Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) said Wednesday he was "shocked" when he discovered in 2015 that Christine Fang — a Chinese national who started working with him in 2012 — was a suspected spy who targeted him and other California politicians, as revealed by Axios.
The big picture: Swalwell is not accused of wrongdoing and immediately cut off ties with Fang after receiving a defensive briefing from the FBI, according to a current U.S. intelligence official. The California lawmaker told CNN that congressional offices don't have the "technical capabilities" to run background checks on the people they work with.
Khartoum — Most Sudanese thought until recently that getting off the U.S. state sponsors of terrorism list was a done deal. Now they realize it's more complicated.
Why it matters: One crucial element of the trilateral deal between the U.S., Israel and Sudan was the restoration of Sudan's sovereign immunity, which would protect the country from future terror-related lawsuits.
Forbes on Wednesday released its annual list of the 'World's 100 Most Powerful Women," with history-making figures like Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern among those featured.
Zoom in: 13 of the women named "helm some of the world’s biggest banks and financial institutions, positions they’ve leveraged to effect change in the world," Forbes' Samantha Todd writes.
The United Arab Emirates said Wednesday that the coronavirus vaccine developed by China's state-owned Sinopharm appears to be safe and 86% effective, according to an interim analysis of the company's Phase III trials.
Why it matters: It's the first public release of information about one of the main Chinese-developed COVID-19 vaccines, which was tested in the UAE in a trial involving 31,000 volunteers from 125 countries that began in September.
A former cabinet minister from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party has announced that he's breaking away to challenge Netanyahu in Israel's next election.
Why it matters: The formation of a new right-wing party by Gideon Saar — a former education and interior minister under Netanyahu who challenged him for the Likud leadership last year — is bad news for Netanyahu with an election looming early next year.
A suspected Chinese intelligence operative developed extensive ties with local and national politicians, including a U.S. congressman, in what U.S. officials believe was a political intelligence operation run by China’s main civilian spy agency between 2011 and 2015, Axios found in a yearlonginvestigation.
Why it matters: The alleged operation offers a rare window into how Beijing has tried to gain access toand influence U.S. political circles.
U.K. medical teams began administering Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine doses on Tuesday, with people aged 80 and older the first to be inoculated.
The big picture: The U.K. last week became the first Western nation to give emergency approval for a COVID-19 vaccine. Margaret Keenan, 90, was the world's first person to get a fully tested, clinically authorized COVID-19 vaccine, at a hospital in Coventry, England. Health Secretary Matt Hancock said, "We will look back on today, V-day, as a key moment in our fightback against this terrible disease."
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Monday that Canada will begin receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine from next week.
Driving the news: "The first Canadians will be vaccinated next week if we have approval from Health Canada this week," Trudeau told a briefing confirming that the country will receive up to 249,000 doses of the vaccine by the month's end.
How did a Chinese student active in San Francisco Bay Area politics from 2011 to 2015 become the target of a U.S. counterintelligence investigation? And why did her efforts to connect with local politicians who would later play a role on the national stage raise investigators' alarms?
In this clip from "Axios on HBO," Axios' Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian and Zach Dorfman of the Aspen Institute explain.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and New Zealand security agencies apologized Tuesday to those affected by last year's shootings at two Christchurch mosques after an inquiry found failings in the lead-up to the terrorist attack.
Why it matters: The attack by a white supremacist was one of the biggest mass killings by a single gunman and the worst in New Zealand's modern history. It prompted governments and tech companies to sign on to an agreement to reduce violent extremist content online after the terrorist broadcast the shootings on Facebook Live.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is off to an awkward start with President-elect Biden. Along with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, he's one of the very few world leaders still declining to recognize Biden’s victory.
Why it matters: López Obrador’s stance may soon be forgotten, but it could foreshadow tensions in a relationship that will be crucial in the coming years as the U.S. and Mexico attempt to contain COVID-19, rebuild their economies and tackle shared challenges like immigration.
