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China said Thursday it detained two U.S. citizens on suspicion of organizing others to illegally cross the border, amid sharpening tensions between the sides over trade, technology and other sensitive issues. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said police in the eastern province of Jiangsu arrested Alyssa Petersen and Jacob Harlan on Sept. 27 and Sept. 29. "The department handling the case has informed the U.S. Consulate General in Shanghai in a timely manner, arranged U.S. diplomats to conduct consular visits and protected the legitimate rights and interests of the two," Geng said at a regular press briefing.

A 93-year-old former concentration camp guard arrived in court in a wheelchair on Thursday, in what could be one of Germany's last trials of Nazi war crimes. Bruno D., whose surname cannot be given for legal reasons, is accused of being an accessory to 5,230 murders in the final months of World War Two.

Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo land in Turkey to salvage U.S. interests in Syria.

The U.K. and the E.U. have come to a new agreement on Brexit, just two weeks before Britain is scheduled to leave the European Union.

(Bloomberg) -- The Chinese foreign ministry said it has detained two American citizens who run an English-teaching business in China, a development that comes amid rising diplomatic tensions and a broader trade war between the two countries.Jacob Harlan and Alyssa Petersen were detained in the eastern province of Jiangsu in late September “on suspicion of organizing others to cross the border,” foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters at a regular briefing in Beijing on Thursday.Family members of the pair have sought to raise money over the internet to fund their defense, with the post supporting Petersen calling the charge “bogus.” The U.S. Embassy in Beijing said it was “aware of the detention of two U.S. citizens in China and the charges being brought against them by the provincial government.”“We take seriously our responsibility to assist U.S. citizens abroad and are monitoring the situation,” the embassy said.The detentions come amid what appears to be a broader crackdown on foreign teachers working in China. State-owned news agency Xinhua has reported 16 foreign teachers were arrested in July, while China Daily reported in August that thousands of teachers may be working in the country illegally.It also comes shortly after the State Department imposed new rules on Chinese diplomats operating in the U.S., requiring them to notify the U.S. if they hold meetings with local American officials or visit educational or research institutions. The U.S. said this was a “reciprocal” measure to level the playing field with how U.S. diplomats operate in China and said it was “not directly linked to any other part of the relationship.”China has lashed out at the new rules, saying the restrictions violate the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations. In the foreign ministry briefing on Thursday, China’s Geng urged the U.S. to “correct its mistake” and withdraw the new rules.Geng added that he “doesn’t see” how the detentions could be related to trade tensions. Chinese authorities alerted the U.S. consulate in Shanghai and arranged consular visits with U.S. diplomats for the two American citizens, he said.Harlan in 2004 founded China Horizons, a business that helps bring teachers to China, and has been going back and forth between the U.S. and China since at least 2002, according to the company’s website.Petersen is listed as an assistant director who has spent the last eight years “jumping in and out of China” as a volunteer and China Horizons employee.(Updates with additional context from fourth paragraph)To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Dandan Li in Beijing at dli395@bloomberg.net;Iain Marlow in Hong Kong at imarlow1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Brendan Scott at bscott66@bloomberg.netFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Photo Illustration by Kristen Hazzard/The Daily Beast/GettyWhen Rudy Giuliani logs into Twitter, he’s presented with a world where the recent California power outages were staged by military operatives rooting out cannibal-pedophiles deep in their underground bunkers. It’s a place where President Donald Trump only betrayed the Kurds because they were running black sites for a global deep-state cabal; where former Trump Russia adviser Fiona Hill ran an anti-Trump spy ring out of the White House; where former Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta eats children; and where the pope is about to seize world power, and maybe already has. It is the worst that the right-wing internet fever swamp has to offer, and it is all right there, waiting for Giuliani to consume. With the president’s personal lawyer now in hot water for helping to orchestrate an apparent pressure campaign to get the Ukrainian leadership to launch investigations beneficial to Trump’s domestic political needs, the question being routinely asked is what compelled him to act in these ways. To answer that question, it’s worth examining the dozen of hardcore conspiracy theory accounts that populate Giuliani’s Twitter timeline. Giuliani, after all, has become a fairly regular user of the platform, having posted to it more than 1,000 times and routinely favoriting content during the course of any given day. But he only follows 224 people (as of Wednesday). A good chunk of those follows are conventional Trumpworld figures, including the president himself (Trump was Giuliani’s earliest