5; Human shields – An estimated 2,000 U.S. veterans are set to protect protesters at Standing Rock
U.S. military veterans continue to arrive at the snowy Standing Rock encampment to form a human shield between protesters and police. By Sunday, camp organizers say, about 2,000 vets will be on site.
“Our goal is to stand there and if need be take the rounds for the First Nations people so they can do their thing,” said Mark Sanderson, a former Army Sergeant who served in Iraq.
Vice News
4: MAN WHO CLAIMED TO BE CIA ASSET SENTENCED TO TEN YEARS IN PRISON IN ARMS DEAL STING
FLAVIU GEORGESCU ARRIVED at U.S. District Court in Manhattan Friday afternoon in a beige prison jumpsuit, shackled around the waist and hands, with his head bowed.
Earlier this year, a jury convicted Georgescu in this same courtroom on terrorism charges. Federal prosecutors accused Georgescu of helping organize a complex weapons deal involving DEA informants posing as members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a designated terrorist organization.
Since his arrest, Georgescu has maintained his innocence, claiming that he had been working undercover for the CIA and pointing to phone calls he had made to the agency as proof of his cooperation.
Georgescu faced a possible life sentence.
The Intercept
3: Syrian forces tighten grip on besieged Aleppo
Syrian government forces and their allies have advanced in Aleppo overnight, seizing another neighbourhood from rebels, as they press an offensive to recapture all of the city, a monitor group and rebel sources said.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Saturday that the capture of Tariq al-Bab means the government has now retaken the majority of the east of the city.
“We are told that around 50 percent of the rebel-held eastern Aleppo is now held by the government forces and its allies,” Al Jazeera’s Stefanie Dekker, reporting from Gaziantep on the Turkey-Syria border, said.
Aljazeera
2: China lodges complaint with US over Trump’s Taiwan phone call
China has lodged “solemn representations” with the US over a call between the president-elect, Donald Trump, and Taiwan’s leader, Tsai Ing-wen.
Trump looked to have sparked a potentially damaging diplomatic row with Beijing on Friday after speaking to the Taiwanese president on the telephone.
The call, first reported by the Taipei Times and confirmed by the Financial Times, is thought to be the first between the leader of the island and a US president or president-elect since ties between the two countries were severed in 1979, at Beijing’s behest.
The US closed its embassy in Taiwan – a democratically ruled island which Beijing regards as a breakaway province – in the late 1970s after the historic rapprochement between Beijing and Washington that stemmed from Richard Nixon’s 1972 trip to China.
Since then the US has adhered to the “One China” principle, which officially considers the independently governed island to be part of the same single Chinese nation as the mainland.
The Guardian
Ethics experts say President-elect Donald Trump must divest from his businesses to avoid conflicts of interest. “There are hard ethical questions in life, and this is not one of them,” says Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, who has written that “Trump’s Conflicts of Interest are Unprecedented in American History.” Also with us in San Francisco is Aaron Glantz, senior reporter at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, where his latest investigation is headlined “Trump’s Indonesia hotel deals hint at his form of foreign relations.”
Democracy Now
