States attorney in Manhattan — had behaved like “storm-troopers” in conducting raids on the president’s former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen. In the same interview, he called Mr. Comey “a disgraceful liar” and said he should be prosecuted. He also had strong words for the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, which he dismissed as “tainted” and “totally garbage.”
On Thursday morning, after Mr. Comey shot back on his Twitter account, saying that the New York F.B.I. was “devoted to the rule of law and the truth,” Mr. Giuliani assailed Mr. Comey, his onetime colleague in the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, as a “sensitive little baby.” By Thursday afternoon, he had tossed another bomb, calling for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “step in” on the Cohen case and put the people behind it “under investigation.”
In all of this, Mr. Giuliani was following the lead of Mr. Trump, who in both the Cohen and Russia matters has adopted a strategy of attacking agents, prosecutors and the larger institutions of the Justice Department and the F.B.I. While some former law-enforcement officials said that those attacks had eroded trust in the criminal-justice establishment, others said that the figures singled out by the president and his lawyer were deserving of their ire.
“Rudy is not anti-law enforcement, but he is upset, like me, at a small cadre of people who have lost their way,” said James K. Kallstrom, who once ran the New York office of the F.B.I. and has emerged more recently as a vigorous supporter of Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani. “We’ve had long talks about it and what we can do to rebuild the bureau.”
Though Mr. Kallstrom acknowledged that Mr. Giuliani, in his television appearances, could have opted “for a better choice of words,” he also said there was ample reason to be wary of some recent decisions by law-enforcement officers. He criticized, for instance, the way that F.B.I. agents, acting on a search warrant last year, broke into the home of Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager. Echoing comments by Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani, he also blasted the more recent raids on Mr. Cohen’s office, apartment and hotel room, saying that they may have violated the attorney-client privilege.
President Donald Trump harkened back to the racist attack he made on Mexican immigrants on the first day of his campaign in the summer of 2015 during a speech at the National Rifle Association (NRA) convention Friday.
“These countries send up their worst,” Trump said, addressing the crowd assembled in Dallas, Texas. “Remember in my opening speech, I got criticized for it. Remember? Well, guess what. They’re not sending their finest. That I can tell you.”
In his opening speech nearly three years ago, Trump said Mexico was “not sending their best,” a racist attack that drove his campaign and eventually catapulted him into the White House.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said at the time. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
He resorted to the same dishonest smear Friday.
“We’re getting some real beauties in here,” he said. “But we’re taking MS-13 horrible killer gang members. We’re getting them out because our guys are much tougher than there is not even a little bit of a contest. And that’s the only language they understand. That’s the only language they understand. These are savage killers.”
That immigrants are more violent or commit crimes at a higher rate than non-immigrants is a lie Trump has used repeatedly to back up his racist, anti-immigrant policies.
He defended his original comments in 2015 saying, “What can be simpler or more accurately stated? The Mexican government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.”
It’s simply not true.
As The Washington Post wrote at the time, “Data on immigrants and crime are incomplete, but a range of studies show there is no evidence immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans. In fact, first-generation immigrants are predisposed to lower crime rates than native-born Americans.”
Immigration and crime have also had, as the Post noted, inverse trajectories since the 1990s: immigration has risen, while crime as fallen.
Trump’s address to the NRA convention comes just weeks after saying the powerful lobbying organization doesn’t have power over him.
“They [the NRA] have great power over you people,” he told a group of lawmakers gathered at the White House in February. “They have less power over me.”
Mr. Duckworth added that the Trump-Pence tag team appearance was encouraging: “It’s very good that they’re supporting the N.R.A.”
The N.R.A. convention has unfolded, so far, as a display of strength and defiance for a group that is battling furious criticism from Democrats in Washington and on the midterm campaign trail. The N.R.A. has faced several policy setbacks on the state level in recent months, as Republican governors in Florida and Vermont signed gun restrictions the group opposed.
Yet if Parkland cast a shadow over the political speeches on Friday, it was a faint one.
The president alluded to the “monstrous attack” in Florida and described having been moved by his meetings with parents and survivors. But he dismissed gun-control proposals as ineffective, and pointed to a funding package for school-safety measures as an alternative.
Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence again called for allowing certain people to carry firearms on school property. And arguing that gun rights were at stake in November, Mr. Trump invoked foreign cities like Paris and London where firearms are harder to obtain and blamed those gun laws for acts of terrorism.
Mr. Trump mimicked what he described as the unimpeded massacre of unarmed people in a Paris terror attack: “Come over here — boom,” he said, imitating the firing of a gun with his hand.
If patrons had been armed, Mr. Trump said, things might have ended differently.
Mr. Cox, speaking minutes before Mr. Trump, acknowledged the “horrible tragedy” of the Parkland massacre, and emphatically rejected the stricter gun regulations that Democrats and some Republicans have proposed.
Rather than blaming gun owners for mass shootings, Mr. Cox said, Americans should reproach the institutions of government and law enforcement that fail to stop such killings. He criticized the F.B.I. and the Broward County, Fla., sheriff’s department for neglecting to act on repeated signals that Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland gunman, appeared to be violent and dangerous.
“The 5 million law-abiding men and women of the National Rifle Association will not accept one shred of blame for the acts of madmen and the failures of government,” Mr. Cox said.
The Department of Homeland Security ended temporary deportation protection for 57,000 Honduran immigrants on Friday, forcing them to either find another legal way to stay in the country or pack up their lives and leave.
DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced that the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program for Honduras will officially end on September 9, 2019. Until then, Honduran immigrants on TPS will either have to change their legal status or leave the country.
“The decision to terminate TPS for El Salvador was made after a review of the disaster-related conditions upon which the country’s original designation was based and an assessment of whether those originating conditions continue to exist as required by statute,” Nielsen’s office said in a statement.
Honduras was added to the list of TPS countries in 1999, after Hurricane Mitch devastated the country (along with Nicaragua, which was also added to TPS at the same time). Mitch was the deadliest hurricane in the Western Hemisphere in more than 200 years. More than 11,000 people across Central America died and millions were left homeless in the wake of the storm.
Honduras has one of the world’s highest murder rates outside of a war zone. The country has seen deadly protests since the disputed reelection of President Juan Orlando Hernandez last November. Security forces have used excessive and lethal force against protesters, and shot a majority of the people who were killed in protests, the U.N. human rights office reported.
The U.S. State Department has currently given Honduras a Level 3 Travel Advisory, urging Americans who wish to visit the country to reconsider travel due to violent crime and gang activity.
Honduras is also one of the most unequal countries in the world. More than half of the population lives below the national poverty line, according to the World Bank.
The TPS program was created by Congress in 1990 to offer refuge to immigrants from 10 countries racked by violence, natural disasters, or “other extraordinary and temporary conditions” making it hard for people to return. Immigrants with TPS receive deportation protection, work authorization, and can even get driver’s licenses. The administration can only extend a TPS designation for 6 to 18 months at a time, meaning that people granted this status often live their lives on hold.
The program does not offer legal permanent residency or a path to citizenship, but many TPS immigrants have spent much of their life in the United States. More than half of Honduran immigrants with TPS have lived in the United States for more than 20 years. Nearly one-fourth of Honduran TPS beneficiaries were 15 years old or younger when they first arrived in the United States, according to a study from the Center for Migration Studies. More than 53,000 U.S.-born children have at least one parent who is a Honduran TPS beneficiary.
Last November, DHS extended TPS for Honduran immigrants for six months, changing the expiration date to July 5, 2018. At the time, DHS Acting Secretary said that additional time was needed to assess conditions in Honduras due to a “lack of definitive information regarding conditions on the ground compared to pre-Hurricane Mitch.”
The Honduran government was pressuring the White House to keep TPS for Honduran immigrants.
“We’ve demonstrated that we’re closely aligned with this country,” Gerardo Simon, the consul general of the Honduran Consulate in Miami, told USA Today last month. “We’ve taken all their advice. The U.S. knows the efforts we’ve made. Now we’re asking for a favor, for help, for Honduras.”
