Treasury Department sent information on Hunter Biden to expanding GOP Senate inquiry


Yahoo News•February 6, 2020

The Treasury Department has complied with Republican senators’ requests for highly sensitive and closely held financial records about Hunter Biden and his associates and has turned over “‘evidence’ of questionable origin” to them, according to a leading Democrat on one of the committees conducting the investigation.

For months, while the impeachment controversy raged, powerful committee chairmen in the Republican-controlled Senate have been quietly but openly pursuing an inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business affairs and Ukrainian officials’ alleged interventions in the 2016 election, the same matters that President Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani unsuccessfully tried to coerce Ukraine’s government to investigate.

Hunter Biden in 2016. (Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images for World Food Program USA)

Unlike Trump and Giuliani, however, Sens. Charles Grassley, chairman of the Finance Committee; Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; and Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, have focused their efforts in Washington, seeking to extract politically useful information from agencies of the U.S. government. They’ve issued letters requesting records from Cabinet departments and agencies, including the State Department, the Treasury, the Justice Department, the FBI, the National Archives and the Secret Service.

Grassley and Johnson have sought to obtain some of the most sensitive and closely held documents in all of federal law enforcement — highly confidential suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by financial institutions with FinCEN, an agency of the Treasury that helps to police money laundering.

The senators’ requests to the Treasury have borne fruit, according to the ranking Democratic senator on the Finance Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon, who contrasted the cooperation given to the Republican senators with the pervasive White House-directed stonewall that House Democrats encountered when they subpoenaed documents and witnesses in the impeachment inquiry.

“Applying a blatant double standard, Trump administration agencies like the Treasury Department are rapidly complying with Senate Republican requests — no subpoenas necessary — and producing ‘evidence’ of questionable origin,” Wyden spokesperson Ashley Schapitl said in a statement. “The administration told House Democrats to go pound sand when their oversight authority was mandatory while voluntarily cooperating with the Senate Republicans’ sideshow at lightning speed.”

Sen. Ron Wyden during President Trump's impeachment trial on Jan. 30. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

The “rapid” production of sensitive financial information from the Treasury Department in response to congressional requests is apparently uncommon. A source familiar with the matter said the Treasury began turning over materials less than two months after Grassley and Johnson wrote to FinCEN on Nov. 15, 2019, requesting any SARs and related documents filed by financial institutions regarding Hunter Biden, his associates, their businesses and clients.

Just a couple of weeks later, Wyden and Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, complained to FinCEN in a letter that “information requests from Congress, including legitimate Committee oversight requests related to Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), often take months to process, and we understand that certain such requests have yet to be answered at all.”

“Sen. Wyden’s warning was spurred by concern that the agency would prioritize Republican requests over Democratic requests,” Schapitl said of the December letter to FinCEN. “Treasury’s subsequent actions have made his concerns even more urgent.”

“It's strange that any senator would complain about receiving responses to oversight requests in a timely manner,” a Grassley spokesperson said to BuzzFeed News on Thursday.

"The Democrats launched a nuclear weapon with impeachment, and then wanted to negotiate while it was in the air — that’s not how oversight works," a Republican Senate aide said, responding to Wyden's comments about a double standard between the GOP investigation and the impeachment inquiry.

Republicans also noted that Sen. Grassley had first raised his concerns about a DNC contractor potentially coordinating with Ukraine in a 2017 letter to the Justice Department.

"Senate Republicans’ investigation ramped up just as the House impeachment investigation ramped up," Schapitl said, "providing an avenue for them to pursue the trumped-up investigation President Zelensky did not announce in the face of President Trump’s extortion scheme."

With the Senate impeachment trial concluded and the Democratic primaries in full swing, the efforts of the Republican-led investigation may soon appear at the center of the political stage. The flow of information from the administration to Senate Republicans has prompted concerns among Democrats that any damaging information uncovered may be deployed at a time of maximum political advantage for the Trump campaign.

