At least 32 Palestinians and four Israelis have been killed since US President Donald Trump announced embassy move to Jerusalem
An Israeli ambulance is seen at the site of a stabbing attack carried out by a Palestinian assailant in Jerusalem's Old City on 18 March (AFP)
Sunday 18 March 2018
A Palestinian stabbed and seriously wounded an Israeli security guard in Jerusalem's Old City on Sunday before being shot dead by a police officer, Israeli authorities said.
Various media reports claimed the assailant was a Turkish national, but Israel's Shin Bet domestic security service told AFP he was a Palestinian from the West Bank.
Israel’s Magen David Adom ambulance service said one person was stabbed in the upper body and was in critical condition. An Israeli police spokesman confirmed the attack, near the Western Wall, and said the assailant was "neutralised" but gave no further details.
The attack comes after a Friday car ramming attack by a Palestinian near Jenin in the northern West Bank that killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded two others, according to the army.
Tensions were high after Hamas called for a day of rage on Friday to commemorate 100 days since US President Donald Trump's controversial recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
Palestinians also see the city as their capital and Trump's recognition broke with decades of US policy that Jerusalem's status would be negotiated between the parties.
At least 32 Palestinians and four Israelis have been killed since Trump's announcement, which set off major protests.
The West’s policies on Palestine can be divided into two broad categories: the mindless and the misleading.
By deciding to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Donald Trump has behaved in a mindless manner. The most plausible explanation for why the US president did so is that acting like a pyromaniac endears him to his pro-Israel campaign bankroller Sheldon Adelson and to an extremist – mainly Christian – constituency.
Despite his propensity for telling lies, Trump has been more honest on this particular dossier than the European Union and its robotic representatives. They claim to be pursuing peace and a two-state solution, while aiding Israeli authorities that have no interest in either objective.
Scientific research has been accorded a high priority in cooperation between Israel and the EU. Israel is an active participant in Horizon 2020, an EU scheme aimed at encouraging innovation, which has been earmarkedalmost $100 billion over a seven-year period.
I have trawled through around 700 projects financed under the scheme and involving Israel. They exemplify how signals given by the EU have been hugely misleading.
Seismic?
Back in 2013, Israel accused the Union of causing an “earthquake,” according to the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz. The Israeli political elite was peeved by guidelines prepared for Horizon 2020, indicating that Israeli firms or institutions based in the occupied West Bank – including East Jerusalem – would not be eligible for its grants.
The publication of those guidelines was not the seismic event that Haaretz hyped it up to be.
They had been drafted after Brussels officials had been informed that some recipients of EU grants were less than transparent – to put it mildly.
The Israel Antiquities Authority took part in the Union’s previous science program, even though its headquarters were located in occupied East Jerusalem. It had supplied a post office box inside Israel as its address, when applying for an EU grant.
The Israel Antiquities Authority has not been punished for that trickery. It is now taking part in a $5 million heritage preservation project under Horizon 2020.
The address given for the authority on the website for that project is the Rockefeller Museum. That building is in East Jerusalem.
A little-noticed loophole in the EU’s 2013 guidelines allow Israeli public bodies to benefit from Horizon 2020 regardless of where they are located.
An announcement by the Israel Antiquities Authority that it is moving offices to West Jerusalem does not atone for its role in dispossessing Palestinians.
The authority has been overseeing excavations as part of plans to develop an archeological park in Silwan, an East Jerusalem neighborhood. While doing so, it has formed a partnership with Elad, an Israeli settler organization that drives Palestinians out of their homes.
The European Commission – which administers Horizon 2020 – tried to justify the way it is bending over backwards to please Israel.
A spokesperson for the Commission stated that it was “constantly making sure every rule is respected,” when I requested a comment. That is a flimsy and formulaic excuse for its complicity in the colonization of Jerusalem.
A number of other Israeli bodies active in East Jerusalem have been awarded grants under Horizon 2020.
Israel’s science ministry – based in East Jerusalem – has signed up to EU projects on diet and gender equality.
Of the 700 projects I examined, Hebrew University was involved in more than 80. Some of the subsidiesbestowed on the college amount to almost $2.5 million each.
Hebrew University is run from Mount Scopus in East Jerusalem. The EU regards that as acceptable because Mount Scopus was commandeered by Zionist forces in 1948, rather than during the June 1967 war (when Israel nabbed the remainder of East Jerusalem).
The EU’s spurious stance ignores how Hebrew University has been encroaching into territory seized in 1967 and how it enthusiastically supports Israel’s forces of occupation.
Several Israeli bodies implicated in human rights violations benefit from the EU’s largesse.
The Israeli-controlled Jerusalem municipality has placed something of a chokehold around Palestinian neighborhoods. The procedures it has introduced make Palestinian construction virtually impossible, while favoring colonization by Israelis.
The list of ways in which the municipality contributes to Israeli apartheid has just got longer. It is seeking to block residents of two Palestinian villages – al-Walaja and Battir – from reaching a spring that has provided their communities with water for 3,000 years.
