On Tuesday morning, the talks that opened the Mobile World Congress trade show in Los Angeles were Southern-California sunny about 5G wireless.“It will revolutionize our lives,” said Meredith Attwell Baker, president and CEO of the wireless communications trade group CTIA, in a typical observation. The Washington trade group cosponsors this convention alongside GSMA, the London-based organization behind the much larger MWC show in Barcelona.We’ve been hearing things like that about 5G for years. The next generation of wireless, so the sales pitch goes, will make the previously impossible possible. Think self-driving cars. Or robot surgery. Or perhaps even robot surgery in the back of self-driving cars.But the resolutely optimistic remarks by opening keynote speakers such as Baker, Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai, U.S. Cellular CEO Kenneth R. Meyers, and Viacom president and CEO Robert Bakish also offered reminders of how far 5G has to go in some key areas.Spotty coverageThe first thing to know is that the fastest flavor of 5G is also the first to fade. Millimeter-wave 5G, the foundation of AT&T and Verizon’s early 5G deployment, can deliver download and upload speeds competitive with fiber-optic links. But that high-band spectrum can’t deliver them more than a block or two.“We’ll just never get the coverage out of millimeter that we need if we’re really going to try to cover vast areas of this country,” U.S. Cellular’s Meyers told Baker.But even 5G networks built on slower but longer-range mid- and low-band spectrum cover far less ground than 4G. I’ve seen this myself carrying a Sprint 5G review unit around Washington, D.C., where reception is a block-by-block proposition.Baker, who noted that “I’m literally walking the streets of Washington, D.C with a 5G phone—two 5G phones, in fact,” has probably observed this too.(Disclosure: I also write for Yahoo Finance, one of Verizon’s media properties.)Infrastructure hiccupsThe keynote led off with remarks from L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti in which he bragged that “we’re going to be one of the first cities, big cities in the world to have a full 5G build-out here.”How? “We made that easier for our providers by getting out of the way, cutting red tape, and then looking at the applications of 5G.”That’s the flip side of limited 5G range: Millimeter-wave service will require an incredibly dense array of small cell sites, and not all cities and counties have welcomed it with the same enthusiasm as Los Angeles.The FCC’s Pai has worked to override municipal-level obstacles and told MWCLA attendees that the U.S. will have “some 200,000” small cell sites deployed by this year. But that’s only a small fraction of what a nationwide 5G build-out could require.In discussing the importance of ending the digital divide overall, Pai provided a useful comparison when he said: “It has an echo of the rural electrification of the 1930s and 1940s.” A 5G build-out probably won’t need decades, but it’s not something we’ll measure in months either.Pai did, however, voice his confidence that the U.S. 5G build-out will proceed without fears over the security of the infrastructure itself—a nod to the concerns of the Trump administration and others over Huawei’s hardware, although neither he nor other MWCLA speakers dropped the H-bomb onstage.“This is not an area where we can afford to take a risk and hope for the best,” Pai said.Incremental improvementsSelling a 5G phone to the type of people in the room at MWCLA, or those who recognize that abbreviation at all, may not be hard. But what about people who think that today’s 4G LTE is already fast enough?Viacom’s Bakish acknowledged that when he noted the progress of mobile video from quick YouTube clips to live streaming services that can replace TV subscriptions. “We don’t actually have to wait for 5G to unlock the value of it,” he said. “The three key enablers of mobile video—connectivity, devices, and content—are all already in place.” So what does 5G add? Bakish suggested a future ofaugmented-reality interactivity routed to connected eyewear “no more intrusive than a pair of sunglasses.”Asked the same question, U.S. Cellular’s Meyers had a simpler answer: “The enablement.” As in, 5G will enable things we can’t imagine yet, but will appreciate when they arrive.In the meantime, stay focused on another application Bakish invoked in his remarks: plain old home broadband.“This massive gain in speed, reliability, and improved latency that 5G mobile networks will deliver will transform wireless broadband into a meaningful alternative to fixed fiber for Internet services into the home,” he said.Yes, you might someday have an alternative to your cable company. But probably not as soon as you’d like.

Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro has derided Greta Thunberg​ after the teenage climate activist added her voice to growing international condemnation of a surge of anti-indigenous violence in the Amazon.“Indigenous people are literally being murdered for trying to protect the forrest [sic] from illegal deforestation. Over and over again,” Thunberg tweeted on Sunday alongside a video showing the aftermath of a drive-by shooting targeting indigenous leaders that left two dead.“It is shameful that the world remains silent about this,” the 16-year-old campaigner added.Bolsonaro – who activists accuse of green-lighting a new era of destruction and violence with his hardline anti-environment rhetoric – hit back on Tuesday.“Greta’s been saying Indians have died because they were defending the Amazon,” a smirking Bolsonaro told reporters outside the presidential palace in Brazil’s capital, Brasília.“It’s amazing how much space the press gives this kind of pirralha,” Bolsonaro added, using a Portuguese word that loosely translates as “little brat” or “pest”.Bolsonaro had initially failed to remember Thunberg​’s name, labelling her simply “that girl”.Thunberg appeared to take Bolsonaro’s disparagement as a badge of honour, changing her Twitter biography to “Pirralha”.Thunberg is far from alone in challenging Bolsonaro over the spike in rainforest destruction and attacks on indigenous communities during his first year in power.Brazil’s Indigenous Missionary Council rights group reported in September that 153 indigenous territories had been invaded since the start of 2019 – more than twice last year’s figure of 76 – and said Bolsonaro’s “aggressive” talk was partly responsible.Recent weeks have seen a spate of deadly attacks on indigenous activists.After Saturday’s killings in the northern state of Maranhão, Brazil’s former environment minister, Marina Silva, tweeted: “This Amazon bloodbath demands a strong and swift response from Brazilian authorities.”“We have been cut adrift and left unprotected by the Brazilian state,” wrote Sônia Guajajara, a prominent indigenous leader.In a recent interview, the Amazon senator Randolfe Rodrigues said Brazil’s native peoples stood at a historic juncture as Bolsonaro pushed ahead with plans to open their lands to commercial mining.“Not since the [1964-85] dictatorship have Brazil’s indigenous peoples felt as threatened as they do now,” Rodrigues said. Topics Greta Thunberg Jair Bolsonaro Brazil Americas Amazon rainforest Indigenous peoples Deforestation news

“Devolution”—transferring powers to the individual nations—was one of the big political projects of Tony Blair’s governments, an effort designed to contain any separatist urges, allowing each part of the union to maintain its unique identity within the whole.The plan was driven by the realistic assessment that there was no reason the U.K. should endure as an entity, any more than the list of “vanished kingdoms” drawn up by Norman Davies in his history of Europe: Burgundia, Litva, Borussia, Aragon. The decision to establish devolved governments in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales took place when the former Yugoslavia’s violent splintering was still fresh in voters’ minds.Now, Brexit has again put the idea of Britishness under severe strain. The leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP), Nicola Sturgeon, is agitating for another independence referendum. The last one, in 2014, in which Scotland voted to remain part of the U.K., may have been billed as a “once-in-a-generation event,” but her party argues that leaving the European Union has profoundly changed Scotland’s circumstances, and its citizens deserve another say.Compared with this, Welsh nationalism feels like the dragon that has never roared. Certainly, there is anti-English sentiment washing around—Cofiwch Dryweryn—but its impact on the ballot box is limited. The nationalist party Plaid Cymru (the “Party of Wales”) holds just a tenth of the Welsh seats in the British Parliament (the SNP has more than half of Scotland’s) and has little chance of making net gains in Thursday’s election. Support for Welsh independence is at only 28 percent. When voters are given a range of options on further devolution, the most popular choice is to leave things as they are now.It didn’t have to be this way. In the first devolved elections in 1999, Plaid Cymru received a higher share of the vote than the SNP. So what went wrong for Welsh nationalists—or, perhaps, what went right for their Scottish counterparts?When it comes to separatist movements, James Mitchell tells me, “memory is more important than history.” Mitchell, a professor of public policy at Edinburgh University, has devoted his career to studying the conditions needed for states to break apart. National identity, unsurprisingly, is key—but that identity is often mythical as much as observable. When we spoke, Mitchell was in Italy, where the far-right League party of former Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has invoked the concept of “Padania,” an alternative name for the Po Valley in the country’s north. Salvini contends that the region is subsidizing the rest of the country. Padania, in its own way, is as symbolic as the drowned village of Capel Celyn.That idea of subsidy brings us to another factor: a sense of grievance—or, to put it more neutrally, injustice. Both Scottish and Welsh nationalists chafe against England’s dominance, but Brexit gives the SNP’s cause an extra boost. A majority of the Welsh voted to leave the European Union, whereas a majority of Scottish voters opted to remain. Sturgeon, therefore, can credibly claim that Scotland is “being taken out of the EU against our will.”Scotland’s economic case for independence is stronger, too. Ahead of the 2014 referendum, Scottish nationalists argued that any decline in revenue after independence could be offset by a “North Sea oil fund.” The exact figures were endlessly disputed, particularly because of the fluctuating price of oil, but the debate created the meme that, far from being a poor relation, Scotland was a country whose natural resources had been exploited by a government in Westminster. Most Welsh jobs, meanwhile, lie within 30 miles of England, and Wales’s economy appears more reliant on its bigger neighbor, according to Roger Awan-Scully, the head of the politics department at Cardiff University.

