The Pentagon Is Awaiting a Possible Challenge from Amazon over a $10 Billion Cloud Deal

Amazon must decide soon if it will protest the Pentagon’s awarding of a $10 billion cloud computing contract to rival Microsoft, with one possible grievance being the unusual attention given the project by President Donald Trump.

Amazon was long thought to be the front-runner in the competition for the huge military contract. Its Amazon Web Services division is far ahead of second-place Microsoft as the market leader for cloud computing and has experience handling highly classified government data. It survived earlier legal challenges after the Defense Department eliminated rival bidders Oracle and IBM and whittled the competition down to the two Seattle area tech giants before choosing Microsoft last week.

And what else distinguishes the losing bidder? Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, have been frequent targets of Trump’s criticism.

The Pentagon was preparing to make its final decision when Trump publicly waded into the fray in July, saying he had heard complaints about the process and that the administration would “take a very long look.” He said other companies told him that the contract “wasn’t competitively bid.” Oracle, in particular, had argued that Pentagon officials unfairly favored Amazon for the winner-take-all contract.

The comments from Trump were “inappropriate and improvident,” though it would be a challenge for Amazon to prove the White House applied undue pressure in a way that made a difference, said Steven Schooner, a professor of government procurement law at George Washington University.

Then again, given Trump’s known antipathy toward the company, Schooner said Amazon may not have much to lose in picking a fight.

Amazon didn’t return requests for comment about its next steps.

The clock is now ticking. Amazon has the right to ask the Pentagon to debrief the company on what led it to pick Microsoft instead.

The Pentagon declined to comment this week on the specifics of the debriefing process and whether it has already started. It has previously said that the competition for the 10-year contract was fair and followed procurement guidelines.

Dana Deasy, the Pentagon’s acting chief information officer, reiterated that position in a Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday after Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent, asked Deasy if he could “categorically assure us” that Trump didn’t influence the contract’s ultimate disposition.

Deasy said the procurement team was compartmentalized and he was confident that team members “that actually took the source selection” were not influenced by the White House. The White House declined comment this week.

If Amazon is not satisfied with the government’s explanation, it can file a formal protest with the Government Accountability Office, which then has 100 days to review the case. Amazon could also separately take its dispute to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

“If you’re Amazon, you want to get into some sort of discovery phase to evaluate if there was political influence or not,” said Mike Hettinger, a tech industry lobbyist focused on federal contracting who doesn’t work for Amazon or its rival bidders.

Hettinger expects the company to file some form of protest.

“Most people in industry believed it was Amazon’s to lose because of its technical superiority,” he said. “Everyone’s paid outsized attention to this, but it’s obviously an important award.”

The project, known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, will store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the U.S. military to use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities.

Microsoft said it brought its “best efforts” to the Pentagon’s rigorous evaluations and appreciates that it was chosen. It is still in the final stages of getting the accreditation required to handle the government’s most sensitive classified data — something Amazon had already achieved.

“We are committed to meeting all the requirements of JEDI,” said Toni Townes-Whitley, a Microsoft executive, in a statement Thursday.

U.S. Extends Civil Nuclear Cooperation Waivers for Iran

(WASHINGTON) — The Trump administration is keeping alive one of the last remaining components of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal by extending sanctions waivers that allow foreign companies to work with Iran’s civilian nuclear program without U.S. penalties.

The waivers had been due to expire Tuesday but were extended by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for another 90 days. The extensions were not announced until Thursday.

Pompeo has been a champion of President Donald Trump’s maximum pressure campaign on Iran.

State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said the move “will help preserve oversight of Iran’s civil nuclear program, reduce proliferation risks, constrain Iran’s ability to shorten its ‘breakout time’ to a nuclear weapon, and prevent the regime from reconstituting sites for proliferation-sensitive purposes.”

Pompeo also announced new sanctions on Iran’s construction sector, which he determines to be under the control of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC was designated earlier this year as a “foreign terrorist organization.”

Trump withdrew last year from the nuclear deal and has steadily ramped up sanctions on Iran that had been eased under the agreement. But the so-called “civilian nuclear cooperation” waivers will permit European, Russian and Chinese companies to continue to work at Iranian civilian nuclear facilities.

Nuclear deal critics, including Trump allies like Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, have long argued that the waivers should be revoked because they give Iran access to technology that could be used for weapons. In particular, they have targeted a waiver that allows conversion work at the once-secret Fordow site. The other facilities are the Bushehr nuclear power station, the Arak heavy water plant and the Tehran Research Reactor.

“This is disappointing and another lost opportunity to tear up the catastrophic Obama-Iran nuclear deal once and for all,” Cruz and Sen. Lindsey Graham said in a statement. “President Trump should immediately order his administration to stop issuing civil nuclear waivers.”

They said they would soon advance legislation “to reverse this misguided decision.”

Deal supporters say the waivers give international experts a valuable window into Iran’s atomic program that might otherwise not exist. They also say some of the work, particularly on nuclear isotopes that can be used in medicine at the Tehran reactor, is humanitarian in nature.

Ivanka Trump to Promote Her Women’s Economic Development Plan in Morocco

(WASHINGTON) — Ivanka Trump is getting ready to promote her women’s economic development program on an upcoming trip to Morocco.

It will be her third overseas trip this year to promote the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative, which was launched in February to benefit women in developing countries.

President Donald Trump’s daughter and senior adviser will visit the North African country in early November, the White House said.

In a statement to The Associated Press, Ivanka Trump said the kingdom of Morocco is a valued U.S. ally that has “taken strides” under King Mohammed VI to promote gender equality.

In August, she tweeted her support to the Moroccan government after it began the process of amending its inheritance laws, which say women should receive half as much as men.

Ivanka Trump will travel with Sean Cairncross, CEO of the Millennium Challenge Corp., an independent U.S. foreign aid agency that provides grants to developing countries to help promote economic growth, reduce poverty and strengthen institutions.

They will meet with government officials and local leaders in Morocco’s capital, Rabat, and in Casablanca from Nov. 6-8 to discuss how to help women in the region gain economic independence.

The Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative has a goal of helping 50 million women in developing nations advance economically over the next six years.

It’s a U.S. government-wide effort that involves the State Department, the National Security Council and other agencies. It aims to coordinate existing programs and develop new ones to help women in areas such as job training, financial support and legal or regulatory reforms.

Ivanka Trump traveled to Ethiopia and Ivory Coast , in sub-Saharan Africa, in April and to Argentina, Colombia and Paraguay , in South America, in September to promote the initiative.

‘I Have Been Treated Very Badly.’ Trump Changes Primary Residence From New York to Florida

(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump says he will be making Palm Beach, Florida, his permanent residence after he leaves the White House, rather than returning to Trump Tower in New York.

Trump tweeted late Thursday that he cherished New York. But he added that “despite the fact that I pay millions of dollars in city, state and local taxes each year, I have been treated very badly by the political leaders of both the city and state.”

The New York Times reported earlier Thursday that Trump had filed “declaration of domicile” paperwork changing his “predominant and principal home” to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Trump, who was born in New York, says “it will always have a special place in my heart!”

Leaked U.N. Report Shows Botched Investigation Into Sexual Abuse Accusations Against Peacekeepers

(DAKAR, Senegal) — The United Nations botched its investigation into accusations of sexual abuse in Central African Republic, letting down victims, according to a draft report.

The report, written in 2017 but not yet made public, was leaked to The New Humanitarian and seen by The Associated Press.

A senior U.N. official disputed the findings in the draft report, which the U.N. said were not included in the final report.

An Associated Press investigative series in 2017 uncovered roughly 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by U.N. peacekeepers around the world over a 12-year period.

The roughly 11,000 peacekeepers in Central African Republic had the most sexual misconduct allegations – 52- of any U.N. peacekeeping mission in 2016.