“Republicans are turning the Senate into an arm of the president’s political campaign, pursuing an investigation designed to further President Trump’s favorite conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election and smear Vice President Biden,” Schapitl said. The Biden presidential campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A series of letters and public statements shows that since last autumn the senators have been pursuing a wide-ranging joint inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business affairs in Ukraine at the time his father, Vice President Joe Biden, was leading the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy and into the activities of Ukrainian officials and a Ukrainian-American Democratic political operative during the 2016 election.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter at a basketball game in 2010. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Aside from the statement from Wyden’s office, there has been scant information about what investigators have uncovered, if anything. Wyden’s statement stopped short of saying whether the “‘evidence’ of questionable origin” produced in compliance with the senators’ request included SARs.

The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 mandates that banks generate SARs to report to FinCEN any transactions that they know or have reason to suspect violate federal criminal laws or are connected to money laundering. SARs are among the most confidential, closely held documents in federal law enforcement. They are forbidden to be disclosed or have their existence disclosed by banks or government authorities, are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and are privileged in most cases from discovery by civil litigants.

Because SARs may be, and indeed are required to be, filed simply on the basis of a reasonable suspicion of illegal activity, the existence of a SAR doesn’t indicate that illegal activity has actually occurred.

The Republican Senate staff conducting the investigation did not respond to inquiries, and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee declined to comment. Treasury, State and Justice did not respond to inquiries. The FBI declined to comment.

The National Archives and Records Administration said that it had not turned over any records to the Senate yet, but that a review of the request by the White House and the office of President Barack Obama, which has purview over some of the records, is ongoing. “NARA has been in regular contact with committee staff,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

The Secret Service, which only received its request from the Republican investigators after the acquittal vote of the president on Wednesday, could not be immediately reached for comment.

From their letters, it’s clear that the senators’ inquiry into the Bidens deals with the same subject matter that Trump and Giuliani’s pressure campaign sought to place under scrutiny. Their interest in suspected Ukrainian influences on the 2016 election, however, has a different point of emphasis.

Instead of the debunked CrowdStrike conspiracy theory that Trump alluded to on his call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky or similar unsubstantiated theories positing that Ukraine was somehow behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the senators have focused on a controversial January 2017 Politico article that alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election to help Hillary Clinton defeat Trump.

The article relied heavily on the allegations of Andrii Telizhenko, then a diplomat in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, who said he was asked by Alexandra Chalupa, a Democratic Party consultant, to get dirt on Paul Manafort, who was then the campaign manager for Trump. Telizhenko has since cast himself as a central figure in Giuliani’s Ukraine investigations.

Rudy Giuliani and Andrii Telizhenko in a photo posted last May 22. (Andrii Telizhenko via Facebook)

The Politico article has been seized on by Trump’s defenders as evidence that there was Ukrainian interference in the U.S. presidential election similar to the Kremlin-directed influence campaign.

“Whether there’s a connection between Democratic operatives and Ukrainian officials during the 2016 election has yet to be determined,” Graham said in a December statement. “It will only be found by looking. We intend to look.”

National security officials who served in the Trump administration have rejected the notion that Ukrainian efforts against Trump were coordinated or could be reasonably be likened to Russia’s systematic election interference campaign, which intelligence agencies have assessed was led by President Vladimir Putin himself.

“It is a fiction that the Ukrainian government was launching an effort to upend our election, upend our election to mess with our Democratic systems,” Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official in Trump’s White House, testified at her House deposition in October.

Yet throughout the fall and early winter, Republican senators peppered executive branch officials with request letters on both the Bidens and the Ukraine interference theory that Hill had implored Congress to avoid.

Grassley and Johnson courted controversy with a letter to the Justice Department seeking to obtain a broad swath of information that Chalupa, the Democratic Party consultant, says she voluntarily provided to the FBI in 2016 when she felt harassed by Russian hacking.

In a January response letter to the Justice Department, Wyden called the request “outrageous.”

