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      Spy Jonathan Pollard expected to fly to Israel after US lifts parole

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      Jonathan Pollard, a US citizen jailed for 30 years after being convicted of spying in one of the most dramatic espionage cases of the cold war, is expected to fly to Israel after being released from parole.
      The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, welcomed the lifting of travel restrictions, his office said in a statement on Saturday, adding that he had “consistently worked towards securing Pollard’s release”.
      “The prime minister hopes to see Jonathan Pollard in Israel soon, and together with all Israelis, extends his best wishes to him and his wife Esther,” the statement said.
      The US justice department on Friday announced Pollard’s parole would not be renewed, freeing the former spy from strict restrictions that have kept him in the country since he left jail five years ago.
      Pollard’s lawyer, Eliot Lauer, also suggested his client would soon depart for Israel: “We are grateful and delighted that our client is finally free of any restrictions, and is now a free man in all respects. We look forward to seeing our client in Israel.”
      Having been arrested by FBI agents in 1985 after unsuccessfully seeking refuge at the Israeli embassy in Washington, Pollard was sentenced to life in prison in 1987. He had pleaded guilty to handing thousands of classified documents to Israel.
      The initial shock between the US and its close ally, and Pollard’s continuing imprisonment, has long strained relations between the two countries.
      Pollard’s release was the latest in a series of gestures by the departing Trump administration towards Netanyahu’s government.
      This week the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, became the first top US diplomat to officially visit an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. He later declared that products from settlements – considered illegal under international law – could be labelled “Made in Israel”, despite being made in the occupied Palestinian territories.
      Netanyahu has long pushed for Pollard’s release. During the longtime leader’s first term in the late 1990s, Pollard was granted Israeli citizenship. Netanyahu later made a personal plea to allow him to attend his father’s funeral. The US denied that request. Repeated attempts to persuade US presidents to grant him clemency have failed.
      In his statement on Saturday, Netanyahu thanked his ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, for “responsibly and sensitively leading the contacts with the [Trump] administration”. More

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      Coronavirus taskforce briefing: Fauci urges vigilance as vaccine is in sight

