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President Trump lashed out at the media Tuesday over reporting about his sudden trip to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center last weekend.

POSTED NOVEMBER 19, 2019 2:55 PM

Evo Morales, who had been president of Bolivia for 14 years, resigned last week amid allegations he fixed an election. In his absence, the country is teetering on the brink of violence and authoritarianism.

POSTED NOVEMBER 20, 2019 2:34 PM

A lawyer for Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman sent a letter to Fox News on Wednesday demanding the network either retract or issue a correction for a segment of the The Ingraham Angle, in which guest John Yoo, a former top lawyer in the Bush administration, seemed to suggest that Vindman might be guilty of espionage.Vindman, who listened to the July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky that forms part of the impeachment probe, testified in House hearings on Tuesday regarding the matter. Vindman is a long-serving military officer whose family fled Soviet Ukraine when he was three years old.During the October 28 airing of "The Ingraham Angle," host Laura Ingraham speculated on Vindman's motives for testifying."Here we have a U.S. national security official who is advising Ukraine, while working inside the White House, apparently against the president’s interest," Ingraham said. "Isn’t that kind of an interesting angle on this story?""I found that astounding,” Yoo responded. "Some people might call that espionage.""LTC Vindman and his family have been forced to examine options, including potentially moving onto a military base, in order to ensure their physical security in the face of threats rooted in the falsehood that Fox News originated," Vindman's lawyer David Pressman wrote.Pressman noted that espionage is a crime punishable by death, and that Vindman "had never in his decorated 20-year career of service to his country been accused of having dual loyalties or committing espionage."A spokeswoman for Fox News said she had no immediate comment when asked by the New York Times.Yoo wrote an op-ed in USA Today after the segment aired in which he clarified that he meant Ukraine may have committed an espionage operation, but that he didn't accuse Vindman specifically of espionage.Pressman wrote in his letter that "Mr. Yoo’s argument that he did not intend to accuse LTC of Vindman of ‘espionage’ — that he was accusing the nation of Ukraine instead — is as legally irrelevant as it is factually incredible."

POSTED NOVEMBER 20, 2019 3:50 PM

United States Ambassador to the European Gordon Sondland apparently remembers everything but the Bidens.During his public impeachment testimony Wednesday, Sondland addressed previous private testimony from David Holmes, an official from the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, in which Holmes said he overheard Trump loudly ask Sondland over the phone in July at a restaurant in Kyiv if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was "going to do the investigation."In Sondland's prepared opening statement, he said he remembered the phone call but didn't find it significant at the time (Holmes did not feel the same way) and that he and Trump were primarily discussing A$AP Rocky and his legal troubles in Sweden. Sondland did say he considered most of Holmes' recollection accurate and didn't directly challenge any part of his testimony, but he was adamant that he at least doesn't remember mentioning former Vice President Joe Biden or his son, Hunter, during or after the call with Trump. Holmes, on the other hand, testified that after the call Sondland told him that Trump doesn't care about Ukraine except for "big stuff" like investigating the Bidens.During Wednesday's questioning, Sondland said he doesn't think he would have said something like that, though he couldn't recall anything specifically refuting Holmes' claims.> Holmes said Sondland specifically invoked Biden on July 26. > > Sondland says, "I have no recollection of discussing Vice President Biden or his son on that call or after the call ended." https://t.co/vDdTz7eBym> > -- Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) November 20, 2019Sondland said he "would have been more surprised if" Trump hadn't mentioned investigations, but he claimed that at the time he was not operating under the assumption that the investigations were referring to the Bidens, which he is aware of now. Though some observers aren't buying that excuse. > Sondland's testimony that he did not understand Burisma meant framing the Bidens is not credible given his exchanges with Taylor. They make no sense otherwise. Taylor specifically says "help with a political campaign." pic.twitter.com/2zBTCwEc7z> > -- Adam Serwer (@AdamSerwer) November 20, 2019More stories from theweek.com Sondland just obliterated Trump and put the entire White House in peril Ken Starr on the Sondland testimony: 'It's over' Biden just sent out a post-debate email hours before the debate starts

