2 children dead, 1 missing in Arizona creek flooding; search continues

Two adults and four other children were rescued near Tonto National Forest in Arizona. Two of three missing children were found dead Saturday.

John Bolton could be Democrats' star witness against Trump

Democrats have long loathed former national security adviser John Bolton, but he could become their most dangerous witness against President Trump in Congress' impeachment inquiry.

10 wounded in shooting near New Orleans’ French Quarter

Ten people were shot and wounded early Sunday near the French Quarter in New Orleans, a popular spot for tourists. Two of the 10 people shot on Canal Street near the French Quarter were in critical condition in local hospitals, Police Superintendent Shaun Ferguson said. “What happened in our city overnight was a cowardly and senseless act that we cannot and will not tolerate,” Ferguson said in a statement.

‘Hero’ Who Ended Terror Rampage Was Convicted Killer

Simon Dawson/ReutersLONDON—A frenzied knife attack by a known terrorist who was let out of prison early on parole was halted by a posse of Londoners that included a convicted killer on day release.The first deadly terror attack in Britain for two years spilled out of a Cambridge University event on rehabilitating ex-cons. A university spokesman told The Daily Beast that the terrorist Usman Khan had been invited to the event, but could not confirm reports that he had addressed the symposium, which included former prisoners and prison staff.A more detailed account of the attack emerged Saturday as the Islamic State claimed that one of its attackers carried out the stabbing, the group’s Amaq news agency reported. The announcement didn’t provide any evidence for the claim.In response, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Saturday that prisoners convicted of terrorism offenses should not have access to early release. “I think that the practice of automatic, early release where you cut a sentence in half and let really serious, violent offenders out early simply isn’t working, and you’ve some very good evidence of how that isn’t working, I am afraid, with this case,” he said.In fact, the law has been tightened several times—and automatic early release for those on long sentences was stopped in 2015—but Khan was convicted in 2012, and therefore subject to earlier legislation.Khan, 28, was wearing a tracking device on his ankle and a hoax suicide belt around his waist when he walked up the grand staircase inside the historic Fishmongers’ Hall, pulled out two knives, and threatened to blow up the building.He was run out of the event by attendees grabbing makeshift weapons to confront the killer, who had already inflicted fatal injuries on two people and wounded several more. One man picked up a fire extinguisher, another pulled the unicorn-like tusk of a narwhal off the wall and gave chase.Khan fled onto London Bridge with the avenging conference guests in hot pursuit. The man with the antique whale cudgel was identified by The Times as a Polish chef called Luckasz, who suffered lacerations in the attack. “Being stabbed didn’t stop him giving him a beating,” a colleague who did not want to be named told the paper.Some of the others who turned on the killer reportedly were ex-cons attending the event.They sprayed him in the face with the fire extinguisher and managed to force him to the ground even though he was flailing at them with knives that were taped to his wrists. Several people held him down while police cars raced to the scene.A man named James Ford grabbed one of the terrorist’s knives and carried it to safety, staggering south across the bridge away from the melee and warning clueless pedestrians to back away from a potential explosion.As cellphone footage spread across social media and onto global news networks, the man was labeled a hero. Some