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Seen here from the lobby of the Time Warner Building, Central Park Tower is the second tallest building in Manhattan at 1,550 feet and the tallest residential building in the world. Designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, it was completed in 2019. The little guy next to it with a limestone facade is 220 Central Park South, 953 feet tall, designed by Robert A.M. Stern, also residential and 2019. To date, sixteen buildings in Manhattan qualify as supertall at over 1,000 feet, and a number of others are almost. (San Franciscans, note that the Salesforce Tower in comparison measures a mere 1,070 feet.)
Went to the billionaire's beach today!
Single exposure with Lee 0.9H grad ND.
Photo @ 4:53pm
Sunset @ 5:04pm
-0.82 minus tide @ 5:29pm
The towers south of Central Park are getting closer to completion. See the comments below for the same view in prior years.
Commentary.
Aldourie Castle originally dates to the 1600’s,
when it was notably smaller than it is now.
In the 1860’s William Fraser-Tytler extended the building
and added features to enhance its appearance as a
traditional 17th. Century, Baronial Scottish Castle.
Stepped gables, coned turrets, a balustraded round tower,
oriel windows, corbels, gun loops and
scroll-sided, steeply pedimented dormers.
In 2015, the Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povisen
bought the castle for 15 million pounds.
It was part of his portfolio of 12 Scottish Estates,
making him the largest landowner in Scotland.
His additions have been extensive and of the highest quality.
The loch-side garden was developed with a central lawn,
with adjacent flower borders and criss-cross paths.
Many sculpted Beech trees give
an impressive architectural formality to the view down the lawn.
Across the narrow section of Loch Ness,
the south-facing slopes of the Great Glen
are resplendent with golden gorse, forest,
heather and rocky summits.
He added a 1.5-million-pound boathouse,
in the shape of an inverted boat.
A kitchen garden was re-established and the
100-acre estate is blessed with a profusion of
mature trees including pine, oak and sweet chestnut.
His pièce de la resistance is an amazing suspension bridge,
anchored by dressed stonework, across a
burn and valley, to the east of the castle.
I finally got around to processing a batch of shots from July 6. These were shot from a ferry boat on the Soundview route.
The One57 skyscraper designed by Pritzker Prize-winning French architect Christian de Portzamparc overlooks Central Park and is home to some of the richest people in the world. However, the critical reaction by the architecture community was not too kind.
Comments and faves welcomed! Thanks for the visit!
HDR from 7 exposures processed with Oloneo PhotoEngine
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Steinway Tower (left) is the thinnest building in the world and the 3rd-tallest in NY, Central Park Tower (right) the 2nd-tallest. The patchwork blue One57, between them, is also on the top-25 list, as is the limestone-faced building at the right, 200 Central Park South. These are all residential, with some hotel and retail space, and help make up Billionaire's Row.
Steinway Tower is built around the existing 16-story Steinway Hall (not visible here), which housed Steinway & Sons' showroom and piano bank until 2014. (Fear not, the piano seller is alive and well and living elsewhere in Midtown.) Similarly, Central Park Tower preserves the modest B. F. Goodrich Building at its base.
Little Bay is probably the most dramatically situated beach on the flat limestone island of Anguilla. This spot is accessible by boat or a non-signposted dirt road and a short walking trail, the trail down to the beach is more adventurous, one needs to use the rope seen at the bottom right corner to glide down, especially scary after watching the film "127 hours" less than a week prior.
As I walked back into the office after my walk, I saw that several people were looking out of the windows. Usually that means there is something in the harbour - a pod of orca or a billionaire's superyacht. Today, the excitement was for three C-130H Hercules planes. No 40. Squadron were doing a retirement fly-past to farewell the 'workhorse of the skies'.
The did come closer than this, but my camera wasn't ready in time to catch that.
For the 25 on 2025 Challenge: 52 - The End.
For 125 in 2025 Challenge: 70 - Out of the Ordinary.
Tuesday, 4th February 2025.
Have the U.S. mainstream media sunk this low? What is the purpose for the Wall Street Journal giving such a full and extensive coverage on Meng Wanzhou's wardrobe? It's so sexist!!
There is no question Ms. Meng is rich. Rich people wear name brand clothing and live luxuriously. It's not unusual that she has nice homes with lots of amenities.
I don't remember reading any news article about Abigail Johnson of Fidelity Investments, for example, detailing her wardrobe or how luxurious her homes are.
While the WSJ article gives every aspect of Ms Meng's wardrobe, there's nothing on why Canada values the two Michaels' arrest so much. After all, when they were arrested in China, there were 300,000 Canadians living in China and Hong Kong and about 200 Canadians were thought to be in custody in China. So why did the U.S. and Canada pay so much attention to these two Michaels? Could it be because they were spies for the Canadian government?
albertapolitics.ca/2020/12/why-did-chinas-government-pluc...
Why did China’s government pluck the Two Michaels from among 300,000 Canadians in China?
This WSJ article fails to mention the omissions and misrepresentations made by the U.S. prosecutor. The fact was HSBC was fully aware of the relationship between Huawei and Skycom, the business entity that sold HP computers to Iran. The prosecutor also omitted a crucial slide in Ms. Meng's Powerpoint presentation.
ca.style.yahoo.com/meng-wanzhous-lawyers-claim-extraditio...
Meng Wanzhou's lawyers claim extradition case riddled with misrepresentations
www.wsj.com/articles/huawei-china-meng-kovrig-spavor-pris...
Inside the Secret Prisoner Swap That Splintered the U.S. and China
Detention of a Chinese executive to stand trial in the U.S. provoked a standoff between global rivals and opened an acrimonious new era
4:30 a.m., Sept. 25, 2021, Tianjin, China
A pair of prison vans approached the terminal at Tianjin Binhai International Airport carrying two Canadians, blindfolded and disoriented from 1,019 days in captivity.
On the moonlit tarmac, an unmarked U.S. Gulfstream jet waited to take them home. Nearby, the Canadian ambassador paced the carpeted lounge.
Fifteen time zones away, an Air China Boeing 777 stood ready at Vancouver International Airport. Armed officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police kept watch in the terminal. A Chinese executive in Manolo Blahnik heels strode past them, carrying a bag with a Carolina Herrera dress shaded the same vibrant red as China’s flag and trailed by an entourage of lawyers, aides and diplomats who called her Madam Meng. She, too, was headed home.
One of the most significant prisoner swaps in recent diplomatic history was under way, after a top-secret negotiation that was three years in the making.
At the Tianjin airport, a Chinese official was on the phone to confirm the woman’s passage through the Vancouver terminal. He then cleared the Canadian prisoners. The Canadian ambassador fumbled for their passports in a yellow envelope and ushered the men to an immigration checkpoint.
A Chinese guard stamped the passports and directed them to the runway.
When Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada in 2018, she was chief financial officer of China’s Huawei Technologies Co., a telecommunications giant founded by her father that was poised to win the race to build 5G networks in most of the world’s largest economies. Canadian authorities took Ms. Meng into custody in Vancouver, British Columbia, on behalf of the U.S., which had filed bank-fraud charges against her.
The detention of the 50-year-old celebrity businesswoman, and U.S. efforts to extradite her for trial in New York, transformed her into a national martyr in China and a symbol of America’s growing hostility to its nearest rival.