With sordid irony, the EU has approved the municipality’s participation in a sustainable cities initiative, also worth $5 million.
Israel’s public security ministry oversees a prison service which regularly subjects Palestinians to torture.
Gilad Erdan, the current Israeli minister for public security, has given the nod – at least tacitly – to a provocative shift in policing. The result is that police are openly siding with activists wishing to take over and destroy Islamic holy sites at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque compound so that they can build a Jewish temple.
Israel’s national water company Mekorot is an environmental hooligan. UN investigators have documented how it imperils Palestinians’ right to water by drying up wells and springs in the West Bank.
Shamefully, the EU is enabling Mekorot to cultivate a more responsible image by taking part in Horizon 2020 activities on the protection of water infrastructure and reducing pollution.
Firms that help to impose a siege on Gaza are equally welcome in Horizon 2020.
The state-owned Israel Electric Corporation cut power supplies to Gaza’s hospitals drastically last year, thereby placing the lives of patients in danger. The same corporation is involved in EU projects on information technology.
Israel’s weapons industry also benefits from Horizon 2020.
Elbit, the supplier of drones, white phosphorus and other munitions used during major Israeli assaults on Gaza, has been allocated an EU subsidy worth $860,000 to help it develop new cockpit components for future aircraft. The stated aim of this work is to advance a cuddly-sounding initiative called Clean Sky.
A profiteer from war crimes is thereby helped to masquerade as a savior of the planet. And the EU can keep on kidding itself that everything is fine and dandy.
Spying does not have laws, but it may have rules which are fluid and bend according to the circumstances of politics and technology
by Shashank Joshi-
( March 18, 2018, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) Does spying have international rules? On the face of it, the question is absurd. How can one regulate an activity that is defined by law-breaking and subterfuge, and whose existence must accordingly be disclaimed? And yet, espionage is not wholly disordered.
Silent understandings emerge between rival agencies, indicating what lies beyond the pale. Where spying is parasitic on the architecture of diplomacy, with intelligence officers masquerading as diplomats, this affords another layer of civility. And not all negotiation is tacit. Russia’s KGB (Committee for State Security) and America’s CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) communicated through the Gavrilov channel, named after an 18th century poet. In later years, Americans used it to acknowledge, obliquely, when a vanished Soviet spy had defected, while the KGB disclosed where it had hidden microphones in the new US embassy. Spying does not have laws, but it may have rules—or at least expectations and norms. These are fluid, because secrecy precludes enforcement. The rules bend according to the circumstances of politics and technology. And today they are bending more than ever.
The first example comes from the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the UK last week. For Russia to hunt down former officials is hardly unusual; the theatrical murder of KGB renegade Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, using a radioactive substance, is one of many examples. But to target someone like Skripal, who was pardoned and released in an exchange of prisoners, is exceptional, perhaps unprecedented. While it is possible that Skripal did something to forfeit his protected status, it may simply be that President Vladimir Putin decided to send a message. But it comes at a cost, with a norm shattered and the credibility of future swaps in tatters.
The value of such espionage etiquette is best understood by observing what happens in its absence. The US and Russia have conducted dozens of spy swaps. India and Pakistan, though routinely exchanging civilian prisoners, have not. If Kulbhushan Jadhav were eventually swapped for the Pakistani military officer who vanished in Nepal, and is alleged to be in Indian hands, then this would be the first such exchange in public record. One reason for this may be that neither side has caught sufficient numbers of the other’s most valued agents—the market is not liquid. But it surely also reflects a dearth of trust. In his book The Kaoboys Of R&AW, B. Raman observed that India and Pakistan both treated foreign intelligence officers with customary restraint “except those of each other”. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence employed electric shocks against detained R&AW (Research and Analysis Wing) officers, while India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB), he conceded, had a similarly “brutal manner”. Russia’s aggressive treatment of Americans in Moscow is not yet at this level, but gloves are being removed.
A second question is whether certain sorts of spying are more acceptable than others and, if so, whether this line is now blurring. When China pulled off a spectacular cyber-heist of data from the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in 2014, including 18 million copies of security clearance forms for federal employees, this was met not with anger, but awe. Michael Hayden, former CIA and National Security Agency director, remarked that if he had the opportunity to grab equivalent Chinese data, he “would not have thought twice”. This was “honourable espionage work”. However, Beijing’s efforts to steal valuable commercial secrets from private American companies were viewed as an affront to the unspoken rules.
To the uninitiated, this inconsistency is puzzling. In both cases, Chinese espionage involved breaking American laws and hurting American interests; why should one be praised, and the other damned? Clearly, America wants to make commercial espionage taboo because it has more technology to lose, whereas in political espionage, it gives as good as it gets. But why would China play by these rules? Norms will not survive if they leave one side at a disadvantage. Although China has now signed up to pacts ruling out commercial espionage, I am sceptical that these will hold in an era when private firms, rather than state laboratories, are becoming the locus for the most important strategic technologies.