follow), Judicial Watch chief Tom Fitton, opinion writer John Solomon, and former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka.But many of those 224 dabble in far darker realms of the far-right conspiracy theory internet than the usual rantings of a Fox News primetime broadcast. For instance, Giuliani follows writer Ella Cruz—the author of an Amazon self-published book called Ring of the Cabal: The Secret Government of The Royal Papal Banking Cabal, which alleges that the New World Order will soon impose the “mark of the beast” on all humanity. In August, Cruz tweeted at Giuliani, warning him that Hillary Clinton murdered pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. Though Giuliani doesn’t often RT or even like the content produced by the people he follows his taste for conspiracy theories does occasionally shine through, such as in August, when he quote-tweeted conspiracy theorist Matt Couch, a prolific promoter of the baseless idea that former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was murdered by Hillary Clinton. Couch has become so vocal in his attacks on the Rich family that Rich’s brother filed a defamation suit against him. Giuliani promoted a tweet from Couch questioning the police narrative about Rich’s 2016 murder, and later told The Daily Beast there are “legitimate questions” about the investigation. Giuliani follows a number of accounts that promote the QAnon conspiracy, which alleges that Trump is engaged in a secret war against cannibal-pedophiles in the Democratic Party, Hollywood, and Wall Street. Nearly 5 percent of the accounts that Giuliani follows have explicit QAnon references permanently on their Twitter pages, either in the form of pinned tweets, Twitter names, bios, or header images. Many more of them frequently tweet and retweet QAnon messages from popular promoters of the conspiracy theory. Several accounts Giuliani follows recently retweeted a video, shot in a dimly lit, anonymous living room, starring a man claiming that Navy SEALs and Marines had recently rescued “2,100 children from California Underground bases.” There is no evidence that this is actually true. Other accounts that Giuliani follows are prone to promoting a wild potpourri of various conspiracy theory claims. Among them are that Barack Obama is engineering the Trump impeachment process to install Michelle Obama in the White House, or that Hillary Clinton plans to kill off each Democratic presidential candidate so she can become president herself. Others allege that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg secretly died months ago, but that her death is being covered up. Taken together, the accounts circle around a few popular right-wing targets: the Clintons, the Obamas, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). Several accounts Giuliani follows recently claimed, without any proof, that Omar had donned a disguise to take part in a gathering of left-wing antifascist activists. Another promoted a long-discredited idea that a photograph proves Omar attended a terrorist training camp (in fact, the picture was taken years before Omar was even born).Many of the accounts Giuliani follows have just a few hundred or thousand followers, raising questions about how he became aware of them in the first place. But Giuliani also follows some of Twitter’s leading right-wing conspiracy theorists. Giuliani follows SGT Report, a sort of clearing house for anti-vaccine activists and other conspiracy theorists that has more than 500,000 subscribers on YouTube.The degree to which Rudy’s Twitter consumption informs his world view is inherently unknowable. Giuliani hasn’t favorited any of tweets from the conspiracy theory accounts. Reached for comment, he declined to say why so many obscure conspiracy theory Twitter accounts make up the relatively small number of total accounts that he follows on Twitter.“Never saw any of that,” Giuliani wrote in a text message.But there is some anecdotal evidence that Giuliani has embraced or, at a minimum, begun to echo the world that he has built for himself on that platform and it is not just because of his penchant for promoting conspiracy theories about billionaire George Soros and former Vice President Joe Biden. Earlier this month, Giuliani appeared on an internet TV radio show hosted by Bill Mitchell, a diehard Trump fan who has frequently promoted QAnon online. Asked ahead of the interview why he was going on the show, given Mitchell’s QAnon connection, Giuliani asked for proof that Mitchell supports QAnon. After The Daily Beast sent Giuliani one article proving Mitchell’s support for QAnon, the former prosecutor stopped responding to text messages.Giuliani’s own Twitter use has accelerated since he took on a starring role in Trump’s Ukraine scandal, according to social media analytics site SocialBlade. In October 2018, Giuliani had 29 average monthly tweets. A year later, he averages 132 tweets a month, according to SocialBlade.Many of the fringe accounts Giuliani follows have rallied to his defense as the Ukraine investigation heats up and echo his most conspiratorial insinuations about the Biden family. One account Giuliani follows, for example, regularly urges him and Trump to sue Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) over impeachment. Several of the conspiracy theorist Twitter users that Giuliani follows have, in turn, cited their social media connection to the former New York City mayor as a way of burnishing their credibility. “It’s an honor that he follows me,” Couch, the Seth Rich conspiracy theorist, told The Daily Beast.Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

