Project Veritas drops CNN exposé

The tables appear to be turning on CNN as a whistleblower launches bombshell allegations of bias against the network. In its latest investigative piece, Project Veritas claims to expose the anti-Trump culture at the highest levels of the news outlet. The organization worked with a CNN contractor who helped gather evidence, including secret recordings at editorial meetings.
The first clip, released Monday, features a man who is allegedly CNN President Jeff Zucker telling staffers he wants them to focus on the president’s impeachment. The video also shows Nick Neville, a media coordinator at CNN, acknowledging Zucker’s negative stance toward the president is personal.
Project Veritas shared a clip of Zucker talking about the forthcoming leaks on a morning call just before its release, confirming the source was an insider. The whistleblower has now been identified as Cary Poarch, who said he decided to secretly record meetings at the network to expose the bias.
Conservative political activist and Project Veritas organizer James O”Keefe took to Twitter to call for support for the insider, calling him a “patriot. Poarch has set up a GoFundMe page in which he plans to use for any legal challenges he may now face.

China tempers hopes about US tariff truce

BEIJING (AP) — A truce in a U.S.-Chinese tariff war and Beijing’s promises to open more of its state-dominated economy are raising hopes among investors.

But Beijing has tempered expectations, while companies express frustration over the halting pace of market-opening moves.

The China Daily, an English-language newspaper aimed at foreign readers, warned the two sides have yet to put last week’s agreement on paper after President Donald Trump suspended a planned tariff hike. In exchange, Trump said Beijing would buy up to $50 billion of American farm goods, a pledge China has yet to confirm.

“There is always the possibility that Washington may decide to cancel the deal if it thinks that doing so will better serve its interests,” said the newspaper. It called on the Trump administration to “avoid backpedaling.”

Business groups welcomed the truce as a possible step toward ending the costly, 15-month-old fight but said it was a small one. Talks broke down earlier after Trump accused Beijing of backsliding on promises Washington believed were locked in.

Friday’s agreement coincided with China’s announcement of a timetable to carry out a 2017 promise to abolish limits on foreign ownership of some finance businesses, starting with futures trading firms on Jan. 1. Securities firms and mutual fund managers follow later in the year.

Investors saw that as a commitment to freer trade. Chinese officials say it has nothing to do with the trade talks and isn’t a concession to Washington.

Over the past 18 months, President Xi Jinping’s government also has promised to allow full foreign ownership in banking, insurance and auto manufacturing in hopes of making its slowing, state-dominated economy more competitive and productive.

Chinese market-opening initiatives follow a standard script. Authorities announce dramatic but vague promises that raise hopes abroad. Six months to a year passes while companies wait to see regulations. Many are dismayed when they impose costly licensing requirements or curbs on the size of a business.

None addresses U.S. complaints that plans for government-led creation of Chinese competitors in robotics and other industries violate Beijing’s market-opening commitments and are based on stealing or pressuring companies to hand over technology.

Foreign companies are frustrated that Beijing is moving so gradually 17 years after joining the free-trading World Trade Organization. China, the biggest global exporter, is widely seen as having benefited most from freer trade but faces complaints it violates the rules and spirit of the WTO by blocking access to its own markets and subsidizing Chinese competitors.

“China’s opening-up process needs to move beyond piecemeal changes and instead embrace an absolute approach in which China goes from ‘increasingly open’ to ‘open’,” said Joerg Wuttke, the president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China.

Chinese leaders want foreign capital, skills and competition for an economy where huge but inefficient state companies still control industries including oil and gas, telecoms, banking, insurance and power generation.

Beijing wants more foreign involvement to help improve China’s finance industry but remains skeptical about the maturity and capability of its own domestic players, said Lester Ross, a lawyer in Beijing for the firm WilmerHale.

Still, “There is a lot of attractiveness” for foreign banks, insurers and other competitors in China’s fledgling market, he said.

Opening its own markets also gives Beijing leverage to ask the United States and other governments to let wholly Chinese-owned banks, insurance and other companies into their markets, Ross said.