Days later, the two Canadians were seized in retaliation for Ms. Meng’s arrest. Michael Kovrig, 50, was on leave from Canada’s Foreign Ministry to work for the International Crisis Group in Hong Kong. Michael Spavor, 46, ran a business that helped students, athletes and academics visit North Korea. During their incarceration and harsh treatment, the two men were sympathetically shorthanded in news reports and by Western leaders as “the two Michaels.” Both men denied any wrongdoing.
The arrests marked a turning point in the growing power competition between the U.S. and China, helping shift it from mutual wariness to full-blown animosity. Unlike last century’s Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union, the prisoner skirmish reflected a U.S.-China battle for control of the international flow of data and, ultimately, primacy in global commerce.
Negotiations to free the prisoners strained relations between China, U.S. and Canada. Each nation navigated its own security concerns and domestic political pressures. The U.S. pressed Chinese leader Xi Jinping to release the two Canadians and cited their arrest as evidence of Beijing’s disregard for the international rules-based order. Mr. Xi saw Ms. Meng’s detention as another underhanded attempt by the U.S. to contain his country’s advance.
Mr. Xi penned more than 100 notes about her case, and he discussed the Michaels with two U.S. presidents. Mr. Xi refused to free them until Ms. Meng was released. Canada was caught in the middle.
Dominic Barton, the Canadian ambassador, spent hundreds of hours at a whiteboard in an embassy safe room charting proposals to get his countrymen released and visiting them in prison. He delivered coded messages in rapid-fire English he knew eavesdropping guards would struggle to understand. Until the final moments, Canada worried that a news leak or a stray remark from a U.S. senator would scuttle the exchange.
This account is based on interviews with current and former U.S., Canadian and Chinese officials, lawyers and prosecutors, former Huawei officials, people familiar with Ms. Meng’s legal team and her staff, as well as current and former diplomats of the three countries. It draws from court documents, real-estate and corporate records, classified diplomatic cables, unpublished photographs and notes of government officials involved in the negotiations.
A spokesman for the Chinese consulate in New York declined to answer questions. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman has said that Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor were detained and tried in accordance with Chinese law, and their case was unrelated to Ms. Meng’s arrest.
Meng Wanzhou planned to spend only a few hours in Vancouver when she touched down on Dec. 1, 2018. It was one of four cities where she kept a home.
The Huawei CFO checked seven suitcases, packed with presentation material for meetings in four countries, including Mexico. The country’s newly inaugurated president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was open to Huawei building 5G networks in his country, brushing off U.S. security concerns.
Ms. Meng also booked a stop in Buenos Aires, where she would join her father, Ren Zhengfei, Huawei’s billionaire founder. Mr. Ren had once announced that none of his three children was visionary enough to succeed him. Ms. Meng, who crisscrossed the world representing her father’s empire, seemed determined to prove him wrong.
Around the time Ms. Meng walked into Hong Kong’s international airport, word of her itinerary passed over a secure line to the Palacio Duhau hotel, site of the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires. A White House lawyer took the call in a soundproof tent set up in a suite. Afterward, the lawyer woke up John Bolton: Ms. Meng was en route.
Mr. Bolton, then-national security adviser in the Trump administration, knew Ms. Meng’s arrest could disrupt the summit’s marquee event that evening, a dinner between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Yet Mr. Bolton, a longtime China hawk, felt it was worth the risk. The president didn’t yet know about the plan. White House staffers later debated whether Mr. Bolton had told Mr. Trump or if it hadn’t fully registered with the president.
While Ms. Meng was on her flight to Vancouver, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents passed along details of her travel outfit: a black Abercrombie & Fitch hoodie, dark sweatpants, her hair just past the shoulders.
Federal prosecutors had a sealed indictment against Ms. Meng and Huawei for bank fraud, alleging she had helped disguise the company’s business dealings in Iran. The evidence was in a PowerPoint presentation Ms. Meng showed an executive of HSBC Holdings PLC in the back room of a Hong Kong restaurant in 2013. Huawei, she claimed in her presentation, wasn’t violating U.S. sanctions on Iran.
The charge was narrow, but it would serve a broader national security objective—to help Washington convince U.S. allies Huawei couldn’t be trusted.
In a briefing room at the Vancouver airport, six Canadian police officers and border guards studied photos of Ms. Meng. “Seize any electronic devices on MENG to preserve evidence, as there will be a request from FBI,” a Canadian constable scrawled in a spiral notebook.
Ms. Meng’s extradition request had arrived from Washington on a password-protected file that Canadian authorities needed more than a day to unlock. The delay meant Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, also attending the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires, was told of the request only around the time officers took positions at the Vancouver airport’s Gate 65 jet bridge.
At 11:18 a.m., Cathay Pacific Flight 838 rolled to a stop at the terminal gate.
Two border guards escorted Ms. Meng to a counter where another guard combed through her luggage. Officers asked questions, among them: Did Huawei ever sell products in Iran? They collected her electronics and demanded her passwords. One by one, they slid her devices into security bags, as the U.S. had requested: a red-cased Huawei phone, a black-and-pink 256-gigabyte thumb drive, a pink-framed MacBook and an iPad with a sticker of Winnie-the-Pooh, a character sometimes used on social media to mock Mr. Xi, China’s leader.
“You have committed fraud, we’re arresting you, and then you will be sent back to the United States,” a police officer told Ms. Meng.
“Me?” she said. “You’re saying I committed fraud in the United States?”
“I don’t have details,” another officer replied. “They have a fraud charge against you regarding your company, uh, Huawei?”
An officer added, apologetically, “We’re only assisting the United States.”
At the police station, Ms. Meng was fingerprinted, and allowed a phone call to the only Chinese-speaking lawyer Huawei could find on short notice, a patent attorney. As the attorney dashed to the station, Ms. Meng began to gasp for air, worrying officers who sped her to a hospital.
Messrs. Trump and Xi were dining on Argentine sirloin, accompanied by a 2014 Malbec. The goal of the dinner was to reach a truce in an escalating U.S.-China trade war. Neither man appeared aware of Ms. Meng’s arrest. Mr. Bolton, seated near Mr. Trump, didn’t mention it.
Mr. Xi learned shortly after, according to Chinese government officials, and it struck him as deceptive and an insult. He had just agreed to buy more U.S. food and energy.
Mr. Trump questioned Mr. Bolton days later at a White House Christmas dinner, according to people familiar with the conversation. “Why did you arrest Meng?” the president said. “Don’t you know she’s the Ivanka Trump of China?”
Chinese Foreign Ministry officials briefed Mr. Xi on the arrest when he returned to Beijing on Dec. 6. Ms. Meng, ranked China’s eighth most powerful businesswoman by Forbes magazine, was in custody and under severe distress.
China’s Ministry of Public Security, which had a list of Canadian names, proposed two for him to select. Canada’s ambassador was summoned to a Foreign Ministry office in Beijing and warned China would retaliate.
Two days later, a call came to the Canadian embassy from a man stopped while trying to board a 2 p.m. flight to South Korea from a city in China’s northeast.
“I’m being questioned,” Michael Spavor said.
That night, the embassy got another call, this one about Michael Kovrig. He had been walking in Beijing when he was bundled into a vehicle.