(Bloomberg) -- One of Hong Kong’s most prominent protest organizers -- including a march planned for Sunday -- was recovering after being attacked on the street by men wielding hammers.Jimmy Sham -- convenor of the Civil Human Rights Front, which has organized many of the city’s largest peaceful protests -- issued a plea from his hospital bed Thursday for police to allow the march go ahead in the Tsim Tsa Tsui area as planned. Sham was assaulted by four to five men Wednesday while on his way to a meeting in nearby Mong Kok -- the second time he’s been attacked since August.“When Jimmy was at his street counter, many of the citizens expressed that they really hope there will be a safe march on Sunday,” the Civil Human Rights Front said in a statement Thursday. “Jimmy therefore urges the Police to issue Letter of No Objection, so that Hongkongers can express their views.”The Civil Human Rights Front has helped organize several of the largest protests ever held in the former British colony, including two largely peaceful marches in June that drew more than a million people. The demonstrations have since mushroomed into a broader push for greater democracy, leading to regular clashes between protesters and police and occasional incidents of mob violence.On Thursday, Hong Kong’s embattled leader, Carrie Lam, was forced to repeatedly halt a question session in the city’s legislature as opposition lawmakers demanded her to step down and address other protester demands. The coming weekend will be the Asian financial center’s 20th-straight weekend of unrest.See also: Hong Kong Police Targeted With Remote-Controlled ExplosiveNg Tak-nam, chief police inspector for the Mong Kok area, condemned the attack on Sham, which he said appeared to have been premeditated. “The police will investigate impartially and seriously, regardless of the person’s background and identity,” Ng told reporters.Sham, who is planning to join the district council elections next month, was attacked in August by two masked men with a baseball bat and knife. Police have arrested three men in connection with that earlier case, charging two of them with conspiracy to assault causing bodily harm. The third is on bail pending further investigation.The Civil Human Rights Front said that the assailants in the latest attack appeared to be aiming for Sham’s head, elbows and knees. The group said he suffered several wounds, but had no broken bones.“The Civil Human Rights Front strongly condemns the acts of the perpetrators,” the group said. “It is not hard to link this incident to a spreading political terror in order to threaten and inhibit the legitimate exercise of natural and legal rights.”(Updates with recovery in headline and first paragraph)\--With assistance from Justin Chin.To contact the reporter on this story: Shelly Banjo in Hong Kong at sbanjo@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Scott at bscott66@bloomberg.net, Ben SharplesFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Thirty-five foreigners were killed and four others injured when a bus collided with another heavy vehicle near the Muslim holy city of Medina, Saudi state media said on Thursday. The accident on Wednesday evening involved a collision between "a private chartered bus... with a heavy vehicle" near the western city, a spokesman for Medina police said, according to the official Saudi Press Agency. This year some 2.5 million faithful travelled to Saudi Arabia from across the world in August to take part in the annual hajj pilgrimage -- one of the five pillars of Islam.

(Bloomberg) -- Protesters in Hong Kong are making unrealistic demands in an effort to take down the government, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said.“Those are not demands which are meant to be a program to solve Hong Kong’s problems,” Lee said at the Forbes Global CEO Conference in Singapore on Wednesday. “Those are demands which are intended to humiliate and bring down the government. And then what?”What began as a series of marches in Hong Kong against a proposal to allow extraditions to mainland China has grown into a broader challenge to Beijing’s grip on the city. Four months of unrest have brought regular scenes of tear gas, vandalism and transit network disruptions that are beginning to weigh on the financial hub.Hong Kong’s demonstrators have called for an independent inquiry into the violence, an amnesty for those charged during the unrest, rescinding the categorization of participants as “rioters” and the ability to nominate and elect their leaders.Lee called for Hong Kongers to solve problems gradually, including respect for the “one country, two systems” framework, universal suffrage and housing in one of the world’s most expensive markets.Why Hong Kong’s Still Protesting and Where It May Go: QuickTake“As one Hong Konger put it very neatly, from China’s point of view they must not only think of one country but remember that this is two systems and from Hong Kong’s point of view, you must not only think of two systems, but remember that this is one country,” he said to applause. “And that calls for wisdom and constraint on both sides.”Lee also said that Hong Kong would need to find “political courage” to solve its housing problems.“You must be prepared to make changes which will have very significant social and economic consequences, and so far the SAR governments have gone for conservative approaches and the problem has not really significantly improved,” he said.Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam on Wednesday announced a slew of measures aimed at reducing the cost of living for poorer members of the city, a bid to address some of the underlying economic issues that have helped fuel discontent. She planned to boost compulsory land purchases for housing, relax mortgage rules for first-time home buyers, give cash to students and increase subsidies for low-income families.Singapore, which competes with Hong Kong as a center of finance in Asia, has faced criticism by human rights groups for taking a heavy hand to block dissent and suppress free speech. The city currently has the second most expensive residential housing market in the world behind Hong Kong, according to research by CBRE.To contact the reporter on this story: Philip J. Heijmans in Singapore at pheijmans1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Ruth Pollard at rpollard2@bloomberg.net, Jon Herskovitz, Daniel Ten KateFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