The megamerger of South Korea’s two big shipbuilders faces new headwinds, with European regulators set to follow their counterparts in Singapore in launching an antitrust investigation. The European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, will launch an antitrust review of the planned combination of debt-ridden Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. and Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co. , which would control 20% of the world’s market for oceangoing vessels, a senior commission official said. “There are monopoly alarm bells all over this deal,” the official said. “The probe is set to launch this month and could take up to six months.” Newsletter Sign-up Reuters reported the investigation on Tuesday. The Competition and Consumer Commission of Singapore said last week that the marriage of the two Korean companies “will remove competition” in the global shipbuilding industry and hurt its own yards. Seoul announced the merger of the two shipyards—linchpins of a transportation sector central to the country’s economy—nearly a year ago, but needed regulatory approval from Japan, Singapore, China, Kazakhstan and the EU to proceed. So far only Kazakhstan, which builds vessels that ply the Caspian Sea, has given the green light. Regulators in other countries continue to study the implications of a deal for their own shipbuilders at a time when orders for new vessels are at their lowest in nearly a decade. One area of concern is the Korean yards’ dominant role in constructing liquefied natural gas carriers, which carry high margins for producers and are in high demand as energy markets move toward natural gas. Hyundai Heavy and Daewoo Shipbuilding together hold around 52% of the global order book for LNG carriers, according to marine-data provider VesselsValue. The two yards also attract about a fifth of orders for tankers, container vessels and dry bulk carriers. Related Maritime Emissions Rule Triggers Split in Shipping Costs December 20, 2019 Retailers Brace for Bigger Holiday Returns Season December 19, 2019 The merger could be canceled if any of the national regulators dismiss it outright. But they will tread carefully given that shipbuilding mergers in their own countries would be subject to Korean approval. The shipbuilding industry has been hurt in recent years by excess capacity as international trade has wavered. “This is not about controlling the market, it’s about survivaland if there is no consolidation we will all go down,” Hyundai Heavy Group President Sam Ka said in late August. “All big shipbuilding countries are moving to merge their yards. There are thousands of jobs involved and there is no appetite for more state bailouts.” China, which builds more ships than any other country, announced in November the merger of its two biggest yards, China State Shipbuilding Corp. and China Shipbuilding Industry Corp. A tie-up of Japan’s two largest shipbuilders—Japan Marine United Corp. and Imabari Shipbuilding Co.—is also in the works, while Singaporean sovereign fund Temasek Holdings Pvt. Ltd. is looking to merge the country’s two big yards, Keppel Corp. and Sembcorp Marine Ltd. Write to Costas Paris at [email protected] Copyright ©2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

President Trump announced Monday that his administration would immediately reimpose tariffs on steel and aluminum from two South American countries, blaming the governments of Brazil and Argentina for devaluing their currencies and hurting the U.S. economy.Trump made the announcement in a series of tweets while pushing the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and loosen monetary policy."Brazil and Argentina have been presiding over a massive devaluation of their currencies. which is not good for our farmers. Therefore, effective immediately, I will restore the Tariffs on all Steel & Aluminum that is shipped into the U.S. from those countries," Trump tweeted."The Federal Reserve should likewise act so that countries, of which there are many, no longer take advantage of our strong dollar by further devaluing their currencies. This makes it very hard for our manufactures & farmers to fairly export their goods. Lower Rates & Loosen - Fed!" he continued......Reserve should likewise act so that countries, of which there are many, no longer take advantage of our strong dollar by further devaluing their currencies. This makes it very hard for our manufactures & farmers to fairly export their goods. Lower Rates & Loosen - Fed!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2019"U.S. Markets are up as much as 21% since the announcement of Tariffs on 3/1/2018 - and the U.S. is taking in massive amounts of money (and giving some to our farmers, who have been targeted by China)!" the president concluded in a third tweet, minutes later.U.S. Markets are up as much as 21% since the announcement of Tariffs on 3/1/2018 - and the U.S. is taking in massive amounts of money (and giving some to our farmers, who have been targeted by China)!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2019The Trump administration first implemented steel and aluminum tariffs in March of 2018, with the president declaring at the time that "aggressive foreign trade practices" related to the trade goods amounted to an "assault on our country" and the U.S. steel industry.At the time, Trump temporarily exempted Mexico and Canada from the plan, while seeking to negotiate a replacement trade agreement for the much-criticized North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).In May of 2018, the administration made deals with several countries to temporarily suspend the tariffs, Brazil and Argentina included.

