November 2020 ~ AJJ News

Former President Barack Obama's chiefs of staff want President-elect Joe Biden to embrace his executive authority once he's in office, NPR reports.Denis McDonough who served in the role during Obama's second term told NPR that President Trump "has demonstrated ... an enormous amount of leeway for the president to institute executive action on things like immigration and energy and climate policy" and "there's no reason" the president-elect "should not use the authority that's available to him."Meanwhile, Obama's first chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, argued Biden, despite his fondness for working across the aisle in Congress, should fit as much of his agenda as he can into his executive orders because "the fewer things you have to clog up the legislative pipeline with allows you to concentrate your political capital in that legislative front."Should Biden heed this advice, which seems likely at least when it comes to certain issues, it would dash the already tenuous hopes of those who want the president-elect to initiate a scaling back of the office. Read more at NPR.More stories from theweek.com 7 scathingly funny cartoons about Trump's refusal to concede Trump is reportedly 'very aware' he lost the election but is putting up a fight as 'theater' Texas senator suggests it's too soon to declare Biden the winner because Puerto Rico is still counting votes

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SpaceX, NASA set for first operational astronaut mission to space

November 15, 2020

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SpaceX's newly designed Crew Dragon capsule, which the crew has dubbed Resilience, was set for liftoff atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time (0027 GMT on Monday) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Mission personnel left the launchpad, and the crew access arm - the walkway between the launch tower and rocket - retracted, setting the stage for the spacecraft's launch escape system to be armed and mission teams to start loading the Falcon 9 rocket with fuel. An air leak caused an unexpected drop in capsule pressure less than two hours before launch, NASA officials said.

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Navajo Nation orders new three-week stay-at-home lockdown

November 15, 2020

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An interactive tool will let you calculate the chance that someone at your Thanksgiving dinner may have COVID-19

November 15, 2020

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Your chance of encountering someone sick varies based on your location in the US and the size of a gathering. This tool calculates that risk.

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Al-Qaida's No. 2, Accused in U.S. Embassy Attacks, Is Secretly Killed in Iran