Third, we may be witnessing a blurring of the defensive and offensive aspects of espionage. Spying is neutral; it can be for any purpose, from reassurance to revolution. But technology adds to the opportunities, and to the confusion. If an adversary has placed implants on your nuclear command and control networks, are they there to receive forewarning of an attack, or to enable sabotage of your deterrent? Offensive or defensive intentions can never be known fully. We now know that the Netherlands was able to warn the US of Russian efforts to intervene in the American elections because Dutch hackers were already inside Russia’s networks. Cyber-defence requires cyber-attack. On the other hand, when Russia began cultivating political operatives around Donald Trump, few would have anticipated that, far from ordinary political intelligence gathering, this was the groundwork for an audacious campaign to disrupt and tilt the election itself.
Technology also permits scale. The covert dissemination of information to sway foreign politics is not in itself new. As Paul McGarr has shown, the UK’s information research department, which worked to counter Soviet propaganda, secretly placed material in over 500 Indian newspapers in 1964 alone. But this looks like child’s play alongside Russia’s Internet Research Agency, whose industrial-scale operations on Facebook and Twitter wrenched open American social cleavages. We have only seen the beginning of these complex campaigns, which fuse human intelligence, cyber-espionage and political warfare.
Intelligence, as Carl von Clausewitz said of war, has its own grammar, but not its own logic. Countries do put artificial restrictions on their espionage by choice. They swap rather than kill foreign spies, limit operations against close allies, and treat some targets as more acceptable than others. Some of this is unilateral, some learnt after tit-for-tat spirals, and some worked out through dialogue. But controlling intelligence is not like arms control. It is messy and fluid. The rules and norms of intelligence are—perhaps always—being renegotiated, rewritten, and bent.
Shashank Joshi is a senior research fellow of the Royal United Services Institute in London. He writes for LiveMint, India, where this piece first appeared
ATTENTION - VISUAL COVERAGE OF SCENES OF INJURY OR DEATH People shift a woman, who according to local media was injured in what they say was a ceasefire violation by the Pakistani troops along the Line of Control (LOC) in Poonch district, towards a government hospital in Jammu, March 18, 2018. REUTERS/Mukesh Gupta Fayaz Bukhari, Tariq Naqash-MARCH 18, 2018
SRINAGAR/MUZZAFARABAD (Reuters) - Five members of an Indian family were killed and two injured by shelling from Pakistani troops on Sunday along the Line of Control, the de facto border between India and Pakistan, according to army and police officials.
Both sides were engaging in heavy shelling despite a 15-year-old ceasefire between the nuclear-armed rivals in the area, the officials said.
Nine people were also wounded across the border in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir due to the shelling from India that began late Saturday night, Pakistani officials said on Sunday.
Tension has been running high since an attack on an Indian army camp in India-controlled Kashmir last month in which six soldiers were killed. India blamed Pakistan for the attack and said it would make its rival pay for the “misadventure”.
The South Asian neighbours have fought two of their three wars since independence in 1947 over Muslim-majority Kashmir, which they both claim in full but rule in part.
ATTENTION - VISUAL COVERAGE OF SCENES OF INJURY OR DEATH People carry a child, who according to local media was injured in what they say was a ceasefire violation by the Pakistani troops along the Line of Control (LOC) in Poonch district, towards a government hospital in Jammu, March 18, 2018. REUTERS/Mukesh Gupta
Indian Defence spokesman Lt Col Devender Anand said on Sunday that Pakistani troops started the shelling around 7:45 in the morning.
“They are specifically targeting civilian areas,” Anand said. “Army troops retaliated strongly and effectively to silence Pakistani guns.”
Director General of Indian Police in Kashmir, S P Vaid said the five people were killed in the village of Devta Dhar when a shell hit the house of Choudhary Mohammad Ramzan.
Ramzan, 45, his wife Malka Bi, 45, and three sons - Muhammad Rehman, 19, Muhammad Rizwan, 18, and Muhammad Razaq, 8 all died, Vaid said.
Two of Ramzan’s daughters - Nooren Akhtar, 14, and Marin Akhtar, 7, were critically injured in the incident and were airlifted to a hospital in Jammu, Vaid said.
President Trump railed against special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation on March 18, prompting a swift response from lawmakers.(Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)
By Philip RuckerMarch 18 at 11:25 AM
President Trump fired off angry tweets Sunday morning railing against the Justice Department special counsel’s Russia investigation and attacking the integrity of former FBI director James B. Comey and his former deputy, Andrew McCabe, charging that their notes from conversations with him were “Fake Memos.”
For the second straight day, Trump was unrestrained in his commentary about Robert S. Mueller III’s expanding investigation, which is probing not only Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible links to the Trump campaign, but also whether the president has sought to obstruct justice.
After Trump’s personal attorney, John Dowd, called Saturday for an end to the Mueller probe, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Sunday urged the president and his legal team to cooperate fully with the investigation and warned of serious ramifications if they did not.