अफ्रीका के जिबूती में स्थित चीन के सैन्य बेस पर मौजूद सैनिकों ने एक अमेरिकी विमान पर लेजर हमला कर दिया। इसमें दो अमेरिकी वायुसैनिक घायल हो गए। हालांकि चीन ने इन आरोपों को सिरे से खारिज कर दिया है।
पेंटागन की प्रवक्ता डाना डब्ल्यू वाइट ने कहा कि लेजर हमले में सी-130 विमान में सवार दो वायुसैनिक घायल हुए हैं। उन्हें यकीन है कि इसके पीछे चीन के सैनिक हैं। डान ने यह भी बताया कि दो से ज्यादा और दस से कम बार ऐसी घटनाएं हो चुकी हैं। हाल के हफ्तों में ऐसी घटनाएं बढ़ी हैं।
उन्होंने चीन के समक्ष इसका आधिकारिक विरोध दर्ज कराया है। मीडिया रिपोर्ट में दावा किया गया है कि यह लेजर पायलटों को कुछ समय के लिए अंधा भी कर सकता है। पेंटागन का आरोप है कि यह लेजर सैन्य स्तर का था, जिससे दो अमेरिकी पायलट घायल हो गए।
उधर, चीन के रक्षा और विदेश मंत्रालय ने अलग-अलग बयान जारी करके इन आरोपों को आधारहीन करार देते हुए नकार दिया है।
चीन के विदेश मंत्रालय के प्रवक्ता हुआ चुनयिंग ने कहा, अमेरिका में कुछ लोगों को तथ्यों पर ध्यान देना चाहिए। न की ऐसे झूठे आरोप लगाने चाहिए। ज्ञात हो कि 2017 में चीन ने जिबूती में सैन्य बेस बनाया था, जिसके बाद पहली बार अमेरिका से उसका टकराव हुआ है। यहां अमेरिका के भी चार हजार से ज्यादा सैनिक तैनात हैं।
चीन द्वारा दक्षिण सागर की तीन चौकियों पर एंटी शिप क्रूज मिसाइलें और जमीन से हवा में मार करने वाला मिसाइल सिस्टम तैनात करने के बाद अमेरिका भड़क गया है। क्षेत्र में ताजा सैन्यीकरण पर अमेरिका ने चिंता जताते हुए चीन को चेतावनी दी है कि उसे निकट व दूरगामी अवधि में इसके नतीजे भुगतने होंगे।
व्हाइट हाउस की प्रवक्ता सारा सैंडर्स ने कहा कि हम दक्षिण चीन सागर में चीन के सैन्यीकरण से अच्छी तरह वाकिफ हैं और हमने इस मुद्दे को प्रत्यक्ष रूप से चीनी नेतृत्व के सामने उठाते हुए उसे अंजाम भुगतने की चेतावनी दी हैै। हालांकि सैंडर्स ने यह नहीं बताया कि चीन को क्या परिणाम भुगतने होंगे।
एक अमेरिकी अधिकारी ने नाम नहीं छापने की शर्त पर यह भी बताया कि हमें यह सूचना भी मिली है कि चीन ने स्प्राली द्वीपों पर पिछले माह चीन ने कुछ हथियार सिस्टम भी तैनात किए हैं। इनमें चट्टान भेदी फायरिंग उपकरण और खतरनाक हथियार शामिल हैं।
अमेरिकी अधिकारी के मुताबिक चीन ने पिछले दिनों इस क्षेत्र में सात आइलैंड, मिसाइल स्टेशन, हैंगर और रडार स्टेशन बना चुका है। राष्ट्रपति के तौर पर बराक ओबामा भी अपने कार्यकाल के दौरान दक्षिण चीन सागर पर चीन के बढ़ते कब्जे को लेकर विरोध जता चुके हैं। पश्चिमी प्रशांत सागर में भी चीन अपनी विस्तारवादी नीतियों के चलते अमेरिका को चुनौती देता रहा है।
अमेरिकी रक्षा मंत्रालय पेंटागन ने भी विवादित क्षेत्र में चीनी सैन्य निर्माण पर चिंता जताई है। पेंटागन के मुख्य प्रवक्ता दाना व्हाइट ने संवाददातों से कहा, हम इन कृत्रिम द्वीपों के सैन्यीकरण से जुड़ी चिंताओं के बारे में बहुत मुखर हैं। चीन को यह महसूस करना होगा कि उन्हें समुद्र के नि:शुल्क नेविगेशन से फायदा हुआ है और अमेरिकी नौसेना इसके गारंटर हैं।
एडवांस हथियारों का प्रदर्शन कर चुका है चीन बृहस्पतिवार को चीन ने विवादित तीन चौकियों पर मिसाइलों की तैनाती को सही ठहराया है। उसने कहा कि दक्षिण सागर पर चीन की निर्विवाद संप्रभुता है। यहां चीन अप्रैल में अब तक का अपना सबसे बड़ा सैन्य अभ्यास भी कर चुका है। यहां पहली बार चीन के विमानवाहक हमला समूह और पीएलए के सबसे एडवांस हथियारों का प्रदर्शन किया गया है।
अफ्रीका के जिबूती में स्थित चीन के सैन्य बेस पर मौजूद सैनिकों ने एक अमेरिकी विमान पर लेजर हमला कर दिया। इसमें दो अमेरिकी वायुसैनिक घायल हो गए। हालांकि चीन ने इन आरोपों को सिरे से खारिज कर दिया है।
