BitGou: Wednesday Morning Briefing: Trump fixer Cohen says he helped Falwell handle racy photos

Exclusives

Exclusive: Months before evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr.’s game-changing presidential endorsement of Donald Trump in 2016, Falwell asked Trump fixer Michael Cohen for a personal favor, Cohen said in a recorded conversation reviewed by Reuters. Falwell, president of Liberty University, one of the world’s largest Christian universities, said someone had come into possession of what Cohen described as racy “personal” photographs — the sort that would typically be kept “between husband and wife,” Cohen said. According to a source familiar with Cohen’s thinking, the person who possessed the photos destroyed them after Cohen intervened on the Falwells’ behalf.

Exclusive: China backtracked on nearly all aspects of U.S. trade deal. The diplomatic cable from Beijing arrived in Washington late on Friday night, with systematic edits to a nearly 150-page draft trade agreement that would blow up months of negotiations between the world’s two largest economies, according to three U.S. government sources and three private sector sources briefed on the talks. The document was riddled with reversals by China that undermined core U.S. demands, the sources told Reuters.

World

South Africa's African National Congress seeks to reverse sliding support in tough election. The ANC faced its toughest electoral test as it sought to reverse a slide in support from voters frustrated by graft and racial inequalities a generation after it won power in South Africa’s first all-race poll. Here is a look at the main contenders vying for a new national parliament.

A bomb targeting Pakistani police outside a major Sufi shrine in the city of Lahore killed at least 10 people and wounded more than 20, officials said. The blast, a day after the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, went off at a police checkpoint near the Data Darbar, one of the largest Muslim shrines in South Asia, which attracts tens of thousands of visitors a year.

“Sorry, my throat is not good,” said chain-smoking singer Gudar Mia, who recently turned 80 in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, taking a puff as he sat cross-legged in the home of his lifelong friend, Amir Ali, a violinist in his mid-seventies. As young men, back in Myanmar, they had played together in a wedding band, touring their native Rakhine state on the western border performing on moonlit nights beside the rice fields. Now their venue is a bamboo shelter in a Bangladeshi camp on the edge of a trash-filled swamp, their audience a curious crowd of fellow refugees. But for the first time in decades they are free to play music.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is reaching out to North Korea in the hope of arranging a summit, a strategy critics say poses risks given doubts about chances of a breakthrough, even as ties with U.S. ally South Korea deteriorate. In an interview with Japan’s Sankei newspaper last week, Abe offered to hold unconditional talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a shift in tone if not substance from previous remarks that had predicated a summit on progress towards resolving a feud over Japanese citizens abducted by Pyongyang decades ago.

Reuters Top News

@Reuters

White House welcomes release of @Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo jailed in Myanmar reut.rs/2H7r63N

3:42 AM - May 8, 2019

Iran

Iran announced it was scaling back curbs to its nuclear program under a 2015 deal with world powers, and threatened to do more — including enriching uranium to a higher level — if countries did not shield it from U.S. sanctions. A year after Washington pulled out of the nuclear deal with Iran, President Hassan Rouhani unveiled measures that do not appear to violate the deal’s terms yet, but could do so in the future if Iran were to persist on the course he set out.

Mike Pompeo briefs Iraqi leaders on U.S. security concerns over Iran. The U.S. Secretary of State made an unannounced visit to Baghdad on Tuesday and met Iraq’s prime minister and other top officials to discuss the safety of Americans in Iraq and explain U.S. security concerns amid rising Iranian activity. Pompeo visited Britain on Wednesday to pitch a post-Brexit ‘special relationship’ as Iran said it may stop complying with some parts of the nuclear deal.

United States

A Denver suburb sought answers as to why two students walked into their school and opened fire with handguns, injuring eight people and killing one just a few miles from where a school massacre took place 20 years ago. Two surviving victims of the Tuesday attack remained in a serious condition, medical officials said. Another was stable and five had been discharged from hospital.

A U.S. appeals court ruled that the Trump administration may continue sending asylum seekers to wait out their cases in Mexico while the government appeals a lower court ruling that found the policy violated U.S. immigration law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco found that a preliminary injunction barring the government from returning asylum seekers to Mexico was “unlikely to be sustained” on appeal in its present form and stayed the lower court ruling.

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Business

Hackers steal $41 million worth of bitcoin from Binance cryptocurrency exchange

Hackers stole bitcoin worth $41 million from Binance, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, the company said, the latest in a string of thefts from cryptocurrency exchanges around the world. The 7,000 bitcoin were withdrawn by hackers using a variety of techniques, “including phishing, viruses and other attacks”, according to a post on Binance’s website by chief executive officer Zhao Changpeng.

2 min read