A former White House official on Thursday will call on some lawmakers investigating impeachment of U.S. President Donald Trump not to perpetuate the “alternative narrative” that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, according to her prepared remarks.

“I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests,” Fiona
Hill, the former senior director for European and Russian Affairs on Trump’s National Security Council, wrote ahead of her public appearance.
 

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One of the sons of Egypt’s former autocratic President Hosni Mubarak says his 78-year-old mother and former first lady is in hospital.

Alaa Mubarak tweeted late Wednesday that Suzanne Mubarak was in intensive care but didn’t elaborate on her illness. He sought to reassure his followers and tweeted: “Things will be fine, God willing!”

During Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year-long rule, his wife had enjoyed significant political power and championed several projects, including efforts to eradicate female genital mutilation.

The 91-year-old Mubarak was ousted in the 2011 uprising that swept Egypt as part of the Arab Spring movements across the region. He was sentenced to life imprisonment but later retried and subsequently acquitted and released in 2017.

Mubarak’s two sons, Alaa and Gamal, were both convicted and served terms for corruption.

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South Korean startups are banking on their country’s similarities with Vietnam — a shared popular obsession with education, similar rituals, a history of a divisive civil war, and a current focus on manufacturing and integration with international trade — to give them an advantage in expanding their business there as Vietnam looks to follow in South Korea’s steps to become one of the next Asian tigers.

South Korea is already a big investor in the Southeast Asian nation, however now it is startups in areas like cosmetics and hotel smartphone apps that are joining in on the investment.

“I think Vietnam startup [investment] is really going up now,” Jisoo Kang, chief executive officer of Fluto, a South Korean startup that conducts user testing on digital products, said.

Next conquest

While South Korean behemoths have conquered international television and automobile markets, the next phase of growth is in developing nations such as Vietnam. Its gross domestic product growth rate is 7% annually, compared with South Korea’s growth rate of 2%.

However, the path taken by Korean behemoths could also help startups. A Korean logistics startup called 2Luck said it would look for opportunities to cooperate with companies already in Vietnam’s industrial sector.

“There are many Korean manufacturers here,” Kim Seungyong, chief executive officer of 2Luck, said.

His company aims to increase logistics efficiency by, for example, connecting truck drivers who have delivered cargo with clients for their return trips.

Other startups are looking at commonalities between Vietnam and South Korea; Vietnamese give high ratings for everything from Korean pop music to Korean drama shows, and intermarriage between the two nationalities is common.

Approach to education

One commonality is education. Just as Korean students obsess over tests and spend hours outside of school preparing for them, so too do their Vietnamese counterparts, and Vietnam has the high international test scores to show for it. The KEII Platform, an education company, calls itself South Korea’s first “edtech,” or education technology, business, and its services include teaching math to students via video and having students record themselves doing math on a smartphone app.

“We want to be the No. 1 education platform in Vietnam,” Peter Lee, chief executive officer of the KEII Platform, said in October.

However they have a lot of competition — they are not the first startup to seek opportunity in the market for education services. Vietnamese companies such as Topica, Elsa, and Yola are in the market here already.

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The reviews are biting: “mind-numbingly dull,” “a huge dud” and “a frickin’ joke.”

Yet they’re coming from an unusual place — Fox News Channel personalities talking about the programming that their network has spent hours televising over the past week.

Fox’s wall-to-wall coverage of the House’s impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump is bumping up against its opinion hosts’ attempt to minimize the proceedings.

In at least one case, viewers were asked to turn it off.

“My advice?” Greg Gutfeld, a host on Fox’s “The Five,” said. “Skip it and show up next November and give these clowns a hearing they’ll never forget.”

Like competitors CNN and MSNBC, Fox has covered all of the testimony, even as Tuesday’s session stretched past 11 hours and broadcast networks cut away. That set up an extraordinary game of chicken between Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat chairing the House investigations committee.

Fox recorded its top ratings of 2019 last week with the opening of the hearings, the Nielsen company said.

“If you’re like most Americans, you didn’t watch today’s impeachment charade,” Fox’s Sean Hannity said a half hour after Tuesday’s hearing concluded. “Here’s the big takeaway: another huge dud. Americans are tuning out in a big way.”

An hour later, Laura Ingraham said that “Tylenol PM has nothing on Schiff.” She said the “impeachment farce” was mind-numbingly dull.

Similarly, “Fox & Friends” co-host Steve Doocy said Americans were ignoring the hearings.