पेंटागन की प्रवक्ता डाना डब्ल्यू वाइट ने कहा कि लेजर हमले में सी-130 विमान में सवार दो वायुसैनिक घायल हुए हैं। उन्हें यकीन है कि इसके पीछे चीन के सैनिक हैं। डान ने यह भी बताया कि दो से ज्यादा और दस से कम बार ऐसी घटनाएं हो चुकी हैं। हाल के हफ्तों में ऐसी घटनाएं बढ़ी हैं।
उन्होंने चीन के समक्ष इसका आधिकारिक विरोध दर्ज कराया है। मीडिया रिपोर्ट में दावा किया गया है कि यह लेजर पायलटों को कुछ समय के लिए अंधा भी कर सकता है। पेंटागन का आरोप है कि यह लेजर सैन्य स्तर का था, जिससे दो अमेरिकी पायलट घायल हो गए।
उधर, चीन के रक्षा और विदेश मंत्रालय ने अलग-अलग बयान जारी करके इन आरोपों को आधारहीन करार देते हुए नकार दिया है।
चीन के विदेश मंत्रालय के प्रवक्ता हुआ चुनयिंग ने कहा, अमेरिका में कुछ लोगों को तथ्यों पर ध्यान देना चाहिए। न की ऐसे झूठे आरोप लगाने चाहिए। ज्ञात हो कि 2017 में चीन ने जिबूती में सैन्य बेस बनाया था, जिसके बाद पहली बार अमेरिका से उसका टकराव हुआ है। यहां अमेरिका के भी चार हजार से ज्यादा सैनिक तैनात हैं।
भड़का अमेरिका, नतीजों की चेतावनी
चीन द्वारा दक्षिण सागर की तीन चौकियों पर एंटी शिप क्रूज मिसाइलें और जमीन से हवा में मार करने वाला मिसाइल सिस्टम तैनात करने के बाद अमेरिका भड़क गया है। क्षेत्र में ताजा सैन्यीकरण पर अमेरिका ने चिंता जताते हुए चीन को चेतावनी दी है कि उसे निकट व दूरगामी अवधि में इसके नतीजे भुगतने होंगे।
व्हाइट हाउस की प्रवक्ता सारा सैंडर्स ने कहा कि हम दक्षिण चीन सागर में चीन के सैन्यीकरण से अच्छी तरह वाकिफ हैं और हमने इस मुद्दे को प्रत्यक्ष रूप से चीनी नेतृत्व के सामने उठाते हुए उसे अंजाम भुगतने की चेतावनी दी हैै। हालांकि सैंडर्स ने यह नहीं बताया कि चीन को क्या परिणाम भुगतने होंगे।
एक अमेरिकी अधिकारी ने नाम नहीं छापने की शर्त पर यह भी बताया कि हमें यह सूचना भी मिली है कि चीन ने स्प्राली द्वीपों पर पिछले माह चीन ने कुछ हथियार सिस्टम भी तैनात किए हैं। इनमें चट्टान भेदी फायरिंग उपकरण और खतरनाक हथियार शामिल हैं।
अमेरिकी अधिकारी के मुताबिक चीन ने पिछले दिनों इस क्षेत्र में सात आइलैंड, मिसाइल स्टेशन, हैंगर और रडार स्टेशन बना चुका है। राष्ट्रपति के तौर पर बराक ओबामा भी अपने कार्यकाल के दौरान दक्षिण चीन सागर पर चीन के बढ़ते कब्जे को लेकर विरोध जता चुके हैं। पश्चिमी प्रशांत सागर में भी चीन अपनी विस्तारवादी नीतियों के चलते अमेरिका को चुनौती देता रहा है।
पेंटागन ने भी विवादित क्षेत्र को लेकर चिंता जताई
अमेरिकी रक्षा मंत्रालय पेंटागन ने भी विवादित क्षेत्र में चीनी सैन्य निर्माण पर चिंता जताई है। पेंटागन के मुख्य प्रवक्ता दाना व्हाइट ने संवाददातों से कहा, हम इन कृत्रिम द्वीपों के सैन्यीकरण से जुड़ी चिंताओं के बारे में बहुत मुखर हैं। चीन को यह महसूस करना होगा कि उन्हें समुद्र के नि:शुल्क नेविगेशन से फायदा हुआ है और अमेरिकी नौसेना इसके गारंटर हैं।
एडवांस हथियारों का प्रदर्शन कर चुका है चीन बृहस्पतिवार को चीन ने विवादित तीन चौकियों पर मिसाइलों की तैनाती को सही ठहराया है। उसने कहा कि दक्षिण सागर पर चीन की निर्विवाद संप्रभुता है। यहां चीन अप्रैल में अब तक का अपना सबसे बड़ा सैन्य अभ्यास भी कर चुका है। यहां पहली बार चीन के विमानवाहक हमला समूह और पीएलए के सबसे एडवांस हथियारों का प्रदर्शन किया गया है।
President Donald Trump has sent a letter to Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, assuring her that the United States will support the country with its refugee crisis, while continuing to “pressure Myanmar” to safely repatriate the nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims fleeing military crackdowns, Reuters reported Friday.