of those watching the video, however, were appalled by what they saw.Angela Cox, 65, received a phone call from police liaison officers telling her to switch on the TV. She thought the man who had disarmed the terrorist was still in prison.Ford had been convicted of the brutal murder of her niece in 2004. He approached the 21-year-old, who was said to have the mental age of a 15-year-old, in an area of woodland and slit her throat. The judge at the time said: “What you did was an act of wickedness. You clearly have an interest in the macabre and also an obsession with death including murder by throat cutting.”He was out of prison on day release on Friday, reportedly to attend the University of Cambridge Criminology department’s “Learning Together” event, although a spokesman was unable to confirm.> — “He murdered a disabled girl. He is not a hero.”“He murdered a disabled girl. He is not a hero,” said Cox. “They let him out without even telling us. It was a hell of a shock.”The authorities will also have to explain why Khan was allowed out of prison to murder at least two people—one man and one woman who have not yet been named. In 2012, he was convicted of plotting to carry out terror attacks in London and set up a terror training camp on land owned by his family in Pakistan.The judge said Khan, who was just 19 at the time, was one of the ringleaders of a small British terror network that followed the teachings of U.S.-born al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki. The eight men, who had been tracked for months by MI5, were convicted on terror offenses including a plot to blow up the London Stock Exchange—they also had a target list that included the U.S. Embassy and the home address of Boris Johnson, who is now prime minister.Five of them were given conventional jail sentences, but the judge said Khan and two of his colleagues were so dangerous that they should be locked up indefinitely under Imprisonment for Public Protection legislation.“They were about the long term business of establishing and operating a terrorist military training facility in Pakistan, on land owned by the family of Usman Khan to which British recruits, whom they would recruit, would go to receive training,” the judge said. “Furthermore it was envisaged by them all that ultimately they, and the other recruits may return to the UK as trained and experienced terrorists available to perform terrorist attacks in this country.”His ruling that they should remain in custody until they were no longer deemed a threat was quashed by the court of appeal in 2013. Britain’s head of counterterror policing Neil Basu said late on Friday night that Khan was released last year. The Times reported that he had agreed to wear an electronic monitoring device and live under restrictions including a curfew at his home in Staffordshire in the West Midlands.He would likely have told the officials monitoring his movements that he was traveling down to London to take part in the rehabilitation event “celebrating five years of Learning Together.”Khan had just taken part in a workshop on storytelling and creative writing when he revealed his true motivation for taking part in the event on the banks of the Thames.Professor Anthony Glees, the director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham, who contributed to the parliamentary Homeland Security Group, said it was clear that the authorities and the academics who wanted to help had failed to identify the true scale of the threat from this man.“That is a deep irony, the do-gooder culture in universities actually gave him the opportunity; how daft was that?” he said to The Daily Beast. “Once a jihadist always a jihadist.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. 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Brother of convicted terrorist faces deportation despite US citizenship