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      Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious diseases expert, has promised that “the cavalry is on the way” in the form of a coronavirus vaccine but urged one last great national effort to stop the spread.
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      Fauci was speaking at the White House coronavirus taskforce’s first press briefing since July. He was joined by Vice-president Mike Pence and response coordinator Deborah Birx, but there was no sign of Donald Trump or his controversial adviser Scott Atlas.
      The taskforce broke its long silence as the virus surges to new highs, infecting more than 158,000 Americans – and killing in excess of 1,100 – every day. The total death toll now stands at a quarter of a million. Trump, little seen in public and refusing to accept election defeat, has been accused of all but giving up on the fight.
      Taskforce members said they did not support a new national lockdown or school closures. But Fauci noted the “extraordinarily impressive” efficacy of vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna in clinical trials and told reporters that he wants to “put to rest any concept that this was rushed in an inappropriate way. This is really solid”.
      Fauci continued: “We now, as the vice-president said, are telling you that help is on the way, which has two aspects to it. It means that we need to actually double down on the public health measures as we’re waiting for that help to come, which will be soon. We’ll be getting vaccine doses into people at a high priority at the end of December.”
      “We’re not talking about shutting down the country. We’re not talking about locking down. We’re talking about intensifying the simple public health measures that we all talk about: mask wearing, staking distance, avoiding congregant settings, doing things to the extent that we can outdoors versus indoors. If we do that, we’ll be able to hold things off until the vaccine comes.”
      Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, added: “Now I’ve used that metaphor that the cavalry is on the way. If you’re fighting a battle and the cavalry’s on the way, you don’t stop shooting. You keep going until the cavalry gets here, then you might even want to continue fighting.”
      White House coronavirus taskforce briefings were an almost daily occurrence during the first surge of the virus in April, with Fauci and Birx becoming household names. But they fell away during the summer as the president fought the election campaign, suffered his own infection and increasingly derided Fauci. He brought in a new adviser, Atlas, who has falsely attacked the science of face masks and state measures to reduce infections.
      Pence said Thursday’s briefing was taking place at Trump’s request, but he took no questions either about the virus or his boss’s refusal to acknowledge that Biden won the election.
      The taskforce acknowledged that infections and hospitalisations are rising across the country. Pence acknowledged that the test positivity rate over the past 30 days has risen from 5% to 10%, and in some parts of the country is much higher. Birx, pointing to a graphic, added: “This is more cases, more rapidly than what we had seen before.”
      But Pence also insisted that the country is much better prepared in terms of personal protective equipment and other resources than it was at the start of the outbreak, as well as a system and kits to distribute a vaccine.
      “America has never been more prepared to combat this virus than we are today,” said the vice-president. “The day after one of these vaccines is approved we’ll be shipping vaccines to the American people and within a day after that we’ll be seeing those vaccines injected into Americans.”
      He added: “We’re getting there, America.”
      On Thursday the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) urged Americans to avoid travel over the Thanksgiving holiday. Birx added her voice calling for “decreasing those friends and family gatherings where people come together and unknowingly spread the virus. Every American needs to be vigilant in this moment because we know that when you are, we can mitigate this virus and stop this spread together.”
      But Pence also ruled out the type of mass closures of businesses that America witnessed in the spring. “President Trump wanted me to make it clear that our taskforce, this administration, and our president does not support another national lockdown, and we do not support closing schools.”
      The pointed remark about schools came a day after New York officials announced public schools would once again close after the city’s positivity rate hit 3%.
      Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, argued that it is possible for schools to safely conduct in-person instruction. He insisted: “They can do it safely, and they can do it responsibly. The infections that we’ve identified in schools, when they’ve been evaluated, were not acquired in schools. They were actually acquired in the community.”
      The big threat in transmission is “not the public square, but family gatherings” where people get comfortable and remove their masks, Redfield added.
      Alex Azar, the health secretary, said Pfizer would seek an emergency use authorisation Friday from the Food and Drug Administration for its coronavirus vaccine. The application and clinical trial data will be reviewed by an independent board of scientists before approval is granted. Azar added: “Hope and help are on the way.”
      Moderna is expected to file for emergency approval for its vaccine candidate in the coming weeks. More

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      Trump administration in 'staggering' isolation at UN on health issues

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      The outgoing Trump administration’s final days at the United Nations have resulted in a deepening of US isolation on social and health issues, with only a handful of allies including Russia, Belarus and Syria.
      In one vote this week, the US was entirely alone in backing its own amendment to a seemingly uncontroversial resolution about efforts to treat medical complications from childbirth. It called for the removal of references to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Population Fund.
      No other nation agreed, with 153 voting against the amendment and 11 abstaining.
      A UN diplomat said the spectacle of a western ally and a superpower so totally isolated was “staggering”.
      “It’s amazing that they decided they want to put their isolation on record, on full display, like that,” the diplomat said.
      Debates at the UN general assembly this week have been on social and humanitarian affairs and human rights issues, on which the US mission stepped up its largely unsuccessful campaign to remove mention of reproductive health from UN documents. The Trump administration sees the phrase as synonymous with abortion.
      The US backed eight amendments to resolutions on issues such as violence against women and girls, trafficking of women and girls, female genital mutilation, and early, child and forced marriages.
      Apart from the move to delete a reference to the WHO, which Donald Trump has blamed for the coronavirus pandemic, the proposed amendment involved removing references to providing reproductive health services to female victims of violence and oppression.
      Each time the amendments were decisively voted down in the general assembly, with the US drawing only a very small group of between four and 14 supporters. Its only consistent allies were Russia, Belarus, Syria, Qatar and the Pacific island states of Nauru and Palau.
      In one resolution about providing healthcare to women and girls during the pandemic, the US wanted to change the phrase “designating protection and healthcare services as essential services for all women and girls, especially those who are most vulnerable to violence and stigma”. The US mission demanded the deletion of the words “services as essential services”.
      “We’ve seen the US approach harden on these issues over the past four years, but I think this year was uniquely challenging as they clearly decided they were going to put their foot down on sexual reproductive health services language, across every single kind of relevant human rights resolution,” a UN diplomat said.
      After failing to change the wording of resolutions in negotiations before a vote was taken, the US took the added step of tabling amendments from the floor of the assembly, even though they were doomed to fail.
      “It is kind of an aggressive move normally used by Russia, but this year US decided to do it too,” the diplomat said.
      The US permanent representative, Kelly Craft, said the US objected to wording in the UN resolutions designed to “promote the global abortion industry”.
      “The US could not be clearer,” Craft said in a tweet. “There is no international right to abortion. Abortion is not healthcare. Abortion is not safe in any circumstance.”
      Explaining a vote on a French-Dutch resolution on sexual violence that mentioned reproductive health, the US delegate Jennifer Barber said: “It is particularly hypocritical that a resolution on violence against women promotes access to something that results in the loss of millions of baby girls every year.”
      Craft and Barber are from Kentucky and were backed for their position by the powerful Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, despite having minimal or no international experience. Barber is a specialist in Kentucky tax law. More