“To use [Chalupa’s] voluntary cooperation in order to weaponize her personal information against her in furtherance of a political attack based on unsupported claims and potential Russian propaganda would compromise public trust in our law enforcement, undermine Americans’ rights, and damage our national security interests,” he wrote.

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Winners and losers from the New Hampshire Democratic debate

LOSER

Joe Biden: Rarely do you see a candidate begin a debate by waving the white flag, but that’s kind of what Biden did on Friday. At the start of the debate, Biden acknowledged he took “a hit in Iowa, and I’ll probably take a hit here. Traditionally, Bernie won by 20 points last time.” Okay, maybe that’s some expectation-setting, but usually you see that on the trail rather than in a high-profile debate in front of a bunch of would-be voters.

As the debate wore on, Biden didn’t really do much to suggest his prediction was wrong. He rebutted an answer about the politics of the past by saying, “The politics of the past, I think, are not all that bad.” He proceeded to try to rescue the point by noting significant legislation he had participated in. Then Buttigieg shot back just as quickly, “Those achievements were phenomenally important because they met the moment, but now we have to meet this moment and this moment is different.” At another particularly puzzling moment, Biden predicted Congress would codify Roe v. Wade if the Supreme Court overturned it, which … seems pretty optimistic given the politics of abortion.

Biden tries really hard to emphasize that the past shows what can be done in the future, but you wonder how many people are buying it. Mostly, though, there was nothing Friday night to suggest Biden would arrest his backward momentum — in New Hampshire or anywhere else.

READ MORE

Trump appoints admiral with Miami ties as recovery czar for Puerto Rico

MORE APPOINTMENTS FROM MAR A LAGO
Trump appoints admiral with Miami ties as recovery czar for Puerto Rico

As Puerto Rico is struggling to recover from hurricanes and earthquakes, the White House confirmed on Friday that it’s appointing U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Peter Brown as its liaison for the island.

 

© Joshua Roberts/REUTERS U.S. President Donald Trump walks with Rear Admiral Peter J. Brown, Assistant Commandant for Response Policy, as he returns from Camp David to the White House in Washington, U.S., September 1, 2019. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

In a statement, the White House said Brown “will coordinate United States Government efforts to build the infrastructure and resiliency of Puerto Rico.”

The U.S. territory of 3.2 million people has been hit by a series of natural and political disasters in recent years that are strangling its economy.

In 2017, Hurricane Maria razed parts of the island and destroyed the electrical grid. In August 2019, Gov. Ricardo Rosselló stepped down amid mass protests sparked by corruption allegations. More recently the island has been rattled by a series of earthquakes that peaked on Jan. 7 with a magnitude 6.4 quake, and that have destroyed hundreds of buildings.

To complicate matters, island authorities have only had access to a fraction of the $48.5 billion in recovery funds that Congress has approved since. And Trump routinely vilifies local officials as corrupt and inefficient, amid burgeoning scandals.

Brown’s appointment as Special Representative for Puerto Rico’s Disaster Recovery comes as the House of Representatives on Friday passed a bill that would provide more than $4.7 billion for education, transportation, infrastructure repairs, and disaster relief measures.

Trump has already signaled that he will veto the bill — if it passes the Senate.

Brown will work across White House offices, including the Office of Legislative Affairs, the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, and Office of Management and Budget as he supervises recovery work, the White House said.

In addition, Brown will work with Puerto Rico officials and Congress “to ensure that their concerns are communicated to the appropriate departments and agencies and to ensure the resources of hardworking taxpayers are effectively used to help the people of Puerto Rico,” the White House said.

Miami Ties

On Tuesday, Brown met with Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vázquez and the island’s non-voting member of the House or Representatives, Jenniffer González.

Brown joined the White House in July 2019 as the Homeland Security and Counter-terrorism Advisor. Prior to that, he was the Commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District headquartered in Miami, where he was responsible for all Coast Guard operations in the Southeast United States and the Caribbean Basin.