“The leaked review … gives a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse at how the U.N. system investigates claims of sexual abuse and exploitation by its own peacekeepers – and shows why it often fails the victims it is supposed to serve,” according to the New Humanitarian.

The failed investigation into the allegations in the Central African Republic cost the U.N. more than $480,000.

Inadequate storage ruined DNA samples that had been collected to connect victims to their alleged perpetrators, according to the report.

“Most were already rotten. It is therefore hardly surprising that positive results could not (be) obtained,” the report said of the DNA samples. Many of the samples were taken from March to May 2016, and then they were stored in Bangui for months and were not delivered to the Nairobi office for the investigation until April 2017.

The report noted the importance of the role of DNA evidence in linking a possible perpetrator to a victim. “It was noted that none of the DNA samples collected was deemed usable by labs retained for that purpose,” said the report.

The lack of action on the investigation left victims feeling abandoned and without any recourse for the sexual exploitation they say they experienced at the hands of the Burundi and Gabonese troops, according to the New Humanitarian who spoke with victims.

But Ben Swanson, the director of the U.N. investigations division in the Office of Internal Oversight Services, the U.N.’s internal watchdog known as OIOS, said OIOS “did all of the DNA swabbing in Dekoa, when and where it was relevant, and we also followed up with missions to Gabon and Burundi to swab soldiers identified as fathers.”

In December 2016, the U.N. announced that OIOS had completed an internal investigation into allegations of sexual abuse against Burundian and Gabonese peacekeepers deployed in Dekoa in Kemo prefecture, Central African Republic.

OIOS interviewed 139 people, investigated their accounts and identified 16 possible perpetrators from Gabon and 25 from Burundi through photos and corroborating evidence, the U.N. said. Of the 139 victims, 25 were minors who asserted that they were sexually assaulted and eight paternity claims were filed, the U.N. said.

“We took swabs from around 20 victims and their children,” Swanson said, and the laboratory used to do the DNA testing was unable to extract any DNA samples from two or three of the swabs which may have been the result of operator error, poor storage techniques or the laboratory.

“Because the victims were adamant as to the identity of the fathers and we didn’t want to miss any evidential opportunities we repeated the entire exercise,” Swanson said.

“I can tell you that the lab was able to say ‘with a high degree of confidence’ that the soldiers identified were not the fathers of the children they were alleged to be,” he said.

The U.N. relies on the country contributing peacekeepers to deal with allegations of misconduct and to determine possible punishments. According to the report, Burundi investigators who went to conduct interviews in 2016 did not have the necessary skills and experience. The interviews seemed to look to discredit witnesses, it said, and interpreters also lacked the needed skills.

The U.N. has vowed to end impunity for sexual misconduct and to work with countries supplying peacekeepers to do more to combat the abuses.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has taken strides to improve the world body’s response to sexual abuse and exploitation, appointing the U.N.’s first-ever victims’ rights advocate, banning alcohol and fraternization for troops, convening high-level meetings on sexual abuse and exploitation and establishing a trust fund for victims.

The U.N. received 259 allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse last year, according to The New Humanitarian, a major increase from the two previous years.

WeWork’s Ex-CEO Faces Pregnancy Discrimination Complaint

(NEW YORK) — A former top aide to WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann is accusing him and other executives of discriminating against her for becoming pregnant.

Medina Bardhi says in a federal complaint filed Thursday that she was demoted, derided for going on leave, and ultimately fired for raising concerns.

Bardhi, who was Neumann’s chief of staff until she was fired in October, is seeking class action status against New York-based WeWork, claiming a pattern of discrimination against women at the office-sharing company.

The complaint, filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, describes a culture at WeWork in which women were paid less than men, demeaned for getting pregnant and subjected to sexually offensive conduct at alcohol-fueled company events.

“Our hope is that this class action complaint will send a loud and clear message to WeWork and other startups that pregnant women cannot be forced out of their jobs, that women must be paid fairly and afforded equal opportunities,” said Douglas Wigdor, Bardhi’s attorney.

WeWork spokeswoman Gwen Rocco said the company will “vigorously defend itself against” Bardhi’s claim.

“We have zero tolerance for discrimination of any kind. We are committed to moving the company forward and building a company and culture that our employees can be proud of,” Rocco said.

The complaint raises a new challenge for WeWork as it tries to regain the confidence of its employees, investors and customers in the wake of a failed attempt to enter the stock market. Neumann stepped down as CEO on Sept. 24 and gave up his controlling shares of the company in a financing deal with Japanese conglomerate Softbank that saved WeWork from possible bankruptcy.

Bardhi said the discriminatory behavior began with her first job interview at WeWork in 2013, when Neumann “unlawfully and intrusively” asked her if she planned to get married and become pregnant. The complaint claimed that Neumann routinely asked that question of female job candidates.

When she became pregnant in March 2016, Bardhi said she waited only a month to tell Neumann because she felt she could no longer accompany him on flights on private jets where he and other WeWork employees smoked marijuana.

She said Neumann later made derogatory comments about her in front of other WeWork employees, including some who were pregnant. At one point, Neumann told her, “I hope you are going to have fun on your vacation while we’re here working.”

The complaint cited another top executive, WeWork Chief Legal Officer Jennifer Berrent, saying she also made derogatory comments, repeatedly referring to Bardhi’s pregnancy as a “problem” that needed “to be fixed.”

Bardhi claimed that Neumann told her soon after learning she was pregnant that he was looking to replace her as chief of staff and demote her to another role. The complaint said the role went to a man who was offered a salary more than double what Bardhi had been earning.

Bardhi was eventually reinstalled as chief of staff. But she claims she faced similar problems when she became pregnant again in February 2018, getting sidelined and replaced by a man who was underqualified for the job.

Despite never receiving clarity about her role after returning from leave, Neumann eventually sought her help with WeWork’s impending initial public offering of stock, according to the complaint. At one point, in a car leaving a bank’s offices, Neumann told her in front of another employee, “I hope you enjoyed your vacation.”

Bardhi described raising complaints with multiple officials, including WeWork’s general counsel. She said she was fired on Oct. 2 in a phone call after being told there was no role for her following Neumann’s departure.

Two other women have filed lawsuits against WeWork in New York state. One employee, Lisa Bridges, said she coordinated a study that found gender-based pay gaps at the company, but when she presented her findings, Berrent responded by saying that men take more risks than women. Another, Ruby Anaya, alleged she was sexually assaulted by male employees at company events.

North Korea Says It Test-Fired a New ‘Super Large’ Multiple Rocket Launcher

(SEOUL, South Korea) — North Korea confirmed Friday it conducted its third test-firing of a new “super-large” multiple rocket launcher that it says expands its ability to destroy enemy targets in surprise attacks, as it continues to expand its military capabilities while pressuring Washington over a standstill in nuclear negotiations.

Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency described the tests a day after the South Korean and Japanese militaries said they detected two projectiles launched from an area near the North Korean capital traveling more than 200 miles cross-country before landing in waters off the North’s eastern coast.

Experts say the North could continue to ramp up weapons demonstrations ahead of an end-of-year deadline set by leader Kim Jong Un for the U.S. to offer mutually acceptable terms to salvage a fragile diplomacy strained by disagreements over exchanging sanctions relief and disarmament steps.

Thursday’s launches followed statements of displeasure by top North Korean officials over the slow pace of nuclear negotiations with the United States and demands that the administration of President Donald Trump ease crippling sanctions and pressure on their country.

KCNA said Kim expressed satisfaction over what North Korea described as a successful test of its new rocket artillery system, but it wasn’t clear whether the leader observed the launches on site. The North previously tested the system in August and September. The latest test verified the “perfection” of the system’s continuous firing ability that allegedly allows it to “totally destroy” enemy targets with “super power,” the agency said.

Earlier this month, the North test-fired an underwater-launched ballistic missile for the first time in three years. The North has also tested new short-range ballistic missile and rocket artillery systems in recent months in what experts saw as an effort to use the standstill in talks to advance its military capabilities while increasing its bargaining power.

