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WASHINGTON: The US State Department said Thursday it has adopted Turkiye’s preferred spelling for the name of the country, Turkiye, acceding to a request from the NATO ally after several months of hesitation.
The department has instructed that new official documents refer to Turkiye instead of Turkiye, although the pronunciation will not change, officials said. But neither the State Department website nor the Foreign Affairs Manual, which guides US diplomatic practices, had been revised to reflect the change as of midday Thursday.
“The Turkish embassy requested that the US government use the name “Republic of Turkiye” in communications,” the department said. “We will begin to refer to Turkiye and Republic of Turkiye accordingly in most formal, diplomatic, and bilateral contexts, including in public communications.”
The move comes ahead of an expected visit to Washington later this month by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu during which Turkiye’s position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its resistance to allowing Finland and Sweden to join NATO will be high on the agenda.
Several other federal agencies, including the Treasury Department, had already adopted the new spelling, which had led to inconsistencies in documents across the US government.
The change was revealed as the State Department released a statement in support of a Treasury move to sanction several Turkiye-related businessmen and companies for supporting the Islamic State. It was later confirmed by two department officials.
Turkiye asked last year for its name to be changed to Turkiye in international forums and most, including the United Nations and NATO, had switched to the new spelling.
The State Department, however, does not often change its style on the names of foreign countries and, in at least one notable case, has refused to do so for decades.
The US still refuses to refer to Burma as Myanmar although the country’s military rulers formally adopted Myanmar in 1989.
The last two countries that the State Department renamed following requests by their governments were North Macedonia, which changed its name from Macedonia in 2019, and Eswatini, which changed its name from Swaziland a year earlier.
WASHINGTON: Republican Kevin McCarthy was elected speaker of the US House of Representatives early on Saturday, after making extensive concessions to a group of right-wing hard-liners that raised questions about the party’s ability to govern.
The 57-year-old Californian suffered one final humiliation when Representative Matt Gaetz withheld his vote on the 14th ballot as midnight approached, prompting a scuffle in which fellow Republican Mike Rogers had to be physically pulled away.
McCarthy’s victory in the 15th ballot brought an end to the deepest congressional dysfunction in 160 years. But it sharply illustrated the difficulties that he will face in leading a narrow and deeply polarized majority.
He won at last on a margin of 216-211. He was able to be elected with the votes of fewer than half the House members only because five in his own party withheld their votes — not backing McCarthy as leader, but also not voting for another contender.
McCarthy agreed to a demand by hard-liners that any lawmaker be able call for his removal at any time. That will sharply cut the power he will hold when trying to pass legislation on critical issues including funding the government, addressing the nation’s looming debt ceiling and other crises that may arise.
“We got the things that are transformational,” said Republican Representative Ralph Norman, who voted to back McCarthy after opposing him for much of the week.
Republicans’ weaker-than-expected performance in November’s midterm elections left them with a narrow 222-212 majority, which has given outsized power to the right-wing hard-liners who have opposed McCarthy’s leadership.
Those concessions, including sharp spending cuts and other curbs on McCarthy’s leadership, could point to further turbulence in the months ahead, especially when Congress will need to sign off on a further increase of the United States’ $31.4 trillion borrowing authority.
Over the past decade, Republicans have repeatedly shut down much of the government and pushed the world’s largest borrower to the brink of default in efforts to extract steep spending cuts, usually without success.
Several of the hard-liners have questioned McCarthy’s willingness to engage in such brinksmanship when negotiating with President Joe Biden, whose Democrats control the Senate. They have raged in the past when Senate Republicans led by Mitch McConnell agreed to compromise deals.
The hard-liners, also including Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry and Chip Roy of Texas, said concessions they extracted from McCarthy will make it easier to pursue such tactics this year — or force another vote on McCarthy’s leadership if he does not live up to their expectations.
“You have changes in how we’re going to spend and allocate money that are going to be historic,” said Representative Scott Perry, the chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus.
“We don’t want clean debt ceilings to just go through and just keep paying the bill without some counteracting effort to control spending when the Democrats control the White House and control the Senate.”
In a sharp contrast to this week’s battles among House Republicans, Biden and McConnell appeared together in Kentucky on Wednesday to highlight investments in infrastructure.
Democrats worried that the concessions McCarthy agreed to could lead to sharp cuts to popular social programs.