A career Coast Guard officer, Brown’s first duty station was in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and he has served more than half his 34-year career in the Caribbean.

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©2020 Miami Herald

Arizona national monument being blown up for border wall


Audrey McNamara

A national monument in Arizona, home to rare species and sacred Native American burial sites, is being blown up this week as part of construction for President Trump's border wall, Customs and Border Protection confirmed to CBS News. "Controlled blasting" inside Arizona's Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument began this week without consultation from the Native American nation whose ancestral land it affects, according to the congressman whose district includes the reservation.

© Getty Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

"There has been no consultation with the nation," said Congressman Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who is the chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources and whose district contains the reservation and shares 400 miles of border with Mexico. "This administration is basically trampling on the tribe's history — and to put it poignantly, it's ancestry."

Customs and Border Protection told CBS News that the blasts are in preparation for "new border wall system construction, within the Roosevelt Reservation at Monument Mountain in the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson Sector."

The explosions are occurring on Monument Hill, a burial site for the Tohono O'odham Nation, according to Grijalva.

The border wall cannot be constructed on the Native American reservation because it is private land. The nation's burial sites, however, which Grijalva said are "immediately adjacent" to the reservation, are on public land, making them fair game for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Customs and Border Protection.

Grijalva sent a letter to Homeland Security on January 7, expressing his "serious concerns" over the wall's construction on historically tribal land. He urged the department to consult the nation "government-to-government," before moving forward with construction.

He has not heard back.

"There's been stonewalling, no response for any request," he said.

Weeks before construction began, Grijalva — along with Tohono O'odham elders, chairman Ned Norris Jr, and archaeologists — toured the nation's sacred ceremonial sites, located within Organ Pipe. The group saw rock piles and burial sites with bone fragments dating back thousands of years. One burial site, known as Las Playas, contained artifacts that go back 10,000 years.

"What we saw on Monument Hill was opposing tribes who were respectfully laid to rest — that is the one being blasted with dynamite," Grijalva said.

In addition to the monument's cultural significance, the land is also a designated UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, an international effort to "conserve samples of the world's ecosystems."

"The Organ Pipe Cactus Biosphere Reserve is a first-generation biosphere reserve created in 1976 for the conservation of the unique resources representing a pristine example of an intact Sonoran Desert ecosystem," according to the National Park Service's website. "The biosphere designation has helped to attract scientists from around the world to Organ Pipe Cactus to conduct a variety of important studies to help us better understand the Sonoran Desert and the impact of humans on this amazing landscape."

Like other remote land that the border wall will bisect, many people are concerned with how the unnatural barrier will irreparably impact Organ Pipe's unique habitat.

Customs and Border Patrol says they have an "environmental monitor" present during the blasts and other "on-going clearing activities," but would not clarify to CBS News what the monitor is doing, or who they are.

The Trump administration has been able to legally construct the border wall over public land due in large part to a little known law passed in the wake of the 9/11.

The REAL ID Act of 2005 gives the federal government broad power to waive other laws that stand in the way of national security. Under REAL ID, the Trump administration has waived dozens of laws — including the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Environmental Protection Act — in its bid to construct the border wall.

"Of the 21 times the (REAL ID) waiver has been enacted since 2005, 16 of those instances have occurred in the last two and a half years," reads the letter Grijalva sent to Homeland Security.

According to the congressman, construction of the border wall has been expedited in Arizona due to an abundance of public land. In Texas, another border state, building the wall has been slowed because it is largely private land.

Efren Olivares, director of the racial and economic justice program at the Texas Civil Rights Project, told the Pacific Standard last year that the REAL ID has essentially eliminated federal laws protecting public land.

"The idea that the secretary of (the) DHS could come to your community and say no laws apply here, what kind of rule of law is that?" Olivares said. "People should be outraged to know that Homeland Security can wield that kind of power."