The leaders of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's key Northern Ireland ally say they can't support the draft Brexit deal struck between the government and the European Union. Support from the Democratic Unionist Party is key to Johnson's plan to get an agreement approved by parliament.

No F-35s or Su-57s? Could Turkey just build their own? What about China?

Two Americans who run an English-teaching business in China have been detained in the east of the country, according to their company, which said they were being held on "bogus" charges. Jacob Harlan, a father of five, and Alyssa Petersen were nabbed in Jiangsu province last month, their Idaho-based company China Horizons said on its Facebook page. "We are aware of the detention of two US citizens in Jiangsu, China and the charges being brought against them by the provincial government," a US State Department official said on condition of anonymity.

Well, that backfired.After an explosive meeting on Wednesday afternoon between President Trump and Democratic leaders -- which included Trump insulting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the Democrats walking out -- the president decided to unwind by continuing the fight on Twitter. He posted several photos from the meeting, including one showing Pelosi standing and pointing at a sitting Trump. "Nervous Nancy's unhinged meltdown!" he captioned the picture.> Nervous Nancy's unhinged meltdown! pic.twitter.com/RDeUI7sfe7> > -- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2019Trump may have thought this was a sick burn, but most of the comments under the picture were not favorable. Some people told him he was the one who appeared nervous, and others pointed out that several of his advisers looked like they would rather be anywhere else in the universe than in that room. As for Pelosi, she's a big fan of the photo that literally shows her standing up to the president -- it's now her Twitter banner.> She changed her header image. pic.twitter.com/aakRqlA4ZF> > -- Alexa O'Brien (@alexadobrien) October 16, 2019

President Vladimir Putin hosts dozens of African leaders next week as Russia seeks to reassert its influence on the continent and beyond. The heads of some 35 African countries are expected for the first Africa-Russia Summit in the Black Sea resort of Sochi next Wednesday and Thursday. For Putin, the summit is a chance to revive Soviet-era relationships and build new alliances, bolstering Moscow's global clout in the face of confrontation with the West.

The Connors' story shows how just one unintentional violation of US immigration law can land a family in weeks of detention in an unfamiliar country.

It's been two weeks and the blood and fat are still seeping into the basement of Nick Lestina's home.

A woman who went public with claims she was a teenage victim of Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking ring can move toward trial with her defamation lawsuit against Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a judge ruled Wednesday as she disqualified a law firm from representing her. U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska rejected Dershowitz's effort to toss out the lawsuit, but she granted his request to disqualify Boies Schiller Flexner LLP from the case. Dershowitz had sought to toss out the case on several grounds, including that the statute of limitations had passed.

What is the Army doing to stay at the top of the pack?

A school district in New Jersey passed a new policy this week that will allow schools to bar students from attending prom if they have a school lunch debt above $75.

A Florida man accused of conspiring with associates of Rudy Giuliani to make illegal campaign contributions made an initial court appearance Wednesday after flying to Kennedy Airport in New York City to turn himself in. David Correia, 44, made a brief appearance before a federal judge in Manhattan, who ordered him released on a $250,000 bond. Jeffrey Marcus, Correia's lawyer, told the judge his client had been traveling in the Middle East when the news broke last week about the charges, but contacted U.S. authorities to arrange his return and surrender.