Top White House official told Congress ‘there was no doubt’ Trump sought quid pro quo with Ukrainians
In vivid and at times contentious testimony before House impeachment investigators, the senior White House official responsible for Ukraine described what he believed was an unambiguous effort by … Trump to pressure the president of Ukraine to open investigations targeting American politicians in exchange for a coveted Oval Office meeting.
Under questioning from Rep. Peter Welch (Vt.) and other Democrats, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman said “there was no doubt” about what Trump wanted when he spoke by phone July 25 with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — particularly in contrast with an April call between the two leaders shortly after Zelensky’s election.
“The tone was significantly different,” Vindman said, according to a transcript of his Oct. 29 deposition released Friday. Vindman, who as a senior White House official listened in on both calls, went on to tell Welch: “I’m struggling for the words, but it was not a positive call. It was dour. If I think about it some more, I could probably come up with some other adjectives, but it was just — the difference between the calls was apparent.”
30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, children of a united Germany remain divided
Michael Weber had just turned 3 when the Berlin Wall fell and doesn’t remember life before communist East Germany reunited with the capitalist West.
Weber’s generation, raised in the rubble of the wall, was expected to grow up without division. They were the children of “die Wende,” as the reunification is known in Germany and which loosely translates as “the turning point.”
And yet that’s not quite how things turned out.
“In my head, the wall is still there,” Weber said. “There’s disappointment here. What was hoped for in the last 30 years hasn’t really happened.”
NPR News
Wildfires Rage In Australian State: 'We've Simply Never Had This Number Of Fires'
An unprecedented number of wildfires are raging across Australia's most populous state. Fire officials say there were nearly 100 active fires in New South Wales on Friday, with dozens reaching "out of control" status.
The wildfires have charred hundreds of thousands of acres across the state, driven by extremely hot, dry and windy conditions. Thousands of residents in New South Wales have been forced to leave their homes.
"We've simply never had this number of fires burn in North South Wales at the same time," NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said at a briefing Friday.
In German Coal Country, This Former Socialist Model City Has Shrunk In Half
It was two years after the Berlin Wall had fallen when Karsten Hilse realized the people in his town had changed. It came to him in a blast of hot, white light.
"It was the first time that a firebomb was thrown at me," Hilse remembers. "Things like that didn't happen in the GDR."
Hilse was a young police officer in his hometown of Hoyerswerda, in the former East Germany, also known as the German Democratic Republic or GDR. In 1991, a year after Germany reunified, rioters in the city targeted immigrants from countries such as Vietnam and Mozambique, accusing them of taking jobs away from Germans. Hilse, dressed in riot gear to fend off the attackers, suddenly didn't recognize Hoyerswerda, a city where, just a few years prior, work was plentiful and most people made the same salary.
BBC News
Brazil ex-President Lula walks free from jail
Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been freed after more than 18 months in prison.
The left-wing former leader, known as Lula, was greeted with rapturous applause from crowds of supporters as he walked out of the jail on Friday. He was held in a prison in the city of Curitiba on corruption charges.
A judge ordered his release after a Supreme Court ruling that defendants should only be imprisoned if they have exhausted their appeal options. Lula is one of several thousand convicts who could benefit from the ruling.
Berlin Wall: 'Germany was first re-united on the dancefloor'
Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, some of the city's clubbers and DJs recall how illegal raves helped bring a once divided nation back together.
Berlin today is a temple for dance music fans from all corners of the globe, ready to leave their prejudices at the nightclub door and collectively surrender to the beat.
There was a time not so long ago though when scenes of this nature were a physical and ideological impossibility.
While baggy ravers in the UK were coming together for an extended Second Summer of Love, people in the German capital remained divided by a 27-mile wall.
The Guardian
'Witnesses of history': the man who kept slabs of the Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was lifted – it did not fall,” insists Hans Martin Fleischer. The bureaucrat produces photographs and film footage shot on hand-held camera on 12 November 1989 – three days after the East German border was first breached. They show the first segments of the concrete barrier that had encircled West Berlin for 28 years being removed at night, amid a sea of camera flashes and applause.
Sparks fly as a worker in a hard hat uses an angle grinder to slice a huge slab emblazoned with a red swastika from one bearing an interlocking hammer and sickle – graffiti painted on the western side in protest at the 1939 non-aggression pact between the Stalinist and Nazi regimes, which paved the way for the second world war and the consequent division of Europe that led to the construction of the Berlin Wall.
Mick Mulvaney: new testimony draws Trump chief of staff into Ukraine scandal
Donald Trump’s acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney approved a White House meeting with the president for the Ukrainian president on condition Ukraine announced investigations tied to Trump’s political rival Joe Biden, according to testimony released on Friday.
Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, “blurted out” that Mulvaney had approved the meeting if the Ukrainians announced an investigation of Burisma, a gas company that formerly employed Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son, said Fiona Hill, a national security council member who was deposed last month by the congressional committees pursuing an impeachment inquiry against Trump.
Hill’s account was corroborated by simultaneously released testimony by another firsthand witness to the conversation, Lt Col Alexander Vindman.