President Trump has made the offer several times in the past, but so far, but nothing has changed.
In September, for instance, Trump urged “strong and swift action” against Myanmar by the U.N. Security Council. In November, when he was on his tour of five Asian countries, he vowed, “The United States supports efforts to end the violence, to ensure accountability for atrocities committed, and to facilitate the safe and voluntary return of refugees. We welcome the commitments by the government of Myanmar, and we are ready to support the implementation of the [Rakhine] recommendations.”
Rakhine state in Myanmar, a Buddhist-majority country of around 53 million people, was previously home to roughly 1.1. million Rohingya, however, the government refuses to recognize the Rohingya as citizens. After insurgents launched deadly attacks on several police posts in August, the government responded with what rights groups and the United Nations have described as “crimes against humanity” and disproportionate force.
The scores of Rohingya fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh have prompted humanitarian groups to call their plight the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world right now.
Witnesses have described military raids of villages, during which unarmed residents, including children, are killed, women and girls are gang-raped and homes are burned down. Indeed, satellite images have documented the razing of hundreds of villages, the land reclaimed by the government for “redevelopment” purposes under local law.
While the United States has pulled some military support from Myanmar and donated to money to help the Rohingya in Bangladesh (though not enough — the U.N. has requested $951 million from member states for Rohingya relief), it has yet to pressure Myanmar in any meaningful way, which would involve going after Russia and China in the U.N. Security Council.
When it comes to Iran and North Korea, the Trump administration does not flinch in threatening to re-impose sanctions on those countries, adding new ones or slapping secondary sanctions against any country — including China and Russia — that does not comply with those sanctions.
In Myanmar, where the U.S. president could restore sanctions by executive order, such a move would be complicated, but doable. Still, Trump has yet to take things that far. The European Union, by contrast, is attempting to implement an arms embargo there.
After the United Nations declared the operation against the Rohingya “ethnic cleansing” last September, it inexplicably took the State Department more than two months to say the same. “After a careful and thorough analysis of available facts, it is clear that the situation in northern Rakhine state constitutes ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya,” then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson finally stated in November.