Beijing allowed full foreign ownership of electric car producers starting last year. Restrictions on commercial vehicle manufacturing end next year and for passenger vehicles in 2022.

That reflects confidence Chinese electric car brands including BYD Auto and BAIC, which are among the global industry’s biggest producers by vehicles sold, can compete with foreign rivals.

Global automakers that until now were required to work through state-owned partners are so deeply enmeshed in those ventures that most plan to stick with them. Buying out partners could cost billions of dollars and the foreigners would lose their political connections.

“China is accelerating the pace of opening, but we still need to see those implementing regulations in place and how fast those are carried out,” said Ross.

Foreign banks are applying to set up shop in China following an August 2018 pledge to allow full foreign ownership. But they need an eye-wateringly high minimum capital of 40 billion yuan ($5.7 billion) to operate in China or 8 billion yuan ($1.1 billion) to conduct cross-border services.

That’s beyond the reach of all but the richest foreign institutions but affordable for state-owned Chinese banks, some the biggest global competitors.

A handful of American, European and Japanese banks have gotten approvals to set up Chinese ventures. It’s unclear if they met the capital requirement or if regulators eased that as a concession to Washington and other trading partners.

In insurance, foreign investors face a time-consuming licensing process requiring them to apply in each one of China’s 36 provinces and major cities and wait up to a year for approvals. That could take up to a decade.

“China’s efforts to boost investor confidence face significant headwinds,” said Andrew Coflan and Allison Sherlock of Eurasia Group in a report.

Another hurdle: Government controls on the movement of money into and out of China that add to the cost and difficulty of bringing in investment capital and taking home profits.

Such obstacles “make entrance by foreign financial firms a challenge, even with no ownership caps,” said Coflan and Sherlock.

Also Tuesday, the Chinese post office said fees it pays the United States and other countries to deliver packages will nearly triple through 2025 under an agreement following complaints by Washington.

Payments will rise 27% next year and by 164% in total through 2025 under the Sept. 25 agreement by members of the Universal Postal Union, the State Postal Bureau said in a statement.

The Trump administration complained the U.S. Post Office was subsidizing Chinese exporters, which it said pay too little to deliver the vast flow of packages generated by online commerce.

Trump imposes sanctions on Turkey, threatens its economy

WASHINGTON (AP) — Targeting Turkey’s economy, President Donald Trump announced sanctions aimed at restraining the Turks’ assault against Kurdish fighters and civilians in Syria — an assault Turkey began after Trump announced he was moving U.S. troops out of the way.

The United States on Monday also called on Turkey to stop the invasion and declare a cease-fire, and Trump is sending Vice President Mike Pence and national security adviser Robert O’Brien to Ankara as soon as possible in an attempt to begin negotiations. Pence said Trump spoke directly to Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who promised not attack the border town of Kobani, which in 2015 witnessed the Islamic State group’s first defeat in a battle by U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters.

“President Trump communicated to him very clearly that the United States of American wants Turkey to stop the invasion, implement an immediate cease-fire and to begin to negotiate with Kurdish forces in Syria to bring an end to the violence,” Pence said.

The Americans were scrambling for Syria’s exits, a move criticized at home and abroad as opening the door to a resurgence of the Islamic State group, whose violent takeover of Syrian and Iraqi lands five years ago was the reason American forces came in the first place.

Trump said the approximately 1,000 U.S. troops who had been partnering with local Kurdish fighters to battle IS in northern Syria are leaving the country. They will remain in the Middle East, he said, to “monitor the situation” and to prevent a revival of IS — a goal that even Trump’s allies say has become much harder as a result of the U.S. pullout.

The Turks began attacks in Syria last week against the Syrian Kurdish fighters, whom the Turks see as terrorists. On Monday, Syrian government troops moved north toward the border region, setting up a potential clash with Turkish-led forces.