For hours, embassy officials waited to hear from the two men, hoping authorities would release them. Then came the whir of the office fax machine, signaling trouble. Fax was the preferred channel of China’s Foreign Ministry. The machine spat out back-to-back missives announcing the detention of two Canadian citizens suspected of threatening national security.
Canada’s ambassador met with officials in Beijing. They asked for Ms. Meng’s release. “He who ties the knot must untie it,” one of them said.
A month later, Mr. Trudeau cemented his government’s position at a snow-drenched cabinet retreat in Quebec. Arrests of innocent Canadian citizens wouldn’t force Ms. Meng’s release.
“Canada cannot be bullied,” he told his cabinet members.
The prime minister, a liberal leader who in public appearances sometimes appeared boyish, had a harder side. Just before he assumed office, Islamic State militants had abducted two elderly Canadians. Mr. Trudeau later refused to pay a ransom, and they were decapitated.
It was his worst moment as prime minister—and the right decision, Mr. Trudeau said at the cabinet retreat.
When Canada’s ambassador to China said in public remarks that Ms. Meng had a strong case to fight her extradition, Mr. Trudeau fired him.
To free Ms. Meng, Huawei assembled a team of more than a dozen lawyers, including some of the corporate world’s highest-paid. They all agreed she was unfairly trapped in the rivalry between Washington and Beijing.
One of Huawei’s recruits—trial lawyer Reid Weingarten, whose clients had included Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Lloyd Blankfein and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—carried a report into a meeting early in 2019 with Justice Department officials. It detailed reasons the defense team believed Ms. Meng would easily win her case.
Elevating a six-year-old PowerPoint presentation to a charge of bank fraud was an overreach the Justice Department would regret, according to Ms. Meng’s lawyers. Some doubted prosecutors had the appetite to go to trial.
Instead, they found little hope for a swift resolution. Federal prosecutors in the case were confident. If Ms. Meng wanted to plead guilty, they were ready to talk. Otherwise, they would see her in court.
The White House had a lot riding on the case. Huawei was on the other side of a contest for control of 5G, the wireless network slated to ferry data to billions of devices worldwide. It was a fight the U.S. didn’t want to lose.
Huawei was offering to deliver its 5G equipment—antennas, base stations and routers—more quickly and less expensively than its Western competitors. The company, a relative newcomer compared with century-old telecom rivals Nokia Corp. and Ericsson AB, had become a world leader.
U.S. national security officials were convinced of a danger other nations thought could be managed—that Huawei was assembling the architecture China could use to conduct worldwide surveillance.
In 2009, U.S. cyberspies had infiltrated the company’s networks. FBI analysts, worried Beijing could use those same networks to spy, alerted their bosses. Defense Department officials urged U.S. telecom companies to steer clear of Huawei. A 2012 congressional investigation concluded China could use Huawei equipment for espionage but didn’t find clear evidence it had.
By the time of the Trump administration, Huawei had built a seemingly insurmountable lead over its rivals. An analysis that circulated among intelligence officials warned Huawei would control 80% of the global market for 5G equipment. National security officials feared that would hand China a surveillance tool with the potential to collect all manner of secrets, from the blueprints of nuclear plants to military plans of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Defense officials and diplomats reached out to America’s closest foreign partners and pushed for Huawei bans. The company dispatched its own lobbyists, lawyers and public-relations firms to say it had never conducted espionage and never would. Huawei challenged the Trump administration to reveal the evidence it claimed to hold, material the U.S. said was secret to protect its sources and methods.
The White House instead offered a slim thread of evidence. In 2017, Beijing had introduced an intelligence law that said “any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work.”
Huawei, the Trump administration argued, was bound by law to spy. The company countered that it applied only in China.
U.S. diplomats took printouts of the law to allies around the world, reading it aloud to officials caught up in what many saw as a feud between superpowers. The U.K., South Korea, Germany, Italy, Mexico and Canada balked at pressure to ban the company. Some were baffled by the escalating campaign.
Huawei said it was a Chinese success story whose founder was motivated not by rivalry with America but admiration for it.
Mr. Ren, a former army engineer, started out in 1987 selling telecom switches from an apartment in Shenzhen, a small city overshadowed by neighboring Hong Kong. In his telling, a 1993 Greyhound bus trip across the U.S. stirred grand ambitions.
In Dallas, Mr. Ren recalled visiting the 60,000-acre headquarters of Texas Instruments Inc. Employees there clocked overtime to take him on a daylong tour of research facilities, revealing technical details of new high-speed devices.
At National Semiconductor in California, at the time one of the world’s leading chip makers, he saw an exhibition of optical devices and 3G network switching technologies.
Mr. Ren hired a taxi to drive around the Silicon Valley research facility of International Business Machines Corp. to calculate how many square kilometers it encompassed. He felt “the United States will prosper forever,” he recalled in a blog post.
A quarter-century later, his company was a leader in artificial-intelligence research and had a smartphone brand that sold more units than Apple Inc. Huawei opened a 4-square-mile campus outside Shenzhen that featured Swiss-style trams zipping past replicas of European castles and landmarks of Paris and Verona, Italy, that housed Huawei offices and research labs.
As the company grew, it was stalked by allegations—from former employees, rival corporations and U.S. officials—that its advance relied on deceit. Huawei denied the allegations and said it was committed to complying with laws in global markets. The company settled lawsuits with competitors that accused it of stealing trade secrets, among them Cisco Systems Inc. and Quintel Technology Ltd.
Paperwork for search warrants and interview notes piled up in a Justice Department office in New York. Some companies were afraid China would retaliate if they took Huawei to court, feeding a view at the department that Huawei’s competitive advantage was impunity.
A bank ended up providing investigators with evidence for the government’s first case, which originated in the Brooklyn, N.Y., office.
In 2013, HSBC had asked Huawei to explain a news report claiming it secretly owned and operated a company that sold its products in Iran. Afterward, Ms. Meng then told the HSBC executive in the Hong Kong restaurant that Huawei adhered to U.S. sanctions.
Months after the meeting, border agents searching Ms. Meng’s electronics during a transit through John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York recovered a text file of her talking points concerning Iran. It had been deleted but not erased from the hard drive.
The file became useful when HSBC, on the hook for its own legal missteps, had to give federal prosecutors a dossier on its business with Huawei, including what Ms. Meng had said about her company’s dealings in Iran.
Federal investigators assigned a code name to keep the probe secret. HSBC and other banks cooperating with the Justice Department feared for the safety of their executives in China, as well as business ties there.
Prosecutors in April 2017 served Huawei with a subpoena to answer questions about whether it conducted business in sanctioned countries, and company executives subsequently halted travel to the U.S.
In August 2018, prosecutors readied an indictment against Huawei and Ms. Meng. They kept it under seal until she landed in a country within their reach.
Ms. Meng’s jail in Vancouver was a $4.2 million house facing the North Shore Mountains. It was the smaller of her two homes in the city.
U.S. officials had hoped Canada would keep Ms. Meng behind bars until her extradition. The billionaire’s daughter, who had been issued at least seven passports, was a flight risk, prosecutors argued during her December 2018 bail hearing.
Instead, a judge had granted her bail, set at 10 million Canadian dollars, equivalent to $7.5 million, and imposed a curfew from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. Otherwise, she was free to roam. A GPS monitor on her ankle kept Ms. Meng tethered to authorities.