WASHINGTON — President Trump undercut his attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, on Friday, and said the former New York mayor will eventually get the facts right regarding a payment to a pornographic actress who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Giuliani, who joined Mr. Trump’s legal team last month, “started a day ago,” Mr. Trump said, speaking to reporters on Friday as he left Washington to attend a National Rifle Association convention in Dallas.
“He’s a great guy,” Mr. Trump said. “He’ll get his facts straight.”
It was the first time the president addressed the inconsistent narrative about the payment made by his personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, to the actress, Stephanie Clifford, who goes by the stage name Stormy Daniels.
Mr. Giuliani kicked off the confusion with an interview on Fox News on Wednesday, surprising even some of Mr. Trump’s other attorneys.
In a series of Twitter posts the following morning, the president backed up what Mr. Giuliani said. But, on Friday, Mr. Trump said that everything said about the transaction “has been said incorrectly.”
“It’s actually very simple,” the president said, without elaboration.
Remarkably, this ground-breaking study, “Temperature and Growth” concludes that “under the business-as-usual scenario, the projected trends in rising temperatures could depress U.S. economic growth by up to a third.”
The study focused on the impact of high temperatures in productivity and found that rising temperatures have their biggest negative economic impact in the summer — but that it’s not just outdoor work like farming and construction that suffers. Using historical data, the authors showed that the finance, retail, and real estate sectors also get hit hard during the hottest summers.
The authors note that a scenario of low CO2 emissions would sharply reduce the economic harm. But such a scenario requires far more aggressive action than the world embraced in the Paris Climate Accord.
In reality, the Trump administration’s policies — to abandon the Paris climate deal while working to gut both domestic climate action and coastal adaptation programs — make the worst business-as-usual scenarios for climate change more likely while undermining any efforts to prepare for what’s coming.
Significantly, the researchers from the University of North Carolina, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank found that “the temperature effects are particularly strong in states with relatively higher summer temperatures, most of which are located in the South.”
The estimated summer impact “for the ten warmest states is about three times as large as their whole-country counterpart.” This means those ten states would be economically devastated in the coming decades.
The study ranks the states by average summer temperature. The top ten, in order, are: Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Arizona. Besides all being in the south, they all also voted for Trump.
We’ve long known the southern U.S. would be hit the hardest by climate change. Back in 2011, the nation’s top climate scientist, James Hansen (then at NASA), warned “If we stay on with business as usual, the southern U.S. will become almost uninhabitable.”
And earlier studies have found that rising temperatures would hit worker productivity hard in peak summer months globally. For instance, a study done in 2013 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that “heat-stress related labor capacity losses will double globally by 2050 with a warming climate.”
NOAA found that business-as-usual policies cut labor capacity in half during peak months by century’s end.
Individual labor capacity (%) during annual minimum (upper lines) and maximum (lower lines) heat stress months. RCP8.5 (red lines) is our current emissions path. CREDIT: NOAA
But the Richmond Fed study is the first to focus specifically on this country: It’s “the first in the literature to systematically document the pervasive effect of summer temperatures on the cross-section of industries in the U.S.”
So it’s the first study to document that Trump’s climate policies will hit the states that voted for him the hardest.
Remarkably, this ground-breaking study, “Temperature and Growth” concludes that “under the business-as-usual scenario, the projected trends in rising temperatures could depress U.S. economic growth by up to a third.”
The study focused on the impact of high temperatures in productivity and found that rising temperatures have their biggest negative economic impact in the summer — but that it’s not just outdoor work like farming and construction that suffers. Using historical data, the authors showed that the finance, retail, and real estate sectors also get hit hard during the hottest summers.
The authors note that a scenario of low CO2 emissions would sharply reduce the economic harm. But such a scenario requires far more aggressive action than the world embraced in the Paris Climate Accord.
In reality, the Trump administration’s policies — to abandon the Paris climate deal while working to gut both domestic climate action and coastal adaptation programs — make the worst business-as-usual scenarios for climate change more likely while undermining any efforts to prepare for what’s coming.
Significantly, the researchers from the University of North Carolina, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank found that “the temperature effects are particularly strong in states with relatively higher summer temperatures, most of which are located in the South.”
The estimated summer impact “for the ten warmest states is about three times as large as their whole-country counterpart.” This means those ten states would be economically devastated in the coming decades.