Trump said Turkey’s invasion is “precipitating a humanitarian crisis and setting conditions for possible war crimes,” a reference to reports of Turkish-backed fighters executing Kurdish fighters on the battlefield.

The Kurdish forces previously allied with the U.S. said they had reached a deal with President Bashar Assad’s government to help them fend off Turkey’s invasion, a move that brings Russian forces deeper into the conflict.

In his sanctions announcement, Trump said he was halting negotiations on a $100 billion trade deal with Turkey and raising steel tariffs back up to 50%. Trump also imposed sanctions on three senior Turkish officials and Turkey’s defense and energy ministries.

“I am fully prepared to swiftly destroy Turkey’s economy if Turkish leaders continue down this dangerous and destructive path,” Trump said.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the sanctions will hurt an already weak Turkish economy. Pence said the U.S. will continue to ramp up the sanctions “unless Turkey is willing to embrace a cease-fire, come to the negotiating table and end the violence.”

American troops consolidated their positions in northern Syria on Monday and prepared to evacuate equipment in advance of a full withdrawal, a U.S. defense official said.

The official, who was not authorized to be quoted by name, said U.S. officials were weighing options for a potential future counter-IS campaign, including the possibility of waging it with a combination of air power and special operations forces based outside Syria, perhaps in Iraq.

The hurried preparations for a U.S. exit were triggered by Trump’s decision Saturday to expand a limited troop pullout into a complete withdrawal.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Monday he would travel to NATO headquarters in Brussels next week to urge European allies to impose “diplomatic and economic measures” against Turkey — a fellow NATO ally — for what Esper called Ankara’s “egregious” actions.

Esper said Turkey’s incursion had created unacceptable risk to U.S. forces in northern Syria and “we also are at risk of being engulfed in a broader conflict.”

The only exception to the U.S. withdrawal from Syria is a group of perhaps 200 troops who will remain at a base called Tanf in southern Syria near the Jordanian border along the strategically important Baghdad-to-Damascus highway. Those troops work with Syrian opposition forces unrelated to the Kurdish-led fighters in northern Syria.

Esper said the U.S. withdrawal would be done carefully to protect the troops and to ensure no U.S. equipment was left behind. He declined to say how long that might take.

In a series of tweets Monday, Trump defended his gamble that pulling U.S. forces out of Syria would not weaken U.S. security and credibility. He took sarcastic swipes at critics who say his Syria withdrawal amounts to a betrayal of the Kurds and plays into the hands of Russia.

“Anyone who wants to assist Syria in protecting the Kurds is good with me, whether it is Russia, China, or Napoleon Bonaparte,” he wrote. “I hope they all do great, we are 7,000 miles away!”

Trump has dug in on his decision to pull out the troops, believing it fulfills a key campaign promise and will be a winning issue in the 2020 election, according to White House officials.

This has effectively ended a five-year effort to partner with Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters to ensure a lasting defeat of the Islamic State group. Hundreds of IS supporters escaped a holding camp amid clashes between invading Turkish-led forces and Kurdish fighters, and analysts said an IS resurgence seemed more likely, just months after Trump declared the extremists defeated.

Trump spoke about the IS detainees in a phone call Monday with Kurdish General Mazloum Kobani. Pence said Mazloum assured the president that Kurdish forces would continue to support the prisons holding IS fighters.

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, normally a staunch Trump supporter, said he was “gravely concerned” by events in Syria and Trump’s response so far.

Withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria “would re-create the very conditions that we have worked hard to destroy and invite the resurgence of ISIS,” he said in a statement. “And such a withdrawal would also create a broader power vacuum in Syria that will be exploited by Iran and Russia, a catastrophic outcome for the United States’ strategic interests.”

New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Trump is weakening America. “To be clear, this administration’s chaotic and haphazard approach to policy by tweet is endangering the lives of U.S. troops and civilians,” Menendez said in a statement.

However, Trump got quick support from Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who earlier had lambasted his withdrawal decision as “shortsighted,” ″irresponsible” and “unnerving to its core.” Graham said he was asked to join the president and his team for phone calls with the key leaders in the conflict.