In one of his tweets, Trump protested, “Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans? Another Dem recently added ... does anyone think this is fair? And yet, there is NO COLLUSION!”
The tweet overstates the partisan makeup of the special counsel’s team and falsely asserts that no Republicans are on it.
Andrew McCabe's firing met heated reactions, with supporters calling the special counsel's probe "corrupted" and opponents criticizing the firing as "petty."(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
Mueller is a longtime Republican. He was nominated as FBI director in 2001 by a Republican president, George W. Bush, and was appointed special counsel by the Republican whom Trump picked to be deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein.
Publicly available voter registration information shows that 13 of the 17 members of Mueller’s team have previously registered as Democrats, while four had no affiliation or their affiliation could not be found. Nine of the 17 made political donations to Democrats, and their contributions totaled more than $57,000. The majority came from one person, who also contributed to Republicans. Six donated to Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 opponent.
Under instruction from his attorneys, Trump has in the past been careful not to publicly criticize Mueller by name or otherwise directly antagonize the special counsel, but rather to make more general criticisms. On Saturday night, in an apparent change of strategy, Trump for the first time tweeted the name of the special counsel.
“The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime,” Trump wrote. “It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!”
The president’s attack comes after Dowd called for the Mueller investigation to end. He initially told the Daily Beast that he was speaking on behalf of the president, though he later backtracked and told The Washington Post that he was speaking only for himself.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, warned Trump that any interference in the Mueller probe would result in “a very, very long, bad 2018.”
“If you have an innocent client, Mr. Dowd, act like it,” Gowdy said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Russia attacked our country. Let special counsel Mueller figure that out.”
Later, as if directly addressing the president, Gowdy said, “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you should want the investigation to be as fulsome and thorough as possible.”
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie (R), an informal adviser to Trump, said it would be inappropriate for the president to try to fire Mueller.
The special counsel has “conducted this investigation so far with great integrity, without leaking and by showing results, and I don’t think the president’s going to fire somebody like that,” Christie said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) warned that a move by Trump to order the firing of Mueller would be a step too far for lawmakers. “If he tried to do that, that would be the beginning of the end of his presidency because we’re a rule-of-law nation,” Graham said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the chamber’s second-ranking Democrat, said he is concerned about “a constitutional crisis in this country.”
“This president is engaged in desperate and reckless conduct to intimidate the law enforcement agencies in this country and to try and stop the special counsel,” Durbin said on “Fox News Sunday.” “That is unacceptable in a democracy.”
Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said the threats to Mueller from Trump and Dowd were “a huge mistake for the president” and “very dangerous for the country.”
“Robert Mueller is as straight an arrow as there is in America,” King said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “The president keeps saying there’s no story here, they didn’t do anything wrong. If they didn’t do anything wrong why are they going to such extreme lengths to undermine this investigation, which is being carried out in a very responsible way?”
But legislation that could protect Mueller from any moves the president makes to fire him has stalled in Congress for months, as Republicans have raised constitutional concerns and argued that there was no pressing risk that the president would actually seek to get rid of the special counsel.
In a pair of separate tweets on Sunday, Trump also attacked Comey and McCabe, both regular foils to the president. Trump sent his Sunday tweets from the White House. He departed the residence shortly before 10 a.m., heading to the Trump National Golf Club in Northern Virginia. Aides would not say who the president’s golfing partners might be.
McCabe, who was fired from the FBI late Friday night just hours before he was set to retire with full benefits, has kept contemporaneous notes of his interactions with Trump, according to two people familiar with his records. McCabe’s memos could prove useful to Mueller’s investigators in their obstruction-of-justice probe.
Trump tweeted, “Spent very little time with Andrew McCabe, but he never took notes when he was with me. I don’t believe he made memos except to help his own agenda, probably at a later date.
Same with lying James Comey. Can we call them Fake Memos?”
Michael Bromwich, McCabe’s lawyer, wrote Sunday on Twitter: “We will not be responding to each childish, defamatory, disgusting & false tweet by the President. The whole truth will come out in due course. But the tweets confirm that he has corrupted the entire process that led to Mr. McCabe’s termination and has rendered it illegitimate.”
In an Oval Office meeting in May, Trump asked McCabe whom he had voted for in the 2016 presidential election, several current and former U.S. officials have told The Post, and he complained about the political donations McCabe’s wife received for her failed 2015 Virginia state Senate campaign.
Comey also took contemporaneous notes of his interactions with Trump and confided in McCabe about those private conversations, including when Trump asked him for his loyalty.
Comey is publishing a memoir next month that is expected to detail his interactions with Trump and investigation of Russian interference, among other topics.
In a Sunday morning tweet, Trump accused Comey of lying in testimony to Congress when he was questioned by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa).
The president wrote: “Wow, watch Comey lie under oath to Senator G when asked ‘have you ever been an anonymous source ... or known someone else to be an anonymous source...?’ He said strongly ‘never, no.’ He lied as shown clearly on @foxandfriends.”