Later, she received court permission to move, for security reasons, to a $12.3 million, seven-bedroom villa, two doors from the home of the U.S. consul general. Mr. Ren dispatched a team of Huawei employees to help with public relations and his daughter’s defense.
A vice president from the Brazil office and a China-based legal director were the first to arrive. They stayed in a villa nearby. A PR manager from Huawei’s headquarters followed, and he began holding impromptu news conferences on the courthouse steps, irritating Ms. Meng and her legal advisers. They worried his public statements could jeopardize the case, but Mr. Ren overruled their objections.
By April, Huawei had a more senior team in place, including Mr. Ren’s translator and personal assistant, who served as a liaison.
The former head sales executive in Europe directed Ms. Meng’s daily Zumba classes and yoga workouts. Personal chefs prepared health-conscious meals. A florist arranged bouquets for the dining table. Mr. Ren tried to prod his daughter into pursuing a Ph.D. while she waited for her release.
The cast of helpers and aides was known as Sabrina’s Team, after one of the English-language names she used.
When Ms. Meng stepped out, a set of court-appointed bodyguards, stationed in a tent pitched on the property, trailed her. Fashion boutiques accommodated her private shopping tours. She dined with friends at the Dynasty Seafood restaurant, where the city’s Chinese elite enjoyed dim sum and city views.
Huawei had built a foothold in Canada’s telecom market, including a 5G research center. Shortly after Ms. Meng’s arrest, the company ramped up its advertising around the city, draping bus stops, billboards and shopping malls in banners, many in Chinese, featuring its latest slogan—Huawei: a higher intelligence.
On March 6, 2019, three months after her arrest, bodyguards and TV cameras followed Ms. Meng into court for her extradition hearing.
On the courthouse steps, protesters opposing Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong set fire to a Chinese flag. Some held placards scrawled in all caps, “EXTRADITE MENG!”
The court hearing lasted just a few minutes, marking the start of a protracted legal battle. Each time Ms. Meng went to court, she passed a Chinese nurse, a member of China’s Uyghur minority, holding pictures of Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor, the two Michaels, to protest their detention.
In the northeastern city of Dandong, on the North Korea border, Michael Spavor lived with some 20 other inmates in Cell 315. At night, they slept side by side like sardines. The overflowing compound was sweltering on hot days and cold after dark. Meals were meager and unchanging: cabbage, eggs and rice.
Mr. Spavor, a Calgary native, traveled to South Korea at age 21 and taught English. He became fascinated with the authoritarian state of North Korea and began arranging tours. In 2013 and 2014, he planned three trips for Dennis Rodman, the former Chicago Bulls basketball star who had his own interest in the secretive country and its leader, Kim Jong Un.
Mr. Spavor impressed party guests in South Korea with his pitch-perfect North Korean accent.
The two Michaels had met once at a dinner in Beijing. The expatriates chatted about China, North Korea and relations between the two countries.
Mr. Kovrig had gone to Budapest after college in the mid-1990s, joining a wave of Westerners who flooded into once-closed Central European countries. He worked as a reporter and sang in a punk band before returning home to join Canada’s diplomatic service.
Fluorescent lights glowed 24 hours a day in Mr. Kovrig’s windowless cell at Beijing’s No. 1 Detention Center. For almost six months, he was confined without a whiff of fresh air. To break the monotony, he devised a daily workout of push-ups, six-minute planks and 7,000 steps around the tiny space.
Prison authorities spent the first months of Mr. Kovrig’s incarceration conducting interrogations that stretched to 10 hours. Over and over, they questioned his work at the Canadian embassy in Beijing.
In June 2019, after more than 150 days in prison, Mr. Kovrig was allowed to send a batch of letters home. The embassy scanned the stack of handwritten notes and emailed them to his wife in Toronto.
Vina Nadjibulla, a 44-year-old international security analyst, met Mr. Kovrig while they were studying international relations at Columbia University in 2001. She was raised in wartime Kabul, the daughter of a Soviet Jew and an Afghan Muslim, and had found her calling in conflict prevention at the United Nations. Mr. Kovrig proposed to her in the U.N. Assembly Hall.
He entered Canada’s foreign service, and she worked on the reconstruction of postwar Sierra Leone. The couple had separated by the time of Mr. Kovrig’s arrest. But each had promised to help the other if they were ever kidnapped during their work abroad.
Ms. Nadjibulla put her life on hold, flying between Toronto, Washington and Ottawa to petition officials who could help free Mr. Kovrig. In June, Mr. Trudeau invited Ms. Nadjibulla to his office, and she read from her husband’s letters to his family.
“If there is one faint silver lining to this hell, it’s this: trauma carved caverns of psychological pain through my mind,” one letter said. “I find myself filling those gulfs with a love for you and for life that is vast, deep and more profound and comforting than what I’ve ever experienced.”
“Come sit with me and walk with me in spirit,” Mr. Kovrig wrote. “Help me feel less isolated. Let me share the love I have for you and we’ll get through this together.”
About a week later, Mr. Trudeau arrived in Osaka, Japan, for the G-20 summit. He set out to lobby the one person who could release his two countrymen—Mr. Xi, the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.
In meetings with Western leaders, Mr. Xi seldom joked and rarely smiled. He usually began with a monologue of talking points almost identical to his public statements. He so resolutely stuck to scripted remarks that his interpreter simply read aloud from a prepared English text. When finished, Mr. Xi would ask, “Don’t you agree?”
White House officials analyzing transcripts from closed-door talks often struggled to understand whether Mr. Xi had said anything of substance beyond his prepared statements.
In their conversations, Mr. Trump would try six or seven ways of bluntly asking a specific question, and Mr. Xi would repeat the same vague responses.
Other world leaders traded small talk and called each other by their first names—Donald, Angela, Vladimir. Even behind closed doors, Mr. Xi stuck to “Mr. President” or “Madam Prime Minister” and other honorifics.
Throughout the first half of 2019, Mr. Trudeau had failed to get an audience with Mr. Xi. His diplomats in China were frozen out. The Chinese reply to Mr. Trudeau was frustrating: It would breach protocol for Mr. Xi, China’s head of state, to speak with Mr. Trudeau, merely the head of government of Canada, whose head of state was Queen Elizabeth II.
Beijing expressed itself through trade restrictions. China blocked shipments of Canadian canola oil at its ports. In May, it barred pork from two of Canada’s top slaughterhouses. Three days ahead of the G-20 summit, it stopped all Canadian meat from entering China.
Mr. Trudeau asked Mr. Trump to speak up for Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor when the U.S. president met with the Chinese leader at the summit in Osaka.
At their meeting, Mr. Trump handed Mr. Xi a sheet of paper that listed the names of Americans being held in China. The names, written in Chinese and English, also included Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig.
“It would be a great gesture,” Mr. Trump said with a stroke of flattery, if China could help these people get home.
Scanning the names, Mr. Xi pointedly noted that the last time the two leaders had met was the day of Ms. Meng’s arrest.
Mr. Trudeau got his opening by chance. Chile was a guest at the G-20 meeting, but its representative didn’t attend a scheduled assembly. That left Canada seated alphabetically between China and Brazil—and Mr. Xi seated to the right of Mr. Trudeau.
The Canadian prime minister passed a note, handwritten in Chinese, to Mr. Xi. “We have to communicate,” it said. Mr. Trudeau proposed they select two confidants to begin backchannel talks.