“This is bad,” said Democratic Representative Lori Trahan. “Kevin McCarthy sold out Medicare and Social Security recipients to pick up speaker votes from right-wing Republicans.”
McCarthy’s belated victory came on the two-year anniversary of a Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, when a violent mob stormed Congress in an attempt to overturn then-President Donald Trump’s election loss.
This week’s 13 failed votes marked the highest number of ballots for the speakership since 1859, in the turbulent years before the Civil war.
McCarthy’s last bid for speaker, in 2015, crumbled in the face of right-wing opposition. The two previous Republican speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan, left the job after conflict with right-wing colleagues.
Wielding the speaker’s gavel will give McCarthy the authority to block Biden’s legislative agenda, force votes for Republican priorities on the economy, energy and immigration and move forward with investigations of Biden, his administration and his family.
CONCESSIONS
But McCarthy has agreed to concessions that mean he will hold considerably less power than his predecessor, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, according to sources involved in the talks. That will make it hard for him to agree to deals with Democrats in a divided Washington.
Allowing a single member to call for a vote to remove the speaker will give hard-liners extraordinary leverage.
He has also offered influential committee posts to members of the group, lawmakers said, as well as spending restrictions that aim to reach a balanced budget within 10 years. The agreement would cap spending for the next fiscal year at last year’s levels — amounting to a significant cut when inflation and population growth are taken into account.
That could meet resistance from more centrist Republicans or those who have pushed for greater military funding, particularly as the United States is spending money to help Ukraine fend off a Russian assault.
Moderate Republican Brian Fitzpatrick said he was not worried that the House would effectively be run by hard-liners.
“It’s aspirational,” he told reporters. “We still have our voting cards.”
NORFOLK, Virginia: A 6-year-old student shot and wounded a teacher at his school in Virginia during an altercation inside a first-grade classroom Friday, police and school officials in the city of Newport News said.
No students were injured in the shooting at Richneck Elementary School, police said. The teacher — a woman in her 30s — suffered life-threatening injuries. Her condition had improved somewhat by late afternoon, Newport News Police Chief Steve Drew said.
“We did not have a situation where someone was going around the school shooting,” Drew told reporters, later adding that the gunshot was not an accident.
Drew said the student and teacher had known in each other in a classroom setting.
He said the boy had a handgun in the classroom, and investigators were trying to figure out where he obtained it. The police chief did not provide further details about the shooting or what happened inside the school.
Joselin Glover, whose son is in fourth grade, told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper she got a text from the school stating that one person was shot and another was in custody.
“My heart stopped,” she said. “I was freaking out, very nervous. Just wondering if that one person was my son.”
Carlos, her 9-year-old, was at recess. But he said he and his classmates were soon holed up in the back of a classroom.
“Most of the whole class was crying,” Carlos told the newspaper.
Parents and students were reunited at a gymnasium door, Newport News Public Schools said via Facebook.
The police chief did not specifically address questions about whether authorities were in touch with the boy’s parents, but said members of the police department were handling that investigation.
“We have been in contact with our commonwealth’s attorney (local prosecutor) and some other entities to help us best get services to this young man,” Drew said.
Newport News is a city of about 185,000 people in southeastern Virginia known for its shipyard, which builds the nation’s aircraft carriers and other US Navy vessels.
Richneck has about 550 students who are in kindergarten through fifth grade, according to the Virginia Department of Education’s website. School officials have already said that there will be no classes at the school on Monday.
“Today our students got a lesson in gun violence,” said George Parker III, Newport News schools superintendent, “and what guns can do to disrupt, not only an educational environment, but also a family, a community.”
NEW YORK: A Manhattan judge on Friday scolded Donald Trump’s lawyers as he denied their bid to dismiss a lawsuit accusing the former president and his company of a yearslong fraud scheme.
Judge Arthur Engoron said lawyers for Trump and his Trump Organization “should have known better” than to recycle what he said were frivolous, meritless arguments in paperwork seeking the dismissal of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit.
Engoron criticized the Trump lawyers throughout his nine-page decision, even quoting baseball great Yogi Berra by writing that the bulk of their arguments — including Trump’s oft-repeated claim that the lawsuit was part of a politically motivated “witch hunt” — were “deja vu all over again.”
Engoron had threatened to punish the Trump lawyers, but he said after excoriating them in his decision that he had made his point.
