Many will debate the substance of the public impeachment testimony against President Trump. To me, each of the Democrats' witnesses of the past two weeks appeared to be well-intentioned and hard-working, and seemed genuinely to believe they know what's best.

But a picture also emerged of U.S. diplomats who appear to believe they, rather than the U.S. president, have the ultimate authority to determine our foreign policy. And if the president doesn't go along? He clearly must be wrong — in their view. Or, even worse, he's a traitor. He's to be obstructed. Taken down.

In an odd turnabout, they actually make the case for President Trump's mantra that we need to "drain the swamp."

One can first look at the language witnesses used as they vented about Trump's tutelage in ways that veered far from relevance to the impeachment allegations. They conveyed hurt feelings, bruised egos and strong differences of opinion. At times, the testimony sounded a bit like a human resources conference or psychotherapy session.

A key panel of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) recommends Russia be hit with a four-year ban from sporting competitions over noncompliance with the World Anti-Doping Code.

The global anti-doping watchdog on November 25 said the recommendation by its Compliance Review Committee is based on a forensic review of "inconsistencies" found in some of the data that were obtained by the agency from a Moscow laboratory in January. WADA's Executive Committee will consider the recommendation and proposed consequences on December 9, a statement said. The four-year ban would prevent Russia from taking part in next year's summer Olympics in Tokyo and the Beijing Winter Games in 2022.

The country was officially banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, but a number of Russian athletes were allowed to compete as neutrals under the Olympic flag.

WADA has documented more than 1,000 Russian doping cases across dozens of sports, most notably at the Winter Olympics that Russia hosted in Sochi in 2014. The country was found guilty of a government-organized effort to mask samples from athletes using banned substances between 2011 and 2015. Full disclosure of data from the Moscow lab was a key condition of Russia's controversial reinstatement by WADA in September 2018.

Democratic Rep. Brenda Lawrence of Michigan now favors censuring President Trump after backing impeachment proceedings over allegations that he withheld military aid from Ukraine for his personal benefit.

Lawrence appeared on the Michigan radio show No BS News Hour with host Charlie LeDuff on Sunday to discuss the impeachment process in the House. Lawrence told LeDuff, to his surprise, that she does not support removing the president from office and that she would ask her caucus to censure him instead.

"We are so close to an election. I will tell you, sitting here knowing how divided this country is, I don't see the value of taking him out of office. I do see the value of putting down a marker saying his behavior is not acceptable. I want to censure. I want it on the record that the House of Representatives did their job and they told this president and any president coming behind him that this is unacceptable behavior and, under our Constitution, we will not allow it."

Lawrence also said she would have a "discussion with the party and with the caucus" to censure Trump instead of impeaching him.

There's a tombstone in northeastern Moscow that bears the portrait of a man with a friendly yet somewhat uneasy smile. His name is Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky. He was born in April 1972 in Odessa, Ukraine, and died in November 2009 in Moscow. To this day, 10 years after the fact, the circumstances of his death in a Russian pretrial detention facility remain unclear.

There are two versions of what happened to Magnitsky. The more well-known version has all the makings of a conspiracy thriller. It's been repeated in thousands of articles, TV interviews and in parliamentary hearings. In this version of the story, the man from the Moscow cemetery fought nobly against a corrupt system and was murdered for it.

The other version is more complicated. In it, nobody is a hero.

The first version has had geopolitical implications. In 2012, the United States passed the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions against Russian officials who were believed to have played a role in his death. The measure was signed into law by then-President Barack Obama after receiving a broad bipartisan majority. Back then, if there was one thing that politicians on both sides of the aisle could agree on, it was their opposition to a nefarious Russian state. In 2017, Congress passed the Global Magnitsky Act, which enabled the U.S. to impose sanctions against Russia for human rights violations worldwide.

The facilitator behind these pieces of legislation is Bill Browder, Magnitsky's former boss in Moscow. "When he was put to the ultimate test, he became the ultimate hero," Browder says of Magnitsky. Browder was born in the U.S. For years, his company, Hermitage Capital Management, was one of the largest foreign investors in Russia. At the time, Browder was an advocate for Russian President Vladimir Putin in the West. That is, until he was prohibited from entering Russia in 2005.

The White House on Tuesday was briefly put on lockdown, as fighter jets were scrambled in Washington following an airspace violation, law enforcement officials told NBC News.

The lockdown was lifted less than 30 minutes after it was first reported by White House reporters.

"The White House was locked down this morning due to a potential violation of the restricted airspace in the National Capital Region," a Secret Service spokesman told CNBC in a statement. "The lockdown has been lifted at this time."