Negotiations have faltered after the collapse of a February summit between Kim and Trump in Hanoi, Vietnam, where the U.S. rejected North Korean demands for broad sanctions relief in exchange for piecemeal progress toward partially surrendering its nuclear capabilities.

The North responded with intensified testing activity while Kim said he would “wait with patience until the end of the year for the United States to come up with a courageous decision.”

Washington and Pyongyang resumed working-level discussion in Sweden earlier this month, but the meeting broke down amid acrimony with the North Koreans calling the talks “sickening” and accusing the Americans of maintaining an “old stance and attitude.”

Hundreds of Koalas Feared Dead in Australian Wildfires

(CANBERRA, Australia) — Conservationists fear hundreds of koalas have perished in wildfires that have razed prime habitat on Australia’s east coast.

Port Macquarie Koala Hospital President Sue Ashton said she hoped wildlife carers would be allowed to begin their search of the fire zone for survivors on Thursday. The fire was started by a lightning strike on Friday in a forest in New South Wales state, 300 kilometers (190 miles) north of Sydney, and has since burnt 2,000 hectares (4,900 acres).

Two-thirds of that area was koala habitat, Ashton said.

“If we look at a 50% survival rate, that’s around about 350 koalas and that’s absolutely devastating,” Ashton said of the death toll. “We’re hoping it’s not as bad as that, but because of the intensity of the fire and the way koalas behave during fire, we’re not holding out too much hope,” she added.

Koalas climb high into trees during wildfires and survive if the fire front passes quickly below them.

The koala colony was particularly heathy and genetically diverse, Ashton said. Koalas prefer coastal forests, which are being cleared for suburban expansion. Increasingly isolated koala colonies have become inbred and diseased.

Australia’s wildfire season has made a particularly early and devastating start in the southern hemisphere spring due to above-average temperatures and below-average rainfall that has left much of the east coast in drought.

Yes, Mitt Romney’s Grandson’s Dressed as ‘Pierre Delecto’ For Halloween

Political enthusiasts had some scary-good Halloween costumes this year, but the most “delectable” among them might have been that of Sen. Mitt Romney’s grandson, Thomas, who dressed as Pierre Delecto.

Romney’s eldest son, Tagg Romney, took to Twitter Thursday morning with pictures of his son Thomas’s version of the look. The costume included a tuxedo, beret, mustache, sunglasses and a name-tag that read “Pierre Delecto” directly underneath a crossed-out “Mitt Romney.”

Thomas as #PierreDelecto and Joe as Nacho. World beware. pic.twitter.com/3SstDeyvwb

— Tagg Romney (@tromney) October 31, 2019

Pierre Delecto was the name of the ‘private’ Twitter account Romney had, for years, been using for social media snooping and self-promotion, before it was recently uncovered by Slate reporter Ashley Feinberg. After the Utah Republican dropped hints about the account’s existence to the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, Feinberg was able to identify the alias by parsing through the accounts Delecto followed (specifically, Romney family members with only a small Twitter presence themselves), as well as how often the account said nice things about Romney.

Sen. Romney confirmed the account was his soon after Slate‘s exposé. “C’est moi,” he told Coppins.

He seemed to find the costume as funny as the rest of the Internet did. “Out of the will!” Romney tweeted about Thomas in jest.

Great costumes! Thomas, #OutOfTheWill! https://t.co/ta6aJqfYq3

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) October 31, 2019

As President Donald Trump is ensnared in a formal impeachment inquiry, and a record number of Democrats seek their party’s nomination for the 2020 presidential election, there were plenty of costume alternatives for those outside of the Romney bloodline: a Sen. Kamala Harris campaign staffer dressed as her 2020 rival Sen. Cory Booker, many donned whistles to represent the government employee who filed an anonymous complaint that jumpstarted Trump’s impeachment woes, and one Pete Buttigieg staffer used a red peacoat and gavel to impersonate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

So nice of you to stop by our HQ for Halloween, @CoryBooker! pic.twitter.com/Xu1dpkqAoo

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) October 31, 2019

North Korea Fires 2 Missiles After Complaining About Stalled Nuclear Talks

(SEOUL, South Korea) — North Korea on Thursday fired two projectiles into its eastern sea, an apparent resumption of weapons tests aimed at ramping up pressure on Washington over a stalemate in nuclear negotiations, according to officials in South Korea and Japan.

The launches followed statements of displeasure by top North Korean officials over the slow pace of nuclear negotiations with the United States and demands that the Trump administration ease crippling sanctions and pressure on their country.

Analysts say the North could dial up its weapons demonstrations in the coming weeks as it approaches an end-of-year deadline set by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for Washington to offer mutually acceptable terms for a deal to salvage the nuclear diplomacy.

Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the weapons were fired from an area near the North Korean capital of Pyongyang and flew about 370 kilometers (230 miles) across the country at a height of up to 90 kilometers (56 miles) before landing off its eastern coast. The Joint Chiefs of Staff urged the North to “immediately stop actions that do not help efforts to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula.”

The military didn’t immediately confirm whether the weapons were ballistic missiles or rocket artillery. The office of South Korean President Moon Jae-in described them as short-range projectiles.

Japan’s Defense Ministry said it believed they were ballistic missiles, but they did not reach Japan’s territorial waters or its exclusive economic zone. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe condemned the launches “as an act that threatens the peace and safety of Japan and the region.”

Seoul’s presidential Blue House said National Security Director Chung Eui-yong presided over an emergency National Security Council meeting where officials expressed “strong concern” and discussed North Korea’s possible intent.

Senior North Korean official Kim Yong Chol on Sunday said his country was running out of patience with the United States over what it described as unilateral disarmament demands, and warned that a close personal relationship between the leaders alone would not be enough to prevent nuclear diplomacy from derailing. He said the administration of President Donald Trump would be “seriously mistaken” if it ignores Kim Jong Un’s end-of-year deadline.

In a speech in Azerbaijan earlier this week, Choe Ryong Hae, considered the second-most powerful official in North Korea, said the deadlocked nuclear negotiations had put the Korean Peninsula at a crossroads between peace and a “touch-and-go crisis,” and demanded that the United States remove its “hostile” policy of sanctions and pressure on the North.

Nam Sung-wook, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Korea University, said more North Korean weapons displays are likely. There’s a possibility that the North will fire some of its powerful midrange missiles over Japan, like it did during a provocative run in weapons tests in 2017, he said.

“North Korea is investing all its strength in a hard-line position against Washington and Seoul,” said Nam, a former president of the Institute for National Security Strategy, a think tank affiliated with South Korea’s main spy agency. “If its missiles fly over Japan, the international impact would be huge because the United States and Japan would find it difficult to let it go,” he said.

Earlier this month, the North test-fired an underwater-launched ballistic missile for the first time in three years. The North has also tested new short-range ballistic missile and rocket artillery systems in recent months in what experts saw as an effort to use the standstill in talks to advance its military capabilities while increasing its bargaining power.

Negotiations have faltered after the collapse of a February summit between Kim Jong Un and Trump in Hanoi, Vietnam, where the U.S. rejected North Korean demands for broad sanctions relief in exchange for piecemeal progress toward partially surrendering its nuclear capabilities.

The North responded with intensified testing activity while Kim said he would “wait with patience until the end of the year for the United States to come up with a courageous decision.”

Washington and Pyongyang resumed working-level discussion in Sweden earlier this month, but the meeting broke down amid acrimony with the North Koreans calling the talks “sickening” and accusing the Americans of maintaining an “old stance and attitude.”

After the breakdown in Sweden, North Korea released a series of photos showing Kim riding a white horse to a snow-covered Mount Paektu, a volcano considered sacred by North Koreans and a place where the leader has often visited before making key decisions. Speaking to officials near the mountain, Kim vowed to overcome U.S.-led sanctions that he said had both pained and infuriated his people.