Trump in the past has masqueraded as a fake publicist by the name of “John Miller” or “John Barron” to leak flattering or boastful details about himself to tabloid reporters.
Both Graham and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a frequent Trump critic, said on CNN that the Senate Judiciary Committee should hold a hearing on McCabe’s firing and give Attorney General Jeff Sessions and McCabe opportunities to explain their actions.
The handling of McCabe’s firing — he was ousted just hours before his 50th birthday on Sunday, at which point he would have been able to retire with full benefits — drew bipartisan disagreement.
“I don’t like the way it went down,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I would have certainly done it differently.”
Rubio added, “He should have been allowed to finish through the weekend.”
Alice Crites, Paige Winfield Cunningham, Karoun Demirjian, Carol D. Leonnig, Julie Tate and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.
Most of Washington is scared to meet with Russians. Jon Huntsman wants to meet as many as possible.
Jon Huntsman, at the time a Republican presidential candidate, visiting a restaurant to greet voters on Jan. 15, 2012. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
BYAMIE FERRIS-ROTMAN,EMILY TAMKIN,ROBBIE GRAMER-
When Jon Huntsman was serving as the U.S. ambassador in Beijing during President Barack Obama’s first term, he observed his counterpart in Washington with envy. Cui Tiankai got meetings with the American political elite, from Hillary Clinton to Henry Kissinger, even before the Chinese emissary assumed his official post.
Huntsman, by contrast, found mostly closed doors. The Chinese, he recalled in a recent interview with Foreign Policy, typically assigned American ambassadors to a specific level in government, and breaking out of that was all but impossible.
Fast forward to 2017. Huntsman surprised many — from Never-Trumpers to Russia analysts — by becoming U.S. President Donald Trump’s man in Moscow. And one of his first moves was to demand that whatever level of meetings Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov gets in Washington, he should get the same in Moscow.
“I didn’t want to replay that” experience in China, Huntsman said, “so I made it clear when I started this job, that I wanted to make sure that wherever the Russian ambassador [had access], then I had similar access, and where I get access, Ambassador Anatoly Antonov should get access.”
The statement may sound ironic, given that a large segment of Washington, D.C. is trying to avoid meeting with Russian officials these days — or denying having met them in the past. Moreover, it’s not clear that Antonov is actually getting that much access in Washington D.C.; he’s reportedly been disappointed by a cold congressional reception.
The challenge of Huntsman’s job is meeting with Russians, as many of them, and as high-level as possible, and he says he’s been successful.
“I’ve been able to access people who no ambassador in recent years has been able to access, in the military side, on the intelligence side, and mostly, on the national security issues where we’re deeply involved and in joint efforts, where we need to meet, where we need to carry messages, where it’s critical to get the work done,” he told FP in his first interview with Western press since arriving in Moscow.
But the question for Huntsman, however, is not how to elevate the U.S.-Russian relationship to new heights; rather, what is the role of the U.S. ambassador to Russia at a near historical post-Cold War low in bilateral relations?
Moscow and Washington remain at odds over everything from Syria to North Korea, not to mention a simmering war in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin, stealing a scene from Dr. Strangelove, threatened the West with an “invincible” intercontinental cruise missile. There are U.S. sanctions on Russia for its annexation of Crimea, additional measures for election meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin assured the public more penalties are coming soon.
The way forward is uncertain, but Huntsman at least makes clear what he will not be doing.
“In the years past, every new administration has tried to reset or redo of some sort, and let’s not repeat the cycles of the past, because in every case, the reality was such that those resets could not be sustained,” he said. “Let’s not even begin with that thought in mind; no resets, no redos. Just take the relationship for what it is, clear-eyed and realistically.”
Unlike his immediate predecessors in Moscow, Huntsman is neither a career diplomat nor a Russia and Eurasia specialist. A former Utah governor, Huntsman comes from a high-profile family whose success was built on his father’s business dynasty. The recently deceased Jon Huntsman Sr. founded the Huntsman Container Corporation, which made the plastic used in McDonald’s clamshell burger containers, and later the Huntsman Corporation, an $8 billion chemical-producing company.
While he’s best known for his brief spotlight on the national political stage as part of a failed presidential bid in 2012, he’s also served as ambassador to Singapore under President George W. Bush and ambassador to China under President Obama. In China, he benefited from unique regional expertise. A Mormon, Huntsman had done missionary work in Taiwan, and spoke some Mandarin. With his language skills, he could, as ambassador, stop and haggle with food vendors and passersby.
Huntsman’s only prior experience with Russia or Eastern Europe was traveling to the Soviet Union on business in the 1990s. That his international background is in China, not Russia, comes through when he attempts to speak Russian, which he says he does with a Chinese accent.
Yet Huntsman, the only American ambassador to have served in both Russia and China, says his time in Beijing helped prepare him for Moscow. He points to both countries’ distinct diplomatic red lines, limited access to government, and centralized, autocratic political systems. Instead of looking for a reset opening, he said the “trick is to find natural openings in these cycles of politics and activity that allow you a little breathing space to build trust, and expand a level of confidence beyond zero.”