The study ranks the states by average summer temperature. The top ten, in order, are: Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Arizona. Besides all being in the south, they all also voted for Trump.
We’ve long known the southern U.S. would be hit the hardest by climate change. Back in 2011, the nation’s top climate scientist, James Hansen (then at NASA), warned “If we stay on with business as usual, the southern U.S. will become almost uninhabitable.”
And earlier studies have found that rising temperatures would hit worker productivity hard in peak summer months globally. For instance, a study done in 2013 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that “heat-stress related labor capacity losses will double globally by 2050 with a warming climate.”
NOAA found that business-as-usual policies cut labor capacity in half during peak months by century’s end.
Individual labor capacity (%) during annual minimum (upper lines) and maximum (lower lines) heat stress months. RCP8.5 (red lines) is our current emissions path. CREDIT: NOAA
But the Richmond Fed study is the first to focus specifically on this country: It’s “the first in the literature to systematically document the pervasive effect of summer temperatures on the cross-section of industries in the U.S.”
So it’s the first study to document that Trump’s climate policies will hit the states that voted for him the hardest.
It was harder to locate the strategy behind Mr. Trump’s swerving, stream-of-consciousness telephone interview last week on “Fox & Friends.” On live TV, the president seemed to stumble into acknowledging, for the first time, that he knew about his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, funneling $130,000 in hush money to an adult film actress who had claimed to have had an affair with the future president.
“He represents me, like with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal,” Mr. Trump said, as the show’s hosts listened politely.
The president went on to say that Mr. Cohen does “a tiny, tiny little fraction” of his legal work — prompting prosecutors to file a fresh brief saying that the comment had undermined the president’s legal argument that documents seized from Mr. Cohen in a raid by prosecutors, were protected by attorney-client privilege.
On Thursday, “Fox & Friends” played host to another awkward and possibly significant exchange. Mr. Giuliani, back on the network less than 12 hours after his appearance on “Hannity” aired, mused that Mr. Cohen’s efforts to quiet Ms. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, had helped Mr. Trump’s presidential bid.
“Imagine if that came out on Oct. 15, 2016, in the middle of the, you know, last debate with Hillary Clinton,” Mr. Giuliani said.
Rudy Giuliani speaks out on Stormy Daniels paymentVideo by Fox News
Fair point — but problematic for Mr. Trump, whose legal team would be better off avoiding any suggestion that he had violated federal campaign finance laws that require the disclosure of spending meant to influence the electorate.
Michael Avenatti, the voluble lawyer representing Ms. Clifford, responded on Twitter by thanking “Fox & Friends” for “helping our case week in and week out.”
“You are truly THE BEST,” Mr. Avenatti wrote. “Where can we send the gift basket?”
Perhaps Mr. Trump and his defenders feel more relaxed when chatting with Fox News’s stable of pundits, whose questions tend to be gentle. Those who know Mr. Trump well said that the president’s meandering call to “Fox & Friends” resembled the way he talks in private.
Also, Mr. Trump and some of his closest allies choose to appear only on Fox News — meaning that any gaffes are bound to appear there, rather than on rival networks.
Still, other moments have scrambled the usual Fox News formula.
When the correspondent Ed Henry sat down in April with Scott Pruitt, the embattled head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Mr. Pruitt was hoping for the interview to clear up a cloud of ethics problems hanging over his tenure. Instead, Mr. Henry pelted him with questions that Mr. Pruitt visibly struggled to answer.
Mr. Henry, though, belongs to the reporting side of Fox News, rather than its conservative commentariat. And the network’s pundits have been less aggressive in their questioning when interviews go south.
On Wednesday night, Mr. Hannity did not press Mr. Giuliani for details about the president’s reimbursing of Mr. Cohen, and the host even offered the former mayor a mulligan.
“But do you know the president didn’t know about this?” Mr. Hannity asked, seeming to prompt Mr. Giuliani to correct his earlier statement.
“He didn’t know about the specifics of it as far as I know,” Mr. Giuliani said. “But he did know about the general arrangement that Michael would take care of things like this.”
Later, Laura Ingraham, who follows Mr. Hannity at 10 p.m., seemed taken aback at what had transpired in the previous hour.
“God, if you go on ‘Hannity’ you better think it through, as the attorney for the president,” she said, her eyes wide in disbelief.