The two men stepped to the side of a conference floor, exchanged pleasantries through a translator and clasped hands.
Days later, Dominic Barton, the former global managing partner of consulting firm McKinsey & Co., carried a thin folder of notes into the gated Diaoyutai state guesthouse in Beijing. His meeting was unofficial and secret. He told his secretary he was on vacation.
The 60-year-old Canadian had risen in the slipstream of China’s economic miracle, and through more than a decade living and working in the country had ties with Chinese entrepreneurs, executives and party leaders. He had written two books on China and taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Mr. Barton wasn’t a diplomat. Yet Mr. Trudeau believed he could break the diplomatic logjam and bring home the two Michaels.
An adviser had informed the prime minister that there was a 40% chance Mr. Barton’s first meeting with Chinese officials would go well, a 40% chance it would go well enough for a second visit and a 20% chance it would go sour.
The silver-haired executive smiled at a pair of Foreign Ministry officials when he and the adviser entered the meeting room. An elderly Communist Party official began reading from a stack of pages, pausing with dramatic effect for the translator to catch up.
“You have arrested Madam Meng.”
“You are lapdogs of the United States.”
Mr. Barton interrupted, and the ministry official, appointed by Mr. Xi, looked up and flipped back to the first page. Then he began rereading from the beginning. For three hours, the official read from an invective-laced script, circling back to the top each time Mr. Barton protested.
Calling for a timeout, Mr. Barton stepped into the hallway. “I think we’re in the 5%,” the adviser said, acknowledging the worse-than-expected outcome.
Mr. Barton held his tongue through the last hour of hectoring. The Chinese official focused on Section 23(3) of Canada’s 1999 Extradition Act, which gave the country’s justice minister authority to cancel an extradition.
“You don’t even know your own law!” the official said.
At the end of the meeting, Mr. Barton asked if China’s Foreign Ministry would attend a second meeting in Ottawa. No, the official said. But the Canadians were welcome to return to Beijing.
That was the only good news Mr. Barton had for the prime minister.
“OK,” Mr. Trudeau said in their phone call. “Well, that’s something.”
Weeks later, Mr. Barton was named Canada’s ambassador to China. His first test was a meeting with Mr. Xi in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. The ambassador delivered a short speech in his halting Mandarin during an exchange that lasted barely a minute.
“My mission here is to resolve this issue,” Mr. Barton said. “I want to get Madam Meng and our people home.”
“I didn’t know you spoke Mandarin,” Mr. Xi said.
“I don’t…that’s the only Mandarin I know,” the executive replied.
Mr. Xi smiled. “It takes two people to repair a relationship,” he said.
China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, then offered his own rough-edged advice.
“You got a lot of work to do,” Mr. Wang said, slapping Mr. Barton’s back. “You better exercise hard!”
Shortly after, Mr. Barton made his first visit to a Chinese prison. Guards escorted him past an interrogation room holding a metal chair with straps.
Guards told Mr. Spavor that he had a visitor.
The two men met in a reception room, and they were told not to discuss Mr. Spavor’s case. Mr. Barton leaned across a table toward the handcuffed prisoner. “I’m going to talk to you very fast to be able to smuggle some stuff in about the case,” he said. “Here are the four things I want to discuss. But first, is there anything you want to put on the agenda?”
Mr. Spavor, struggling with sleep, looked numb. “How long will this go on?” he said. “Every day I wake up, and it’s the same.”
Mr. Barton said he didn’t know. He spoke rapidly about efforts to free him and of the health of Mr. Spavor’s father in Calgary, who had fallen seriously ill.
When guards caught mention of Ms. Meng, they interrupted, and Mr. Barton switched subjects before returning to the case.
Mr. Barton also went to the Beijing prison to see Mr. Kovrig, who was livid and gesturing at guards he said were abusive. They had taken away his glasses, citing rules against metal objects.
“Take their numbers!” he said, his 6-foot-4 frame stretching out of his too-small prison uniform. “Write them down!”
In his letters, Mr. Kovrig had called the prison a concrete desert.
He also demanded to know about his release. “When will this get done?”
Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor were headed toward their second Christmas behind bars when NATO leaders mingled at a Dec. 3, 2019, Champagne reception in Buckingham Palace.
It was hosted in the Green Drawing Room, a long, crimson-carpeted hallway decorated with silk wallpaper and gold-framed pictures of England’s monarchs. Kate Middleton and Prince William filtered through the crowd of NATO officials charged with defending the West. Mr. Trudeau spoke privately with the queen.
The prime minister’s chief foreign policy adviser, David Morrison, grabbed a word with White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. Earlier in the day, the prime minister had told Mr. Trump about the ordeal the two Michaels were enduring. The U.S. agreed to a meeting in Washington, an opening Canada welcomed.
The White House had already resumed prisoner-exchange talks with Beijing. National security adviser Robert O’Brien, who followed Mr. Bolton, had recently been in Bangkok for a meeting of Asian leaders.
He surprised China’s premier, Li Keqiang, at the meeting with books for the two Canadian prisoners: “Unbroken,” Laura Hillenbrand’s profile of World War II prisoner Louis Zamperini, for Mr. Kovrig, a C.S. Lewis novel for Mr. Spavor and a Bible for each. The books contained handwritten notes reassuring the two captives that the world knew of their suffering.
As Mr. O’Brien passed on the books, he also relayed a diplomatic message: Washington wanted to talk.
Days later, China’s deputy chief of mission in Washington met discreetly with National Security Council staff at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. Washington had no right to demand the Canadians’ release, the Chinese delegate said: “This is not a U.S. matter.”
Beijing, however, was willing to consider another exchange first, to build trust. The U.S. could accelerate the deportation of Bank of China Ltd. manager Xu Guojun, who was sought by Chinese authorities for corruption-related charges.
In return, the Americans wanted David Lin, a Taiwanese-American pastor imprisoned for life after proselytizing in China, and Kai Li, a Chinese-American businessman from Long Island, N.Y., who was serving 10 years for espionage.
A few days before Christmas, a Canadian delegation met in Mr. Mulvaney’s office at the White House, where administration officials were preoccupied with Mr. Trump’s first impeachment hearings.
Canada’s acting ambassador to Washington, Kirsten Hillman, and Messrs. Barton and Morrison squeezed next to John Demers, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for national security, and Matt Pottinger, deputy national security adviser. The sooner Ms. Meng was extradited, Mr. Pottinger said, the sooner the two Michaels could be freed.
The Canadian delegation said Ms. Meng’s appeal could last years and would almost certainly end in a plea deal. If so, they said, the sooner the U.S. agreed to a plea deal, the better for Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor.
After several videoconference calls through the spring of 2020, Mr. Demers told the Canadian diplomats that the Justice Department was considering a deferred prosecution agreement: Prosecutors wouldn’t move forward with charges if Ms. Meng pledged not to commit other federal crimes.
The sticking point was that Ms. Meng would have to admit wrongdoing. Her lawyers said she would never agree because she had done nothing wrong.
Mr. Barton and his closest aides in Beijing frequently worked in a room below the Canadian embassy that had metal-coated walls to repel electronic surveillance. It was named the Salle de Deux Innocents—the Room of Two Innocents—for a travelogue written by former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau after he hitchhiked with a friend across Mao-era China.
