Bhinneka News Online: Thursday Morning Briefing: White House receives FBI report on Kavanaugh

Thursday, 4 October 2018

Thursday Morning Briefing: White House receives FBI report on Kavanaugh

United States

The White House received the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s report on sexual misconduct allegations against U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and is “fully confident” the Senate will approve his nomination, a spokesman said.

In the most influential position of his long career, John Bolton has softened some of his bellicose positions, at least in public, and says he is happy to follow the president’s lead. That has kept him in good graces with Trump and it allows Bolton the room to shape and execute a hardline strategy on Iran.

A U.S. federal judge in California barred the Trump administration from implementing a plan to end temporary protections for more than 300,000 immigrants in the United States from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan.

Cyber Risk

The U.S. government warned that a hacking group widely known as cloudhopper, which Western cybersecurity firms have linked to the Chinese government, has launched attacks on technology service providers in a campaign to steal data from their clients.

Britain accused Russian military intelligence of directing a host of cyber attacks aimed at undermining Western democracies by sowing confusion in everything from sport to transport and the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

World

Some services began returning to normal in Indonesia’s quake and tsunami stricken city of Palu, but the fate of many thousands of people in outlying districts remained unknown nearly a week after the disaster struck. The small city of 370,000 people has been the focus of the aid effort launched after last Friday’s 7.5 magnitude earthquake and tsunami on the west coast of Sulawesi island.

Commentary: Palestinians had high hopes that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would deliver a historic speech to the U.N. General Assembly last week. "Yet, once again, Abbas failed to deliver. His 'historic' speech turned out to be more of the same: a call for the world to salvage a two-state solution that died years ago," writes Diana Buttu, a lawyer and former adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization.

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Exclusive: The European Union is considering trade sanctions on Myanmar over the Rohingya crisis, potentially stripping the country of tariff-free access to the world’s largest trading bloc, three EU officials said.

Reuters Top News

@Reuters

Two @Reuters journalists have been imprisoned in Myanmar for 297 days. See full coverage: https://reut.rs/2yPnwus

3:35 AM - OCT 4, 2018

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