A small aircraft violated airspace rules in a restricted area, officials told the Associated Press. The North American Aerospace Defense Command said the plane was not considered hostile.

NBC also reported that a security alert was raised at the Capitol building.

U.S. Capitol Police confirmed that access to the Capitol Complex buildings was halted "for a short time." The situation was cleared at 9:12 a.m., Capitol Police said, about 45 minutes after the aircraft was first reported in the restricted airspace.

The White House referred CNBC to the Secret Service.

Hong Kong's embattled leader Carrie Lam has refused to offer any concessions to anti-government protesters despite a local election setback.

The Chief Executive says she will accelerate dialogue and plans to set up a committee to review deep-seated social issues that contributed to grievances.

Hong Kong's most unpopular post-colonial leader acknowledged voters wanted to express their views on many issues, including "deficiencies in governance", but also wanted an end to the six-month-old unrest gripping the city.

"Everybody wants to go back to their normal life and this requires the concerted efforts of every one of us," Lam said.

"So, as I have said repeatedly, resorting to violence will not give us that way forward. So please, please help us to maintain the relative calm and peace ... and provide a good basis for Hong Kong to move forward."

At her weekly news conference on Tuesday, Lam said the central government didn't blame her for poll the outcome. The pro-democracy bloc won a landslide victory with 90 per cent of seats securing their first majority after running a campaign against Beijing's perceived encroachments on Hong Kong's liberties.


Meanwhile, Beijing, who has set up a crisis command centre in a villa on the mainland side of the border with Hong Kong, is considering replacing its official liaison office to the semi-autonomous city to tighten control and manage the recent upheaval.

So we all know about the missing trillions by now, but where is that money going? And what can Americans do to reclaim that money that is rightfully theirs? Join Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari.com and James Corbett of The Corbett Report for this wide-ranging discussion on the most important topic of our time that no one is talking about.

The federal government is finding new and creative ways to spend US tax dollars, even as public debt soars into the trillions. Fiscal hawk Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) took aim at some of the most absurd programs out there.

Issued on Monday, the libertarian-leaning lawmaker's quarterly report on government waste tracks some of the more outrageous uses of federal cheese, totaling over $230 million, ranging from academic studies on drug-addicted fish to, well, literal cheese.

A big slice of cheese

Last year, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) spent a cool $22 million subsidizing cheese production in the highlands of southwest Serbia, aiming to teach farmers in the region about "questionable practices...such as adding water or baking powder to the milk or skimming the fat."

While the Serbian cheese-makers are surely fine by the multi-million dollar scheme, American dairy farmers might have different ideas. And with the United States in the middle of a massive, 1.4 billion-pound cheese surplus, it's not clear how any of it is America's business.

The report found fishy spending in other areas as well. To the tune of over $708,000, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded research in London to study a burning question: what happens when zebrafish get addicted to nicotine? Though the study hoped to uncover genetic links to dependency and addiction, some US taxpayers may want to know why they should foot the sizable bill.

Green New Deal sponsor Senator Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) is seeking to expand US sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act to foreign individuals and companies involved in "significant actions that exacerbate climate change."

While Democrats have denounced President Donald Trump's plan to build a wall on the southern US border and make Mexico pay for it, Markey's proposal seems to take that approach and apply it to the entire world, when US climate change efforts are concerned.

"As we fight to enact a Green New Deal here at home, we must use all of the tools or our foreign policy to change the behavior of companies and individuals most responsible for exacerbating the climate crisis," Markey said on Monday, announcing his new bill.


The 2012 Magnitsky Act, expanded to the entire globe in 2016, allows the US government to ban all trade with - and seize the property of - people and entities it claims violate human rights. Markey now wants those powers levied against those responsible for building coal power plants or logging in rainforests, for example. Such measures "could help ensure that efforts to address climate change do not worsen global inequality," says the 19-page draft of the bill.

The much-anticipated meeting between Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia's Vladimir Putin is in danger of being a lost opportunity for peace. Washington's political infighting has stacked the odds against a successful summit.

Weeks of impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives, accusing President Trump of abusing his office with regard to Ukraine, have achieved very little except for two things. Ukraine's international image has been trashed with corruption claims and depiction of the country as having vassal-like dependency on the US, and secondly, demonization of Russia which has been heightened as an "aggressor" supposedly out to destroy Ukraine.

The irony is that Washington purports to be an ally of Ukraine to promote democracy, sovereignty, and independence of the former Soviet republic. But the upshot of the impeachment inquiry is that Ukraine's independence and sovereignty is gravely undermined.