Nevertheless, he has managed to observe Russia’s red lines. “Under the circumstances, and given that he doesn’t have a Russia background nor a professional foreign service background, I think he’s handling a hard situation pretty well,” said Matthew Rojansky of the Kennan Institute. “He’s not stepped in it in any obvious contexts. He’s managed to avoid any bad mistakes in early days.”
Not all previous ambassadors, including those with extensive Russia experience, have been able to navigate the political scene deftly. Michael McFaul, who served as Obama’s ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 and is now back at Stanford University, arrived amid protests against electoral fraud and met with opposition leaders on his second day in the job, a move that was seized on by Kremlin-friendly press outlets as proof the United States was meddling in Russian politics.
McFaul declined to speak to FP for this article, but David Kramer, a former senior State Department official, told FP that standing up for U.S. interests can be just as important as avoiding the perception of attempted regime change. “I do think the ambassador should meet with a whole range of people, including people in the opposition,” said Kramer, now a senior fellow at Florida International University.
Yet Huntsman, by contrast, quickly earned respect in Moscow by working to establish contacts with heavy-hitters in the Kremlin, says Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center, though he did not specify who. Trenin says when Huntsman gets through to them, he tables talks on democracy and values (the type of message that typically falls flat in Moscow) and instead focuses on the few areas where Moscow and Washington can actually still find common ground: counterterrorism, North Korea, drug trafficking. “They see him as a serious ambassador, as a serious man,” Trenin said. “Moscow is not a place for weaklings; it’s not a place for idealists.”
Huntsman himself acknowledges this strategy. “Where [Russia] has a national interest, they will engage. And you have to be smart enough to identify areas where we both have overlapping interests,” he said. “Where we have interests and they don’t, they’re just not going to waste their time. And neither should we.” And though Huntsman did not specifically mention President Putin or Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in his interview with FP, both of whom he met in October 2017, he did offer: “There are just a very few people who, in the end, are going to carry the day on issues around Syria, on DPRK, on Ukraine. And gladly I’ve had access to some of those people. It included the very top on day one.” (Huntsman has not met Putin, at least not publicly, since presenting his credentials.)
Huntsman has also made overtures to Russians outside government. He’s given interviews to Russian-language media outlets; laid flowers to gulag victims and at World War II memorials; and replied in video form over soft jazz to questions that members of the Russian public can send in to the embassy via Twitter.
In late January, and just days after Putin had done the same, Huntsman even plunged, shirtless, into icy cold water as part the Orthodox tradition for Epiphany, the holiday marking the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River.
Even his wife Mary Kaye has gone on the charm offensive, giving an interview complete with glamour shots inside the opulent ambassador’s residence to Russian Tatler. Their daughter, the pianist Mary Anne, visited in November, playing Rachmaninoff to an international audience. Their youngest daughter, Asha Bharati, is studying Russian in her school in Moscow.
But Huntsman faces some unique challenges. It has, as one former senior U.S. diplomat noted, gotten more difficult to communicate with a wide Russian audience, given the tight state control on what’s broadcast on television. It’s also harder, even for the ambassador, to travel around Russia (in December 2017, Huntsman canceled a trip to Vladivostok and Sakhalin Island after local officials declined to meet with him). And after a diplomatic tit-for-tat last summer, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow cut hundreds of staff.
In the end, however, Huntsman’s political tightrope may be more about Washington than Moscow. Russian electoral interference is a sensitive subject for Trump, and even acknowledging it can incur the president’s wrath, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, and other top deputies have learned the hard way.
Huntsman acknowledges that managing the relationship with Russia amid an investigation into Kremlin meddling in the presidential election — and possible collusion with the Trump campaign — is uniquely challenging.
“It’s almost a surreal environment that I find myself in, because you’ve got the drama playing out in Washington, and then here on the ground — the blocking and tackling, and making the yard here, a yard there, doing the real work — is completely disassociated from a lot of the Mueller investigation,” he said, “because it’s work that you just need to get done in a relationship among major powers.”
Yet the reality is that with the Russia investigation in high gear in Washington, and no clear articulation of a new policy toward Moscow, Huntsman’s job is more caretaker than policymaker. Back in Washington, Huntsman is being praised simply because he hasn’t made any big gaffes.
“When policies overall are frozen, all [ambassadors] can do is maintain the connections they’ve got and hope for an opening,” Olga Oliker, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tells FP.
In that sense, Huntsman’s lack of Russia credentials is not necessarily a negative.
“Under current conditions,” Oliker says, “it doesn’t matter that much.”
Call for Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg to testify before parliamentary committee
The chair of the Commons culture, media and sport select committee said he would call on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to testify. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The head of the parliamentary committee investigating fake news has accused Cambridge Analytica and Facebook of misleading MPs in testimony, after the Observer revealed details of a vast data breach affecting tens of millions of people.