News of the launches came after South Korea said earlier Thursday that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sent a message of condolence to Moon over his mother’s recent death. The two leaders met three times last year and struck a set of deals aimed at easing animosities and boosting exchanges. But in recent months, North Korea has drastically reduced its engagement and diplomatic activities with South Korea, after Seoul failed to resume lucrative joint economic projects held back by U.S.-led U.N. sanctions.

Last week, Kim ordered the destruction of South Korean-built facilities at a long-shuttered joint tourist project at North Korea’s scenic Diamond Mountain resort. South Korea later proposed talks but North Korea has insisted they exchange documents to work out details of Kim’s order.

“The North Korean leader does not ride a white horse to the top of Paektu mountain because he is satisfied with the status quo,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.

“Kim’s year-end threat is as much a deadline for economic progress as it is a diplomatic ultimatum,” Easley said. “This is why Pyongyang is increasing pressure on Seoul and Washington in the form of announcing plans to bulldoze even stalled inter-Korean projects, such as at Mount Kumgang, while continuing provocative missile tests.”

___

Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

Why Fiat Chrysler Is Merging With French Carmaker Peugeot

Rival carmakers PSA Group and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles unveiled a plan to combine, pooling resources to confront an expensive new era of trade tariffs, emissions rules and electrification.

Shareholders of each company will own 50% of the combined entity, to be listed in Paris, Milan and New York. Investors in Fiat will receive a dividend of 5.5 billion euros ($6.1 billion) and its robotics arm Comau, while France’s PSA plans to distribute its 46% stake in auto-parts maker Faurecia SE. Cost savings from the deal without plant closures are projected to be about 3.7 billion euros.

PSA shares dropped as much as 9.1% in Paris, the most in more than three years, while Fiat rose as much as 10% in Milan.

The boards of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot and Citroen-maker PSA agreed to work toward a binding agreement in the coming weeks, they said Thursday in a joint statement. The accord would create the fourth-largest automaker with a combined market value of about $50 billion.

A merger of Fiat Chrysler and PSA, the No. 2 for car sales in Europe, would create a regional powerhouse to challenge Volkswagen AG. The tie-up would bring together the billionaire Agnelli clan in Italy and the Peugeot family of France as consolidation sweeps through an industry trying to finance major transformation.

The 11-member board of the new Netherlands-based group will have six members from PSA including Chief Executive Officer Carlos Tavares, who will remain CEO for five years, and five from Fiat Chrysler. Fiat Chairman John Elkann stays in that role. It’s unclear what role Fiat CEO Mike Manley will hold.

The announcement comes several months after Fiat Chrysler and PSA explored a partnership on pooling investment to build cars in Europe, and following the collapse in June of negotiations between Fiat and French competitor Renault SA.

“It’s not as good a partner as Renault, but any partnership is good,” said Felipe Munoz-Vieira, an analyst with Jato Dynamics in Turin. Fiat Chrysler “is not facing very good times, and it seems it’s getting worse as the time passes.”

Both PSA and Fiat Chrysler lag on investments in electrification and neither has a strong presence in China, but a combination could help them grow in the lucrative commercial vehicle market in Europe, Munoz said. Fiat Chrysler, which reports third-quarter earnings on Thursday, is suffering in Europe with an aging Jeep lineup and lack of SUVs under the Fiat brand, he said.

Automakers face tremendous pressure to combine to help pay for platform development, manufacturing and purchasing as they battle through trade wars, a global slowdown and an expensive shift toward electrification and autonomous driving. Producers face the additional burden in Europe of new rules on emissions.

Against this backdrop, the pace of dealmaking has picked up. Volkswagen in July said it will work with Ford Motor Co. on electric and self-driving car technology, while Toyota Motor Corp. is strengthening ties with partners such as Subaru Corp. and China’s BYD Co. The Indian conglomerate that owns Jaguar Land Rover has said it’s open to finding partners for the British automaker but isn’t planning on selling the embattled unit.

Dismal car sales have also added to the mix. Volkswagen on Wednesday lowered its outlook for vehicle deliveries this year due to a faster-than-expected decline in auto markets.

France is one of the biggest shareholders of PSA, whose brands also include Opel and Vauxhall, and the government has signaled support for a deal, while warning it would scrutinize the jobs impact and governance structure of the new company, as well as its commitment to build a European battery-maker.

“The operation responds to a need in the auto industry for consolidation to face the challenges of the future,” French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said in a statement Thursday.

PSA had been floated as a logical merger partner with Fiat, because of their complementary product and geographic fit, and the two sides discussed partnership possibilities this year. However, the Italian-American carmaker instead pursued a deal with Renault.

Those talks fell apart in June when Elkann, who also heads Fiat Chrysler’s largest shareholder, Exor NV, walked away amid opposition from the French government and a lack of support from Renault’s Japanese alliance partner Nissan Motor Co.

Tavares has sought to re-establish Peugeot’s foothold in the U.S., a market it exited in 1991. He set plans earlier this year for a return, with shipments starting from Europe or China in 2026.

Fiat has sought to secure its future with a larger partner for several years, dating back to late CEO Sergio Marchionne’s failed courtship of General Motors Co. After being rebuffed by GM in 2015, rumors of talks with other automakers have swirled with varying intensity.

Why Fiat Chrysler Is Merging With French Carmaker Peugeot

Rival carmakers PSA Group and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles unveiled a plan to combine, pooling resources to confront an expensive new era of trade tariffs, emissions rules and electrification.

Shareholders of each company will own 50% of the combined entity, to be listed in Paris, Milan and New York. Investors in Fiat will receive a dividend of 5.5 billion euros ($6.1 billion) and its robotics arm Comau, while France’s PSA plans to distribute its 46% stake in auto-parts maker Faurecia SE. Cost savings from the deal without plant closures are projected to be about 3.7 billion euros.

PSA shares dropped as much as 9.1% in Paris, the most in more than three years, while Fiat rose as much as 10% in Milan.

The boards of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot and Citroen-maker PSA agreed to work toward a binding agreement in the coming weeks, they said Thursday in a joint statement. The accord would create the fourth-largest automaker with a combined market value of about $50 billion.

A merger of Fiat Chrysler and PSA, the No. 2 for car sales in Europe, would create a regional powerhouse to challenge Volkswagen AG. The tie-up would bring together the billionaire Agnelli clan in Italy and the Peugeot family of France as consolidation sweeps through an industry trying to finance major transformation.

The 11-member board of the new Netherlands-based group will have six members from PSA including Chief Executive Officer Carlos Tavares, who will remain CEO for five years, and five from Fiat Chrysler. Fiat Chairman John Elkann stays in that role. It’s unclear what role Fiat CEO Mike Manley will hold.

The announcement comes several months after Fiat Chrysler and PSA explored a partnership on pooling investment to build cars in Europe, and following the collapse in June of negotiations between Fiat and French competitor Renault SA.

“It’s not as good a partner as Renault, but any partnership is good,” said Felipe Munoz-Vieira, an analyst with Jato Dynamics in Turin. Fiat Chrysler “is not facing very good times, and it seems it’s getting worse as the time passes.”

Both PSA and Fiat Chrysler lag on investments in electrification and neither has a strong presence in China, but a combination could help them grow in the lucrative commercial vehicle market in Europe, Munoz said. Fiat Chrysler, which reports third-quarter earnings on Thursday, is suffering in Europe with an aging Jeep lineup and lack of SUVs under the Fiat brand, he said.

Automakers face tremendous pressure to combine to help pay for platform development, manufacturing and purchasing as they battle through trade wars, a global slowdown and an expensive shift toward electrification and autonomous driving. Producers face the additional burden in Europe of new rules on emissions.

