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Joe Biden has been in a back and forth with President Trump over a reported whistleblower complaint as well as his son's business dealings in Ukraine.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 22, 2019 7:35 AM

"Yesterday, millions of people across the globe marched and demanded real climate action," Thunberg said at the first UN Youth Climate Summit.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 21, 2019 12:03 PM

Greek police said Saturday they have arrested a suspect in the 1985 hijacking of a flight from Athens that became a multi-day ordeal and included the slaying of an American. Police said a 65-year-old suspect in the hijacking was arrested Thursday on the island of Mykonos in response to a warrant from Germany. Lt. Col. Theodoros Chronopoulos, a police spokesman, told The Associated Press that the hijacking case involved TWA Flight 847.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 21, 2019 5:38 PM

POSTED SEPTEMBER 22, 2019 9:00 AM

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., recently proposed killing it on the grounds that the presidential selection mechanism leads candidates to focus on just a handful of “swing states” that are most likely to determine the election.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 22, 2019 11:30 AM

Turjoy Chowdhury/NurPhoto via GettyThis story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 220 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story. ROME—Manu remembers vividly the grim conditions he faced when he left coastal Bangladesh just three years ago to try to start a new life in Europe. The 45-year-old woodworker was one of millions of people in his South Asian country who had, for years, adjusted to seasonal flooding, moving in and out of their homes as the higher tides passed with the seasons. But in recent years, the rising seas didn't subside, and Manu lost his home, his belongings and finally his livelihood when trees vital to his craft disappeared under the rising sea. In 2016, Manu made his way to Italy where he requested asylum, which very likely won’t be granted. “There isn’t even a category on the application to request protection from the changing climate,” he told The Daily Beast. “No one even recognizes the problem.”Some do, in fact, but too few, and global society cannot ignore the problem much longer. The World Bank estimates that by the year 2050, at least 143 million additional migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America—already the greatest migrant and refugee-producing areas—will be on the move because of rising seas, droughts, and extreme weather. Adding to the injustice for those most affected is the fact that the climate change crisis is not the fault of those on the move. Founder and executive director of the Environmental Justice Foundation, Steve Trent, tells The Daily Beast that the poorer communities, affected first and worst, are those least able to mitigate the impacts of the heating planet. “The world’s least developed countries produce only a fraction of greenhouse gas emissions and have had far fewer of the benefits reaped by richer countries from our addiction to carbon, yet they are suffering the worst impacts of the climate crisis,” says Trent. “This summer, entire villages in India were abandoned, leaving only the sick and the elderly, as the country baked in 50°C [122°F] heat. Right now in the Bahamas, the death toll in the wake of Hurricane Dorian is expected to [continue to] rise dramatically.”  Trent points to the fact that the European Union alone was responsible for 40 percent of all global C02 emissions between 1850 and 2011. “Yet in an unjust world, 99 percent of all deaths from weather-related disasters occur in the world’s 50 least developed countries,” he says. “Countries that have contributed less than 1 percent of global carbon emissions. This is not justice.”A new doomsday report  by the World Bank’s climate scientists, migration experts and statistical researchers paints a picture of what's to come so dire it verges on the apocalyptic. According to Kanta Kumari Rigaud, the World Bank’s lead environmental specialist who compiled the report, events like crop failures due to droughts or floods will create what he calls “hotspots” that force people to move at first within national borders. Most will be go from rural to urban areas, but that influx will create new concentrations of poverty and cause people to start moving beyond borders.To meet this challenge, the report suggests, many urban areas and their environs need to prepare for an influx of people with improved housing and transportation infrastructure, social services, and employment opportunities. If managed correctly, the migration could create a “positive momentum” in some areas facing depopulation. But in others, it will only put additional burdens on already overwhelmed systems. Look at the recent global migration crises that have relatively little to do with climate change, and the way those have shaken developed nations. The rise of the xenophobic extreme right in Europe was spawned in part by the 2015 influx of a million refugees, largely from war-torn Syria. Central Americans trying to reach the United States by way of Mexico have faced a figurative and perhaps soon-to-be physical wall. Rohingya people fleeing inter-communal wars in Burma were met by some of the most abhorrent human rights violations since the Holocaust. To date, sub-Saharan Africans fleeing war and poverty trying to reach Europe though Italy have been met with harsh policies and closed ports, but only a fraction were fleeing the impact of a changing climate. Now, as a recent report by UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency, points out, drought is compounding security woes and people are fleeing to Ethiopia. Many will then try to move on to Europe.Now imagine the extra migration pressures imposed by “natural” disasters related to climate change. The U.N. today counts 68.5 million forcibly displaced people in the world due to war, poverty, and natural disasters. Imagine tripling that figure.Some migrants will have it much harder than others. The United Nations special rapporteur on poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, warns of a disaster made worse by wage disparity. “We risk a ‘climate apartheid’ scenario where the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer,” he wrote in a report to the U.N. in June. “Perversely, while people in poverty are responsible for just a fraction of global emissions, they will bear the brunt of climate change, and have the least capacity to protect themselves.”Alston also warns that climate change will impact democracies as governments try to cope with the consequences. Aid agencies have yet to define what it means to be a climate migrant or refugee, and without crucial designations there won't be policies and legal protections. “Most human rights bodies have barely begun to grapple with what climate change portends for human rights, and it remains one on a long laundry list of ‘issues,’ despite the extraordinarily short time to avoid catastrophic consequences,” Alston said when he presented his report. “As a full-blown crisis that threatens the human rights of vast numbers of people bears down, the usual piecemeal, issue-by-issue human rights methodology is woefully insufficient.”UNHCR has been reluctant to designate the new category for people moving due to climate change. John Podesta, founder and director of the Center for American Progress, outlined the issue of classification in a recent report for the Brookings Institution.  “The UNHCR has thus far refused to grant these people refugee status, instead designating them as ‘environmental migrants,’ in large part because it lacks the resources to address their needs,” Podesta wrote. “But with no organized effort to supervise the migrant population, these desperate individuals go where they can, not necessarily where they should. As their numbers grow, it will become increasingly difficult for the international community to ignore this challenge.”He believes the international community will be forced either to redefine what a refugee is to include climate migrants or create a new category and institutional framework to protect climate migrants.“However, opening that debate in the current political context would be fraught with difficulty,” he said in the report. “Currently, the nationalist, anti-immigrant, and xenophobic atmosphere in Europe and the U.S. would most likely lead to limiting refugee protections rather than expanding them.”All agencies that eventually will be tasked with managing the new migration have reached the same conclusion: the developed world has to act to cut emissions and stave off the apocalyptic disaster in the making. But vulnerable countries need to act, too. The World Bank is helping Bangladesh, which is projected to produce a third of South Asia’s climate migrants by 2050, to develop a “Perspective Plan for 2041,” that, while pessimistic, recognizes that people need to start moving away from coastal areas in order to integrate and find new skills. Mexico is also working on a plan towards adaptation, which will help retrain workers who rely on industries that will disappear as the real effects of climate change take hold. The World Bank says that if the industrialized world starts to act by cutting greenhouse gases now and integrating a climate migration contingency into all development plans, the inevitable disaster does not have to become a worst case scenario.  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.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 23, 2019 4:43 AM