“The American public, they want us to watch it all,” said Doocy’s morning show colleague, Ainsley Earhardt. “They want us to give them the summary and tell them what happened. It’s hard to follow all of these players and all of these individuals.”

Fox notes that its news operation, not the opinion hosts, has been covering the hearings. News anchor Chris Wallace, for example, has specifically contradicted the contention that people don’t care by pointing to ratings and saying Tuesday, “a lot of people are engaged and are watching this.”

Gutfeld has been a particularly harsh critic of the hearings, saying last week that Fox may be required to air the proceedings, but viewers aren’t required to watch.

“The media is shoving this down your throat, with blanket, abysmal coverage, and then they scold you for not genuflecting before their altar of solemn news,” he said last week. “This is historical, they tell you. No, it is hysterical.”

His colleague on “The Five,” Jesse Watters, said he tuned in to CBS for the hearing Tuesday afternoon and saw that the network had “dumped out” on coverage and was airing a daytime drama. “What’s the difference between this and a soap opera?” he said.

CBS cut out of networkwide coverage for part of Tuesday afternoon’s session, the first broadcast network to do so, saying it was giving local affiliates the option to air it and streaming it online. Later as the hearing stretched into the evening, CBS, ABC and NBC all left the hearing to air typical programming.

Each broadcast network, along with the cable news outlets, returned to live hearing coverage Wednesday with Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s testimony.

Tuesday’s hearing stretched into prime time, ending with a lengthy summation by Schiff that became an argument for impeachment itself and a refutation of various talking points expressed by Trump’s supporters. It was the first, and likely only, time that Schiff would have the chance to deliver unedited remarks to the roughly 3 million people who routinely watch Fox’s nightly opinion lineup.

As he talked, a chyron printed on Fox’s screen pleaded with viewers to stick around: “Tucker Carlson is Next,” the message read. “Impeachment Hearings Wrapping up Now.”

After adjournment, Carlson’s traditional hour-long show had been cut in half.

“We are out of time, sadly,” Carlson said at the end. “Stolen by Adam Schiff.”
 

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A new survey shows about one in four Europeans holding anti-Semitic beliefs, with such attitudes on the rise in eastern countries and mostly steady in the west.

The poll of 14 European countries released Thursday by the New York-based Anti-Defamation League found anti-Semitic attitudes most prevalent in Poland, Ukraine and Hungary, with more than 40% of the respondents in each country expressing such views.

The governments of all three countries have been criticized by Jewish groups recently, though all deny being anti-Semitic.

In western Europe, the study found anti-Semitic views were either stable or down, with decreases in Britain, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Austria. Denmark and Belgium saw minor increases, while France was unchanged and Sweden had the lowest rate, at 4%.

Italy and Austria both posted significant decreases.
 

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Germany sought Wednesday to ease French worries about NATO by offering to set up a group of experts to examine the alliance’s security challenges after President Emmanuel Macron lamented the “brain death” of the military organization.

Macron’s public criticism of NATO — notably, a perceived lack of U.S. leadership, concerns about an unpredictable Turkey since it invaded northern Syria without warning its allies, and the need for Europe to take on more security responsibilities — has shaken the alliance.

At a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels, Germany’s Heiko Maas said that the 29-nation trans-Atlantic alliance is “Europe’s life insurance and we want it to remain so.” He said the aim should be to prevent “break-away tendencies” within NATO.

To ensure that doesn’t happen, Maas told reporters, the “political arm” of NATO must be strengthened.

“We should get advice from experts, from people who understand these issues,” he said.

Maas declined to elaborate or comment on who might be part of this expert commission, saying he was more interested in how Germany’s partners react to the proposal. France’s response to the offer should indicate whether NATO’s internal differences can quickly be papered over.

Macron’s choice of words was rejected as “drastic” by German Chancellor Angela Merkel the day after they were published in The Economist magazine. Senior U.S. and European officials have since piled on, leaving France feeling isolated for speaking out.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg heads to Paris next week for talks with Macron, tentatively scheduled for Nov. 28. On the eve of the Brussels meeting, Stoltenberg said the best way to resolve differences “is to sit down and to discuss them and to fully understand the messages and the motivations.”

Asked Wednesday why Macron’s stance has angered allies or might hurt NATO, Stoltenberg said, without mentioning France, that “there is no way to deny that there are disagreements on issues like trade, like climate change, the Iran nuclear deal and also simply on how to deal with the situation in northeast Syria.”