Against this backdrop, the pace of dealmaking has picked up. Volkswagen in July said it will work with Ford Motor Co. on electric and self-driving car technology, while Toyota Motor Corp. is strengthening ties with partners such as Subaru Corp. and China’s BYD Co. The Indian conglomerate that owns Jaguar Land Rover has said it’s open to finding partners for the British automaker but isn’t planning on selling the embattled unit.

Dismal car sales have also added to the mix. Volkswagen on Wednesday lowered its outlook for vehicle deliveries this year due to a faster-than-expected decline in auto markets.

France is one of the biggest shareholders of PSA, whose brands also include Opel and Vauxhall, and the government has signaled support for a deal, while warning it would scrutinize the jobs impact and governance structure of the new company, as well as its commitment to build a European battery-maker.

“The operation responds to a need in the auto industry for consolidation to face the challenges of the future,” French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said in a statement Thursday.

PSA had been floated as a logical merger partner with Fiat, because of their complementary product and geographic fit, and the two sides discussed partnership possibilities this year. However, the Italian-American carmaker instead pursued a deal with Renault.

Those talks fell apart in June when Elkann, who also heads Fiat Chrysler’s largest shareholder, Exor NV, walked away amid opposition from the French government and a lack of support from Renault’s Japanese alliance partner Nissan Motor Co.

Tavares has sought to re-establish Peugeot’s foothold in the U.S., a market it exited in 1991. He set plans earlier this year for a return, with shipments starting from Europe or China in 2026.

Fiat has sought to secure its future with a larger partner for several years, dating back to late CEO Sergio Marchionne’s failed courtship of General Motors Co. After being rebuffed by GM in 2015, rumors of talks with other automakers have swirled with varying intensity.

Argentina Gambles on All-Too-Familiar Faces

It’s never a good sign when a country’s central bank tightens capital controls just hours after a national election. But when that country is Argentina, it’s not exactly surprising, either.

One in 10 Argentines today can’t find work. More than one-third are impoverished. In a country not generally known for fiscal discipline, reform-minded President Mauricio Macri had good intentions to fix the country’s finances but lacked the political support to do so. He was eventually forced to seek a major $57 billion aid package from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but that was mismanaged, aggravating the country’s already dire economic situation; just 40% of Argentines voted to re-elect him. Alberto Fernández–his leftist opponent, who received 48% of the vote–will replace him on Dec. 10. He will be accompanied by his vice-presidential running mate, former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK).

When her second presidential term ended in 2015, CFK was presiding over a country with rampant political corruption and an economic situation pointing seriously south, but one that had yet to fully develop into a crisis. She remains beloved by millions for her generous welfare policies (which the country was ultimately unable to afford). Fernández served as CFK’s chief of the Cabinet of Ministers for her first seven months in office but was always considered the more practical politician of the two. Following CFK’s presidency, they headed separate wings of their Peronist movement, refusing even to talk to each other. Then CFK approached Fernández with a deal–if he would run for the country’s presidency, she would serve as his VP, delivering the votes he needed to unseat Macri.

It was a bargain Fernández couldn’t refuse. Now comes the hard part. Fernández has two distinct challenges ahead of him; the first is the country’s looming credit crunch, which if left unaddressed would lead to its ninth sovereign-debt default. To avoid that fate, Fernández has to play ball with the IMF, an institution widely reviled in Argentina given its history of demanding austerity measures in exchange for financial lifelines, and which Fernández criticized on the campaign trail. But Fernández doesn’t have many good options. Without support from the IMF, no foreign investors would touch the country, especially now as there’s talk of trimmed repayments–a so-called haircut–on existing Argentine bonds. Macri cut public spending in order to bring the country’s finances in line with IMF demands; Fernández just vowed to increase public spending.

The second concern is the person who propelled Fernández to the presidency. CFK, who currently faces multiple charges of corruption, is one of the most divisive political figures in Argentina. While her presence on the ticket secured the presidency for Fernández, he underperformed relative to polls, which may be explained by voters’ wariness of re-electing CFK to a position of power. (Fernández was also unable to secure a majority in the lower house of parliament.) More concerning still, Kirchner has her own political base and influence network, which could complicate Fernández’s ability to govern if he doesn’t manage the relationship properly.

Fed up with the past four years of economic struggle, Argentine voters made their decision. Macri should take heart–in Argentine politics, there is such a thing as second chances. It remains to be seen what Fernández and CFK will do with theirs.

What the Death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Says About the War That Killed Him

The death of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi may not change the world. Nevertheless, how it came about says a fair amount about the world he has departed.

In the chain of events that led to the Oct. 26 demise of the ISIS leader, every link tells a story. But even as it crystallizes what the war on terrorism looks like 18 years after 9/11, al-Baghdadi’s death may mark the beginning of an uncertain new chapter.

The first link begins with the government of Iraq, which in September arrested one of al-Baghdadi’s wives and a courier. Intelligence pointed to Syria, where the CIA was already working with the Kurdish militia. Both Iraq and the Kurds are committed enemies of ISIS. Iraqis suffered tens of thousands of casualties pushing ISIS out of their country from 2014 to 2017, and Kurdish militias lost some 11,000 fighters finishing the job in Syria, where the group’s claim of a caliphate was erased.

Their involvement underscores that this is a global fight: the U.S. is not going it alone. The people actually prosecuting the war on terror are overwhelmingly local and Muslim–in Iraq and Syria, but also in Libya, Niger, Chad, Mali, Somalia, southern Yemen and much of Afghanistan, where more than 58,000 Afghan national military and police forces lost their lives through 2018. Typically the U.S. military role in these missions is restricted to half a dozen or more special-operations commandos working with local forces by providing intelligence, training and air cover. The local forces are mostly Muslim.

Kurdish fighters in Iraq and Syria continued to battle ISIS and hunted al-Baghdadi even after American forces retreated from those countries. On Oct. 6, Trump ordered U.S. troops to pull back from territory held by the Kurds, who were left alone to face an attack by Turkey. “I don’t think we could have done this without the help we got from the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds,” a U.S. official told TIME, speaking of the operation against the ISIS leader. The official quickly added that Iraq military and intelligence officers “kicked the whole thing off.”

Maxar Handout/EPA-EFE/ShutterstockThe ISIS leader had gone to ground near the Turkish border, in an area known for smugglers and al-Qaeda

Al-Baghdadi’s trail led east. He appeared to have gone to ground not near the lush Euphrates valley where ISIS fighters made their last stand in Syria–and where his fighters still mount ambushes and suicide attacks–but in Idlib province, the last large section of Syria still controlled by rebel militias, which in turn are dominated by an affiliate of al-Qaeda. That’s the next link in the war on terrorism: it’s far from over. Militant Islam may hold scant appeal to the overwhelming majority of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims (a 2015 Pew Center survey found almost no more support for ISIS in Lebanon than in Israel), but a terrorist attack does not require great numbers, and chaos gives extremism both oxygen and maneuvering room. Not by chance are ISIS, al-Qaeda and their offshoots found in the globe’s least-governed locations.

Like Syria. During its eight-year civil war, the country was a proving ground for jihadists, many drawn by the sectarian nature the conflict quickly assumed. The Damascus government of Bashar Assad is dominated by Alawites, a heterodox religious minority. Assad’s brutal answer to peaceful Arab Spring protests by Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority was answered by a range of armed groups, including extremists who dominated the rebel battlefield. ISIS was a latecomer, having begun across the desert border as al-Qaeda in Iraq. There ISIS fought the U.S. occupation while slaughtering Shi’ite Muslims and religious minorities.

Al-Baghdadi, born Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri 48 years ago in a village in central Iraq, took his nom de guerre from the capital city, where he got a Ph.D. in Quranic studies. He was swept up in arrests by U.S. forces in 2004 and, during almost a year in custody, turned his prison tent into an incubator of extremism. After release he joined the armed group he would in 2010 come to lead. All three of the leaders who preceded him, including the notorious Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, were killed by U.S. forces in tandem with the Iraqi government.