“President Trump made it clear to President Erdogan this incursion is widely unpopular in the United States, greatly destabilizing to the region, is putting in jeopardy our successes against ISIS, and will eventually benefit Iran,” Graham said.

The Kurds have turned to the Syrian government and Russia for military assistance, further complicating the battlefield.

The prospect of enhancing the Syrian government’s position on the battlefield and inviting Russia to get more directly involved is seen by Trump’s critics as a major mistake. But he tweeted that it shouldn’t matter.

“Others may want to come in and fight for one side or the other,” he wrote. “Let them!”

California Cartoons

Do California power shutoffs work? Hard to know, experts say

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Millions of Californians spent part of the week in the dark in an unprecedented effort by the state’s large electrical utilities to prevent another devastating wildfire. It was the fifth time Pacific Gas & Electric Co. has pre-emptively cut the power but by far the largest to date in the utility’s effort to prevent a deadly wildfire sparked by its power lines.

But do the power shut-offs actually prevent fires?

Experts say it’s hard to know what might have happened had the power stayed on, or if the utility’s proactive shutoffs are to thank for California’s mild fire season this year.

“It’s like trying to prove a negative,” said Alan Scheller-Wolf, professor of operations management and an energy expert at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. “They can’t prove they prevented a disaster because there’s no alternative universe where they didn’t try this.”

The winds that prompted the mass outage that affected nearly 2 million people in northern and central parts of the state shifted southward by Friday, where a wind-fueled wildfire prompted officials to order the evacuation of 100,000 people from their homes in foothills of the San Fernando Valley.

California is experiencing the first major fire activity of the season after two years that brought some of the most devastating fires on record, many of them caused by utility equipment. Until Monday, fires had covered only about 5% of the acreage burned by that date last year, and only about 13% of the average for the last five years.

But it’s too early — and maybe impossible — to tell if that can be attributed to increased measures to cut power.

“We have good reason to be skeptical, and the reason is that PG&E bears the costs of starting a fire, but they don’t bear the costs of shutting off power,” said Severin Borenstein, faculty director of the Energy Institute at University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

He noted that weather forecasting is notoriously difficult, “so even if PG&E were doing the best possible job, it would not get it right sometimes.”

PG&E said in a statement that employees located 23 spots where parts of its systems were damaged during the strong winds, but officials have declined to provide details, saying it will be included in a state-mandated report.

Gov. Gavin Newsom blasted PG&E for what he called decades of mismanagement, underinvestment and lousy communication with the public. He pointed to San Diego Gas & Electric, which pioneered proactive power shutoffs following a devastating 2007 fire sparked by its equipment, as a model for responsibly shutting off power in bad weather.

“Specifically as it relates to their predictive analysis, their weather station, I had a chance to visit it a few months ago,” Newsom said. “It’s exceptional, it’s at another level.”

SDG&E, which serves 3.6 million people, has spent about $1.5 billion to better predict bad weather and update its equipment, said Chief Operating Officer Caroline Winn. The company hired meteorologists, data scientists and fire experts and deployed an extensive array of weather monitors, she said. It replaced about 18,000 wooden poles with steel, installed new conductors and increased the wind tolerance in remote areas, using data from weather sensors to know which equipment was most at risk. The company also sectionalized electrical circuits so power managers could target outages more precisely to the lines facing danger.

“We didn’t have all the answers then, but what we did know as we had to change and we had to do things differently,” Winn said.

A decade of data and the refined grid have helped SDG&E to narrowly target outages when they’re necessary, she said. Of its 14 outages since 2013, only two affected more than 20,000 customers and most have been significantly fewer.

Outside California, other large western utilities in Nevada and Utah said they, too, are considering proactively shutting off power to avoid sparking fires.

“We want to make sure our system isn’t the cause of one of these devastating fires,” said Tiffany Erickson, a spokeswoman for Rocky Mountain Power in Utah, which has notified 5,000 households and businesses that shutoffs are possible during dangerous weather.