Grijalva said repealing REAL ID has been a priority of his for many years.

He plans to convene a hearing of the House Committee on Natural Resources' subcommittee for Indigenous Peoples in the coming weeks to address the impact of the wall — and waiver — on Native American communities.

In his letter to Homeland Security, Grijalva wrote: "Using this waiver to avoid essential federal government responsibilities to tribes is unnecessary, reckless, and counter to the Department's own policy."

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Coronavirus brings China's surveillance state out of the shadows

BEIJING/HONG KONG (Reuters) - When the man from Hangzhou returned home from a business trip, the local police got in touch. They had tracked his car by his license plate in nearby Wenzhou, which has had a spate of coronavirus cases despite being far from the epicenter of the outbreak. Stay indoors for two weeks, they requested.

After around 12 days, he was bored and went out early. This time, not only did the police contact him, so did his boss. He had been spotted near Hangzhou’s West Lake by a camera with facial recognition technology, and the authorities had alerted his company as a warning.

“I was a bit shocked by the ability and efficiency of the mass surveillance network. They can basically trace our movements with the AI technology and big data at any time and any place,” said the man, who asked not to be identified for fear of repercussions.

Chinese have long been aware that they are tracked by the world’s most sophisticated system of electronic surveillance. The coronavirus emergency has brought some of that technology out of the shadows, providing the authorities with a justification for sweeping methods of high tech social control.

Artificial intelligence and security camera companies boast that their systems can scan the streets for people with even low-grade fevers, recognize their faces even if they are wearing masks and report them to the authorities.

If a coronavirus patient boards a train, the railway’s “real name” system can provide a list of people sitting nearby.

Mobile phone apps can tell users if they have been on a flight or a train with a known coronavirus carrier, and maps can show them locations of buildings where infected patients live.

Although there has been some anonymous grumbling on social media, for now Chinese citizens seem to be accepting the extra intrusion, or even embracing it, as a means to combat the health emergency.

“In the circumstances, individuals are likely to consider this to be reasonable even if they are not specifically informed about it,” said Carolyn Bigg, partner at law firm DLA Piper in Hong Kong.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES

Telecoms companies have long quietly tracked the movements of their users. China Mobile promoted this as a service this week, sending text messages to Beijing residents telling them they can check where they have been over the past 30 days. It did not explain why users might need this, but it could be useful if they are questioned by the authorities or their employers about their travel.

“In the era of big data and internet, the flow of each person can be clearly seen. So we are different from the SARS time now,” epidemiologist Li Lanjuan said in an interview with China’s state broadcaster CCTV last week, comparing the outbreak to a virus that killed 800 people in 2003.

“With such new technologies, we should make full use of them to find the source of infection and contain the source of infection.”

The industry ministry sent a notice to China’s AI companies and research institutes this week calling on them to help fight the outbreak. Companies have responded with a flurry of announcements touting the capabilities of their technology.

Facial recognition firm Megvii said on Tuesday it had developed a new way to spot and identify people with fevers, with support from the industry and science ministries. Its new “AI temperature measurement system”, which detects temperature with thermal cameras and uses body and facial data to identify individuals, is already being tested in a Beijing district.

SenseTime, another leading AI firm, said it has built a similar system to be used at building entrances, which can identify people wearing masks, overcoming a weakness of earlier technology. Surveillance camera firm Zhejiang Dahua says it can detect fevers with infrared cameras to an accuracy within 0.3ºC.


Slideshow (2 Images)

In an interview with state news agency Xinhua, Zhu Jiansheng of the China Academy of Railway Sciences explained how technology can help the authorities find people who might be exposed to a confirmed or suspected coronavirus case on a train.

“We will retrieve relevant information about the passenger, including the train number, carriage number and information on passengers who were close to the person, such as people sitting three rows of seats before and after the person,” he said.

“We will extract the information and then provide it to relevant epidemic prevention departments.”

