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President Xi Jinping ended term limits on China's leaders in 2018. You don't even have to mention Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia or any other authoritarian government to see how, all over the world, leaders left and right wing just hold on to power

Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan took power as prime minister in 2003 — was elected president in 2014, then established an "executive presidency" in 2017. He has suppressed a free press and arrested political opponents and academics.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants the Israeli parliament to give him immunity from prosecution on bribery and fraud before Israel's next elections in March.

This week, there may have been a message in all the American messiness.

Elections count.

Even an imperfect democracy can give dissident voices the chance to be heard and keep open chances for change.

The ban will mean that any activities or meetings by the group could lead to fines or imprisonment, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said.

Tensions between France and Turkey also intensified recently after French President Emmanuel Macron's pledge to defend secular values and fight radical Islam.

It came after French teacher Samuel Paty was murdered after showing his students controversial images of the Prophet Muhammad.

I asked Ornstein, not prone to histrionics, how real the threat to American democracy is, at 67 days from the election. “If we are not at Defcon 1, we are pretty close,” he said, referring to the label used by the United States armed forces for the highest level of threat.

Europeans know how this goes. Viktor Orban, the rightist Hungarian prime minister, has established a template for the authoritarian system Trump would pursue if re-elected: neutralize an independent judiciary, demonize immigrants, claim the “people’s will” overrides constitutional checks and balances, curtail a free media, exalt a mythologized national heroism, and ultimately, like Orban or Vladimir Putin or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, secure a form of autocratic rule that retains a veneer of democracy while skewing the contest sufficiently to ensure it can yield only one result.

Officials close to Biden are looking at several ominous scenarios: Trump claiming victory before the votes in battleground states are fully counted — a count that could take many days or even weeks given the likely number of absentee ballots

Trump, supported by Barr, who has claimed that foreign governments have produced counterfeit mail ballots, refusing to concede and challenging the validity of the mail-in voting tally

some attempt by Trump to use the armed forces to help him win

Trump contesting the outcome in one or more states, so that neither Biden nor Trump has the needed 270 electoral votes and the election is determined by Republican-majority delegations with one vote per state.

any of this could happen — and Europe will want to “contain” that America.

An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

often direct conflict of interest with his job as presiden

“Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015,” Mr. Garten said in a statement.

Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.

“There’s nothing to learn from them,” he told The Associated Press in 2016. There is far more useful information, he has said, in the annual financial disclosures required of him as president — which he has pointed to as evidence of his mastery of a flourishing, and immensely profitable, business universe.

Most of Mr. Trump’s core enterprises — from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington — report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year.

He reported paying taxes, in turn, on a number of his overseas ventures. In 2017, the president’s $750 contribution to the operations of the U.S. government was dwarfed by the $15,598 he or his companies paid in Panama, the $145,400 in India and the $156,824 in the Philippines.

The leak of Mr. Nixon’s small tax payment caused a precedent-setting uproar: Henceforth, presidents, and presidential candidates, would make their tax returns available for the American people to see.

that he might release the returns if President Barack Obama released his birth certificate.

He often claims that he cannot do so while unde

r audit — an argument refuted by his own I.R.S. commissioner.

Throughout his career, Mr. Trump’s business losses have often accumulated in sums larger than could be used to reduce taxes on other income in a single year. But the tax code offers a workaround: With some restrictions, business owners can carry forward leftover losses to reduce taxes in future years. That provision has been the background music to Mr. Trump’s life.

each new acquisition only fed the downward draft on his bottom line.

“consulting fees” as a business expense across nearly all of his projects.

Mr. Trump reduced his taxable income by treating a family member as a consultant, and then deducting the fee as a cost of doing business.

The “consultants” are not identified in the tax records. But evidence of this arrangement was gleaned by comparing the confidential tax records to the financial disclosures Ivanka Trump filed when she joined the White House staff in 2017. Ms. Trump reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Vancouver and Hawaii.

Hair stylists, table linens, property taxes on a family estate — all have been deducted as business expenses.

he ethical quandaries created by Mr. Trump’s decision to keep his business while in the White House have been documented. But the full financial measure of his extraordinary confluence of interests — a president with a wealth of business entanglements at home and in myriad geopolitical hot spots — has remained elusive.

how heavily he has come to rely on leveraging his brand in ways that pose potential or direct conflicts of interest while he is president.

he president’s conflicts have been most evident with Turkey, where the business community and the authoritarian government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have not hesitated to leverage various Trump enterprises to their advantage.

Some of the largest payments from business groups for events or conferences at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties have come since Mr. Trump became president, the tax records show.

Beyond one-time payments for events or memberships, large corporations also pay rent for space in the few commercial buildings Mr. Trump actually owns.

his barrage of derogatory remarks about immigrants quickly cost him two of his biggest and easiest sources of cash — licensing deals with clothing and mattress manufacturers that had netted him more than $30 million. NBC, his partner in Miss Universe — source of nearly $20 million in profits — announced that it would no longer broadcast the pageant; he sold it soon after.

“They say, ‘Trump is getting rich off our nation,’” he said at a rally in Minneapolis last October. “I lose billions being president, and I don’t care. It’s nice to be rich, I guess, but I lose billions.”

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.

The tax data examined by The Times provides a road map of revelations, from write-offs for the cost of a criminal defense lawyer and a mansion used as a family retreat to a full accounting of the millions of dollars the president received from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.

For all the challenges confronting him, the president attempted to stay optimistic. As Biden departed the news conference, he offered a thumbs up when asked if West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema — key Democratic votes — were on board with his $1.75 trillion spending package for families, health care and renewable energy. The president also shrugged off his recent decline in the polls, saying that numbers go up and down

Biden’s overall take on his efforts: On climate change, he’s got $900 billion planned for renewable energy, and Congress will vote this coming week.