That collaboration formed the next link in the chain that led to al-Baghdadi’s death. This story is one of professional cooperation, shared goals and keeping everyone on the same page. By doctrine and training, U.S. special-operations forces work jointly with others, from the CIA to the Iraqi military and intelligence and the Syrian Kurds who dispatched agents along the routes al-Baghdadi was thought to use, tracing him to a compound near the Turkish border.

The Kurds had a man on the inside, their general Mazloum Abdi told reporters afterward. Abdi said a member of al-Baghdadi’s security detail smuggled out soiled underwear, and even a blood sample, for DNA testing that confirmed the ISIS leader’s presence. The agent also described the layout of the compound in detail, including a tunnel. (The reward for information leading the U.S. to al-Baghdadi was $25 million.) Planning began for a capture-or-kill operation carried out by the Army’s elite Delta Force and Ranger Regiment troops. The mission was named in part for Kayla Mueller, the U.S. aid worker kidnapped by ISIS in 2013 and raped by al-Baghdadi.

Al-Furqan Media/AFP/Getty ImagesAn ISIS video released in April gave the world its first glimpse of al-Baghdadi in five years

On Oct. 26, the operation went off without incident, commandos flying from Iraq in eight CH-47 Chinooks and other helicopters, breaching a high wall surrounding the compound and pursuing al-Baghdadi into the tunnel, a dead end where he detonated a suicide vest, killing the two children he’d taken with him. President Donald Trump watched the video feeds in the White House Situation Room “like a movie,” he said in an announcement the next morning.

But Trump himself had disrupted planning. His abrupt announcement that the U.S. was leaving Kurdish territory in Syria infuriated the U.S. partners in the operation. As the U.S. retreated, and the Kurds scrambled for their lives while under attack by Turkey, raid planners scrambled to coordinate logistics, air power and other military assets required for the operation against al-Baghdadi.

And so the impact of al-Baghdadi’s elimination (and the data recovered from his compound) is not the only question left looming in the aftermath of the raid.

ISIS has operated as an insurgency, a militia, a government and, perhaps most dangerously, as a movement, inspiring followers despite its astonishing brutality. “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s death–welcome and important though it may be–is not a catastrophic blow to the quality of leadership in ISIS,” says Michael Nagata, who retired in August as Army lieutenant general and strategy director from the National Counterterrorism Center. Nagata, who served in the Middle East as a special-operations commander in 2014 when the counter-ISIS campaign began, says ISIS now has a cadre of young, battle-hardened leaders who are climbing its echelons and in the terrorist group’s global network. “ISIS isn’t a crippled organization because Baghdadi’s gone,” he says. “The depth and breadth of ISIS leadership, in my judgment, is unprecedented for this type of terrorist group.”

Nor does killing al-Baghdadi reverse Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds. The decision has raised doubts even in Iraq, where the U.S. lost thousands of troops and spent $1 trillion. “The staying power of the United States is being questioned in a very, very serious way,” the President of Iraq, Barham Salih, told Axios in an interview. “And allies of the United States are worried about the dependability of the United States.”

Iraq declared that troops Trump ordered out of Syria can’t stay there, opening the question of how the U.S. will suppress an ISIS that “is stronger today than its predecessor al-Qaeda in Iraq was in 2011, when the U.S. withdrew from Iraq,” as the Institute for the Study of War wrote in a June report. “ISIS’s insurgency will grow because areas it has lost in Iraq and Syria are still neither stable nor secure.”

After Russian and Turkish forces took over territory once held by the Kurds and Americans, Trump ordered a rump U.S. force to protect nearby oil fields. The move underscored the betrayal of the Kurds and reinforced perceptions that the West cares most about resources–never a good outcome in a contest for hearts and minds. After al-Baghdadi, there can be no question such a contest matters.

“It’s good to take out the leader, but it’s not just a terrorist group–it’s an ideology as well,” says Aki Peritz, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst. “Stamping out the idea of the Islamic State will prove to be much more difficult than one successful military-intelligence operation.”

–With reporting by JOHN WALCOTT/WASHINGTON

500 Years Later, Leonardo Da Vinci Is Still a Hit—and a Headache— for the Louvre

Leonardo Da Vinci was no stranger to France. He spent his final three years in the country, dying at 67 in a Loire Valley château exactly 500 years ago. His Mona Lisa, which has hung in the Louvre Museum since the French Revolution, virtually defines Paris as a city of art treasures.

And so it is Paris–not, to the irritation of many Italians, Leonardo’s native Florence–that’s marking that anniversary by hosting the largest collection of his work ever shown. After all, the Louvre already owns five of his 15 paintings that remain. “Leonardo da Vinci,” which opened Oct. 24 and runs for four months, is a runaway hit, with more than 410,000 advance tickets sold by day five.

Walking through the dark rooms, one can see why. The nearly 120 works range from notebook sketches to spectacularly spotlit paintings, like the Benoit Madonna and St. John the Baptist, as well as infrared reflectographs, all capturing one man’s relentless inquiry into biology, architecture, mechanics, light and texture.

Staging it was not easy. The Louvre spent a decade cajoling museums, including several in the U.S., to lend their Leonardos. Even so, the celebrated Vitruvian Man drawing arrived from Venice just days before the opening after a bitter court battle in Italy over whether it was too fragile to travel. And no amount of begging could bring to Paris the Salvator Mundi painting that sold in 2017 for a record $450.3 million, reportedly to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Also absent: the Mona Lisa, which remains in its regular spot in the Louvre, where more than 30,000 people a day snake past its recessed glass case, jostling for selfies. The Louvre did not want that obsession to overwhelm its Leonardo exhibition, which requires a separate ticket and instead includes a virtual-reality Mona Lisa experience. “If the Mona Lisa was there, there would be no more exhibition,” Louis Frank, one of the exhibition’s curators, tells TIME. “It is the most venerated work in the museum.”

The Mona Lisa also, some Louvre workers say, creates a circus. In May, museum staff went on strike, saying the 10.2 million annual visitors were turning the Louvre into a “cultural Disneyland,” making their work untenable. “The Louvre is suffocating,” their union stated.

This blockbuster Leonardo exhibition will do little to ease the crush. But given that all tickets must be prebooked, it will at least be a more orderly experience, potentially drawing Parisians who typically steer clear of the overrun Louvre. “People want to see works that they know, that they recognize,” Frank says. And France, after all, is no stranger to Leonardo.

The Irishman May Seem Like a Movie About Old White Men. It’s So Much More

Even without the now almost ubiquitous modifier toxic in front of it, masculinity has become a dirty word. That’s as true in the world of film as anywhere else. White male directors–Who needs them? White male stars? Ditto. Old white male directors and stars? Let’s not even go there.

The stories of white men have been told to death. And here comes Martin Scorsese with yet another film about gangsters obsessed with guns and status, a story in which women are mostly relegated to the sidelines. The Irishman may be the last thing you want to see right now.

Yet even if The Irishman takes place almost completely in a world of men, it’s all about the limits of that world–and about how even the most thoughtless and ruthless men somehow long for women’s approval, even if they can’t, or won’t, admit it. Scorsese has never bought into facile readings of masculinity: In Taxi Driver, a loner’s fantasies of heroic vigilantism push him beyond his limits. The Wolf of Wall Street is a burlesque of American male greed. The Aviator shows us a dashing, ambitious capitalist whose eccentricities morph over time into crackpot paranoia. Scorsese’s 25th narrative feature inches into even subtler realms. The Irishman is a late-career masterwork, a picture that couldn’t have been made by a young man, or by anyone without Scorsese’s range of experience as a filmmaker. It’s an antidote to men’s insistence on their own superiority and power, and a reminder that old age, if we’re lucky enough to see it, eventually brings us all to our knees. The Irishman is about everything life can take out of a man–even one who thinks he has everything.

