Bedugul Coffee: Friday Morning Briefing: Republicans duck the president in key House races

Politics

Special Report: One of the biggest questions for battleground Republicans is how closely they should align themselves with the president. The answer for some? Keep quiet. Republican nominees in a third of House battleground districts have offered no statements of support for Trump on campaign websites, Facebook or Twitter this year.

President Trump’s nomination of conservative federal appeals court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to hinge on the votes of a handful of senators: three Republicans and two Democrats.

The ugly partisan brawl over U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation remains undecided, but Trump appears likely to come out on top regardless of the outcome.

Commentary: Trump has finally agreed to a fairly modest and sensible update of the North American Free Trade Agreement, while attempting to spin the announcement as the replacement of a horrendous deal with a magnificent new one, writes Andres Martinez, a professor of practice at the Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. The way in which the new deal was hammered out – from Trump’s over-the-top hostility (first towards Mexico, then towards Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau) to its happy ending – offers instructive insights into the Trump modus operandi, and a strong hint of things to come.

World

“Today, I prayed that they are in a better place. They deserve better,” said Ichsan Hidayat, who told how the bodies of his sister and her 43-day-old daughter were found under a sea of mud and debris, the mother clutching her baby to her chest. A week after a major earthquake brought devastation to Indonesia’s Sulawesi island. Hidayat told Reuters as he left Friday prayers at a mosque in the center of Palu, 1,500 km (930 miles) northeast of Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta.

Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist helping victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nadia Murad, a Yazidi rights activist and survivor of sexual slavery by Islamic State, won the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.

A Seoul court jailed former South Korean President Lee Myung-bak for 15 years for corruption, making him the latest in a string of high-profile political and business leaders ensnared by graft charges.

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