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      Trump fires director of US cybersecurity agency that refuted voter fraud claims

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      Donald Trump has fired the director of the federal agency that vouched for the reliability of the 2020 election and pushed back on the president’s baseless claims of voter fraud.
      Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), in a tweet on Tuesday, saying Krebs “has been terminated” and that his recent statement defending the security of the election was “highly inaccurate”.
      The firing of Krebs, a Trump appointee, comes as Trump is refusing to recognize the victory of the president-elect, Joe Biden, and removing high-level officials seen as insufficiently loyal. He fired Mark Esper, the defense secretary, on 9 November part of a broader shake-up that put Trump loyalists in senior Pentagon positions.
      Krebs had indicated he expected to be fired. Last week, his agency released a statement refuting claims of widespread voter fraud. “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” the statement read. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
      Krebs, a former Microsoft executive, ran the agency, known as Cisa, from its creation in the wake of Russian interference with the 2016 election through the November election. He won bipartisan praise as Cisa coordinated federal state and local efforts to defend electoral systems from foreign or domestic interference.
      Trump mentioned the Cisa statement in his tweet firing Krebs. The president’s tweets also repeated many of the baseless election fraud claims he has made in recent weeks.
      Several top Democrats were swift to condemn the president’s decision to fire Krebs.
      On CNN, senator Chris Coons of Delaware said, “Chris Krebs’ federal service is just the latest casualty in President Trump’s four-year-long war on the truth.”
      Angus King, the Maine senator who is among the candidates who may be appointed Director of National Intelligence in the upcoming Biden administration, called Krebs “a dedicated public servant who has helped build up new cyber capabilities in the face of swiftly-evolving dangers.
      “By firing him for doing his job, President Trump is harming all Americans.”
      Adam Schiff, the Democratic California congressman who chairs the House intelligence committee, said that Trump’s move is “ pathetic and predictable from a president who views truth as his enemy”.
      And Mark Warner, a Democratic senator of Virginia and co-chair of the Senate cybersecurity caucus, said Krebs “is an extraordinary public servant and exactly the person Americans want protecting the security of our elections”.
      “It speaks volumes that the president chose to fire him simply for telling the truth,” he said, echoing many of his Democratic colleagues.
      Ben Sasse, a Republican senator of Nebraska also chimed in. “Chris Krebs did a really good job,” he said. “He obviously should not be fired.”
      Two other DHS officials – Bryan Ware, Cisa’s assistant director of international affairs, and Valerie Boyd, DHS assistant secretary of international affairs – were also reportedly forced out last week.
      Krebs tweeted from his personal account that he was “honored to serve”.
      Twitter quickly flagged the tweets in which the president announced Krebs’ firing for containing “disputed” claims about the election.
      Unwilling to accept reality and concede the election, Trump has doubled down on conspiracy theories about election fraud. His administration has blocked the Biden transition team from receiving briefings, but now that Krebs is no longer working in an official capacity, the incoming administration may be able to glean non-classified briefings from the former cybersecurity official. More