The president did leave the G-20 with commitments by his fellow leaders on a global minimum tax that would make it harder for large companies to avoid taxes by assigning their profits to countries with low tax rates.

The president met Sunday with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose office said the meeting was held in a “positive atmosphere” despite tensions over human rights and Turkey’s purchase of a Russian missile system, among other issues.

Biden heads Monday to the U.N. climate summit in Scotland, where he’ll once again face questions about whether the world’s wealthiest are doing enough to stop the warming of the Earth by moving away from fossil fuels.

Surprisingly, Iran is not happy with Azerbaijan’s victory. As openly as the Iranians ever do, they’ve threatened to use force against any changes to the borders of Armenia. Iran, a millenniums-old civilization central to a whole continent, cannot tolerate being walled off behind a chain of Turkish dependencies. India, similarly, is on Armenia’s side and has been sending a regular supply of weapons. One spur for such support, no doubt, is Pakistan’s joining the Azeri-Turkish alliance. In the jargon of American lawyers, this opens a whole new can of worms.

Then there’s Russia, whose absence from the denouement in Nagorno-Karabakh was striking. Even after the 1990s, Moscow still remained by far the biggest supplier of weapons to both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Their economies and societies, above all the elites and their corruption networks, were until very recently molded together. What we are seeing now, as both nations slip out of Russia’s orbit, might be the second round of Soviet collapse.

Once again, Armenia started the shift. In spring 2018 a tremendously hopeful uprising, reminiscent of 1989 in Central Europe, forced the post-communist elites to surrender power. Vladimir Putin was visibly displeased to meet Nikol Pashinyan, the anticorruption journalist and street rebel elected Armenia’s premier by an overwhelming majority. Mr. Pashinyan admittedly had neither political team nor experience; he is learning statesmanship on the job, often at great expense to his nation. Yet he managed to significantly reduce corruption, helping to unlock the legendary entrepreneurship of Armenians. Amid all the grim news, the Armenian economy, led by the I.T. sector, is registering impressive growth.

History has a habit of serving the same lessons with changed variables. In 1988, it was the dreamer Gorbachev stumbling over Nagorno-Karabakh that unwittingly shattered the world order. Today, Mr. Putin could become the second, much darker incarnation of the Kremlin aggrandizer going awry on all fronts. The consequences — from emboldening international aggression to reanimating the West under the banner of NATO — will be profound. As events in Nagorno-Karabakh show, the fragile post-Cold War order is giving way to something else entirely.

The Caucasus might seem strange and distant. Yet it might prove the wedge that turns the fortunes of world order. Trieste, Smyrna, Sarajevo, Danzig and Crimea were all such places. Let us not have to relearn history at the cost of yet another ethnic cleansing

Sources say US and European officials have been in intense discussions over the several past hours over how to proceed with additional sanctions against Russia.

Monday's sanctions were cautious in nature and Tuesday's sanctions are expected to go further but it will not be the full blow that the US has previewed, pending "further actions" by Russia.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to recognize breakaway eastern Ukrainian territories, calling it “unacceptable," and saying it is contrary to the Minsk Agreements.

China's Foreign Ministry evaded more than a dozen questions on Ukraine in its daily briefing on Tuesday. In his responses, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin reiterated that any country’s “legitimate security concerns should be respected” and urged all parties to "exercise restraint.” Beijing is navigating a complex position as it attempts to balance deepening ties with Moscow with its practiced foreign policy of staunchly defending state sovereignty.

The plan includes production of a graphic propaganda video that would show staged explosions and would use corpses and actors depicting grieving mourners, according to the official, who was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity.The plan, which was revealed in declassified intelligence shared with Ukrainian officials and European allies in recent days, is the latest allegation by the U.S. and Britain that Russia is plotting to use a false pretext to go to war against Ukraine.

He reiterated Turkey’s commitment to Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.

Meanwhile, Putin met with Argentinian President Alberto Fernandez in Moscow and then spoke by phone to Macron, who had a call Wednesday night with U.S. President Joe Biden. Macron then spoke with Zelenskyy.

The NATO chief said Russian forces in Belarus are likely to rise to 30,000, including special forces, supported by fighter jets and missiles.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian confirmed Thursday that Paris is sending troop reinforcements to Romania under NATO command, as part of France’s commitment to the alliance and its member states in Eastern Europe.

He did not say how many French soldiers will be deployed. The announcement came a day after the U.S. said it was moving troops stationed in Germany to Romania.

Ukraine’s defense minister is urging calm, saying the likelihood of a Russian invasion was “low.”Oleksii Reznikov said the threat of attack has loomed over the country since 2014, the year Russia seized Crimea, but he added: “There are no grounds for panic, fear, flight or packing of bags.”The minister said there are about 115,000 Russian troops near Ukraine’s border, including those deployed to Belarus for war games, but he said no battle groups have been detected along Ukraine’s border with Belarus. He also reiterated earlier assurances that Kyiv doesn’t plan to attack rebel-held areas in the war-torn east of Ukraine or Crimea — something the Kremlin has accused Kyiv of plotting.

An ice hockey fan, Putin will also attend Friday’s opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.His talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday will be their first face-to-face since 2019 and will help cement a strong personal relationship that has been a key factor behind a growing partnership between the two former Communist rivals.

As part of the re-branding, "Made in Türkiye" will feature on all exported products, and in January a tourism campaign was launched with the catch-phrase "Hello Türkiye".

The Ü may be tricky for most of the international audience who don't have that letter in their alphabet but it's the same as the German Ü, like the U in pure or cue. So for an English-speaker, changing the first vowel of Turkey to a Ü and adding an E to the end (as in pet) is enough to pronounce the new name perfectly.