U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday the United States will ensure Israel’s military advantage in the Middle East under any potential U.S. arms deals with the United Arab Emirates.“The United States has a legal requirement with respect to qualitative military edge. We will continue to honor that,” said Pompeo after his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.“But we have a 20-plus year security relationship with the United Arab Emirates as well, where we have provided them with technical assistance and military assistance,” he added.The top U.S. diplomat’s trip to the Middle East comes after Washington helped broker the Israel-UAE deal earlier this month, a pact that Netanyahu said heralds a new era for the region. President Mahmoud Abbas gestures during a meeting with the Palestinian leadership to discuss the United Arab Emirates’ deal with Israel to normalize relations, in Ramallah on Aug. 18, 2020.But Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said the deal is a “betrayal” of Palestinians. The Israel-UAE deal is seen as breaking a tradition among most Arab countries not to make peace with Israel until Israel and the Palestinians make peace.Pompeo is also traveling to Bahrain, UAE and Sudan from August 23-28, with Iran, regional security issues, and “establishing and deepening Israel’s relationships in the region” high on the agenda.The U.S. and Israel are hopeful that other Arab nations will follow the UAE in normalizing relations with Israel.“We discussed this and I hope we’ll have good news in the future, maybe in the near future,” said Netanyahu on Monday.Bahrain and Oman are seen as the next Gulf countries to establish diplomatic ties with Israel.Monday, British Foreign Minister Dominic Raab renewed a call for a dialogue between governments of Israel and the Palestinian Authority.”Israel’s suspension of annexation is an essential step towards a more peaceful Middle East. It is important to build on this new dynamic, and ultimately only the government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority can negotiate the two state solution required to secure lasting peace,” said Raab in a statement.Raab met with Pompeo on Monday in Jerusalem and is set to meet with Netanyahu and Abbas this week.Netanyahu has praised the Trump administration for its efforts to initiate a return of the international sanctions against Iran that were lifted under the 2015 agreement restricting the country’s nuclear program.   The United States withdrew from the agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and other signatories, including Britain, France and Germany, said because the U.S. walked away they could not support its sanctions action.  
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Kellyanne Conway, a long-serving advisor to President Donald Trump known for sparring with reporters, announced Sunday she will step down to focus on her family.
 
Conway, 53, has been at Trump’s side since day one, managing his 2016 campaign that catapulted the reality TV star into the world’s most powerful office.
 
But the past four years of singular loyalty to Trump, including defending him on TV and with informal “gaggles” with the press, have taken a toll on the combative spin doctor who coined the phrase “alternative facts.”
 
While she made a name for herself as one of Trump’s sharpest defenders, her husband, prominent Washington lawyer George Conway, is a strident critic of the president, repeatedly and loudly questioning his mental fitness for office.
 
“I will be transitioning from the White House at the end of this month,” she said in a statement.
 
“George is also making changes. We disagree about plenty but we are united on what matters most: the kids.”
 
She said their four children would be starting the new academic year remotely.
 
“As millions of parents nationwide know, kids ‘doing school from home’ requires a level of attention and vigilance that is as unusual as these times,” she said.
 
“For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama.”
 
Her announcement came a day after her 15-year-old daughter Claudia tweeted that she was “devastated” that her mother would speak at the Republican convention, and pledged to seek legal emancipation “due to years of childhood trauma and abuse.”
 ‘Alternative facts’
 
Separately, George Conway said he would be stepping back from the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans he co-founded, and taking a break from Twitter, which he frequently used to assail the president.
 
The dislike was mutual, with Trump calling him the “husband from hell.”
 
Kellyanne Conway came to prominence just days after Trump took office for coining the term “alternative facts” while defending the debunked White House claim that the 45th president’s inauguration crowd was larger than Obama’s.
 
In 2017 she referred to a non-existent terrorist attack, “the Bowling Green massacre,” to defend Trump’s immigration ban.
 
During Trump’s term she was both famous and notorious for sparring with the media, often by finding a way to change the topic, turn the question back on the reporter, or merely complain.
 
She did all of it with a flamboyant fashion sense — snake-skin pattern dress one day, a bright red one the next — standing out in an often-gray city.
 
Her work led her at one point to be depicted on the long-running U.S. comedy show Saturday Night Live as “Kellywise”, a spoof of the murderous, sewer-dwelling clown from horror novel and film “It”.
 
A lawyer and pollster by training, she also stuck out her White House role while a parade of other aides was forced out, quit or left in humiliation.
 
In her statement, Conway described her time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as “heady” and “humbling” and said her departure was her call.
 