In meetings, Mr. Barton and the aides toggled through flipboard pages with names of officials they hoped could persuade China to see the logic of settling Ms. Meng’s case with the Justice Department.
Months before her arrest, the two countries had pursued a free-trade agreement. Now, the invitations to state functions slowed to a trickle. Mr. Barton, known for his ability to strike deals in China, couldn’t get calls returned, even from longtime acquaintances. “We have come to expect this from the U.S., but we have a 50-year relationship with you,” one official said.
The mission wasn’t just faltering, Mr. Barton confided to a colleague. It was lurching toward humiliation.
In spring 2020, Mr. Barton hoped for better luck with Mr. Ren, the Huawei founder. He secured an appointment at the company’s Shenzhen headquarters, where he found Mr. Ren upbeat about his daughter’s prospects.
Madam Meng would be home soon, Mr. Ren said through his translator. Her lawyers had many grounds to appeal her extradition, and they believed one would stick. “I trust the Canadian legal system will do the right thing,” he said.
Ms. Meng, her legal team and Huawei were so confident of a win that they had her bags packed and chartered the 787th Boeing 787 ever made, a commemorative Dreamliner jet that would bring her home from Vancouver.
Days before Ms. Meng’s May 27, 2020, court hearing, her assistants staged a rehearsal for a planned photo on the steps of British Columbia’s Supreme Court building. Huawei colleagues and household staff joined Ms. Meng, flashing victory signs in front of an imagined crowd of supporters.
On the morning of the hearing, they were met instead by a jeering crowd hoisting signs: “Boycott Huawei” and “Free Canadians Michael Kovrig, Michael Spavor.”
In the courtroom, Ms. Meng’s lawyers told the judge that the U.S. extradition request was faulty. Under Canadian law, the extradition could proceed only if the offense was a crime in both Canada and the U.S.
Although U.S. prosecutors had charged Ms. Meng with bank fraud, the lawyers said, the case was in fact about U.S. sanctions on Iran, and Canada had no such sanctions. The judge declined the appeal.
Vina Nadjibulla, Mr. Kovrig’s wife, was watching the judgment and taking notes. She had spent hundreds of hours following the case. After the judge’s decision, she went to Washington to brief officials.
Each month, she sent Mr. Kovrig a letter with regards from friends. She included such cryptic messages as, “I was walking in our old stomping grounds,” meaning she had been lobbying officials at the U.N.
Ms. Nadjibulla sent nutritional and fitness advice. Mr. Kovrig began sprinkling milk powder and sesame powder from the prison canteen on meals for a protein boost; he tried pistol squats to strengthen his core. His life was so closed he didn’t understand that a pandemic was disrupting the world.
Mr. Kovrig read 20 to 30 books a month—on philosophy and geopolitics, classics from Tolstoy to Kafka and Nelson Mandela’s prison autobiography, “The Long Walk to Freedom.” He and Mr. Spavor read copies of Viktor Frankl’s meditation on life in Auschwitz, “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
Mr. Spavor shared his books with cellmates, who were rarely allowed them. In return, they helped him learn to write Chinese characters.
Mr. Kovrig’s letters home included book reviews, and Ms. Nadjibulla forwarded his recommendations to an informal book club of friends and colleagues in the U.S., Canada and Asia.
After months of requests, Chinese prison guards allowed Mr. Kovrig to call his family. Ms. Nadjibulla answered.
“V, is that you?” he said.
In the summer of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread worldwide, FBI agents arrested five academic researchers, most of them charged with lying on visa applications. Trump administration officials believed the students were exploiting U.S. research to advance China’s military. All pleaded not guilty.
The arrests prompted China to resuscitate secret prisoner-swap discussions with the U.S., which had gone silent in the pandemic. Beijing wanted its researchers back. Washington wanted its Americans—and the two Michaels.
A videoconference linked officials from the National Security Council, State Department and Justice Department with Chinese Foreign Ministry diplomats and the Ministry of Public Security. The U.S. insisted on using Microsoft Teams rather than Chinese software for the meeting.
“They are students,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry official said. “They are just studying.”
The U.S. offered to return the researchers, as well as speed up the deportation of Xu Guojun, the banker sought by China on corruption charges.
In return, the Americans wanted Kai Li, the businessman, and David Lin, the pastor, as well as Victor Liu and Cynthia Liu, American siblings blocked from leaving China since 2018. The U.S. also asked China to allow the exit of another three U.S. citizens, including two children.
The proposed exchange—seven Chinese for seven Americans, plus the two Canadians—would make it one of the largest prisoner swaps since the Cold War.
When U.S. officials raised the names of Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor, a Ministry of Public Security official said, “The Chinese people would not allow the Michaels to go home unless Madam Meng does.”
A Justice Department official encouraged the Chinese officials to talk with Ms. Meng’s lawyers about accepting the offer from federal prosecutors: freedom in exchange for an admission of wrongdoing. Persuade her to sign, the U.S. official said.
The talks fizzled. The U.S. wouldn’t bring home the Americans without the two Canadians. Ms. Meng wasn’t interested in the prosecutors’ offer.
The Chinese executive told her lawyers she would never admit wrongdoing. She was willing to remain in Vancouver for years, if necessary, while her legal team fought the U.S. extradition. The company’s reputation was at stake.
That summer, Huawei swept past Samsung Electronics Co. to become the world’s top smartphone maker. As chief financial officer, Ms. Meng had to protect the empire her father had built.
But Huawei was already tipping.
Mr. Trump, who began referring to Huawei as “Spyway,” signed off on new export restrictions in 2020 that blocked the company from buying computer chips produced with U.S. tools. The restrictions extended to manufacturers using American technology worldwide. Huawei started to run low on chips it needed to churn out smartphones, which made up around half its revenue.
Huawei also lost the license to load Google software on its phones and tablets. As sales plunged, Huawei considered shifting into electric cars.
Canada discussed the arrest of Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor at NATO counterintelligence briefings. Western leaders who spoke with Mr. Trudeau heard about the harrowing prison conditions endured by the two Michaels. Many of the details came from Ms. Nadjibulla.
One by one, the world’s wealthiest countries gravitated toward the U.S. position and cut ties with Huawei.
In July 2020, the U.K. announced it would ban the company from its networks by 2027. Two weeks later, France said it would stop renewing licenses for Huawei 5G equipment, effectively barring the company. By October, the U.K. Parliament’s defense committee said it would accelerate the Huawei ban.
Huawei’s head of public affairs in North America, Vincent Peng, bounced between the U.S., Canada and China, scouting for lobbyists to reach lawmakers and diplomats to help free Ms. Meng.
Mr. Trump lost the 2020 presidential election in November, and as the clock ticked down to a new administration, Mr. Peng called Mr. Barton a few days before Christmas. He said Huawei was going to try its luck with Joe Biden.
Mr. Biden’s first bilateral meeting as president was with Canada on Feb. 23, 2021. The first item on Mr. Trudeau’s meeting agenda was the release of Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor. “These two guys are in prison,” the prime minister said. “They are there because we are living up to our commitments to you….We need to get them out.”
“I will not interfere with the judicial process,” Mr. Biden replied. “Everything else, I am here for you.”
Ms. Meng’s detention was one area where Mr. Xi hoped he could reset U.S.-China relations under the new president. Yet from all appearances, the relationship remained volatile.
