In Brief: August 14, 2020

UAE and Israel to establish full diplomatic ties

JERUSALEM — Israel and the United Arab Emirates announced Thursday they are establishing full diplomatic relations in a U.S.-brokered deal that required Israel to halt its contentious plan to annex occupied West Bank land sought by the Palestinians.

The historic deal delivered a key foreign policy victory to President Donald Trump as he seeks re-election and reflected a changing Middle East in which shared concerns about archenemy Iran have largely overtaken traditional Arab support for the Palestinians.

A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the deal amounts to “treason,” and should be reversed.

The agreement makes the UAE the third Arab country, after Egypt and Jordan, to have full diplomatic ties with Israel. They announced it in a joint statement, saying deals between Israel and the UAE were expected in the coming weeks in such areas as tourism, direct flights and embassies.

Trump called the deal “a truly historic moment.”

Trump admits he’s blocking postal cash to stop mail-in votes

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump frankly acknowledged Thursday that he’s starving the U.S. Postal Service of money in order to make it harder to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots, which he worries could cost him the election.

In an interview on Fox Business Network, Trump explicitly noted two funding provisions that Democrats are seeking in a relief package that has stalled on Capitol Hill. Without the additional money, he said, the Postal Service won’t have the resources to handle a flood of ballots from voters who are seeking to avoid polling places during the coronavirus pandemic.

“If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money,” Trump told host Maria Bartiromo. “That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting; they just can’t have it.”

Trump’s statements, including the false claim that Democrats are seeking universal mail-in voting, come as he is searching for a strategy to gain an advantage in his November matchup against Joe Biden. He’s pairing the tough Postal Service stance in congressional negotiations with an increasingly robust mail-in-voting legal fight in states that could decide the election.

In Iowa, which Trump won handily in 2016 but is more competitive this year, his campaign joined a lawsuit Wednesday against two Democratic-leaning counties in an effort to invalidate tens of thousands of voters’ absentee ballot applications. That followed legal maneuvers in battleground Pennsylvania, where the campaign hopes to force changes to how the state collects and counts mail-in ballots. And in Nevada, Trump is challenging a law sending ballots to all active voters.

Asia Today: S. Korea sees virus jump, urges more vigilance

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea reported 103 new virus cases Friday, one of its biggest daily jumps in months, as officials express concerned that infections are getting out of control in cities as people increasingly venture out in public.

Eighty-three of the new cases were from the densely populated Seoul metropolitan area, where health authorities have struggled to stem transmissions from various sources and groups, including churches, nursing homes, schools and workers. Infections were also reported in other major cities such as Busan, Gwangju and Ulsan.

From wire sources

Eighteen of the new cases were linked to international arrivals, which health officials consider a lesser threat than local transmissions because testing and two-week quarantines are mandatory for all passengers arriving from abroad.

South Korea on July 25 had reported 113 new cases of COVID-19, which was its first daily jump over 100 in nearly four months, but that was a predictable spike driven by imported infections found among hundreds of South Korean construction workers airlifted out of Iraq.

Friday’s jump was more concerning as it was driven by local transmissions, which health authorities said could worsen because of the increase in travelers during the summer vacation season.

Trump gives credence to false, racist Harris theory

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday gave credence to a false and racist conspiracy theory about Kamala Harris’ eligibility to be vice president, fueling an online misinformation campaign that parallels the one he used to power his rise into politics.

Asked about the matter at the White House, Trump told reporters he had “heard” rumors that Harris, a Black woman and U.S.-born citizen whose parents were immigrants, does not meet the requirement to serve in the White House. The president said he considered the rumors “very serious.”

The theory is false. Harris, who was tapped this week by Joe Biden to serve as his running mate on the Democratic ticket, was born in Oakland, California, and is eligible for both the vice presidency and presidency under the constitutional requirements. The question is not even considered complex, according to constitution lawyers.

“Full stop, end of story, period, exclamation point,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School.

Trump built his political career on questioning a political opponent’s legitimacy. He was a high-profile force behind the so-called “birther movement” — the lie that questioned whether President Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, was eligible to serve. Only after mounting pressure during his 2016 campaign did Trump disavow the claims.

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US seizes virtual currency alleged to fund militant groups

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said Thursday that it has seized millions of dollars from cryptocurrency accounts that militant groups, including al-Qaida and the Islamic State, relied on to finance their organizations and violent plots.

Law enforcement officials said the groups used the accounts to solicit donations, including by trying to raise money from the sale of fraudulent personal protective equipment for the coronavirus pandemic.

Officials described it as the largest-ever seizure of virtual currency funds related to terrorism. It’s also part of a broader Justice Department goal of disrupting the financing of extremist organizations, including those designated as foreign terror groups.