After a whistleblower detailed the harvesting of more than 50 million Facebook profiles for Cambridge Analytica, Damian Collins, the chair of the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee, said he would be calling on the Facebook boss, Mark Zuckerberg, to testify before the committee.
He said the company appeared to have previously sent executives able to avoid difficult questions who had “claimed not to know the answers”.
Collins also said he would be recalling the Cambridge Analytica CEO, Alexander Nix, to give further testimony. “Nix denied to the committee last month that his company had received any data from [his firm] GSR,” he said. “We will be contacting Alexander Nix next week asking him to explain his comments.”
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: 'We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles' – video
The whistleblower Chris Wylie’s claim that the 50m, mostly American, profiles were harvested in one of Facebook’s biggest data breaches caused outrage on both sides of the Atlantic, with lawmakers in both the UK and America, and a state attorney general calling for greater accountability and regulation.
Wylie said the personal information was used to build a system to influence voters.
“We need to hear from people who can speak about Facebook from a position of authority that requires them to know the truth,” Collins said. “Someone has to take responsibility for this. It’s time for Mark Zuckerberg to stop hiding behind his Facebook page.”
Shortly before the story broke, Facebook’s external lawyers warned the Observer that it was making “false and defamatory” allegations and reserved Facebook’s legal position. Facebook denies the harvesting of tens of millions of profiles by Cambridge Analytica, working with Cambridge academic Aleksandr Kogan and his firm GSR, was a data breach.
The tech giant also suspended the whistleblower Chris Wylie from the platform “pending further information” over misuse of data, along with his former employer Cambridge Analytica and its affiliates, and the academic they worked with, Aleksandr Kogan.
The public attack on Wylie came after he had approached the tech giant about the data breach, offering to help investigate. He described it as a chilling attack on someone acting in the public interest.
“They acknowledged my offer but then turned around and shot the messenger. I’m trying to make amends for my mistakes and so should Facebook,” he told the Guardian.
“Facebook has known about this for at least two years and did almost nothing to fix it. This is not new. And it’s only by coming forward that Facebook is now taking action. People need to know this kind of profiling is happening.”
Last month, both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix told the parliamentary inquiry into fake news that the company did not have or use private Facebook data, or any data from Kogan’s firm, Global Science Research (GSR).
But in its statement on Friday night, explaining why it had suspended Cambridge Analytica and Wylie, Facebook said it had known in 2015 that profiles were passed to Nix’s company.
“In 2015, we learned that a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge named Dr Aleksandr Kogan lied to us and violated our platform policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica,” the statement said.
Collins attacked Facebook for appearing to have been “deliberately avoiding answering straight questions” in testimony to the committee.
“It is now clear that data has been taken from Facebook users without their consent, and was then processed by a third party and used to support their campaigns,” Collins said. “Facebook knew about this, and the involvement of Cambridge Analytica with it.”
Cambridge Analytica responded to the Observer story on Twitter before Collins had said Nix would be recalled. “We refute(s) these mischaracterizations and false allegations,” it said.
“Reality Check: Cambridge Analytica uses client and commercially and publicly available data; we don’t use or hold any Facebook data,” the company said. “When we learned GSR sold us Facebook data that it shouldn’t have done, we deleted it all – system wide audit to verify.”
An elderly man lights a candle during a rally against the murder of Brazilian councilwoman and activist Marielle Franco, in Sao Paulo Brazil on March 15, 2018. Brazilians mourned for the Rio de Janeiro councilwoman and outspoken critic of police brutality who was shot in the city center in an assassination-style killing.Miguel Schincariol /AFP/Getty Images
Three days of mourning have begun in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, after the murder of a black human rights campaigner who spoke out against the lethal methods routinely used by security forces within the city's poorest neighborhoods.
Many residents of Rio are hardened to daily incidents of deadly violence yet the killing of Marielle Franco, a city council member and civil society activist, is being met by a huge wave of anger and indignation on social media, and protests on the streets.
Pallbearers carry coffins containing the remains of Marielle Franco and her driver Anderson Pedro Gomes past a crowd of thousands gathered outside City Hall in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday.
Leo Correa/AP
Flowers, pictures and condolence messages are amassing outside the city council offices, paying tribute to a charismatic young woman with a long record of championing social causes in a metropolis plagued by issues of violence, race and poverty.
A crowd of several thousand gathered there Thursday, brandishing slogans alleging that Franco was executed, and demanding that Rio's military police be disbanded. "How many more have to die?" asked one.
Investigators reportedly suspect that Franco, 38, was the victim of a targeted assassination. She was shot at around 9:30 p.m. Thursday in Estacio, a downtown neighbourhood, as she was returning from an event about empowering black women in Brazil, a cause she passionately championed.
Reports say two men in a car drew up alongside her vehicle, opened fire, and sped away. Her driver, Anderson Pedro Gomes, was also killed, and an aide was injured.