November 15, 2020

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WASHINGTON -- Al-Qaida's second-highest leader, accused of being one of the masterminds of the deadly 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, was killed in Iran three months ago, intelligence officials have confirmed.Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Masri, was gunned down on the streets of Tehran by two assassins on a motorcycle on Aug. 7, the anniversary of the embassy attacks. He was killed along with his daughter, Miriam, the widow of Osama bin Laden's son Hamza bin Laden.The attack was carried out by Israeli operatives at the behest of the United States, according to four of the officials. It is unclear what role if any was played by the United States, which had been tracking the movements of al-Masri and other Qaida operatives in Iran for years.Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York TimesThe killing occurred in such a netherworld of geopolitical intrigue and counterterrorism spycraft that al-Masri's death had been rumored but never confirmed until now. For reasons that are still obscure, al-Qaida has not announced the death of one of its top leaders, Iranian officials covered it up, and no country has publicly claimed responsibility for it.Al-Masri, who was about 58, was one of al-Qaida's founding leaders and was thought to be first in line to lead the organization after its current leader, Ayman al-Zawahri.Long featured on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist list, he had been indicted in the United States for crimes related to the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people and wounded hundreds. The FBI offered a $10 million reward for information leading to his capture, and as of Friday, his picture was still on the Most Wanted list.That he had been living in Iran was surprising, given that Iran and al-Qaida are bitter enemies. Iran, a Shiite Muslim theocracy, and al-Qaida, a Sunni Muslim jihadi group, have fought each other on the battlefields of Iraq and other places.American intelligence officials say that al-Masri had been in Iran's "custody" since 2003, but that he had been living freely in the Pasdaran district of Tehran, an upscale suburb, since at least 2015.Around 9 on a warm summer night, he was driving his white Renault L90 sedan with his daughter near his home when two gunmen on a motorcycle drew up beside him. Five shots were fired from a pistol fitted with a silencer. Four bullets entered the car through the driver's side and a fifth hit a nearby car.As news of the shooting broke, Iran's official news media identified the victims as Habib Daoud, a Lebanese history professor, and his 27-year-old daughter Maryam. The Lebanese news channel MTV and social media accounts affiliated with Iran's Revolutionary Guard reported that Daoud was a member of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant organization in Lebanon.It seemed plausible.The killing came amid a summer of frequent explosions in Iran, mounting tensions with the United States, days after an enormous explosion in the port of Beirut and a week before the U.N. Security Council was to consider extending an arms embargo against Iran. There was speculation that the killing may have been a Western provocation intended to elicit a violent Iranian reaction in advance of the Security Council vote.And the targeted killing by two gunmen on a motorcycle fit the modus operandi of previous Israeli assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. That Israel would kill an official of Hezbollah, which is committed to fighting Israel, also seemed to make sense, except for the fact that Israel had been consciously avoiding killing Hezbollah operatives so as not to provoke a war.In fact, there was no Habib Daoud.Several Lebanese with close ties to Iran said they had not heard of him or his killing. A search of Lebanese news media found no reports of a Lebanese history professor killed in Iran last summer. And an education researcher with access to lists of all history professors in the country said there was no record of a Habib Daoud.One of the intelligence officials said that Habib Daoud was an alias Iranian officials gave al-Masri and the history teaching job was a cover story. In October, the former leader of Egypt's Islamic Jihad, Nabil Naeem, who called al-Masri a longtime friend, told the Saudi news channel Al-Arabiya the same thing.Iran may have had good reason for wanting to hide the fact that it was harboring an avowed enemy, but it was less clear why Iranian officials would have taken in the Qaida leader to begin with.Some terrorism experts suggested that keeping Qaida officials in Tehran might provide some insurance that the group would not conduct operations inside Iran. American counterterrorism officials believe Iran may have allowed them to stay to run operations against the United States, a common adversary.It would not be the first time that Iran had joined forces with Sunni militants, having supported Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Taliban."Iran uses sectarianism as a cudgel when it suits the regime, but is also willing to overlook the Sunni-Shia divide when it suits Iranian interests," said Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Center.Iran has consistently denied housing the Qaida officials. In 2018, the Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi said that because of Iran's long, porous border with Afghanistan, some Qaida members had entered Iran, but they had been detained and returned to their home countries.However, Western intelligence officials said the Qaida leaders had been kept under house arrest by the Iranian government, which then made at least two deals with al-Qaida to free some of them in 2011 and 2015.Although al-Qaida has been overshadowed in recent years by the rise of the Islamic State, it remains resilient and has active affiliates around the globe, a U.N. counterterrorism report issued in July concluded.Iranian officials did not respond to a request for comment for this article. Spokesmen for the Israeli prime minister's office and the Trump administration's National Security Council declined to comment.Al-Masri was a longtime member of al-Qaida's highly secretive management council, along with Saif al-Adl, who was also held in Iran at one point. The pair, along with Hamza bin Laden, who was being groomed to take over the organization, were part of a group of senior Qaida leaders who sought refuge in Iran after the 9/11 attacks on the United States forced them to flee Afghanistan.According to a highly classified document produced by the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center in 2008, al-Masri was the "most experienced and capable operational planner not in U.S. or allied