Last month, Southern California Edison shut off electricity to 14,000 customers in the remote Mammoth Lakes area along the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada because of forecasts of extreme winds and extremely dry vegetation.

Winds reached 88 mph (141 kph) and the California Highway Patrol banned trucks and campers from traveling along a highway after gusts blew over big-rig trucks, the utility said. The winds knocked down power poles and damaged electric circuits.

“It’s abundantly clear that the conditions that were in place up there were so severe that they could likely have caused a spark to occur,” said Don Daigler, a company spokesman. “We’re not going to do this willy-nilly.”

Stephen Pyne, a retired Arizona State University professor and fire historian, likened the power line problem to challenges posed by railroads until the early 1900s, when steam engines and train wheels regularly threw sparks that ignited deadly fires.

“Think about the railroads then,” Pyne said. “They were enormously powerful — economically, politically, socially. And we took it on. Railroads ceased to be a source of regular or lethal emissions (of sparks.)”

___

Cooper reported from Phoenix. Associated Press writers Olga R. Rodriguez in San Francisco; Keith Ridler in Boise, Idaho; Brady McCombs in Salt Lake City and Brian Melley in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

Ambassador expected to testify key assurance was from Trump

WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. ambassador is expected to tell Congress that his text message reassuring another envoy that there was no quid pro quo in their interactions with Ukraine was based solely on what President Donald Trump told him, according to a person familiar with his coming testimony in the impeachment probe.

Gordon Sondland, Trump’s hand-picked ambassador to the European Union, is among administration officials being subpoenaed to appear on Capitol Hill this week against the wishes of the White House. It’s the latest test between the legislative and executive branches of government, as the impeachment inquiry by House Democrats deepens.

On Monday, the House panels leading the investigation expect to hear from Fiona Hill, a former top National Security Council expert on Russia.

Sondland’s appearance, set for Thursday, comes after a cache of text messages from top envoys provided a vivid account of their work acting as intermediaries around the time Trump urged Ukraine’s new president, Volodymr Zelenskiy, to start investigations into a company linked to the family of a chief Democratic presidential rival, Joe Biden.

One witness who may not be called before Congress is the still anonymous government whistleblower who touched off the impeachment inquiry. Top Democrats say testimony and evidence coming in from other witnesses, and even the president himself, are backing up the whistleblower’s account of what transpired during Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelenskiy. Lawmakers have grown deeply concerned about protecting the person from Trump’s threats over the matter and may not wish to risk exposing the whistleblower’s identity.

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday, “We don’t need the whistleblower, who wasn’t on the call, to tell us what took place during the call. We have the best evidence of that.”

Schiff said it “may not be necessary” to reveal the whistleblower’s identity as the House gathers evidence. “Our primary interest right now is making sure that that person is protected,” he said.

The impeachment inquiry is testing the Constitution’s system of checks and balances as the House presses forward with the probe and the White House dismisses it as “illegitimate” without a formal vote of the House to open impeachment proceedings.

In calling for a vote, the White House is trying to press House Democrats who may be politically reluctant to put their names formally behind impeachment. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has resisted those efforts and is unlikely to budge as Congress returns. Democrats say Congress is well within its power as the legislative branch to conduct oversight of the president and it is Republicans, having grown weary of Trump’s actions, who may be in the greater political bind over a vote.

Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said Sunday he’d be fine with taking a formal vote, “but it’s not required.”

“Look, my own opinion is that we ought to just take this off the table because it’s such a non-issue, and there’s no doubt in my mind that of course if Nancy Pelosi does that she will have the votes and that will pass,” Himes said.

Sondland’s appearance comes after text messages from top ambassadors described their interactions leading up to Trump’s call and the aftermath.

Sondland is set to tell lawmakers that he did understand the administration was offering Zelenskiy a White House visit in exchange for a public statement committing to investigations Trump wanted, according to the person, who demanded anonymity to discuss remarks not yet given.