POSTED NOVEMBER 20, 2019 11:14 AM

The son of former German president Richard von Weizsaecker was stabbed to death while he was giving a lecture at a hospital in Berlin where he worked as a head physician, police said Wednesday. A 57-year-old German man is in custody after he jumped up from the audience at the Schlosspark-Klinik and attacked Fritz von Weizsaecker with a knife on Tuesday evening. Von Weizsaecker died at the scene from a knife wound to the neck despite immediate attention from colleagues, said Martin Steltner, a spokesman for Berlin prosecutors.

POSTED NOVEMBER 20, 2019 2:28 AM

Douglas Haig, 57, of Mesa, Arizona, became the first and only person arrested and charged in connection with the Oct. 1, 2017, massacre, which ended when the gunman, Stephen Paddock, killed himself. Haig told reporters following his arrest early last year that none of the surplus military ammunition he sold to Paddock in September 2017 was ever fired during the killing spree, which ranks as the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

POSTED NOVEMBER 19, 2019 5:12 PM

Mexico's government said Wednesday it has helped 10 Mexican citizens file lawsuits against Walmart over an August shooting at a store in El Paso, Texas, where a suspected white nationalist killed 22 people. "The objective of these suits, presented in El Paso county, is to hold the company responsible for not taking reasonable and necessary measures to protect its clients from the attack," the foreign ministry said in a statement. Eight Mexicans were killed and eight wounded in the August 3 attack in El Paso, a city on the US-Mexican border where 83 percent of the population is Latino.

POSTED NOVEMBER 20, 2019 5:13 PM

The student newspaper reported that a black female student was called the N-word while walking on campus Saturday night.

POSTED NOVEMBER 19, 2019 3:23 PM

(Bloomberg) -- The Indian Army plans to buy just 1,800 state-of-the-art sniper rifles and 2.7 million rounds of ammunition -- less than a third of its total requirement -- driven by budgetary constraints and the need to speed up deliveries, people with knowledge of the matter said.The military pruned its original requirement of 5,720 sniper rifles and 10 million rounds of ammunition, which would have cost $140 million, to prioritize spending and advance the purchase of more modern equipment, they said, asking not to be identified as the information isn’t public.Indian Army spokesman Aman Anand said he had no comment to offer on the change in procurement plans.The Indian armed forces have 450,000 infantry soldiers, of whom only half go into ground battle and an even smaller number of them use sniper rifles to take out specific enemy targets through precision firing.The move is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s $250-billion modernization plan for the Indian defense forces, as the infantry soldiers continue to face the brunt of deadly attacks in disputed border areas such as Kashmir and the northeast.Plans to buy new equipment from global manufacturers, however, has been hit by bureaucratic delays and the Modi government’s desire to meet the needs of the armed forces through the domestic industry under his ‘Make in India’ initiative, a key plank to boost local defense manufacturing and woo his core supporters.The 1.3 million-strong Indian Army’s previous efforts to buy 5,720 sniper rifles in a process that began in Feb. 2018 was scrapped in July this year after four vendors, including the U.S.-based Barrett, Indonesia’s PT Pindad and Russia’s Rosoboronexport, failed to meet technical requirements, such as technology transfers for manufacturing the ammunition by local industry.Through the new bid to buy a smaller quantity of 8.6 mm sniper rifles and .338 Lapua Magnum ammunition, India wants to overcome the hurdles in first identifying the vendor to buy them in a fast-track mode, before placing future orders for 4,000 more sniper rifles.To contact the reporter on this story: N. C. Bipindra in New Delhi at nbipindra@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Ruth Pollard at rpollard2@bloomberg.net, Muneeza NaqviFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

POSTED NOVEMBER 20, 2019 4:35 AM

POSTED NOVEMBER 19, 2019 6:04 PM