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      The madness of King Trump, America's sulky George III sequel | Ian Martin

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      “He went mad and lost America”. A conventional summary of King George III, the tragic figure who took on the colonies, sending in his troops to “dominate” the streets and crush resistance. Alas, the war of independence didn’t end well, for George anyway. Defeated, bipolar, suffering frequent manic episodes, he retreated to Windsor Castle having nevertheless amassed an impressive library and a reputation for cultured intelligence.
      A couple of centuries and 45 presidents later, Old King Trump sits barricaded in the White House doing nothing much. His face puckered into that trademark rosebud of petulance. Barking at underlings. Pretending HE won because a lot of Democrat votes were from dead people and very illegal. His sulky-toddler folded arms, like that time he refused to say a single kind word when fellow Republican and war hero John McCain died. There’s something almost majestic about Trump’s utter contempt for the office of president.
      Karl Marx – apparently the evil genius behind peaceful protest and Medicare – said that historical entities appear twice, “first as tragedy, then as farce”. That feels about right. More

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      Fears of foreign policy chaos in Trump's final days fueled by Iran bombing report

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      Fears that Donald Trump might try to wreak havoc on the world stage in his final, desperate, weeks in office appear to have been well-founded, after he reportedly asked for options on bombing Iran.
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      A report in the New York Times said Trump was advised against strikes on Iranian nuclear sites by senior officials warning of the risk of triggering a major conflict. But it added that the president may not have entirely given up on the idea of staging attacks on Iran or its allies and proxies in the region.
      On the same day, Trump’s newly installed defence secretary, Christopher Miller, confirmed that the US would draw down its military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq to 2,500 troops in each country, shrugging off concerns that an abrupt withdrawal in Afghanistan could derail peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban by convincing the rebels they could win without a deal.
      A defence department inspector general report on Tuesday said it was “unclear” whether the Taliban were violating a separate deal it made with the US in February.
      The developments come days after Trump removed Mark Esper, who as defence secretary had argued against a rapid departure from Afghanistan, and installed loyalists in the Pentagon and National Security Agency, with a record of backing aggressive action against Iran, or supporting a rapid extrication from Afghanistan.
      Miller issued a message to Pentagon staff on Tuesday, with a warning not to try to resist new orders from the top. “Do your job,” Miller said. “Focus on your assignment.”
      He stated his first goal was: “Bring the current war to an end in a responsible manner that guarantees the security of our citizens.”
      Miller did not define the “current war” but it was widely seen as a reference to the military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.
      The new acting under secretary of defence for intelligence and security, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, installed in the Pentagon at the same time as Miller, has reportedly pushed for regime change in Iran, and for aggressive action against Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq.
      The turmoil in foreign and defence policy comes at a time when Trump is refusing to accept election defeat and is preventing Joe Biden’s incoming team from receiving intelligence or policy briefings.
      Former officials have suggested that Trump is aware he will eventually have to leave office and is considering another run at the presidency in 2024. To that end, he is looking at last-minute options for fulfilling campaign promises he can point to, to build a narrative that he ran a successful administration that was removed by a rigged election.
      “This will be his version of the Lost Cause,” a former official from the Trump White House said, referring to attempts after the civil war to romanticise the Confederacy. “He can go out in a blaze of glory, and the stab in the back theory gets strengthened because he can point to all the things that he did.” More

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      Trump officials rush plans to drill in Arctic refuge before Biden inauguration