At a March 2021 meeting in Alaska, China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, publicly accused the U.S. of persuading other countries to attack China. In private, Secretary of State Antony Blinken brought up the two Michaels, saying serious countries don’t kidnap people to use as bargaining chips.
That month, Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor were tried for espionage in closed-door hearings. Verdicts and sentences wouldn’t be announced until later.
As Mr. Biden took office, the Chinese leader came to see the case as an obstacle to restoring U.S.-China ties under the new administration. Mr. Xi felt his country had demonstrated sufficient resolve against Western provocation.
He tapped Xie Feng, a vice foreign minister, to bring the prisoner standoff to an end. Mr. Xi by then had sent more than 100 handwritten notes to underlings about Ms. Meng’s case.
In July 2021, the Justice Department dropped charges against the five Chinese researchers, a decision that lowered tensions between the two countries. Days later, Mr. Xie joined a gathering of senior U.S. and Chinese officials in Tianjin, the first such meeting in more than three months.
Between testy exchanges about Covid-19 and human rights, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said her department wouldn’t block Ms. Meng’s return home if she settled with U.S. prosecutors.
That was the assurance Mr. Xie was seeking.
Two weeks after the Tianjin meeting, Mr. Barton learned that Mr. Spavor would be sentenced in Dandong. The ambassador’s team invited diplomats from allied countries to gather at the courthouse. If Canada couldn’t stop the sentencing, it wanted the world as a witness.
Mr. Barton was joined by diplomats from the U.S., Japan, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. In the courtroom, Mr. Barton opened a video call to the Canadian embassy in Beijing and narrated the proceedings.
The judge sentenced Mr. Spavor to an 11-year term for espionage, based on the number of incriminating photos authorities claimed they found on his phone. Mr. Barton called Mr. Spavor’s family and then spoke to reporters.
“Our collective presence and voice sends a strong signal to China and the Chinese government that all the eyes of the world are watching,” the ambassador said.
A month later, Mr. Barton was summoned to the U.S. Embassy safe room to read transcripts of a call between Messrs. Biden and Xi. The two leaders had again pressed each other to release the prisoners.
It was, according to Beijing, “the consensus of the two presidents.”
Mr. Barton got an unexpected call while he was wrapping up a visit to an organization serving children with special needs in Qinghai, one of China’s poorest provinces. An aide handed him a phone and said, “Xie Feng wants to speak to you now!” Mr. Barton stepped into a blue van.
Mr. Xie spoke through a translator and quizzed Mr. Barton over details for completing the deferred prosecution agreement with Ms. Meng. The snag was how the U.S. would characterize her wrongdoing. Mr. Barton relayed some potential wording, and Mr. Xie cut him off, breaking into English.
That’s good, he said.
Ms. Meng wouldn’t explicitly admit to lying—only that the statements she had made to HSBC were “untrue.”
Mr. Barton plugged in a phone charger and called off his next visit. He kept Mr. Xie on the phone to go over logistics of a deal that could easily collapse. It all hinged on one overriding question: Would Xi Jinping approve?
The decision arrived in a handwritten note from the General Office of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Mr. Xi gave his consent.
On the evening of Sept. 19, one of Ms. Meng’s new lawyers emailed a statement of facts to the Justice Department. The Huawei executive would concede that what she told the HSBC banker in 2013 was untrue.
Five days later, Ms. Meng joined a Brooklyn, N.Y., court hearing in a videoconference call from Vancouver. She pleaded not guilty to the indictment and accepted the deferred prosecution agreement.
The same day, Mr. Barton arrived for a prison visit with Mr. Kovrig. He learned he would speak to the two Michaels in video calls. Mr. Spavor had already arrived in Beijing by train.
“You will have the honor of telling them they’re going home,” a security official told Mr. Barton.
Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor appeared on the calls, one after the other. Mr. Barton tried to keep his voice from breaking in his call to Mr. Spavor.
“You’re going home,” he said.
Mr. Spavor looked bewildered.
“Are you serious?”
Nervous that any snag could derail the prisoner exchange, only a few select diplomats in Canada’s Beijing embassy knew what was afoot. Embassy staff worked out travel arrangements. A diplomat’s wife volunteered to bake peanut-butter cookies for the trip home.
In Vancouver, Ms. Meng and her lawyers had a 4 p.m. deadline on Sept. 24 to complete paperwork for the agreement with the Justice Department.
After the U.S. case was done, Canada invoked Section 23(3), the article allowing the government to terminate Ms. Meng’s custody.
In China, Messrs. Spavor and Kovrig, handcuffed and blindfolded, arrived at the Tianjin airport. Mr. Barton waited in the VIP lounge.
As the Canadians cleared the immigration checkpoint in China, officers at the Vancouver airport handed Ms. Meng her own freshly stamped passport. She hugged a lawyer and bid farewell to Chinese consular officers.
Ms. Meng learned during her flight that Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor had also been freed.
After a nighttime landing, Ms. Meng descended the airplane stairs at Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport. She wore a Chinese flag pinned to her red Carolina Herrera dress and waved to a waiting crowd. Projectors flashed her name across skyscrapers in Shenzhen.
From a red carpet placed on the tarmac for her arrival, Ms. Meng raised her hands in victory and thanked one person, Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor touched down in Anchorage, Alaska. On the rain-washed runway, Mr. Kovrig bent to kiss the ground. Mr. Spavor joked they should hold their kisses until they reached Canada.
Mr. Trudeau and a small entourage greeted their return in Calgary, Mr. Spavor’s hometown. They were welcomed with to-go cups of Tim Hortons coffee.
Mr. Kovrig flew on to Toronto. Ms. Nadjibulla met him there, and they embraced beside a Royal Canadian Air Force jet.
The next day, China allowed the Liu siblings to return to the U.S.
Once home, Mr. Spavor found it hard to sleep in his own bed, having grown accustomed to contorting himself in a cell beside dozens of inmates. He remains in Canada and regularly speaks by phone with Mr. Barton.
Mr. Kovrig and Ms. Nadjibulla spent weeks together writing a book on the ordeal during her stays in Spain, Canada and the Netherlands. They hope the book offers a road map for other prisoners and their families. Despite their divorce plans, they are in some ways closer now than ever, friends said.
Mr. Barton resigned his post as ambassador three months after the two Michaels returned home. He became chairman of Rio Tinto PLC, the Anglo-Australian mining conglomerate. China, long locked in a trade dispute with Australia, agreed last month to develop a $2 billion iron-ore project with his new company.
Ms. Meng was recently promoted to a six-month rotation as Huawei’s chairwoman. She no longer sets foot in Western countries.
The U.S. and Canada persuaded 66 other countries to sign a declaration against arbitrary detention to forestall similar international disputes.
The resurgence of what the U.S. has called hostage diplomacy—by China but also Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and Turkey—has reached such proportions that Mr. Biden this summer declared it a national emergency. He signed an executive order authorizing the U.S. to impose sanctions on anyone involved in wrongfully detaining Americans abroad.
Huawei has pleaded not guilty to the bank-fraud and other charges in the U.S. case. On Monday, prosecutors unsealed charges against two Chinese intelligence officers accused of trying to bribe a U.S. law-enforcement employee for confidential information about what people familiar with the case said was the Huawei investigation.
Canada in May declared Huawei a national security risk and banned it from building 5G networks in the country. It was a political decision, a Huawei spokesman said, resulting from U.S. pressure.