The outcry over Franco's death comes a month after Brazil's president, Michel Temer, signed a decree placing the military in overall charge of security in the state of Rio de Janeiro. His government portrayed this as an attempt to curb rising violence, particularly in favelas, between drug gangs and the police.
Last year, 6,731 civilians were killed statewide, according to Rio's Institute of Public Security. This year, the figure in one month alone — January — was 649, including 154 killed by police during various operations.
People cry on the sidewalk next to the scene where council member Marielle Franco and her driver were shot to death by two unidentified attackers in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday.
Leo Correa/AP
The deployment of Brazil's military — which security analysts say has so far failed to make any obvious difference — was strongly criticized by Franco who feared this would lead to still more bloodshed and human rights abuses.
Franco was born in a giant Rio favela — or shantytown — and was a powerful critic of Rio's military police and their tactics within these neighborhoods. Last week, she spoke out after the police shot two youngsters in Acari, a neighborhood in the northern part of Rio.
One of her last posts on Twitter highlighted the shooting death of a young man, describing this as "another homicide...that could be credited to the police." In a previous message, she labeled a military police unit as "the battalion of death" because of the number of civilians shot by its officers.
A woman positions a sign with a message that reads in Portuguese: "Stop Killing Us!" on the steps of City Hall where people gathered to pay their respects to slain council member Marielle Franco and her driver.Leo Correa/AP
Franco was considered to have a promising political future in a country that has become deeply cynical about its established leaders and parties after a series of huge corruption scandals. A member of a small leftist group, she was believed to be contemplating running for election to Brazil's Congress.
"She was becoming a very relevant, significant leader herself, of the feminist and anti-racism movements, and movements against inequality.
Those were her issues," said Luiz Eduardo Soares, a former public security secretary with Brazil's federal government, and co-author of Elite da Tropa, a book about Rio's military police.
Protesters from Amnesty International display banners regarding the the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar as they sail a boat near the venue for the one-off summit of 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) being held in Sydney, Australia, March 16, 2018. Source: Reuters/David Gray
AUSTRALIA’S promise to raise human rights concerns with Burma (Myanmar) and Cambodian leaders when they attend the summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) in Sydney this weekend doesn’t go far enough, according to Human Rights Watch.
Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said Friday that human rights abuses and the ongoing violence against the Rohingya minority in Burma would be “matters that we would be discussing with the Myanmar delegation” when the summit begins on Friday.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull shakes hands with Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen before their bilateral meeting during the one-off summit of 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Sydney, Australia, March 16, 2018. Source:/David Gray
But Director of Human Rights Watch Elaine Pearson doesn’t think this is a strong enough message.
“Ultimately, I don’t think, given the gravity of these abuses, that just having a quiet chat behind closed doors is really enough,” Pearson told Asian Correspondent, instead favouring a public statement by the government.
“It’s important, not just to get the message across to leaders, but also so the people back home in Cambodia and Myanmar are crystal clear on what Australia’s position is … (The government) needs to send a message to the people that Australia is really concerned about the human rights abuses in those countries.”
The three-day meet is officially aimed at strengthening political ties, counter-terrorism, and fostering economic cooperation between the 10-member Asean and Australia amid China’s rising influence.
The inclusion of Burma’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and Cambodia Prime Minister Hun Sen in the meeting has drawn criticism, and large protests are planned against both.
Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge general who has ruled Cambodia for more than 30 years, threatened to personally attack any demonstrators should they burn effigies or pictures of him, saying: “I will follow you all the way to your doorstep and beat you right there … I can use violence against you.”
There will also be protests held condemning Suu Kyi for her lack of action in the continued persecution of Rohingya Muslims, which has seen almost 700,000 flee across the border into neighbouring Bangladesh.
(L-R) Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak, Myanmar’s State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, South Korea President Moon Jae-in, Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Brunei’s Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen, Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo and Laos’ Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith join hands during a family photo before the 19th ASEAN Republic of Korea Summit in Manila, Philippines November 13, 2017. Source: Reuters/Aaron Favila/Pool
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has been under pressure to condemn the Nobel laureate’s failure to speak out against the crisis.
“It is in our interest to engage all Asean members including Aung San Suu Kyi at this summit because it gives us the best chance of influencing outcomes and making our concerns known,” Bishop said, as reported by Reuters.
Pearson urged the government to be direct in their petitions to the leaders by making it known that Australia will not consider the upcoming Cambodian election legitimate if it remains essentially a one-party state. She also called on Turnbull to demand that Burma allow a UN fact-finding mission access to the country.
Australia risks missing a rare opportunity to engage on such a senior level with these countries, and the promise of improved trade should not take precedence over human rights issues, Pearson said. Without a clear and unambiguous message, the invite to the summit and the welcome from the Australian Prime Minister “will only give more legitimacy to these leaders.”
The Israeli ministry in charge of policing Jerusalem is benefiting from the EU’s research program Horizon 2020. 
Jon Huntsman, at the time a Republican presidential candidate, visiting a restaurant to greet voters on Jan. 15, 2012. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
