President Trump twice raised to the Iraqi prime minister the idea of repaying America for its wars with Iraqi oil, a highly controversial ask that runs afoul of international norms and logic, according to sources with direct knowledge.
Trump appears to have finally given up on this idea, but until now it hasn't been revealed that as president he's raised the concept twice with Iraq's prime minister and brought it up separately in the Situation Room with his national security team.
Carlos Ghosn is in jail, and he's likely to be there for a while. Up until last week, Ghosn was the unquestioned leader of the largest carmaker in the world, the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, which sold 5.5 million cars in the first 6 months of 2018. The group has also sold more than 500,000 electric cars, which is twice as many as Tesla.
The big picture: The success of the Alliance is in large part due to the hard-charging Ghosn. But Ghosn's sheer force of personality cuts both ways. It can get things done, especially in countries like France and Japan where change is particularly difficult. It also pisses people off, including a Japanese whistleblower at Nissan. The result: Ghosn being arrested while aboard his private jet in Tokyo.
California's Camp Fire, which killed at least 85 people and destroyed nearly 14,000 homes in the northern part of the state, has been fully contained, according to Cal Fire.
The big picture: While the blaze, which started on Nov. 8, is now fully under control, there are still nearly 250 people unaccounted for, so the death toll for the state's deadliest wildfire on record could continue to rise as authorities make their way into the fire zone. And continued rainstorms in the region this week will bring the threat of mudslides to area burn scars, creating difficult conditions for the thousands of displaced evacuees housed in makeshift shelters.
Some wildfire victims are leaving the state ... "[T]owns are struggling to absorb the roughly 50,000 people displaced by the Camp fire," the L.A. Times' Anna Phillips reports:
The big picture: "[T]he evacuees’ arrival has worsened the state’s housing crisis and raised the possibility that they could be evicted from the region again, not by fire but by a scarcity of suitable dwellings... Unable to find single-family homes in the area, evacuees have resorted to renting individual bedrooms, buying recreational vehicles and purchasing travel trailers."
The U.S. government's Black Friday climate report warns that rising "temperatures in the Midwest are projected to be the largest contributing factor to declines in U.S. agricultural productivity, with extreme heat wilting crops and posing a threat to livestock," the Chicago Tribune's Tony Briscoe writes.
Details: "Midwest farmers will be increasingly challenged by warmer, wetter and more humid conditions from climate change, which also will lead to greater incidence of crop disease and more pests and will diminish the quality of stored grain."
A new government report released on Friday said the demolition of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, driven by illegal logging and the expansion of agriculture in the area, has reached its highest level in a decade, per BBC.
Why it matters, per Axios science editor Andrew Freedman: The trees and soils of the Amazon rainforest make the region a massive carbon sink, meaning that cutting down trees and replacing them with palm oil plantations or mines causes more planet-warming greenhouse gases to be emitted into the air. With the newly elected leader of Brazil pledging to further develop the Amazon, many climate and forestry experts fear the deforestation rate will only increase.
Parisian law enforcement used tear gas and water canons on a crowd of thousands of activists protesting rising fuel taxes and French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday morning.
By the numbers: 5,000 protestors surged around the Champs-Elysees on Saturday, and six protestors have already been arrested, according to the AP. The nationwide protests have taken place all week with an estimated 23,000 participants, according to Interior Minister Christophe Castaner. Thousands of police have been deployed, hundreds of people have been injured, and two have been killed in accidents related to the protests, the AP reports.
November has become one of the most devastating months in history for California, with two major wildfires raging in the northern and southern parts of the state.
The big picture: It's worth a closer look at what the future holds in California and across the West, where a changing climate is leading to larger fires. Here's a roundup of our coverage and the best stories from other sources — including local media reports that can give us the best insight into possible causes, what it would take to reduce the risk, and how the disasters have affected people's lives.