Brother of man who detonated a pipe bomb in a New York subway and four relatives are fighting efforts to strip their residency status ‘You can play everything by the book and they’ll still get you,’ said Sherin Ullah. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesA New Yorker who gained US citizenship as a child is suddenly facing deportation, along with several green card-holding members of his family, after apparent targeting by the Trump administration in what the family believes is a clear case of anti-Muslim bias.None of the individuals have a criminal record, and say the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) only raised questions about the validity of their immigration status after another relative was arrested following a terrorist incident in the city. The government’s actions have alarmed advocates and led to them accusing officials of meting out unfair “collective punishment”.Ahsan Ullah, 32, an electrician from Brooklyn, was placed in immigration detention in Kearny, New Jersey, on 22 October. He spent about four weeks separated from his American wife and three children before being released on bond last Tuesday pending the outcome of his case.Four of his relatives, who all hold green cards, are also fighting government efforts to strip them of their US residency status. Since Trump came into office, the number of such denaturalization and citizenship revocation cases filed by DHS has surged.Sherin and Ahsan Ullah. Photograph: Courtesy family“Citizenship is permanently conditional for many people who were not born here,” said Fahd Ahmed, executive director of the advocacy group Desis Rising Up and Moving (Drum), which has been providing support to the Ullah family.“At a time when we are seeing a white nationalist current in government and society that wants to depopulate communities of color from this country, these cases are an indication of how their tactics and attacks are evolving.”Ahsan was born in Bangladesh and adopted by his uncle at a young age, the family said.After the uncle won a US visa through the diversity lottery program, Ahsan was granted a green card. He migrated to the US at eight years old and became a citizen several years later.Meanwhile, his uncle successfully petitioned to bring his sister, Ahsan’s biological mother and four siblings to the country as permanent residents in 2011.The family assumed their future in the US was secure. They focused on going to school, building careers and starting families. Ahsan became an electrician, got married and had three children.But everything changed in December 2017, when one of Ahsan’s brothers, Akayed, was arrested for detonating a homemade pipe bomb in a crowded New York City subway station. He was the only person injured, in what was seen as a botched attack.Family members both in the US and Bangladesh were questioned and none was found to have assisted the 27-year-old or to be supportive of terrorist organizations. Akayed was convicted of several terrorism offenses in 2018 and will be sentenced in February.Sherin, Ahsan’s wife, 30, said that the day Akayed was arrested the rest of the family was utterly shocked to learn what he had done.“For at least three, four months we were in disbelief,” she said. “We didn’t think [Akayed] was capable of this.”From the moment of Akayed’s arrest, other family members say that despite being cleared by law enforcement, they began to see consequences.Ahsan recounted receiving a letter from the bank notifying him that his personal and business banking accounts would be closed, and that the FBI put his business license on hold.Wary clients cancelled their contracts, he said. His mother and siblings would see New York police department squad cars parked regularly near their building and other places they frequented, including their mosque, which they had never remembered seeing before.Then, in April 2019, Ahsan received a letter out of the blue from US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), part of the DHS, stating that the agency planned to cancel his US citizenship on the grounds it was not lawfully obtained.In a panic, his mother and siblings applied for citizenship but soon received news that not only had their application d been denied but that the DHS intended to revoke their green cards. On 6 November, Ullah’s mother and one of his sisters were detained for two days.“After all this time, we [had] mentally and physically bonded with this country, and love this country so much,” said Ayfa, Ahsan’s 22-year-old sister, the day she was released from detention. “How can you disown a person just like that?”The family is now trying to fight the agency’s orders.In paperwork issued to the family, which was reviewed by the Guardian, the DHS claims that Ahsan, his mother and siblings have no legal or biological relationship to the uncle whose original success in the green card lottery facilitated the others’ settling in the US. Lawyers for the family said they are gathering the paperwork to prove their relationships.The family and their advocates said the treatment amounts to collective punishment. “This is retribution for sharing the same DNA” as someone accused of terrorism, Ahsan said in a phone call from the Hudson county correctional facility in New Jersey, just before his release from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention.“I’ve been here [in the US] since I was a kid – my school is here, my college is here, my family is here, my business is here, my friends are here, my career is here,” he said . “This is where my everything is.”DHS declined to comment on the family’s case.fundraiserWhat’s happening to the Ullah family is not an isolated case. A report by the Open Society Justice Initiative in September found that the Trump administration has filed three times more civil denaturalization cases, about 30 a year – stripping Americans of their citizenship – than the average annual number pursued under the eight preceding presidents.Nearly half of all persons targeted for denaturalization in 2017 and 2018 came from “special interest” countries, a label used to identify nations with presumed links to terrorism, including Bangladesh, the report said, which amounted to a policy of “collective suspicion”.Manar Waheed, senior legislative and advocacy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the data indicates that “the same communities that this administration has targeted over and over again” are being singled out.Ahsan said that while he was in detention, he missed the moment when his seven-month-old son said “Baba” for the first time.“I’m just surprised by all this,” Ahsan said, speaking from the detention facility before he was released on bond. “I pay my taxes, I’ve never done anything wrong, I try to be a model citizen, and I’m here [in detention].”The administration has threatened to deport the family members unless they can prove their relationships are what they have long claimed and had not been challenged by the authorities before.The family is hoping they can reverse the Trump administration action by submitting challenges to the USCIS appeals office, contesting their deportation orders in immigration court and, if necessary, filing civil motions in federal court.But they are dismayed by the turn of events, and very nervous.Sherin said: “You can play everything by the book and they’ll still get you.”