The lawsuit, filed in September, alleges Trump and the Trump Organization misled banks and others about the value of prized assets, including golf courses and hotels bearing his name. James, a Democrat, is seeking $250 million and a permanent ban on Trump, a Republican, doing business in the state.
“Once again, Donald Trump’s attempts to evade the law have been rejected,” James said in a statement. “We sued Mr. Trump because we found that he engaged in years of extensive financial fraud to enrich himself and cheat the system. Today’s decision makes clear that Donald Trump is not above the law and must answer for his actions in court.”
Trump lawyer Alina Habba said they are planning to appeal Engoron’s ruling, just the latest he’s made against Trump or Trump-related interests while presiding over matters related to the lawsuit and an underlying investigation into his company.
Last year, Engoron held Trump in contempt and fined him $110,000 after he was slow to turn over documents. He also forced him to sit for a deposition with James’ investigators. In that testimony, Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination more than 400 times.
In November, Engoron said he was appointing an independent monitor “to ensure there is no further fraud” at the Trump Organization, restricting its ability to freely make deals, sell assets and change its corporate structure while the lawsuit is pending.
The Trump Organization was convicted of criminal tax fraud last month for helping executives dodge taxes on extravagant perks such as apartments and luxury cars.
The company is facing a potential $1.6 million fine and is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 13.
A New York judge on Friday said former US President Donald Trump must face a lawsuit by the state’s attorney general accusing him of fraudulently overvaluing his namesake real estate company’s assets and his own net worth.
Attorney General Letitia James had sued Trump, his adult children Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka and the Trump Organization last September over an alleged scheme to inflate Trump’s assets by billions of dollars through a decade of lies to banks and insurers, in what she called a “staggering” fraud.
Justice Arthur Engoron of the state Supreme Court in Manhattan rejected defense claims that James waited too long to sue, fell short of establishing fraud, and should have better justified the $250 million of damages she is seeking.
He also said Ivanka Trump could be sued despite her claims she had not falsified valuations and not worked for the Trump Organization since 2017, saying she could be liable for participating in “continuing wrongs.”
The judge also decided not to sanction the defendants for making arguments including that James was pursuing a political “witch hunt” and lacked legal authority to sue.
“Sophisticated defense counsel should have known better,” Engoron wrote nonetheless.
Lawyers for the defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In a statement, James said Trump “engaged in years of extensive financial fraud to enrich himself and cheat the system,” and must defend himself in court.
She also wants to stop the Trumps from running businesses in New York, and ban Trump and his company from acquiring real estate there for five years. An Oct. 2 trial is scheduled..
The lawsuit is one of many legal woes affecting Trump, who is seeking another term as president in 2024.
They include criminal investigations related to the FBI’s seizure of government documents from his Florida home, and his role in efforts to overturn or interfere with 2020 presidential election results.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office is also conducting a criminal probe relating to James’ civil case, and the Trump Organization faces a Jan. 13 sentencing after being convicted of tax fraud in another New York case.
LONDON: Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich’s seven children became the beneficiaries of 10 offshore trusts holding assets worth billions of dollars shortly before he was hit with sanctions, Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported Friday.
They acquired the beneficial ownership of the secretive trusts with assets of at least $4 billion in early February 2022, three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, the Guardian said.
The “sweeping reorganization” of his financial affairs just prior to Abramovich then being sanctioned is detailed in leaked files from a Cyprus-based offshore service provider administering the trusts, the newspaper added.
An anonymous source shared the “large cache” of documents — dubbed “the Oligarch files” — with the newspaper, it reported.
They show that Abramovich’s children — five of whom are adults, with the youngest aged nine — became the trusts’ majority beneficial owners.
The reorganization happened just as Western governments were threatening to sanction Russian oligarchs if Moscow ordered an invasion of Ukraine.
It has previously been reported that his children, all Russian citizens, had been made beneficiaries of two trusts established to benefit Abramovich. But the extent of the changes now being reported was not previously known.
“The leaked documents raise questions about whether the changes to trusts were made in an attempt to shield the oligarch’s vast fortune from the threat of asset freezes,” said the Guardian.
The newspaper noted that the reorganization could hinder efforts to enforce sanctions against Abramovich and lead to more calls for his children to face asset freezes also.
The 56-year-old former Chelsea Football Club owner is seen as a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and has been sanctioned by Britain, the EU and Canada, though not the US.