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are favored for illicit transactions because they are perceived as hard to trace, and one of the groups singled out Thursday explicitly encouraged donations by telling potential contributors that the money trail would be difficult for law enforcement to untangle, the department said.

The legal action, which included undercover law enforcement work and a forfeiture complaint filed in Washington’s federal court, is meant to deprive the organizations of funds needed to buy weapons and develop fighters, Assistant Attorney General John Demers said in a conference call with reporters announcing the case.

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Trump’s suggestion to eliminate payroll tax doesn’t add up

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s push to cut Social Security payroll taxes for the rest of the year — and even arguing for a permanent cut — would do little to bolster the coronavirus-battered economy in the short term and could destabilize long-term funding for benefits that millions of Americans depend on.

Trump this week said that he could eliminate the tax if he is reelected without undercutting the retirement program or greatly adding to the deficit, arguing that economic growth would offset the revenue losses.

“At the end of the year, the assumption that I win, I’m going to terminate the payroll tax, which is another thing that some of the great economists would like to see done,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday, adding that “tremendous growth” in the U.S. will cover the costs of Social Security. “We’ll be paying into Social Security through the general fund.”

But aides to the president on Thursday sought to walk back Trump’s comments. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump meant to say he would seek forgiveness of employee payroll tax payments that he had already ordered deferred for the rest of the year.

Employers are pressing the Trump administration to walk back even more parts of the plan. They want Treasury to make it voluntary, letting companies decide if they want to offer their workers the option of deferring payroll taxes. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says it has “serious concerns” whether the tax deferral would be workable.

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75 years later, Japan war orphans tell of pain, recovery

TOKYO — For years, orphans in Japan were punished just for surviving the war.

They were bullied. They were called trash and left to fend for themselves on the street. Police rounded them up and threw them in jail. They were sent to orphanages or sold for labor. They were abandoned by their government, abused and discriminated against.

Now, 75 years after the end of the Pacific War, some have broken decades of silence to describe for a fast-forgetting world their sagas of recovery, survival, suffering — and their calls for justice.

The stories told to The Associated Press ahead of Saturday’s anniversary of the war’s end underscore both the lingering pain of the now-grown children who lived through those tumultuous years and what activists describe as Japan’s broader failure to face up to its past.

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Feds say Yale discriminates against Asian, white applicants

WASHINGTON — A Justice Department investigation has found Yale University is illegally discriminating against Asian American and white applicants, in violation of federal civil rights law, officials said Thursday.

Yale denied the allegation, calling it “meritless” and “hasty.”

The findings detailed in a letter to the college’s attorneys Thursday mark the latest action by the Trump administration aimed at rooting out discrimination in the college application process, following complaints from students about the application process at some Ivy League colleges. The Justice Department had previously filed court papers siding with Asian American groups who had levied similar allegations against Harvard University.

The two-year investigation concluded that Yale “rejects scores of Asian American and white applicants each year based on their race, whom it otherwise would admit,” the Justice Department said. The investigation stemmed from a 2016 complaint against Yale, Brown and Dartmouth.

“Yale’s race discrimination imposes undue and unlawful penalties on racially-disfavored applicants, including in particular Asian American and White applicants,” Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband, who heads the department’s civil rights division, wrote in a letter to the college’s attorneys.

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Cohen’s book foreword: Trump ‘wouldn’t mind if I was dead’

NEW YORK — Michael Cohen’s memoir about President Donald Trump will be released Sept. 8 by Skyhorse Publishing, which confirmed the news Thursday to The Associated Press. The book is called “Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump.”

“‘Disloyal’ is the most devastating business and political horror story of the century,” according to a Skyhorse statement shared with the AP. “It is a story that you haven’t read in newspapers, or on social media, or watched on television. These are accounts that only someone who worked for Trump around the clock for a decade — not a few months or even a couple of years — could know.”

Earlier in the day, Cohen had released the book’s foreword, writing of his estranged former boss, “He wouldn’t mind if I was dead.” He did not list a publisher for the book and, as of midday Thursday, it was not listed on Amazon.com or Barnes &Noble.com.

Cohen is completing the last two years of a three-year prison sentence at home after pleading guilty to campaign finance charges and lying to Congress. He was released from prison in May amid coronavirus fears, only to be returned in July after making it known that he planned to publish “Disloyal.” The U.S. government dropped its effort to silence Cohen late last month after an agreement was reached between government lawyers and Cohen attorney Danya Perry that lifted a ban on Cohen speaking publicly.

Cohen’s charges stemmed from his efforts to arrange payouts during the 2016 presidential race to keep the porn actress Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal from speaking out about their alleged extramarital affairs with Trump, who has denied the affairs. He has said that Trump directed him to make the payments.