NetflixThe Irishman opens in limited theaters Nov. 1 before arriving on Netflix worldwide Nov. 27

Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zaillian adapted The Irishman from Charles Brandt’s 2004 potboiler I Heard You Paint Houses, about a lower-tier Mafia figure, Frank Sheeran, who claims he killed Jimmy Hoffa, the onetime Teamster president who went missing in 1975 and was finally declared dead in 1982, though his body was never found. (The book’s title refers to alleged Mafia code for discreetly approaching a man who’s willing to kill, for a price.) The picture unites three actors who have worked together before in various permutations, though never all in the same film. Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci–all in superb, layered performances–play characters whose arc spans the 1950s to the early 2000s, which means their faces, appropriately weathered in real life, required extensive digital de-aging. In their younger guises, the artificial marble smoothness of their skin is distracting at first, but you learn not to notice it. These actors, de-aged, don’t even fully look like their younger selves; their faces are semi-new creations, more like sketches made from memory than images we can fact-check by revisiting old movies.

The Irishman opens in the early 2000s, as an aged Frank, played by De Niro, begins recounting, from his nursing-home wheelchair, either the truth as it happened or a series of tall tales. He flashes back to 1975, and then further back, to the mid-1950s, when, as a delivery-truck driver, he meets Russell Bufalino (Pesci), the boss of a small but mighty Northeastern Pennsylvania crime family. Pinched and miserable, Russell commands rather than earns respect. With his creased brow and perpetual scowl, he could be a tortured gremlin out of Dante’s Inferno. He takes Frank under his wing and launches him in a new line of work: rubbing guys out.

Frank accepts these jobs with more equanimity than bluster, but they do give him power and a sense of purpose. And in the course of his work–a career packed with colorful, crooked men, most of whom end up prematurely dead–he eventually meets Hoffa (Pacino), an affable guy who thinks in big loops and speaks in even bigger gestures–the air around him vibrates with his big-boss energy. He’ll get the job done, whatever it takes, consorting with mobsters as needed.

Frank becomes Hoffa’s unofficial sometime bodyguard and a close friend: each man is welcomed into the other’s family, absorbed into whatever warmth is there. It’s not until the movie’s end that you understand how golden this time was, for both of them. If women mostly drift around the periphery of The Irishman–Hoffa’s wife Josephine is played by Welker White; Frank’s wife Irene by Stephanie Kurtzuba–they’re also the near-invisible network that keeps the men going. And the most defiant force in The Irishman, one that pits the three male characters in a stubborn and destructive triangle, is a woman, Frank’s daughter Peggy, played as a girl by Lucy Gallina and as a teenager and grown woman by Anna Paquin.

Peggy is a sensitive soul who knows what a bully her father is; she keeps her distance, and it pains him. But if Peggy despises her father, she recoils from Pesci’s Russell. With no kids of his own, Russell longs to earn her affection: in one of the movie’s most searing scenes, he presents the young Peggy with a Christmas gift–ice skates, plus a generous chunk of cash–that repulses rather than delights her. Her disdain crushes him, only reinforcing the one behavior that works for him: bullying. His life has no meaning unless he’s in control.

Hoffa, garrulous and avuncular and gruffly kind, also adores Peggy, and she loves him back, seeing him, with at least partial accuracy, as a champion of the little guy–not as the kind of man who, like Frank or Russell, might crush that guy under his boot. Paquin is wonderful here: she turns Peggy’s disgust and revulsion into a kind of bristly radiance. No wonder she’s one of the most powerful characters in the movie, albeit one with relatively few lines. Both Frank and Russell see how easily Hoffa’s charm works on her; how could they not resent it? What’s coming is a betrayal of Shakespearean proportions, and it’s a daughter’s love–or withholding of that love–that helps set off its destructive vibrations.

For the first 2½ hours of its 3½-hour runtime, The Irishman is clever and entertaining, to the point where you may think that’s all it’s going to be. But its last half hour is moving in a way that creeps up on you, and it’s then that you see what Scorsese was working toward all along: a mini-history of late–20th century America–and its machismo–as filtered through the eyes of a small-time guy who needs to believe in his own importance and capacity for decency.

The Irishman is a ghost twin to another Scorsese movie, one that also featured De Niro and Pesci: the 1990 Goodfellas. In places it has the same freewheeling jauntiness, though not nearly as much macho swagger. Guys like the ones we meet in Goodfellas live in the bluntness of their present. Today’s virile, angry energy is all that matters. Who cares what happens tomorrow?

But The Irishman, digging deep into strata of betrayal and regret and loss, is affecting in a way Goodfellas is not. An old man couldn’t have made that movie, just as a younger one couldn’t have made this one. The Irishman is all about the tomorrow that a young man with power never has to think about, a tomorrow that’s here before you know it. The world is his–until it isn’t.

Willem Dafoe Doesn’t Mind If You Don’t Like His Movies

Willem Dafoe–a man who has played a Spider-Man villain, Vincent van Gogh and Jesus–is charming even before you meet him. In advance of our interview, his publicist suggested meeting in Abingdon Square Park, a small triangle of green space in New York’s West Village. “He’s not in New York often,” she wrote in an email, “but walking around the park/city is something he truly cherishes about it.”

The idea of cherishing anything seems almost quaintly Victorian in an age when we spend more time staring at the mini computers we keep in our pockets than looking at the world around us. But having a walk in the park–or even just sitting on a bench for an hour, with the sounds of city alive all around–is just one of the ways Dafoe lives in the moment. It’s also part of the joyful discipline he brings to his work, a vocation he’s been building upon since he helped start an experimental-theater company, the Wooster Group, in the 1970s. “The job is always different, and you’re always calibrating in relationship to the people, to how you’re feeling. It’s for that reason that I’ll never tire of performing,” Dafoe says, once we’ve settled onto our park bench. “People say, ‘Don’t you want to direct?’ It’s like, Hell no! Because I’m not through with that performance stuff.”

Dafoe has some 120 film credits to his name, and the number grows every year. And if you try to draw any sort of thematic thread from one role to the next–good luck. Dafoe has worked with big-name directors, like Martin Scorsese, and on big-budget pictures, like last year’s Aquaman. But he also works frequently with cult filmmaker Abel Ferrara, and he seeks out emerging directors too: that’s how he found his way to The Lighthouse, a mystical thriller by Robert Eggers (director of the 2015 indie-horror hit The Witch), one of two movies featuring Dafoe being released this autumn. In the other, Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn–adapted from Jonathan Lethem’s innovative 1999 detective novel–he plays the retreating sibling of a big New York power broker, a figure who represents the supremacy of love over ambition. The point, maybe, is that Dafoe chooses roles based on what’s interesting to him–and what’s interesting to him is impossible to strictly define, perhaps because he’s always chasing after what he doesn’t know. He revels in helping create something new.

“If you’re going to make something, make something that doesn’t point to anything,” he says. “I’m attracted to people who are self-starters. Ferrara is a big self-starter. He gets no help, he makes his stuff out of nothing, so you really feel contact with making something. There’s no buffer. You feel that every inch of the way, and that’s a nice feeling. When you’re really in the process, you don’t worry about anything. You don’t worry about money, about the reception–any of that stuff. I don’t, as an actor. I’m happy, I got my plate full, I’m chewing away, and I feel alive.”

That helps explain why every Dafoe performance, even the smallest one, is its own discrete, original entity. When you consider how distinctive his face is, it’s astonishing that he has melted so gracefully into so many roles. His cheekbones, Adonis-like when he was younger, have been chiseled further over the years, like a rock formation that’s welcomed whatever wind and rain nature can dish out. (He’s now 64.) He’s got the gloriously imperfect teeth of a theater actor rather than a movie star. You notice them especially when he laughs, which is often. He cackled when he forced me to admit, after a few seconds of stammering, that I admired The Lighthouse more than I actively liked it: “You didn’t dig it! You didn’t dig it!”