CNN
Referee says he complained to Jim Jordan about sexual misconduct by Ohio State athletics department doctor, lawsuit alleges
A college wrestling referee says former Ohio State University athletic team doctor Richard Strauss masturbated in front of him inside a locker room shower in the mid-1990's, according to a new lawsuit filed against the school.
When he reported the incident to OSU's wrestling coaches -- US Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, then the team's assistant coach, and Russ Hellickson, the team's former head coach -- they failed to take any action, according to the lawsuit filed Thursday.
They responded, "Yeah, that's Strauss," the referee, referred to in the lawsuit as John Doe 42, alleges.
OpEd: 30 years after the Berlin Wall fell, America is less free
It felt like the future was endlessly bright. […]
Looking back, the gap between the hopes of 1989 and the facts of 2019 is stark.
We've gone from tearing down walls to
building them -- from autocrats being on the run, to autocrats on the rise. With technological surveillance states secured by fear and greed, democracy itself seems in retreat.
Reuters
China factory prices falter, while inflation soars to near eight-year high
China’s producer prices fell the most in more than three years in October, as the manufacturing sector weakened on declining demand and a knock from the Sino-U.S. tariff war, reinforcing the case for Beijing to keep the stimulus coming.
The producer price index (PPI), seen as a key indicator of corporate profitability, fell 1.6% in October from a year earlier, marking the steepest decline since July 2016, National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) data showed on Saturday. Analysts had tipped a contraction of 1.5% for the PPI.
In contrast, China’s consumer prices rose at their fastest pace in almost eight years, driven mostly by a surge in pork prices as African swine fever ravaged the country’s hog herds. Some analysts say the CPI rise could become a concern for policymakers looking to introduce measures to prop up demand.
'Cornerstones of cruelty': Recalling Berlin Wall, Pompeo warns of authoritarianism
When Mike Pompeo was posted to Europe as a U.S. soldier in the late 1980s, he patrolled the border that marked the “Iron Curtain” dividing East and West. […]
Back in Berlin on Friday as U.S. secretary of state, the day before the 30th anniversary of the Wall coming down, Pompeo had no regrets about the demise of Communist East Germany but warned that there was still authoritarianism in the world. […]
In a speech in which he criticized Russia and China, he cautioned that freedom was never guaranteed in the world.
“Today authoritarianism is just a stone’s throw away, it’s rising and if we’re honest, it never really went away completely,” he said.
The Atlantic
Let's Please Stop Crediting Ronald Reagan for the Fall of the Berlin Wall
[…] It is certainly true that the Reagan presidency helped usher along the opening of the inner German frontier and later the demise of the Soviet Union. After all, his changes to U.S. foreign policy toward Moscow challenged, among other things, the status quo that assumed the Berlin Wall's existence as inevitable. And Reagan reasserted the idea that simple coexistence with the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe was neither desirable nor acceptable.
But did Reagan's 1987 address have much bearing on the actual fall of wall? That's a newer idea, one that happens to put Reagan at the center of a wider narrative of communism's descent in Europe. In fact, not only was Reagan out of office by the time the wall collapsed in the summer of 1989, but his speech had received very little coverage in the media, according to
Time and to historian Michael Meyer, who wrote in his
history of 1989's revolutions, "Major U.S. newspapers with correspondents in Europe, such as the New York Times, carried stories that ran in the back pages." Reagan also delivered the speech to an audience of about
45,000, one tenth the crowd estimated to have attended John F. Kennedy's 1963 speech. When Reagan declared "Tear down this Wall," it's easy for us to forget now, he was the visibly aged leader of a lame duck administration clouded by scandal and corruption, Iran-Contra in particular.
Historians still dispute, and likely will for many years, the extent to which the Soviet Union collapsed due to pressures from the U.S. or from within. But the Berlin Wall's fall was a moment when Gorbachev's actions, not Reagan's, played a particularly prominent role.
Speigel
Interview with Mikhail Gorbachev: 'It Was Impossible To Go On Living Like Before'
DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Gorbachev, the Berlin Wall came down on Nov. 9, 1989. Thirty years on, how do you look back on this event?
Gorbachev: My view of German unity is the same today as it was back then. Unification was one of the most important things I've ever done. It had a huge impact on many people's lives. I appreciate this day very much and I have great admiration for every person who was involved.
DER SPIEGEL: Did the fall of the Berlin Wall surprise you?
Gorbachev: We followed the events in the German Democratic Republic very closely. The demand for change was omnipresent. In early October 1989, during celebrations marking the 40th anniversary of the GDR's founding, I watched young members of the ruling party marching in columns and expressing their sympathy for our perestroika and chanting: 'Gorbachev, help us!' Spontaneous demonstrations were taking place in the large cities of the GDR and were becoming more massive every day. And there were an increasing number of banners that read, 'We are one people!' On Oct. 18, Erich Honecker had to vacate his post and was replaced by Egon Krenz. But the reforms came too late. In a meeting of our politburo on Nov. 3, a week before the fall of the Berlin Wall, during a discussion about the situation in Germany, the chairman of the Committee for State Security said: "Tomorrow, 500,000 people will take to the streets of Berlin and other cities..."