U.S. chief technology officer Michael Kratsios came to the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal, with a stern message: You don’t want Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei in your 5G future.“The Chinese government has built an advanced authoritarian state by twisting technology to put censorship over free expression and citizen control over empowerment,” he said on the main stage Thursday afternoon. “The government continues extending its authoritarianism abroad, and in no case is this more clear than with Huawei.”It was an unusually direct slam, at an event which usually plays up themes of international cooperation and learning (and runs a sister event in Hong Kong). But Kratsios plunged ahead.“Chinese law compels all Chinese companies, including Huawei, to cooperate with its intelligence and security services, no matter where the company operates,” he warned. Then he reminded his audience of reports last year by Le Monde that Huawei’s work on the African Union’s headquarters building was followed by data being exfiltrated to servers in Shanghai for five years.Kratsios—whom President Trump nominated as U.S. CTO in March, filling a slot that had stayed vacant for two years—urged European governments to reject Huawei’s offers to help build their 5G networks. “If we don’t act now, Chinese influence and control of technology will not only undermine the freedoms of their own citizens but all citizens of the world,” he said.The trustworthiness of Huawei’s network gear—a separate issue from its smartphones—is getting to be a touchy subject all around. But it’s not a settled one.Not all governments feel as alarmed as that of the U.S. and allies such as Australia. Beyond the European governments that Kratsios urged to stop tolerating the Chinese telecom giant, the African Union denied the spying allegations and then signed a tech collaboration deal with Huawei this spring. Those last two details didn’t make Kratsios’s speech.Back in Washington, an 18-month review conducted for the Obama administration found no evidence of Huawei spying in 2012.On the other side of the Atlantic, a March 2019 report for the British government found no backdoors either. But that report by the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre Oversight Board also cited grave insecurities in how Huawei ships and patches the software in its network gear. Its glum summary: “It will be difficult to appropriately risk-manage future products in the context of U.K. deployments, until the underlying defects in Huawei’s software engineering and cyber security processes are remediated.”In October, Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai proposed rules that would bar companies receiving federal universal-service funding from buying “equipment or services from companies posing a national security threat”—with Huawei and another Chinese provider, ZTE, specifically named. “Rather than asking people to trust you, show them why they don’t have to trust you.” They would also compel certain universal-service recipients to “remove existing equipment and services from designated companies from their networks,” a farther-reaching proposition. Both have bipartisan support on the five-member FCC. Pai’s Democratic colleague Geoffrey Starks has already endorsed them in hearings and speeches.But without a full-scale rip-and-replace of network hardware, what can you do with connectivity that might not merit much trust? The first headline speaker at Web Summit offered a simple bit of advice to any tech firms that might be tuned into his remote video appearance: Encrypt your customers’ communications from one end to another, without any backup keys.“Rather than asking people to trust you,” Edward Snowden suggested to telecom vendors, “show them why they don’t have to trust you.”Sen. Ron Wyden (D.-Ore.) made the same basic prescription Wednesday in a letter to the FCC’s Pai. It urged the FCC to “ensure that encryption and authentication features included in 5G standards are enabled” by the nationwide carriers—then suggested that the commission consider mandating end-to-end encryption, ensuring that content could not be read even when cached on carrier servers.Apple’s iMessage and Facebook’s WhatsApp provide end-to-end security by default, while standard-issue SMS isn’t even encrypted in transit over the air.Encrypting 5G wouldn’t grind down the risk of eavesdropping to zero. But it would limit that risk on the individual parties to any one conversation, as Snowden said at the end of his Web Summit talk: “The only people you have to trust are the people that you’re talking to.”Disclosure: I moderated two panels at Web Summit, in return for which the organizers covered my airfare and lodging.