UK's Kew Gardens to help protect Australia's plants after wildfires

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain is to protect Australia’s plants and trees by helping the emergency collection of seeds in areas devastated by wildfires and storing some of the rarest specimens in the world’s biggest wild seed bank.


Dr Elinor Breman of Kew Millennium Seed Bank poses for a photograph in a sub-zero seed store at a facility in Wakehurst, southern Britain February 7, 2020. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls

Scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London will help the emergency seed collection and store precious specimens at its Millennium Seed Bank (MSB), a giant trove of seeds which acts as an insurance policy for plants and trees.

Over 2.3 billion seeds from 190 countries are stored in air-tight glass containers stacked in huge -20°C freezers underground and can be used to grow a new generation of plants in years to come. It currently has 41,000 different species.

For the collecting, Kew scientists will work alongside colleagues in the Australian Seed Bank Partnership.

“We ... are pleased to be able to support their efforts, as part of our ongoing partnership to address biodiversity loss through seed-banking in Australia,” said the MSB’s Elinor Breman in a statement.

She added: “Kew’s scientists will work with the ASBP to conduct emergency seed-collecting in areas devastated by the bushfires and longer-term germination research, which will hopefully aid the international effort to restore habitats more quickly in this precious and biodiverse region.”

Kew has worked with Australian seed banks since 2000, sharing expertise on seed collection processes, conservation and research so that the seeds of plant species considered rare or threatened can be banked and conserved for the future.

So far, 12,450 seed collections representing 8,900 Australian species, all of which are saved in local seed banks, have been duplicated and stored in Kew’s MSB.

Australia’s wildfires have burned through an area the size of Greece since September, in what the government there has called an ecological disaster.

The protected species of Wollemi Pines - prehistoric trees which outlived the dinosaurs - survived the wildfires.

Others were not so lucky: wood-chopping company Kangaroo Island Plantation Timbers suspended trading in its shares after severe fire-damage meant 90% of its tree crop was no longer productive.

The collaboration with Kew was announced by visiting British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab.

“This further collaboration between the Australian Seed Bank Partnership and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, will help protect Australia’s precious biodiversity following the terrible bushfires,” Raab said.

“We stand shoulder to shoulder with the Australian people in the face of this challenge,” he said.

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Unpaid bills, empty homes: Families of Iran crash victims put lives back together

Slideshow (20 Images)

TORONTO (Reuters) - Grief-stricken relatives of passengers killed aboard an airliner shot down by Iran over Tehran last month are grappling in Canada with the daily challenges of long-distance funeral arrangements, empty homes, cars left in driveways and unpaid bills.

Iran admitted it shot down the Ukrainian airliner by mistake on Jan. 8, killing all 176 people aboard including 57 Canadians. The Canadian government said that 138 people on the flight were headed to Canada as their final destination.

Meisam Salahi’s younger brother Mohsen and sister-in-law Mahsa Amirliravi were passengers who died on the flight.

Salahi, 34, wants to return his brother’s car to the dealership where it was leased, deal with mortgage payments on the couple’s home and collect rent from their tenants. But without a death certificate - sometimes delayed after aviation disasters as local authorities identify remains - he has struggled.

“Technically, in Canada, he’s still alive,” Salahi said. “I don’t even know how many bills I have to pay.”

Many next of kin are in Iran, giving family and friends in Canada limited power in dealing with the victims’ estates.

For Amirali Alavi, whose mother died in the crash, traveling to Iran after the crash was a trek that included a dash to Washington to get Iranian consulate paperwork, leading to a four-hour ordeal at the U.S.-Canadian border.

Alavi, 27, said he and his father were detained for questioning by U.S. border agents before he was allowed to cross at 2 a.m. His father was denied entry and returned to Canada on foot while Alavi drove on to Washington alone. It was nearly two weeks before they could bring his mother’s remains back, Alavi said.