custody." The document described him as the "former chief of training" who "worked closely" with al-Adl.In Iran, al-Masri mentored Hamza bin Laden, according to terrorism experts. Hamza bin Laden later married al-Masri's daughter, Miriam."The marriage of Hamza bin Ladin was not the only dynastic connection Abu Muhammad forged in captivity," Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent and Qaida expert, wrote in a 2019 article for West Point's Combating Terrorism Center.Another of al-Masri's daughters married Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, no relation, a member of the management council. He was allowed to leave Iran in 2015 and was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Syria in 2017. At the time, he was the second-ranking Qaida official after Zawahri.Hamza and other members of the bin Laden family were freed by Iran in 2011 in exchange for an Iranian diplomat abducted in Pakistan. Last year, the White House said Hamza bin Laden had been killed in a counterterrorism operation in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.Abu Muhammad al-Masri was born in Al Rarbiya district of northern Egypt in 1963. In his youth, according to affidavits filed in lawsuits in the United States, he was a professional soccer player in Egypt's top league. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, he joined the jihadi movement that was coalescing to assist the Afghan forces.After the Soviets withdrew 10 years later, Egypt refused to allow al-Masri to return. He remained in Afghanistan where he eventually joined bin Laden in the group that was later to become the founding nucleus of al-Qaida. He was listed by the group as the seventh of its 170 founders.In the early 1990s, he traveled with bin Laden to Khartoum, Sudan, where he began forming military cells. He also went to Somalia to help the militia loyal to Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. There he trained Somali guerrillas in the use of shoulder-borne rocket launchers against helicopters, training they used in the 1993 battle of Mogadishu to shoot down a pair of U.S. helicopters in what is now known as the Black Hawk Down attack."When al-Qaida began to carry out terrorist activities in the late 1990s, al-Masri was one of the three of bin Laden's closest associates, serving as head of the organization's operations section," said Yoram Schweitzer, head of the Terrorism Project of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. "He brought with him know-how and determination and since then was involved in a large part of the organization's operations, with an emphasis on Africa."Shortly after the Mogadishu battle, bin Laden put al-Masri in charge of planning operations against U.S. targets in Africa. Plotting a dramatic, ambitious operation that, like the 9/11 attacks, would command international attention, they decided to attack two relatively well-defended targets in separate countries simultaneously.Shortly after 10:30 a.m. on Aug. 7, 1998, two trucks packed with explosives pulled up in front of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The blasts incinerated people nearby, blew walls off buildings and shattered glass for blocks around.In 2000, al-Masri became one of the nine members of al-Qaida's governing council and headed the organization's military training.He also continued to oversee Africa operations, according to a former Israeli Intelligence official, and ordered the attack in Mombasa, Kenya, in 2002 that killed 13 Kenyans and three Israeli tourists.By 2003, al-Masri was among several Qaida leaders who fled to Iran which, although hostile to the group, seemed out of American reach."They believed the United States would find it very difficult to act against them there," Schweitzer said. "Also because they believed that the chances of the Iranian regime doing an exchange deal with the Americans that would include their heads were very slim."Al-Masri was one of the few high-ranking members of the organization to survive the American hunt for the perpetrators of 9/11 and other attacks. When he and other Qaida leaders fled to Iran, they were initially kept under house arrest.In 2015, Iran announced a deal with al-Qaida in which it released five of the organization's leaders, including al-Masri, in exchange for an Iranian diplomat who had been abducted in Yemen.Abdullah's footprints faded away, but according to one of the intelligence officials, he continued to live in Tehran, under the protection of the Revolutionary Guards and later the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. He was allowed to travel abroad and did, mainly to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria.Some American analysts said al-Masri's death would sever connections between one of the last original Qaida leaders and the current generation of Islamist militants, who have grown up after bin Laden's 2011 death."If true, this further cuts links between old-school al-Qaida and the modern jihad," said Nicholas J. Rasmussen, a former director of the National Counterterrorism Center. "It just further contributes to the fragmentation and decentralization of the al-Qaida movement."--TIMELINE1963Abu Muhammad al-Masri was born in northern Egypt, and grew up to play soccer in Egypt's top professional league. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he joined the jihad movement there.1980sAfter the Soviets withdrew, Egypt refused to allow al-Masri to return. He remained in Afghanistan, and eventually joined Osama bin Laden in a group that was later to become the nucleus of al-Qaida.EARLY 1990sAl-Masri traveled with bin Laden to Khartoum, Sudan, where he began forming military cells. He also went to Somalia, where he helped train the fighters who fought U.S. troops in a battle popularly known as the Black Hawk Down attack.1998Al-Masri was one of the masterminds of the deadly attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.2000Al-Masri became one of the nine members of al-Qaida's governing council and was put in charge of the organization's military training activities.2002While overseeing African operations, he issued orders for the attacks in Mombasa, Kenya, that killed 15 people, according to a former Israeli Intelligence official.2003After the 9/11 attacks, al-Masri was among several Qaida leaders who fled to Iran. They were initially held under house arrest.2015Iran and al-Qaida announced a deal in which Iran released five of the organization's leaders, including al-Masri, from prison in exchange for an Iranian diplomat who had been abducted in Yemen.2020Al-Masri was secretly assassinated in Tehran at the behest of the U.S., officials said. But no one -- Iran, al-Qaida, the U.S. or Israel -- publicly acknowledged the killing.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