“This is completely my choice and my voice. In time, I will announce future plans.”
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A 63-day strike at Bath Iron Works — against the backdrop of a pandemic in an election year — came to an end Sunday with shipbuilders voting to return to their jobs producing warships for the United States Navy. With the approval of a three-year contract, the 4,300 production workers represented by Machinists Local S6 will begin returning to work on Monday. After falling behind schedule, Bath Iron Works is eager to get caught up on production of destroyers as the U.S. Navy faces growing competition from China and Russia on the high seas. The General Dynamics subsidiary was already more than six months behind schedule before the strike. “We are pleased to welcome back our valued manufacturing employees and get back to the important work of building ships on schedule for the U.S. Navy,” Bath Iron Works said Sunday in a statement. Robert Martinez Jr., the Machinists’ international president, cast the outcome on Sunday in historic terms, saying “this fight for dignity, justice and good Maine jobs will go down in the history books of the Machinists Union.” The shipyard on the Kennebec River is one of the Navy’s largest, and it’s also a major employer in the state with 6,800 workers. The stakes were high for both a company that feared being priced out of competition for Navy contracts and a highly skilled workforce that didn’t want to give up ground to subcontractors. The test of wills ultimately ended with help from a federal mediator. Shipbuilders represented by Machinists Local S6 got most of what they wanted when it came to work rules and maintaining the status quo for hiring of subcontractors, along with the previous proposal’s annual pay raises of 3% for three years. The company got streamlined rules for hiring subcontracting, and a commitment to work together to get back on track. Because of the pandemic, voting on the contract’s approval — unanimously endorsed by the union negotiating committee — took place online and by telephone. Voting began Friday and ending at noon Sunday. The vote was 87% in favor of the contract among those who voted, said Jay Waldeigh, a district union official. “Now that we successfully protected our contract language with respect to subcontracting and seniority, we need to get back to work,” said Local S6 President Chris Wiers. The shipyard builds the workhorse of the Navy fleet, destroyers that have the ability to provide air defense while simultaneously waging war against submarines and surface warships. Destroyers are also one of the few types of warships equipped to withstand a chemical attack. The Navy wants to increase the fleet’s size — something President Donald Trump supports — and Bath Iron Works has said it needs to get back on schedule and lower costs to remain competitive on those contracts. Going into negotiations, the shipyard’s production workers were already angry over past concessions that ultimately still failed to yield contracts on Coast Guard cutters and a new class of Navy frigates. The pandemic in which they were required to remain on the job only added to their feeling that the company didn’t care about them — deemed essential by the Navy, the shipyard continued production despite a union request to shut down for two weeks. Workers were determined enough to strike, despite the loss of company-paid insurance as the coronavirus raged around the country. A giant inflatable, cigar-smoking pig outside the union hall took aim at corporate greed as workers fumed over the hiring of “scab” workers and political leaders got involved. It’s a far cry from the way things were in the past. The strike was the first in 20 years at Bath Iron Works. There was enough trust between management and the union in 1994 that a contract was approved allowing cross-training of workers under a formula called a “High Performance Work Organization.” Then-President Bill Clinton visited the shipyard to praise the collaboration. The company hopes that mediated discussions between the union and the company will help get the relationship back on track. But it’s going to take time. Levi Benner, a shipfitter, said there are hard feelings because management routinely rejects workers’ ideas for improvements. “It’s going to be hard to restore trust. We know what we’re doing. We’ve been building ships for years and years. These guys are geeks. They know their graphs and pie charts, but they don’t know how to build ships,” he said Sunday. In the end, workers and the shipyard must learn how to work together if the company is to successfully compete for contracts against lower-cost competitors, said Loren Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute. “Both sides need to understand that their best chance for having a future is to get along with each other,” he said. “The American landscape is littered with the debris of destroyed industries. Most of them made a good product but they’re still gone.” 
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A federal judge on Sunday ordered a stay in President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign’s lawsuit seeking to ban drop boxes and other changes to Pennsylvania’s mail-balloting procedures.The Nov. 3 election promises to be the nation’s largest test of voting by mail and the two major parties are locked in numerous lawsuits that will shape how millions of Americans vote this autumn.The Republican president has repeatedly and without evidence said that an increase in mail-in ballots would lead to a surge in fraud, although Americans have long voted by mail.Drop boxes have taken on new urgency after cost-cutting measures at the U.S. Postal Service slowed mail delivery nationwide.In Connecticut, Secretary of State Denise Merrill is recommending that voters return their ballots via drop box rather than through the mail for the November election, after receiving reports that some ballots mailed a week before the state’s Aug. 11 nominating contests arrived too late to be counted.Three-quarters of ballots in that August primary were cast absentee, she said, up from roughly 4% in prior years. Merrill, a Democrat, said the state’s 200 newly installed drop boxes had proven a safe and popular option.”I do not understand why people think they’re such a problem,” Merrill said. “They’re more secure than mailboxes.”Democratic Governor Tom Wolf has defended Pennsylvania’s use of drop boxes, arguing they are legal and essential, particularly in the age of the coronavirus.Wolf’s state, which Trump won by less than 1 percentage point in 2016, is considered essential to his reelection effort.J. Nicholas Ranjan, U.S district judge for western Pennsylvania appointed by Trump, said the federal case brought by the Trump campaign would not move forward until similar lawsuits in state courts are completed or unless they are delayed.Justin Clark, Trump’s deputy campaign manager, said the judge’s decision recognized that the issue touched on both state and constitutional issues.”The federal court is simply going to reserve its judgment on this in the hopes that the state court will resolve these serious issues and guarantee that every Pennsylvanian has their vote counted—once,” Clark said.The Trump campaign is seeking to ban ballot drop boxes, which were deployed in the state’s most recent primary and that allow voters to submit absentee ballots and bypass the U.S. Postal Service.The campaign argues the drop boxes were not explicitly authorized in a bipartisan bill passed by the state legislature last year that expanded the state’s mail-balloting procedures.The suit also wants the residency requirement for poll watchers lifted, so that any Pennsylvania voter could serve in that function at any polling location in the state.“The Court will apply the brakes to this lawsuit and allow the Pennsylvania state courts to weigh in and interpret the state statutes that undergird Plaintiffs’ federal-constitutional claims,” Ranjan said.The Trump campaign says the ballot drop box invites fraud. The federal judge asked the campaign to provide evidence of actual fraud, but the campaign declined, arguing it did not have to do so in order to win the case.
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