“We haven’t even started to deal with the aftermath,” Alavi added. “These past two weeks have been really tough emotionally, and at the same time, all the work we had to do, it didn’t leave us with much time to think about stuff we have to do in Canada.”

Immigration advocacy groups have criticized detentions of Iranian nationals at the U.S.-Canadian border in the aftermath of an American drone strike that killed a top Iranian general on Jan. 3.

A Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) representative declined comment on the Alavi incident, citing privacy laws, but said allegations that the agency has detained dual citizenship Iranians because of their country of origin are false.

More than 100 Canadian government workers are assisting the families of victims connected with Canada on everything from managing DNA samples to repatriating bodies and getting legal advice and visas, said Omar Alghabra, a member of Canada’s Parliament tasked with liaising with the families.

On a chilly Sunday morning last month, a mosque north of Toronto held burial services for Sahar Haghjoo, 37, and her daughter Elsa Jadidi, 8. The entrance was lined with Canadian flags.

Inside, hundreds of mourners watched photos scroll on a screen. They showed Elsa as a baby, holding one foot, and then older, kissing her father on the cheek. She held a giant ice cream cone, then a school project. A final picture showed her sitting with her mother on the plane in the last few minutes of their lives.

In tears, her grandfather Habib Haghjoo said he would not wish what happened on his worst enemy: “This is unbearable.”

Reporting by Allison Martell and Moira Warburton; Editing by Will Dunham and Amran Abocar

Nicaraguan government releases ink, paper it impounded from newspaper critical of Ortega
ORTEGA IS NOT A COMMUNIST HE IS A RADICAL CATHOLIC DICTATOR

SUPPORTED BY PENTECOSTALS, EVANGELICAL CATHOLICS AND THE CIA

A fork lift truck driver moves paper rolls in the La Prensa newspaper printing plant in Managua, Nicaragua February 7, 2020. REUTERS/Oswaldo Rivas

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Nicaragua’s government on Friday released a shipment of impounded ink and paper belonging to La Prensa newspaper, which has been critical of leftist President Daniel Ortega, one of the owners said.

The United States welcomed the release of the ink and paper seized in October 2018. Washington has imposed sanctions on it for human rights violations following a wave of anti-government protests in 2018, and urged Managua to ease restrictions on other organizations.

La Prensa is Nicaragua’s biggest newspaper and has been a thorn in the side of Ortega, repeatedly referring to him as the “dictator” in the wake of the protests that were crushed by the security forces. About 326 people died in the unrest.


The government of Ortega, whose family presides over a vast media empire, has cracked down on independent news outlets. As well as impounding La Prensa’s shipment of ink and paper, Nicaraguan police also raided and shuttered two television channels.

La Prensa, Nicaragua’s only national newspaper, has been forced to reduce the number of pages it prints, which cut its advertising revenue and forced it to lay off many journalists.

Jaime Chamorro, whose family owns La Prensa, told Reuters that a channel of communication was opened with the customs department and it “freed our supplies that were detained.”


Michael Kozak, the Acting Assistant Secretary for the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, said on Twitter that “the long-overdue decision to release @laprensa’s paper & ink from Nicaraguan customs is a step in the right direction.”

Kozak called for Ortega to “return property confiscated from other independent outlets” such as Confidencial and 100% Noticias, which were effectively shut down inside Nicaragua following the protests.

“Freedom of expression is a #HumanRight,” Kozak added.

India's New Delhi heads to vote amid protests against citizenship law

Voters stand in queues as they wait to cast their vote outside a polling booth during the state assembly election, in Shaheen Bagh, New Delhi, India, February 8, 2020. REUTERS/Anushre Fadnavis

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Voters in New Delhi began voting on Saturday in a state election seen as a test of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity following months of deadly anti-government protests over a new citizenship law.

The election comes as India’s economic growth is at its slowest in six years, and amid strong opposition to the law which makes it easier for non-Muslim persecuted minorities from three neighboring countries to become Indian citizens.