But he added: “We have to overcome these disagreements, because it is so essential both for Europe and the United States that we stand united.”

The rift bodes ill for a Dec. 3-4 summit of NATO leaders in London, where U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to once again demand that the Europeans and Canada step up defense spending. That meeting comes amid impeachment hearings in the U.S., and in the heat of a British election campaign.

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The Senate has easily approved a bill to support human rights in Hong Kong following months of often-violent unrest in the semi-autonomous Chinese city.

The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act was passed by voice vote Tuesday. It now goes to the House, which has already passed similar legislation.

The bill would mandate sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials who carry out human rights abuses and require an annual review of the favorable trade status that Washington grants Hong Kong.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said in introducing the bill that it would send a message of support to the Hong Kong people who have protested for basic freedoms in the face of Chinese government oppression.

China’s government has promised unspecified countermeasures in response.
 

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Bolivian police and military forces used armored vehicles and helicopters to clear access to a major gas plant in the city of El Alto on Tuesday, a show of strength after blockades at the facility had cut off fuel supply to nearby La Paz.

Helicopters flew above roads around the Senkata gas plant, operated by state-run YPFB, which were blocked with piles of burning tires, according to a Reuters witness. Protesters are demanding the return of unseated leftist leader Evo Morales.

Morales resigned on Nov. 10 amid anti-government demonstrations and rising pressure over vote-rigging allegations after an audit by the Organization of American States (OAS) found serious irregularities in an Oct. 20 election.

But Morales supporters have since ramped up protests, calling for caretaker President Jeanine Anez to step down and for Morales to return. Mounting violence in the South American nation has seen 27 people killed in street clashes.

In what it said was a bid to restore calm, Bolivia’s congress, controlled by lawmakers from Morales’ Movement for Socialism (MAS), said on Tuesday it would cancel a contentious vote in the legislature that had been expected to reject Morales’ resignation.

The vote would be suspended “to create and contribute to an environment conducive to dialogue and peace,” the Legislative Assembly said in a statement, citing instructions from new Senate head and MAS lawmaker Monica Eva Copa Murga.

Eva Copa Murga later told reporters the assembly would prepare legislation to annul the Oct. 20 election and move towards new elections as soon as possible. The two chambers of Congress will convene separately on Wednesday.

“We do not want more deaths, we do not want more blood,” she said, flanked by the majority of the MAS party lawmakers, calling on the military and pro-Morales group to demobilize.

The country’s human right ombudsman said that three people have been killed in clashes with security forces around Senkata.

The military said in a statement they had carried out a “peaceful” operation after trying negotiation and dialogue.

The MAS party – which itself has been split over how to proceed – holds a majority in the congress and could have voted to reject Morales’ resignation, potentially creating dueling claims on the country’s leadership and raising pressure on Anez.

Morales has railed at what he has called a right-wing coup against him and hinted he could return to the country, though he has pledged repeatedly not to run again in a new election. He stepped down after weeks of protests led to allies and eventually the military urging him to go.

Desperate to Buy

Bolivians are feeling the pinch of the turmoil, with fuel shortages mounting and grocery stores short of basic goods as supporters of Morales blockade key transport routes.

In the highland capital La Paz, roads have grown quiet as people preserve gasoline, with long queues for food staples.

People lined up with gas canisters next to the Senkata plant on Tuesday. Images showed some fuel trucks moving through the area under a strong military and police presence.

“Unfortunately this has been going on for three to four weeks, so people are desperate to buy everything they find,” said Ema Lopez, 81, a retiree in La Paz.

Daniel Castro, a 63-year-old worker in the city, blamed Morales for what he called “food terrorism.”

“This is chaos and you’re seeing this chaos in (La Paz’s) Plaza Villarroel with more than 5,000 people just there to get a chicken,” he said.

The country’s hydrocarbons minister, Victor Hugo Zamora, said on Tuesday he was looking to unlock fuel deliveries for La Paz and called on the pro-Morales movements to join talks and allow economic activity to resume.

Juan Carlos Huarachi, head of the powerful Bolivian Workers’ Center union and once a staunch Morales backer, called on lawmakers to find a resolution. “Our only priority is to bring peace to the country,” he told reporters.

Jorge Quiroga, a former president and Morales critic, said Morales wanted to see Bolivia “burn,” echoing other detractors who say he has continued to stoke unrest from Mexico, which Morales denies.

