Morning Report - Hegseth accused of potential war crimes

TODAY’S INTERNTATIONAL story

Honduras votes amid Trump endorsement, pardon vow

What happened
Honduran presidential candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura of the conservative National Party took a narrow early lead in yesterday’s national elections, days after President Donald Trump endorsed him and criticized his two main rivals. On Friday, Trump said he would pardon the last Honduran president from the National Party, Juan Orlando Hernández, who is serving 45 years in U.S. prison for facilitating the trafficking of 500 tons of cocaine through Honduras to the U.S.

Who said what
“Tito and I can work together to fight the narco-communists and provide the necessary aid to the Honduran people,” Trump said last Wednesday on social media. “If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad.” With 43% of polling stations reporting early today, Asfura had 41% of the votes, versus 40% for Salvador Nasralla of the conservative Liberal Party and 19% for Rixi Moncada of the ruling democratic socialist LIBRE party.

Trump told reporters last night that he would pardon Hernández, convicted in New York last year after a trial that exposed bribes and the use of the Honduran military to protect traffickers, because “many of the people of Honduras, they said it was a Biden setup.” He told The New York Times on Saturday that “many friends” had asked him to pardon Hernández, and if his conviction stood, “you could do this to any president.” Hernández was “the leader of one of the largest criminal enterprises that has ever been subject to a conviction in U.S. courts,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said yesterday, and Trump’s “shocking” pardon suggests he “cares nothing about narcotrafficking.”

What next?
Honduras’ National Electoral Council was expected to announce an election winner today. Trump did not say when he would pardon Hernández.

TODAY’S NATURAL DISASTER Story

Death toll from Southeast Asia storms tops 1,000

What happened
More than 1,000 people have died and hundreds remain missing after catastrophic floods and landslides from tropical storms struck Southeast Asia, according to the latest death tolls. Sri Lanka reported 355 deaths from mudslides and flooding triggered by Cyclone Ditwah. A separate cyclone, Senyar, caused at least 502 deaths in Indonesia, 170 in Thailand and three in Malaysia.

Who said what
Much of the Indonesian island of Sumatra remains “cut off due to blocked roads, while damage to telecommunications infrastructure has hampered communication,” Reuters said. Hat Yai, the biggest city in Thailand’s hard-hit Songkhla Province, recorded 13 inches of rain on Friday, “its highest single-day tally in 300 years, amid days of heavy downpours.” Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake yesterday declared a state of emergency to manage what he called the “largest and most challenging natural disaster in our history,” and the first to strike the entire country.

“Persistent bouts of the La Niña climate pattern are at least partially to blame for the flooding across the region,” as unusually warm oceans increase the moisture in the air, The Washington Post said. But “rising global temperatures have also made the atmosphere more waterlogged, fueling wetter and more dangerous storms.” Southeast Asia is “one of the areas most vulnerable to climate change,” said CNN.

What next?
As emergency response crews work to clear roads and get aid to people stuck without food or shelter, “a separate tropical storm, Koto, is expected to hit western Vietnam,” the latest in the “near-continuous string of storms” that have lashed Southeast Asia since mid-September, the Post said.

It’s not all bad

Through a musical project called Raise Your Voice, people living with dementia and their caregivers wrote nine original songs and sang them onstage at the Glyndebourne Opera House in England. Over the last year, the group has met for weekly workshops led by different artists, and this “musical creativity” triggered “original words and tunes based on present and future thinking,” Raise Your Voice events manager Hazel Gaydon told The Guardian. The Glyndebourne performance was recorded for a CD, “Murmuration.”

Under the radar

Mendik Tepe: the ancient site rewriting human history

The 12,000-year-old Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey is often called the “zero point of history,” said The Archaeologist. But recent excavations at the nearby Mendik Tepe site suggest that it dates back even further and could offer “newer insights into humanity’s earliest steps toward settled life.”

Mendik Tepe (Mendik Hill or Peak) is in a rural area of southeastern Anatolia, about 130 miles east of the city of Sanliurfa. It is in this region that the first permanent human settlements are thought to have been established in the early Neolithic period.

Excavation at Mendik Tepe got underway last year, led by University of Liverpool archaeology professor Douglas Baird. The “site seems to capture the very beginnings of that transformation” from mobile foraging to a more “settled down” lifestyle, and possibly experimentation with agriculture, Baird told The Archaeologist. He dated the site to as much as 2,000 years before Göbekli Tepe. The excavations have already unearthed several buildings of various sizes, and as-yet-unknown function and significance.

While structures excavated at Göbekli Tepe have massive T-shaped stone pillars, decorated with carvings of people and animals, the pillars on the buildings at Mendik Tepe are smaller and not T-shaped. This suggests that the two communities “possessed a different ideology” or that Mendik Tepe “was constructed for different purposes,” said science site The Debrief.

The whole Tas Tepeler region is “particularly exciting” for archaeologists, Baird told Turkey’s Anadolu news agency. It allows for the study of “a network” of Neolithic settlements and their development “on a larger, regional scale.”

On this day

December 1, 1959

The Antarctic Treaty was signed by 12 countries: Argentina, Australia, Britain, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the Soviet Union and the U.S. The treaty banned military activity in Antarctica and classified the continent for scientific research. Much research is still conducted there, and the list of treaty signatories has risen to 58.

TODAY’S newspaperS

‘Russia dangles business ties’

“Peace pact in Ukraine elusive as talks end,” The Boston Globe says on Monday’s front page. “Russia dangles business ties at Europe’s expense,” The Wall Street Journal says. “Hegseth targets foes of Trump,” The Washington Post says. “White House gives Maduro ultimatum as U.S. moves toward land operations” in Venezuela, the Miami Herald says. “Bipartisan demands for legal scrutiny of U.S. boat strikes,” the Los Angeles Times says. “Elite unit of Justice Department sees exodus despite wins” at Supreme Court, The New York Times says. “Music piracy heads to high court,” USA Today says. “Carnage at children’s birthday party in Stockton,” says The Sacramento Bee.

► See the newspaper front pages

Tall tale

Coffee beak

An endangered parrot recently swooped into a Seoul cafe, where it posed for photos, ate from customers’ hands and stuck its beak into someone’s drink. After mingling with the crowd at Cafe the Merge, the bird was taken to an animal rescue shelter. There, officials identified it as a yellow-headed amazon, a parrot typically found in Mexico and parts of Central America. An estimated 4,000 of these birds live in the wild.

Morning Report was written and edited by Nadia Croes, Catherine Garcia, Scott Hocker, Anya Jaremko-Greenwold, Alex Kerr, Justin Klawans, Rafi Schwartz, Peter Weber and Kari Wilkin, with illustrations by Stephen Kelly and Julia Wytrazek.