He found this hilarious, but he also accepted my explanation of how much I enjoyed the performances: Dafoe plays a crusty, flatulent New England lighthouse keeper, breaking in newbie Robert Pattinson. He was drawn, he says, to the specificity of Eggers’ script and his vision. “On one level, it’s a very simple story: two guys, trapped in a lighthouse, they run out of food, they start to drink, they go crazy, they get aggressive with each other. The end. But it’s also about identity, it’s about belief. So I think it has deep roots. They’re articulated in the images and in the actions, which are very specific. I just find it really beautiful.”

Dafoe was born in Appleton, Wis., and moved to New York in the mid-1970s. His first film job was in Michael Cimino’s 1980 Heaven’s Gate, though Cimino fired him for laughing at a crew member’s joke on set–but if you’re going to be fired by a finicky auteur, you may as well go out chuckling. Dafoe earned a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination for one of his first breakthrough roles, in Oliver Stone’s 1986 Platoon, and has been nominated three times since: in 2001, for E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire; in 2018, for his supporting role in Sean Baker’s The Florida Project; and in 2019, for his Van Gogh, in Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate.

Dafoe has been working for so long, and has earned so much respect along the way, that he can afford to follow his heart, and his instincts. He’s happiest when he’s working with people who, like Ferrara, Eggers and Motherless Brooklyn’s Norton, need to make something, as opposed to directors who are simply being paid to do it. “There’s more possibility. They have to make this thing, they have to find something out. I think that inquiry, using film to find that thing that they need, is real contact. And I think that’s the heart of great movies.” The key word here is movies, because Dafoe has done very little work in television and confesses a preference for the former–though he’s also quick to add, “Believe me, if I could only find work in TV, I’d be right there. I’m not a snob.”

That goes without saying, especially when Dafoe admits, a beat later, that as much as he believes movies ought to be watched on the big screen, he, like just about everyone else, sometimes catches up with them on airplanes. He works so much that he spends plenty of time on them: he’ll go where the work takes him, and the locales aren’t always glamorous. The Lighthouse was filmed on a rocky peninsula in Nova Scotia, a stand-in for New England, and the shoot was demanding. “When it whipped up, the wind was so strong that someone my size could get blown into the water–off the land, into the water.”

Dafoe could be on easy street, if he wanted it. Why subject himself to weeks of shooting on a peninsula in Nova Scotia? He answers the question as you’d expect him to. “But I love it! Not because I’m a masochist–I’m not. For me it’s all about waking up, all about beating the lockstep. Not just changing things up for the sheer sake of variety. But really, do things that don’t let you decide definitively who you are and the way things are.”

So much of what we do, Dafoe says, is predicated on an idea of ourselves that we’re trying to protect. And when you’re an actor, you have a public face as well. If he’s serious about being an actor, he seems even more serious about just being a person, which is, perhaps, why he has such a particular fondness for just walking around New York, even the New York of today, which he recognizes is highly gentrified. He tells a story about a woman who recently approached him for a selfie. “She came up to me and she said, ‘Hey, how are you? We took a picture 10 years ago together and I had no hair because I had cancer. And shortly after that I started getting better, and I was free of cancer. And just recently, I found out it’s back. Can we take a picture?'”

Dafoe, of course, said yes. “To be involved with people intimately that way is strange. And it’s sort of powerful. I don’t think it’s an egotistical thing. You just feel the reach of what you do. Because they don’t know me–it’s not about me. But that woman is a stranger that I have a relationship to. I don’t want to overstate that–but it’s interesting, no?” It couldn’t have happened if Dafoe hadn’t been walking around, present in all ways, cherishing a city he doesn’t get to spend enough time in.

Cynthia Erivo’s Harriet Tubman Feels Utterly Alive in Harriet

Sometimes it’s hard to conceive of awe-inspiring historical figures like abolitionist hero Harriet Tubman as living, breathing people. But a single visual cue can make a difference: a recently discovered photograph shows a younger Tubman, a contemplative, vibrant-looking woman in a stylish dress. That’s the Tubman director Kasi Lemmons brings to life in her carefully observed biographical film Harriet: it’s as if Tubman walks among us, melting away the years between her life and ours.

Cynthia Erivo plays Tubman, whom we first meet as a slave–her birth name is Araminta Ross–on a farm in Bucktown, Md., circa 1849. She’s married to a free black man and yearns for freedom herself, at least partly to escape the sinister advances of her master’s son (an oily Joe Alwyn). Araminta pulls off a daring escape, even leaping from a bridge when she finds herself cornered by the dogs and men on horseback who are quite literally hunting her. She makes her way, at great risk, to Philadelphia, building a new life for herself with the help of a sophisticated businesswoman and adviser (played, with glittering vitality, by Janelle Monáe). But the woman who now calls herself Harriet Tubman can’t forget those she left behind. She returns again and again to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, often in disguise, to guide other slaves to freedom. The dangers increase with each trip.

Lemmons–who has directed some splendid pictures over the years, among them Eve’s Bayou and The Caveman’s Valentine–is fully alive to both the danger and beauty of the landscape of the American South–even the shape of a tree, craggy and twisted or lush with leaves, could be either a warning or a welcome. Erivo shines through it all, giving us a glimpse into the mind of a steadfast woman of purpose. Her Tubman is as bold and alive as the woman staring at us from that photograph. The directness of her gaze is the ultimate challenge.

Harriet opens in theaters Nov. 1

500 Years Later, Leonardo Da Vinci Is Still a Hit—and a Headache— for the Louvre

Leonardo Da Vinci was no stranger to France. He spent his final three years in the country, dying at 67 in a Loire Valley château exactly 500 years ago. His Mona Lisa, which has hung in the Louvre Museum since the French Revolution, virtually defines Paris as a city of art treasures.

And so it is Paris–not, to the irritation of many Italians, Leonardo’s native Florence–that’s marking that anniversary by hosting the largest collection of his work ever shown. After all, the Louvre already owns five of his 15 paintings that remain. “Leonardo da Vinci,” which opened Oct. 24 and runs for four months, is a runaway hit, with more than 410,000 advance tickets sold by day five.

Walking through the dark rooms, one can see why. The nearly 120 works range from notebook sketches to spectacularly spotlit paintings, like the Benoit Madonna and St. John the Baptist, as well as infrared reflectographs, all capturing one man’s relentless inquiry into biology, architecture, mechanics, light and texture.

Staging it was not easy. The Louvre spent a decade cajoling museums, including several in the U.S., to lend their Leonardos. Even so, the celebrated Vitruvian Man drawing arrived from Venice just days before the opening after a bitter court battle in Italy over whether it was too fragile to travel. And no amount of begging could bring to Paris the Salvator Mundi painting that sold in 2017 for a record $450.3 million, reportedly to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Also absent: the Mona Lisa, which remains in its regular spot in the Louvre, where more than 30,000 people a day snake past its recessed glass case, jostling for selfies. The Louvre did not want that obsession to overwhelm its Leonardo exhibition, which requires a separate ticket and instead includes a virtual-reality Mona Lisa experience. “If the Mona Lisa was there, there would be no more exhibition,” Louis Frank, one of the exhibition’s curators, tells TIME. “It is the most venerated work in the museum.”

The Mona Lisa also, some Louvre workers say, creates a circus. In May, museum staff went on strike, saying the 10.2 million annual visitors were turning the Louvre into a “cultural Disneyland,” making their work untenable. “The Louvre is suffocating,” their union stated.

This blockbuster Leonardo exhibition will do little to ease the crush. But given that all tickets must be prebooked, it will at least be a more orderly experience, potentially drawing Parisians who typically steer clear of the overrun Louvre. “People want to see works that they know, that they recognize,” Frank says. And France, after all, is no stranger to Leonardo.