Israel's national electricity company said Sunday it was cutting power to parts of the occupied West Bank due to outstanding payments amounting to nearly $483 million. The Israel Electric Corporation said it was owed 1.7 billion shekels in debts from the main Palestinian power distributor for the West Bank, which is based in east Jerusalem. From Monday, the company "will reduce the current in some areas of the West Bank" because of the debts, it said in a statement.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 22, 2019 3:19 PM

Stacks of cash piled high were shown as evidence on Saturday against ousted Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir at his trial on charges of possessing illicit foreign currency and corruption. Millions of euros and Sudanese pounds were found at Bashir's residence in April after he was overthrown and detained by the military following months of demonstrations against his rule. The court heard four defense witnesses on Saturday, including Abubakr Awad, who was minister of state for the presidency until Bashir's fall, before it was adjourned until next Saturday.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 21, 2019 3:28 PM

Pete Buttigieg’s husband is now headlining fundraisers solo, helping power the mayor’s 2020 campaign as he focuses on Iowa and New Hampshire.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 22, 2019 6:57 AM

(Bloomberg) -- Ukraine’s novice leader may have thought Vladimir Putin would pose his biggest diplomatic challenge. Five months after being elected, it’s Donald Trump who’s giving him a crash course in the perils of international politics.President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is being pulled into the storm surrounding the 2020 U.S. election over a July phone call during which media allege Trump repeatedly asked him to investigate the son of the Democratic hopeful Joe Biden.It’s an awkward predicament: the U.S. has been a major donor since Ukrainians booted out their Kremlin backed leader back in 2014, providing financial aid and military assistance. And the timing is far from ideal, with Zelenskiy traveling this week to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where he’s scheduled to meet Trump.Ukraine, already the source of the worst tensions between the U.S. and Russia since the Cold War, is becoming a focus of next year’s re-election bid by Trump, who’s trailing in polls. He appeared to acknowledge Sunday that he’d discussed Biden with Zelenskiy, though said he was just concerned about corruption.Zelenskiy, who scored a shock election victory in April, must tread carefully.“Ukraine needs to hold neutral ground, and that requires flexibility and resourcefulness,” Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta Political Analysis Center in Kyiv, said by phone. “He can’t quarrel with Trump, but at the same time it’s not in his or Ukraine’s best interest to become part of the internal political scuffles in the U.S.”Whistle-Blower EmergesThe controversy concerns Hunter Biden’s role on the board of one of Ukraine’s biggest gas companies, which featured in a corruption investigation. Trump’s allies say a push by President Barack Obama’s administration to remove then General Prosecutor Viktor Shokin in 2016 was aimed at closing down any probe.In May, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor said he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden or his son. Vitaliy Kasko, a prosecutor who pursued a case against the gas company’s owner, told Bloomberg in May that there was no U.S. pressure to close the case. Many world leaders and the European Union were demanding Shokin’s dismissal. Shokin denied accusations of wrongdoing.A whistle-blower from the U.S. intelligence community, who hasn’t been publicly identified, raised concerns about Trump’s interactions with a foreign leader, subsequently believed to be Zelenskiy during the July call.New ‘Lawlessness’Zelenskiy had been off to a flying start at home. His market-friendly policies helped turn the hryvnia into this year’s best-performing currency. He sealed a prisoner swap with Putin and has top diplomats talking about the improved chance of peace between the longtime foes. He’s riding high in polls.But the past week has seen Zelenskiy’s job become trickier. First, ties with a billionaire whose TV channel use to air Zelenskiy’s shows have come under the microscope once again. Then, a champion reformer under the previous administration said her house had been burned down in an arson attack in Kyiv.The scandal over Trump could be his biggest challenge yet because of the extreme partisan nature of U.S. politics.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned Sunday of “a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation.”\--With assistance from Daryna Krasnolutska.To contact the reporters on this story: Aliaksandr Kudrytski in Minsk, Belarus at akudrytski@bloomberg.net;Andrew Langley in London at alangley1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Andrea Dudik at adudik@bloomberg.net, Michael WinfreyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

POSTED SEPTEMBER 23, 2019