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Shepherd Bushiri: Preacher flees South Africa ahead of fraud trial

November 15, 2020

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The self-styled prophet says he skipped bail and left South Africa because he had received death threats.

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Washington state governor imposes sweeping restrictions amid COVID-19 surge

November 15, 2020

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The restrictions, most of which will take effect Monday at 11:59 p.m. and last for one month, come as the average daily tally for cases has doubled in the past two weeks, Inslee told a news conference. The spike in cases "...means, unfortunately, the time has come to reinstate restrictions on activities statewide to preserve the public's well-being and to save lives," Inslee said. Indoor gatherings will be prohibited outside one's household and outdoor gatherings will be limited to five people.

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Huge India oil well fire extinguished after five months

November 15, 2020

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A massive oil well fire that raged for more than five months in northeast India has finally been extinguished, officials said Sunday.

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Secret intelligence exists that ‘would cast Trump in very negative light’, warns ex-FBI chief

November 15, 2020

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‘It’s almost incomprehensible to me that he would want that information out,’ says Andrew McCabe

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Column: The Georgia Senate runoffs could make all the difference. But is electing a Democrat possible?

November 15, 2020

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As money comes pouring in from Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and election ads saturate the state, will will there be a backlash from Georgia voters?

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Boris Johnson is in self-isolation after a British parliament member he spent 35 minutes with tested positive for COVID-19, reports say

November 15, 2020

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Johnson and Conservative MP Lee Anderson attended a 35-minute last week and were photographed standing side by side, unmasked.

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Newspaper headlines: 'No 10 reset in disarray' as PM self-isolates

November 15, 2020

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Monday's papers lead with news that Boris Johnson is self-isolating ahead of a "crucial" week at No 10.

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Saturday, 14 November 2020

In pictures: Diwali celebrations around the world

November 14, 2020

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November 14, 2020

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The eye-watering cost of delivering a fibre network to rural areas.

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4-year-old boy in Texas loses mom and dad to Covid

November 14, 2020

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"Just this morning he told me that he wishes he had his mom back and he just wanted her back," Raiden Gonzalez's grandmother said. "I just told him that they're now angels watching over us."

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The Wolverine Watchmen plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Whitmer also included a plan to burn down the state Capitol building, officials say

November 14, 2020

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According to the Michigan Attorney General's Office, the group had also considered storming the Capitol to "take hostages" and "execute tyrants."

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Following ceasefire and concessions Armenians leave disputed territory, some setting fire to homes

November 14, 2020

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Following a Russian-brokered ceasefire that includes territorial concessions which will go into effect Sunday, Armenians are leaving villages in the Nagorno-Karabakh region and some are setting fire to their homes, The Associated Press and Reuters report. It's unclear when and how many Azeris, many of whom were displaced from the same land in 1994, will return to the villages.The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory, which is officially recognized as part of Azerbaijan but has been controlled by ethnic Armenians for decades, flared up in recent months. The fighting resulted in Azerbaijan seizing the key city of Shusha, leading to the ceasefire, which Russia — generally considered a staunch ally and protector of Armenia — plans to enforce with 2,000 peacekeepers.The Armenians who are leaving their homes cast doubt on the idea that they could live peacefully beside the returning Azeris, per AP and Reuters, and many remain uncertain of where their next destination will be. "We are homeless now, do not know where to go and where to live," one woman leaving her home told AP. Read more at The Associated Press and Reuters.More stories from theweek.com 7 scathingly funny cartoons about Trump's refusal to concede Trump is reportedly 'very aware' he lost the election but is putting up a fight as 'theater' Texas senator suggests it's too soon to declare Biden the winner because Puerto Rico is still counting votes

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California governor went to party, violated own virus rules

November 14, 2020

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For months, Gov. Gavin Newsom has pleaded with Californians to resist the temptation to socialize with friends and relatives outside their household. Newsom acknowledged Friday he attended a birthday party with a dozen friends on Nov. 6 at the posh French Laundry restaurant in wine country north of San Francisco. Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a professor of public policy communication at the University of Southern California, noted people across the state have been canceling birthday parties, funerals and other important events to abide by the rules.

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Critics dispute McEnany's claim about MAGA march crowd size

November 14, 2020

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White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Saturday claimed that "more than one million" people came out to march in support of President Trump in Washington, D.C. as he continues to challenge the results of the presidential election, but several critics quickly dispelled that figure. The Washington Post, for instance, described the "falsehood" as "ludicrous."It's not that the crowd was completely sparse -- there's no official estimate, but reports indicate the actual numbers are in the thousands -- but it does not appear to be close to the image conjured up by McEnany.> We don't have exact figures, but the crowd is not remotely close to a million people. https://t.co/J4y0IJp2xm> > -- Daniel Dale (@ddale8) November 14, 2020As some folks pointed out, Trump's time in office similarly began with a dispute over the size of his inauguration crowd, with the White House exaggerating the number of attendees, which appeared to pale in comparison to previous inaugurations. > From Spicer to McEnany...the Trump administration ends as it began: With a lie about crowd size. https://t.co/xiwn5TllD0> > -- Ashley Parker (@AshleyRParker) November 14, 2020More stories from theweek.com 7 scathingly funny cartoons about Trump's refusal to concede Trump is reportedly 'very aware' he lost the election but is putting up a fight as 'theater' Texas senator suggests it's too soon to declare Biden the winner because Puerto Rico is still counting votes