“I love Rudy,” she added, “but they better have an explanation for that. That’s a problem.”
As his host tried to throw him several lifelines, Mr. Giuliani dug in, insisting that Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, had tried to keep Ms. Clifford from going public with the alleged affair before the 2016 election.
He also called agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation who raided Mr. Cohen’s office “storm troopers,” a reference to Nazis that offended others in the law enforcement community who once held Mr. Giuliani in largely high regard.
(In 2000, Mr. Giuliani refused to apologize for using the same term to describe federal agents who seized Elian Gonzalez, a Cuban boy at the center of an immigration battle in Florida. “I’m not going to back down from it,” he said at the time.)
Mr. Giuliani’s appearances infuriated others in Mr. Trump’s orbit, who had been kept in the dark about his plans. At the White House, many of the president’s associates were particularly angry over an odd swipe that Mr. Giuliani took at Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser.
“Jared is a fine man, you know that,” Mr. Giuliani said, before adding, “Men are disposable.”
What he meant by disposable is unclear, but Mr. Kushner’s friends in the West Wing were equally puzzled by Mr. Giuliani’s comments about Ivanka Trump, Mr. Kushner’s wife. Mr. Giuliani called her “a fine woman” and predicted that “the whole country” would turn on Robert S. Mueller III, the special prosecutor in the Russia investigation, if Mr. Mueller went after Ms. Trump.
“A fine woman like Ivanka?” he said. “Come on.”
A veteran of the no-holds-barred world of New York tabloids that Mr. Trump inhabited for decades, Mr. Giuliani was an early and vocal supporter of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign — a potential entree back into the limelight of national politics after his failed 2008 bid for the White House.
During Mr. Trump’s campaign, he was a forceful critic of Hillary Clinton, a longtime political rival and Mr. Trump’s opponent in the 2016 presidential race, and indulged in some non-truth telling that was as puzzling as it was brazen.
For example, he suggested that Hillary Clinton had not visited ground zero in the immediate period after the 9/11 attacks, even when reporters covered their joint trips there and ample photographic evidence to the contrary instantly emerged.
Mr. Giuliani also said during the campaign that the F.B.I. gave him the inside track into investigations into Mrs. Clinton’s emails. His private security consulting firm often attracted scrutiny and dinged his chances at joining the Trump administration.
An energetic speech he delivered in 2016 at the Republican National Convention and his repeated defense of Mr. Trump after Mr. Trump was heard making crude comments on an “Access Hollywood” tape prompted talk of Mr. Giuliani’s being appointed secretary of state or, perhaps, of his leading the Department of Homeland Security.
Those aspirations never materialized. Mr. Giuliani was passed over for both jobs — not once, but twice for each position.
Still, Mr. Giuliani has never wavered in his support for his fellow New Yorker. And when Mr. Trump was seeking a new lawyer — a high-wattage TV combatant who would not wilt under the pressures of the news media or legal adversaries — Mr. Giuliani seemed a natural pick.
But Mr. Giuliani is not used to having his words carefully managed. His comments on Fox News on Wednesday set off a frenzy on Twitter. Almost instantly, people were reposting video of Mr. Trump on Air Force One last month saying he knew nothing about the payments.
Asked about his remarks after finishing the interview, Mr. Giuliani said that what might have seemed to some — including, perhaps, Mr. Hannity — like a slip of the tongue, was actually a planned disclosure.
“That removes the campaign finance violation, and we have all the documentary proof for it,” Mr. Giuliani said, explaining that the president was aware of what Mr. Giuliani intended to say on the program. He insisted he had spoken with Mr. Trump before and after the interview on Fox News. Mr. Giuliani also dismissed the social media furor.
But late Wednesday, Common Cause, a government watchdog group, said Mr. Giuliani’s remarks bolstered its lawsuit accusing the president and his campaign of breaking the law by failing to disclose a contribution to his campaign.
“Giuliani seemingly thought he was doing President Trump a favor — but instead made Trump’s legal problems much, much worse,” said Paul S. Ryan, the group’s vice president for policy and litigation.
Whether or not that proves true, Mr. Giuliani is likely to have an opinion about it. And a combative one, at that.