This Time Trump Will Be Just One of the Wild Cards at NATO

(Bloomberg) -- What was conceived as a celebration for one of the world’s most important military alliances risks becoming a show of disunity -- and this time it’s not because of anything Donald Trump has said or done.Meeting in London this week, leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have two other presidents to worry about: France’s Emmanuel Macron, who in recent weeks has openly questioned the collective defense clause at NATO’s heart, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has troubled alliance members with his decisions to send troops into Syria and buy a Russian anti-missile system.To make matters worse, Macron and Erdogan are now trading insults in public.In fact, so much has changed since then-Prime Minister Theresa May offered to host the two-day commemoration of NATO’s 70th anniversary that her successor, Boris Johnson could be forgiven for wishing she hadn’t.“I will tell you again at NATO, first check your own brain death,” Erdogan said, addressing Macron in a speech from Istanbul on Friday. He was referring to an interview the French leader gave last month in which he not only criticized Turkey, but described the alliance as brain dead.With three significant member states bringing conflicting agendas to the table at a gathering that takes place in the closing stretch of a charged U.K. election campaign, the event risks fanning concern about NATO’s future, rather than celebrating what alliance officials and leaders routinely call the most successful military grouping in history.Officials from the U..S. and Britain were at pains last week to highlight NATO’s successes, including a renewed sense of purpose since Russia’s 2014 aggression in Ukraine. Defense spending is on the rise and NATO is expanding into counter-terrorism, cyber security, and now even space.And NATO does continue to attract. North Macedonia, set to join next year, will bring the number of leaders at the table this week to 30, up from 15 when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.Such accomplishments however are being drowned out by the increasingly public dispute over what NATO should focus on, and what it should stand for. In an apparent attempt to contain the debate, Germany has proposed forming an expert group to report on the future political shape of the alliance.Macron drove Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel to make an uncharacteristically spirited defense of the alliance last week. “Even more than during the Cold War, maintaining NATO is today in our own best interest,” she told lawmakers in Berlin. “Europe cannot currently defend itself alone.”Read more: Erdogan May Seek EU Money Even as He Trades Insults With MacronA senior U.S. official said on Friday that Trump would prioritize enlisting NATO to push back against China’s growing influence. The official said Trump would also press allies to increase defense spending and to exclude Chinese companies from the construction of 5G mobile networks, something many have been unwilling to do.Instead of containing China, Macron wants NATO to prioritize the fight against terrorism. Thirteen French soldiers died in Mali last week and a lone terrorist on Friday killed two people in London. A French official said Macron also plans to press for greater “operational” burden-sharing as a way of complementing Trump’s push for Europe to share more of the alliance’s financial burden.Erdogan, meanwhile, is demanding acceptance of Turkish goals in northern Syria, including classifying as a terrorist threat the Kurdish militias that have fought Islamic State alongside other NATO allies. He also rubbed salt into another open wound in Turkey’s ties with Western allies, by unpacking and testing the NATO non-compatible S-400 air defense system he recently bought from Russia.Read more: NATO Foresees More Europe Defense Outlays as It Braces for TrumpAnd that’s all before Trump makes his first tweet of the event.“It will be a great tribute to how much all the NATO allies value the institution if we manage to get through this leaders meeting without President Trump, President Macron or President Erdogan doing something damaging to the alliance,” said Kori Schake, a former National Security Council official in the George W. Bush administration who is now deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.The shortened time frame for meeting –- formal sessions will take only about four hours -- may limit the potential for damage. Long term NATO watchers also caution against exaggerating the dangers of intra-alliance tensions, which aren’t new to an organization that includes countries with differing geographies and security priorities.Macron’s questioning of the collective defense commitment at NATO’s heart is certainly dangerous, but in many ways he is simply reverting to France’s traditionally semi-detached status. President Charles De Gaulle pulled out of the organization’s military command structure in 1966, and France rejoined only in 2009.Read more: Macron Says NATO Should Shift Its Focus Away From Russia“It’s not a fashionable view, I know,” said Sir Adam Thomson, the U.K.’s envoy to NATO from 2014-2016, but NATO “has been pursuing a new vision since the end of the Cold War and, to some extent, it’s already got a lot of the material.”He cited three new roles since the Cold War: Crisis management in places like Afghanistan, keeping a lid on potential disputes between members in eastern Europe, and building partnerships with dozens of non-member countries.“It is quite distinctive that this alliance, which in the eyes of some is so wicked, finds so many partners to work with it.”As the site of NATO’s first headquarters, London was a natural choice for this week’s anniversary. It was also supposed to make a statement on the global stature of a new post-Brexit Britain.Read more: Johnson Plans Major Review of U.K.’s Defense, Foreign PolicyBrexit, however, has since been delayed. Johnson also called a snap election that will happen just eight days after the leaders fly home. The presence of Trump, a toxic figure among British voters, is a potential political liability for the prime minister.Were Johnson to lose to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, that would give NATO yet another individual to worry about at its next summit, due in 2021.Over his career the socialist firebrand has called NATO “a danger to world peace and a danger to world security,” among other things. He has more recently fallen into line with party policy, which is for the U.K. to stay in the alliance, but he would likely prove another awkward partner.The last time Britain hosted NATO leaders, in 2014, he told an anti-NATO rally that the end of the Cold War “should have been the time for NATO to shut up shop, give up, go home and go away.”\--With assistance from Onur Ant, Geraldine Amiel and Justin Sink.To contact the reporters on this story: Marc Champion in London at mchampion7@bloomberg.net;Jonathan Stearns in Brussels at jstearns2@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Rosalind Mathieson at rmathieson3@bloomberg.net, Flavia Krause-JacksonFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Mass protest breaks out in Chinese province near Hong Kong

Chinese police clashed with protesters in a southern province near Hong Kong over the weekend, in a rare case of public dissent that saw hundreds demonstrate against the building of a crematorium.