…

Thirty-eight more Colombian municipalities are considered free of landmines and unexploded ordinance, President Ivan Duque said Tuesday, as civilian and military efforts to remove improvised explosives continue despite ongoing conflict in some areas.

Colombia was once among the countries where people suffered the most injuries from landmines, one result of more than five decades of armed conflict between leftist guerrillas, crime gangs, right-wing paramilitary groups and the government.

More than 700 of Colombia’s 1,122 municipalities once had landmines, but 391 of those are now certified as mine-free.

“Today we make history because we are freeing 38 municipalities from suspicion of mines,” Duque told attendees at a ceremony in the Andean country’s southwest. “Thirty-eight municipalities have said goodbye to this tragedy; they have the light of new hope.”

Mines, widely used by both rebels and crime gangs to impede military movements, have killed 2,297 people and injured another 9,492 since 1990, government figures show.

A 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels allowed de-mining work to accelerate in certain mountain and jungle areas which formerly had guerrilla presence, but remaining rebel group the National Liberation Army (ELN) and crime gangs continue to use improvised explosives, non-governmental organizations say.

Some 9.8 million square meters have been cleaned of mines and 7,100 explosive devices destroyed across the country of 48 million. The army and 11 civilian groups and NGOs, including the Halo Trust, are responsible for de-mining work.

Colombia, along with more than 160 other countries, is a signatory to the Ottawa Treaty, which forbids the manufacture, storage and use of landmines.

It has pledged to remove all mines by 2021 and will need to ask fellow signatories to approve an extension if it misses its removal target.
 

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Waves of student protesters attempted daring escapes past police lines, while less than 200 others remain barricaded inside a Hong Kong University, which has been surrounded by riot police since Sunday.

VOA Cantonese Service reporter Iris Tong, who was with students inside the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, described scenes of desperation, with at least two young teenagers threatening suicide. 

“I saw one boy (threaten) to use a knife on his neck,” Tong says. “I didn’t see any blood from his neck, but he just talked about how he wanted to kill himself. But other people said it wasn’t necessary for him to do that and told him to put down the knife.” 

“I can feel they are hopeless,” she said. “It’s quite sad.”

Since Sunday, police have ordered the protesters to drop their homemade weapons and leave the campus via a single exit, where they likely would face riot-related charges. As of early Tuesday, hundreds had agreed to leave the school following negotiations by local officials and community leaders.

Many other students have attempted to escape to freedom — some by sliding down ropes to waiting motorcycles, which tried to zoom past the security cordon that surrounds the campus. Police have fired tear gas and rubber bullets at those who attempt to flee.

Last week, hundreds of students barricades themselves on the campus, collecting makeshift weapons including bricks, arrows, and molotov cocktails. Now, only “100-something” protesters remain, says Tong. “But less than half of them can go to the frontlines,” she estimates. 

Lam comments

Hong Kong’s executive Carrie Lam on Tuesday made her first substantial remarks on the standoff, saying she is “extremely worried” and hopes the situation can be resolved peacefully.

But the Beijing-friendly Lam also defended police actions, saying she was shocked that the students had turned the campus into a “weapons factory.” About 600 protesters have left the campus so far, Lam said. 

The scene around the campus was relatively calm as of midday Tuesday. A night earlier, waves of protesters tried unsuccessfully to breach police lines and reach the campus with supplies. Protesters lobbed petrol bombs at police and set obstructions on the street, but were eventually turned back by the police, who fired water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets. 

Escalation

The clashes are some of the worst violence since anti-government protests began in Hong Kong five months ago.

The protests started in opposition to a proposed bill that would have allowed Hong Kong citizens to be extradited to the mainland. The protests quickly morphed into wider calls for democracy and opposition to growing Chinese influence.

A smaller group of hardcore protesters have also increasingly engaged in more aggressive tactics — clashing with police, destroying public infrastructure, and vandalizing symbols of state power. The protesters have defended the tactics as a necessary response to police violence and the government’s refusal to make political concessions.

Beijing standing firm

Neither Beijing nor Hong Kong authorities show signs of giving in.

Earlier this week, Hong Kong’s High Court ruled that the government’s ban on face masks was unconstitutional. The face mask ban, which went into effect last month, punished offenders with up to a year in prison.

But China’s top legislature on Tuesday slammed the court ruling, insisting Hong Kong courts have no authority to rule on the legality of legislation.

Beijing’s statement fundamentally threatens the rule of law in Hong Kong, says Angel Wong, a Hong Kong lawyer.