But Sondland will say he did not know the company being talked about for an investigation, Burisma, was tied to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, the person said. Sondland understood the discussions about combating corruption to be part of a much broader and publicized Trump administration push that was widely shared, the person said.

In the text exchange, the diplomats raised alarm that Trump appeared to up the ante, withholding military aid to Ukraine over the investigation.

One seasoned diplomat on the text message, William Taylor, called it “crazy to withhold security assistance” to Ukraine in exchange for “help with a political campaign.”

Sondland responds that the assertion is “incorrect” about Trump’s intentions. “The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind,” he said in the text message.

The person familiar with Sondland’s testimony said that before Sondland sent that text, he spoke to Trump, who told him there was no quid pro quo. Sondland then repeated that message to Taylor.

Schiff appeared on “Face the Nation” on CBS and Himes spoke on ABC’s “This Week.”

___

Tucker reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

Syrian army moves to confront Turkish forces as US withdraws

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Syria’s army deployed near the Turkish border on Monday, hours after Syrian Kurdish forces previously allied with the U.S. said they had reached a deal with Damascus to help them fend off Turkey’s invasion.

The announcement of a deal between Syria’s Kurds and its government is a major shift in alliances that came after President Donald Trump ordered all U.S. troops withdrawn from the northern border area amid the rapidly deepening chaos.

The shift sets up a potential clash between Turkey and Syria and raises the specter of a resurgent Islamic State group as the U.S. relinquishes any remaining influence in northern Syria to President Bashar Assad and his chief backer, Russia.

On Monday morning, Syria’s state news agency said that the army had moved into the town of Tal Tamr, which is about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the Turkish border.

SANA said government forces would “confront the Turkish aggression,” without giving further details. Photos posted by SANA showed several vehicles and a small number of troops.

Tal Tamr is a predominantly Assyrian Christian town that was once held by IS before it was retaken by Kurdish-led forces. Many Syrian Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Syria’s pre-war population of 23 million, left for Europe over the past 20 years, with the flight gathering speed since the country’s conflict began in March 2011.

SANA did not say from which area the Syrian army had moved into the town.

Despite widespread criticism from its NATO allies in Europe and the U.S., Turkey has pressed on with its offensive into northern Syria.

Turkish forces appeared set to launch an operation on the town of Manbij farther west on Monday, according to CNN-Turk, which said the forces had reached the city’s edge.

Trump sees ‘consensus’ on imposing new sanctions on Turkey

President Trump on Sunday said there is widespread support in Washington to impose new sanctions against Turkey over its swift incursion into northern Syria.
Specific details about the sanctions were unclear but Trump said on Twitter, "Treasury is ready to go, additional legislation may be sought. There is great consensus on this. Turkey has asked that it not be done. Stay tuned!"
Reuters, citing an unnamed U.S. official, reported that the measures were being “worked out at all levels of the government for rollout.”
Last week, Trump vowed to obliterate Ankara’s economy if Turkey did anything in Syria that he considered "off limits."
Over the past five days, Turkish troops and their allies have pushed their way into northern towns and villages, clashing with the Kurdish fighters over a stretch of 125 miles. The offensive has displaced at least 130,000 people.
On Sunday, at least nine people, including five civilians, were killed in Turkish airstrikes on a convoy in the Syrian border town of Ras al-Ayn, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Syrian Kurdish officials.
The New York Times reported that the troop advancement was so fast, they seized a road that complicated the U.S. troop pullout.
Trump has faced criticism over his decision to give Turkey a green light for the offensive. Critics said the U.S. abandoned its Kurdish allies that were credited for their actions to defeat ISIS. Trump has insisted that he wants to pull U.S. troops  out of endless wars.
Trump was criticized by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., for his initial decision, but was praised Sunday night for working with Congress “to impose crippling sanctions against Turkeys (sic) outrageous aggression/war crimes in Syria.”
The  Associated Press contributed to this report