The law has stoked suspicion that Modi wants to turn secular India into a Hindu nation, something he rejects.


A poor showing in the capital this weekend could be another blow to Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after it lost control of Maharashtra state, whose capital is Mumbai, late last year.

Modi appealed to voters to exercise their franchise. “Urging the people of Delhi, especially my young friends, to vote in record numbers,” he wrote on Twitter.

Polling is underway for 70 seats and the results will be announced on Feb. 11.


The contest to win New Delhi is between the BJP and incumbent Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s regional Aam Aadmi party (AAP).

AAP has highlighted its work over the last five years to fix state schools and healthcare in the city of more than 16 million people.

The BJP, however, has focused on the work of Modi’s federal government since its re-election last May, in particular changes that have appealed to the party’s Hindu base such as reforms in the disputed Kashmir region and a court ruling, backed by the government, clearing the way for the construction of a Hindu temple on a long-disputed site in northern India.

Palestinian protester killed in unrest over U.S. Mideast plan
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A Palestinian protester was shot dead in the West Bank on Friday as Palestinian and U.S. leaders blamed each other for violence that erupted after President Donald Trump unveiled a Middle East Peace plan that Palestinians rejected as one sided.


A Palestinian demonstrator hurls stones at Israeli forces as he stands next to the Israeli barrier during a protest against the U.S. President Donald Trump's Middle East peace plan, in the village of Bilin in the Israeli-occupied West Bank February 7, 2020. REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman

Palestinian protesters and Israeli security forces have repeatedly clashed since the peace proposals were unveiled by Trump, with Israel’s prime minister at his side.

Friday’s killing raised the Palestinian death toll to four. More than a dozen Israelis have been wounded in car-ramming and shooting attacks since the Trump proposal.

On Friday, mourners had gathered in the occupied West Bank for the funeral of a Palestinian police officer who was shot dead in the unrest a day earlier. Palestinian authorities said he was killed by Israeli gunfire. Israel has not commented.

There were sporadic clashes between protesters and Israeli security forces near Azzun, where the funeral was held.

Palestinians also clashed with Israeli troops in Jericho and burned tires in the West Bank village of Bil’in.

Palestinian medics said one protester had been shot and killed near Tulkarm on Friday.

The Israeli army said dozens of Palestinian rioters had hurled rocks and fire bombs at troops, and soldiers had identified a Palestinian who threw a firebomb and “responded with fire in order to remove the threat.”

“The Palestinian people will not allow the ‘Deal of the Century’ to pass,” said Mohammed Barakeh, waving a Palestinian flag in Bil’in, referring to the U.S. peace deal.

“They are fighting for their national character and the independence of their country,” said Barakeh, a former Israeli lawmaker and member of Israel’s 21% Arab minority, many of whom identify with Palestinian brethren in the West Bank and Gaza.

President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority has rejected Trump’s peace plan, which would give Israel most of what it has sought during decades of conflict, including the disputed holy city of Jerusalem and nearly all the occupied land on which it has built settlements.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Washington was to blame for the unrest since the plan was unveiled.

“Those who introduce plans for annexation and the legalizing of occupation and settlements are really responsible for deepening violence and counter-violence,” he said.

He said Abbas would go to the U.N. Security Council with “a genuine peace plan”.

Trump’s senior adviser Jared Kushner, the main architect of the U.S. plan, has denounced the Palestinian leadership, breaking from decades of diplomacy when Washington sought to appear neutral. On Thursday, he blamed Abbas for the violence.

“I think he does have responsibility,” Kushner said after briefing U.N. Security Council ambassadors. “He calls for days of rage in response, and he said that before he even saw the plan.”

Israeli police said security chiefs had met on Thursday and would increase security “across the country, with emphasis on Jerusalem”.

Palestinians have long boycotted relations with the Trump administration, which they view as biased. Washington says its plan offers a path toward a Palestinian state, and blames the Palestinian leadership for chasing unrealistic goals.