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      In a last-ditch attempt to make good on promises to the oil and gas industry, the Trump administration is rushing to formalize plans to drill for oil in the Arctic national wildlife refuge before Joe Biden takes office. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management initiated the process with a formal “call for nominations”, inviting input on which land tracts should be auctioned off in the refuge’s 1.5m-acre coastal plain region.The call for nominations “brings us one step closer to […] advancing this administration’s policy of energy independence”, said Chad Padgett, the BLM Alaska state director, in a statement.The call for nominations lasts 30 days, which would allow the bureau to begin auctioning leases for land tracts to oil and gas companies just days before Biden’s inauguration on 20 January. The coastal plain region, where land could be auctioned, is considered some of the country’s last pristine wilderness, containing dozens of polar bear dens, essential migratory bird habitat, and caribou calving grounds held sacred to the Gwich’in people.“Oil and gas drilling could wipe out polar bears on the coastal plain of the Arctic national wildlife refuge in our lifetimes,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and chief executive of Defenders of Wildlife, in a statement.Native communities in the region say they will also be disproportionately affected by the leasing of Arctic lands to oil and gas companies.“The adverse impacts of oil development in these sacred and critical caribou calving grounds will be heavily felt by Gwich’in and Inupiat villages,” said Jody Potts, Native Movement regional director, in a statement. “As a Gwich’in person, I know my family’s food security, culture, spirituality and ways of life are at stake.”The rush to sell leases appears to be spurred by Biden’s very different approach to public land management. He has promised to “permanently protect” the refuge and ban all new oil and gas leasing on public lands, making it unlikely that leases will be sold once Biden takes office.Even if the BLM holds an auction as early as 17 January, it’s unclear how much bidding will take place. The oil industry is also having a particularly bad year; two dozen banks have announced that they would not fund fossil fuel extraction in the Arctic refuge. And either way, it could be years before any drilling might take place, given the environmental reviews required to do so.“If BLM holds an auction, but doesn’t get as far as issuing leases, the new administration may be able to avoid issuing them, particularly if it concludes the program or lease sale was unlawfully adopted,” said Erik Grafe, an attorney with the environmental law non-profit Earthjustice.Drilling in the refuge has been fiercely opposed for decades and remains extremely unpopular; the Yukon government in Canada has recently voiced opposition to oil exploration in the region due to the harm it could cause to the 200,000 Porcupine caribou who use the coastal plain as calving grounds.In August, more than a dozen environmental organizations sued the Trump administration to block drilling in the refuge, citing “irreparable damage to one of the world’s most important wild places”.If sales do occur before Biden takes office, it would be challenging – but not impossible – for Biden to walk back leases issued.“Even if leases are issued by the Trump administration, the Biden administration could seek to withdraw the leases if it concludes they were unlawfully issued or pose too great a threat to the environment,” Grafe said.In addition to rushing lease sales in the refuge, the Trump administration has fast-tracked seismic testing for oil on the coastal plain, trimming a permitting process that would normally take up to a year down to a few months. The testing, proposed by Kaktovik Inupiat Corporation, could begin as soon as December and run until May. Environmentalists oppose testing, which involves 90,000lb (41,000kg) “thumper” trucks that could leave permanent scars on the landscape and disturb denning polar bear mothers.The Arctic refuge’s coastal plain has been at the center of a fierce battle over oil extraction on public lands for decades. It was earmarked for potential development in 1980 but remained protected until a Republican-controlled Congress added a provision to a tax bill in 2017 that finally opened the area to oil development.The Gwich’in people, who have lived in the area for thousands of years, have consistently opposed drilling in a land they call iizhik gwats’an gwandaii goodlit, or “the sacred place where life begins”. Their opposition has remained strong as they have borne the brunt of the climate crisis’s impacts. The call for nominations comes during a month when Arctic sea ice is at a record low and temperatures are at a record high for this time of year.“The Trump administration opening up oil lease sales is devastating to our way of life as Gwich’in people,” said Quannah ChasingHorse Potts, a member of the Gwich’in Youth Council. “The Gwich’in people’s identity is connected to the land and animals. We have lost so much [that] we can’t afford to lose more.” More