“This completely changes our understanding of our legal system,” says Wong. “It makes us worry what Beijing will do to take away the power of the Hong Kong court(s).”

Many Hong Kongers are outraged by the steady erosion of the  “one country, two systems” policy that Beijing has used to govern Hong Kong since Britain handed it over to China in 1997.

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South Korean and U.S. officials broke off talks on Tuesday aimed at settling the cost burden for Seoul of hosting the U.S. military, South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said, amid a public backlash over a U.S. demand for a sharp increase in the bill.

Officials had resumed a planned two-day negotiation on Monday, trying to narrow a $4 billion gap in what they believe South Korea should contribute for the cost of stationing U.S. troops in the country for next year.

“Our position is that it should be within the mutually acceptable Special Measures Agreement (SMA) framework that has been agreed upon by South Korea and the U.S. for the past 28 years,” South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said, referring to the cost-sharing deal’s official name.

“The U.S. believes that the share of defense spending should be increased significantly by creating a new category,” the ministry said in a statement.

Negotiators left the table after only about one hour of discussions while the talks were scheduled throughout the day, South Korean media reported, citing unnamed foreign ministry officials.

South Korean lawmakers have said U.S. officials had demanded up to $5 billion a year, more than five times the 1.04 trillion won ($896 million) Seoul agreed to pay this year for hosting the 28,500 troops.

U.S. officials have not publicly confirmed the number, but Trump has previously said the U.S. military presence in and around South Korea was “$5 billion worth of protection.”

The negotiations are taking place as U.S. efforts to reach an agreement with North Korea over its nuclear and missile programs appear stalled, ahead of a year-end deadline from Pyongyang for the U.S. to shift its approach.

Lee Hye-hoon, head of South Korea’s parliamentary intelligence committee, said in a radio interview on Tuesday the U.S. ambassador to South Korea talked to her at length earlier this month about how Seoul had been only paying one-fifth what it should have been paying for the cost of stationing U.S. troops.

Under South Korean law, the military cost-sharing deal must be approved by parliament.

Ruling party lawmakers have said this week they will “refuse to ratify any excessive outcome of the current negotiations” that deviate from the established principle and structure of the agreements for about 30 years.

Trump has long railed against what he says are inadequate contributions from allies towards defense costs. The United States is due to begin separate negotiations for new defense cost-sharing deals with Japan, Germany and NATO next year.

…

The union representing U.S. diplomats said on Monday it has raised tens of thousands of dollars in the last week alone to help defray the legal costs of foreign service officers who have testified in U.S. President Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry.

The American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) also issued a statement defending U.S. diplomats after Trump criticized several of those who have appeared before Congress and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said nothing specific in their support.

“These patriots go abroad to every corner of the world and serve the interests of the American people,” AFSA President Eric Rubin said in a statement. “They do so with integrity and have no partisan or hidden agenda.”

“We should honor the service of each and every one of them.”

Separately, Rubin said: “We have raised tens of thousands of dollars in the past week alone” in the union’s Legal Defense Fund to help defray lawyers’ bills. He did not provide details.

One person caught up in the inquiry said he had already run up a legal bill of more than $25,000.

Neither the State Department nor the White House responded to requests for comment. A State Department spokesperson has previously said the agency planned to provide legal assistance to employees called to testify but did not give details.

Trump lashed out on Sunday at Jennifer Williams, a U.S. diplomat and foreign policy aide to Vice President Mike Pence who has testified that some of Trump’s comments on a July 25 phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart were “inappropriate.”

The call is at the heart of the Democratic-led House of Representatives’ inquiry into whether Republican Trump misused U.S. foreign policy to undermine former Democratic Vice President Joe Biden, a potential opponent in the 2020 election.

Writing on Twitter, Trump accused Williams of being a “Never Trumper” who should “work out a better presidential attack.”

Trump has denied wrongdoing and branded the probe a witch hunt aimed at hurting his re-election chances.

Asked on Monday why he had not spoken in support of his employees, Pompeo said he would talk about U.S. policy toward Ukraine but not about the impeachment inquiry.

Pressed, he said nothing specific: “I always defend State Department employees. It’s the greatest diplomatic corps in the history of the world. Very proud of the team.”

Asked if he shared Trump’s view, expressed on Twitter, that “everywhere (former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine) Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” Pompeo replied: “I’ll defer to the White House about particular statements.”

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