However, the US Justice Department seized two of his aircrafts last year, saying they had been used in violation of sanctions on Moscow over Ukraine.
Through the 10 trusts, Abramovich’s seven children now appear to be the ultimate beneficial owners of various trophy assets long linked to him, the Guardian said.
They include a host of luxury properties, super-yachts, helicopters and other private jets.
The changes — enacted around a month before the UK government sanctioned him on March 10 — left their beneficial ownership stakes in the trusts ranging from a collective 51 percent to 100 percent in some, the paper added.
Neither Abramovich nor MeritServus, the Cyprus-based offshore service provider that administers the trusts, would answer the newspaper’s questions about the arrangements. MeritServus cited privacy laws.
Abramovich, who holds Russian, Israeli and Portuguese citizenship, has denied financial ties to the Kremlin and filed legal action to overturn the EU’s measures.
CULIACAN: Ten soldiers and 19 suspected criminals were killed in an operation to arrest a son of jailed drug trafficker Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s government said Friday, with a dramatic shootout sowing terror at an airport.
Thousands of soldiers retook control of the Sinaloa cartel stronghold of Culiacan, which resembled a war zone after furious gunmen went on the rampage to try to free their boss.
Ovidio Guzman was captured in the northwestern city on Thursday and flown to Mexico City before being transferred to the high-security Altiplano prison in central Mexico from which “El Chapo” escaped in 2015.
The 32-year-old, nicknamed “El Raton” (The Mouse), had allegedly helped to run his father’s operations since the former Sinaloa cartel boss was extradited to the United States in 2017.
A colonel who commanded an infantry battalion was among those killed after his team came under attack following the arrest, Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval told reporters.
Another 35 soldiers sustained gunshot wounds and were taken to hospital, while 21 gunmen were arrested.
Sandoval said a civilian airliner that was about to take off from Culiacan International Airport, as well as two Mexican Air Force aircraft, were hit as cartel henchmen tried to free Ovidio Guzman.
The military planes “had to make an emergency landing” after receiving “a significant number of impacts,” said Sandoval.
No injuries resulted from the plane attacks and Culiacan airport resumed operations on Friday.
The United States had issued a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to Ovidio Guzman’s capture. It accuses him of being a key player in the Sinaloa cartel founded by his father.
The arrest came as Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador prepared to welcome his US counterpart Joe Biden for a North America leaders’ summit next week where security is expected to be high on the agenda.
The drug trafficker’s detention was “not an insignificant accomplishment by Mexican authorities,” US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said.
“And we’re certainly grateful for that,” he said, adding that the United States would keep working “in lockstep” with Mexico, notably to tackle trafficking of the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl.
Mexico denied that the United States had been involved in the operation to catch Ovidio Guzman.
“We act autonomously, independently. Yes there is cooperation and there will continue to be, but we make the decisions as a sovereign government,” Lopez Obrador told reporters.
He said calm had returned to Culiacan, where security forces removed dozens of stolen and burnt out vehicles scattered throughout the city of 800,000 people.
Videos on social media Thursday showed passengers and Aeromexico airline employees ducking behind counters as gunfire rang out at Culiacan airport.
Cartel gunmen set cars and trucks ablaze at several intersections in the city, and authorities reported 19 roadblocks.
El Chapo is serving a life sentence in the United States for trafficking hundreds of tons of drugs into the country over the course of 25 years.
However, his cartel remains one of the most powerful in Mexico, accused by Washington of exploiting an opioid epidemic by flooding communities in the United States with fentanyl, a synthetic drug about 50 times more potent than heroin.
Ovidio Guzman and one of his brothers are accused of overseeing nearly a dozen methamphetamine labs in Sinaloa as well as conspiring to distribute cocaine and marijuana, according to the US State Department.
Ovidio Guzman also allegedly ordered the murders of informants, a drug trafficker and a Mexican singer who refused to perform at his wedding, it said.
He was captured briefly once before in 2019, but security forces freed him after his cartel waged an all-out war in response.
His release prompted sharp criticism of Lopez Obrador, who said the decision was made to protect civilians’ lives.
Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard has played down the prospects of a fast-track extradition, saying Ovidio Guzman was expected to face legal proceedings in Mexico.
Mexico has registered more than 340,000 murders since the government controversially deployed the army to fight drug cartels in 2006, most of them blamed on criminal gangs.