“We used to embrace the ideal of globalization and aspire to serve all mankind,” Mr. Ren wrote in an August company memo. “What is our ideal now? Survive and earn some money wherever we can.”
The company has since been expelled from most European and North American 5G networks.
Welcome to this week's #FixTheWorld or #GiveUp newsletter no. 36
Tech billionaire's had everything - genius, vision, wealth beyond imagining. Yet some of them put shackles on progress, not liberation.
Brilliance and depravity. Innovation and corruption. The two sides of Silicon Valley’s founders that left carnage in their wake. But which one really reflects their souls?
Can billionaire Tech leaders help?
Is there any solution? This article highlight solution might be finding and nurturing light triad traits ..
TLDR: Picture a league of fledgling billionaires uniting to create groundbreaking foundations with an audacious aim: to render their new foundation(s) obsolete by tackling systemic global dilemmas such as hunger, climate chaos, or even birthing a revolutionary, sustainable energy source.
Click through to read the full blog post here: tiny.cc/DarkvL_flickr
Or read previous editions of the FTW newsletters: FixTheWorld.4Good.Space
#FixPersonalityTraits #FixTheWorld #AskTheRightQuestions
Dalle3 (Bing Create was used) and created about 5/600, 300 or so selected, wonder if you agree with those I selected, full of the digital creations in this album here: tiny.cc/DarkVsLightFlickr
Join our AI Artists of the World Flickr group, which we aim to run some competitions in 2024: tiny.cc/AIArtistFlickr to hope to encourage finding next AI Artiste that can help #FixTheWorld!
The Museo Soumaya opnened in 2011 to house the private collection of Carlos Slim, the world's billionaire's billionaire, in his home country. The building and approach are ... distinctive ... Among his many businesses is telcel.
Tower Fifty Seven is a 32-story building on “Billionaire’s Row” in Manhattan, New York City, NY (USA).
Some miscellaneous shots around town over the last month.
I wonder if the skating rink will open this winter.
Had to sneak down a billionaire’s driveway to get this, right between their pair of color-coordinated Teslas.
NYC Skyline Icons - View to a few of New York City's classic iconic structures. Seen in this image is One Vanderbilt, Billionaire's Row and the Statue of liberty lined up in front of the Empire State Building (ESB). This image shows the NYC midtown Manhattan skyline.
The Empire State Building is lit up in blue and white with a flickering candle in the mast in celebration of Chanukkah.
This image is also available as a black and white.
To view additional images please visit www.susancandelario.com
Thank You,
Susan Candelario
The toys of the rich at £260m (US $333m), 'Sailing Yacht A' belongs to Russian billionaire Andrey Igorevich Melnichenko, seen in Cartagena, Spain.
See article:-
www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3243137/Th...
Central Park Tower (CPT) is a supertall high-rise located in Midtown Manhattan at 217 West 57th Street along "Billionaire's" Row", a block south of Central Park.
With a total height of 1550 feet (472m), Central Park Tower is the first building in the western hemisphere to eclipse the 1450ft roof height of Chicago's Sears Tower. However, due to a technicality, the spire atop One World Trade Center is counted in its full 1776ft height. One World Trade Center remains the tallest building in New York City, and the United States, despite it's parapet only reaching to 1368ft.
CPT is the world's tallest residential building. (The Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat classifies buildings as residential if at least 85% of the floor area is devoted to residential purposes.)
The tower contains 179 condominium units and the total construction costs were estimated to be $3B.
It was initially dubbed The Nordstrom Tower due to its retail anchor tenant.
The developer is Extell Development Company, which also built the neighboring 1004 foot One57 residential tower. Land acquisition began in 2005 and excavation at the site started in May 2014. The building topped out in September 2019.
Central Park Tower was designed by the team of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture. Smith is the architect credited with designing Dubai's Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building during his tenure at Skidmore Owings and Merrill.
A spire that would have reached to 1775ft, just a foot shy of One World Trade Center's pinnacle, was dropped from an earlier proposed design.
Manhattan NYC Icons - View to a few of New York City's classic iconic structures. Seen in this image is One Vanderbilt, Billionaire's Row and the Statue of liberty lined up in front of the Empire State Building (ESB). This image shows the NYC midtown Manhattan skyline.
The Empire State Building is lit up in blue and white with a flickering candle in the mast in celebration of Chanukkah.
This image is also available as a black and white.
To view additional images please visit www.susancandelario.com
Thank You,
Susan Candelario
Classic NYC Icons - View to a few of New York City's classic iconic structures. Seen in this image is One Vanderbilt, Billionaire's Row and the Statue of liberty lined up in front of the Empire State Building (ESB). This image shows the NYC midtown Manhattan skyline.
The Empire State Building is lit up in blue and white with a flickering candle in the mast in celebration of Chanukkah.
This image is also available as a black and white.
To view additional images please visit www.susancandelario.com
Thank You,
Susan Candelario
21-10-2018
Another view of this fairly regular Falcon 7X M-LJGI operated by Ven Air for Larry J Goodman. This reg was on the Irish Billionaire's 2000LXbefore and he previously owned a C750 P4-LJG.
Unsolicited junk mail is a good replacement for toilet paper if you cannot find the softer, more comfortable real thing.
This was addressed to ME, personally, and, therefore, I have every right to take a photo of it and share it with other Flickr users.
Let me assure you, in my 70 plus years on this earth, I have never been a member of the Republican Party, and I most certainly have never supported anyone in the Trump family despite what the lying son writes in the above four page letter.
Second, I would NEVER send this scoundrel or anyone in his family any of my hard earned money as a donation. Yes, some of my taxes trickle over to the White House, but I am a patriotic American and pay my fair share of taxes. We don't know if the President pays his taxes because he refuses to show us his tax returns. If Obama had pulled that shit, he would have been impeached. And I would never, ever send a pissed on penny to the Senate Republicans. I never saw such a bunch of gutless wonders who are afraid to vote against the wishes of our Supreme Leader (with the only exception of Mitt Romney. I used to believe I could count on Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowsky to at least be fair in their votes, but I have found both of them to be spineless, also).
Now, you can read page one, but the last three pages are even worse in parts. I had to laugh at the salutation " Dear Friend of the Family". Really? "The Family"? I could never be friends with this clueless family of liars who have zero regard for the environment or for anyone who is not a multi-millionaire who can be of help to them. And I would never be associated with a family that has two sons who enjoy killing trophy big game animals in Africa, just for the thrill of it. Rotten to the core.
"I pray this finds you well...."
This guy prays? For ME? LOL, what a joke.
He goes on to bash Democrats for being Socialists. Not true, anymore than Republicans are socialists....how about bailing out the airlines the other day, Trump? That was true socialism. What happened to the free market? When Obama bailed out the auto industry, Republicans wanted him impeached. They called GM "Government Motors" and all guffawed over it. But, guess what, that was one of the best things Obama did because it saved the auto industry and saved hundreds of thousands of jobs, and GM payed all the money back to the government. The airlines do not have to pay it back. They simply got bailed out with our tax dollars. This is Republicanism? Whatever happened to the small government conservatives, the Tea Party people, the Trumpsters? I don't see them clamoring about this.
When I run out of toilet paper, this will be the first replacement I will use. It is such a joke that a billionaire's son asks ME for a donation.