The price of bitcoin was sent plummeting 18% as it and other cryptocurrencies yo-yo in value over fears of a wider trading crackdown spurred by renewed potential of South Korean regulatory action.Bitcoin’s slide of over over $2,200 triggered a massive selloff across the broader cryptocurrency market, with biggest rival Ethereum down 23% on the day, according to trade website Coinmarketcap, and the next biggest, Ripple, plunging 33%.Following initial statements that South Korea was looking to ban trading of cryptocurrencies, followed by a climbdown, the country’s finance minister Kim Dong-yeon said in an interview with local radio station TBS that banning trading in digital currencies was “a live option”.Kim said: “There are no disagreements over regulating speculation,” such as using real-name accounts and levying taxes on cryptocurrency trading. Shutting down digital currency exchanges is “a live option but government ministries need to very seriously review it,” he added.Following the latest news, Bitcoin traded as low as $11,191.59 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange, down 18% on the day for a short period, putting the digital currency on track for its biggest one-day fall in three years.“It’s mainly been regulatory issues which are haunting the cryptocurrency, with news around South Korea’s further crackdown on trading the driver today,” said Think Markets chief strategist Naeem Aslam, who holds what he described as “substantial” amounts of bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple. “But we maintain our stance. We do not think that the complete banning of cryptocurrencies is possible.”Joachim Wuermeling, a director of Germany’s national bank, said on Monday that national rules are likely to prove ineffective given the borderless bitcoin’s global scale. He said: “Effective regulation of virtual currencies would therefore only be achievable through the greatest possible international cooperation, because the regulatory power of nation states is obviously limited.”European Union states and legislators agreed last month on stricter rules to prevent money laundering and terrorism financing on exchange platforms for bitcoin and other virtual currencies.Meanwhile, Chinese regulators have banned initial coin offerings (ICOs), shut down local cryptocurrency trading exchanges and limited bitcoin mining. Chinese authorities also plan to block domestic access to Chinese and offshore cryptocurrency platforms that allow centralised trading, Bloomberg reported on Monday.Cryptocurrencies enjoyed a bumper year, with bitcoin hitting a high of about $20,000 in 2017 as mainstream investors entered the market and an explosion in ICOs drove demand for bitcoin and Ethereum.The latest tumble left bitcoin down more than 40% from the record high in mid-December, wiping about $130bn billion off its “market cap” – the unit price multiplied by the total number of bitcoins that have been released into the market.“[It] seems like it’s uncertainty spooking the markets … with regulations unclear,” said Charles Hayter, founder of data analysis website Cryptocompare. “[Traders] are taking profits on the increased risk scenarios going forward.”The price of bitcoin was fluctuating to under $12,000 by publication time, according to Bitstamp. 2017’s 1,500% rise in the value of bitcoin has made billionaires out of early investors such as the Winklevoss twins, and seen some such as the Pineapple Fund turn to philanthropic endeavours.But high-profile investor Warren Buffett recently said he would never invest in bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, predicting that the assets are in for a fall.Many do not share Buffett’s scepticism. Companies such as Kodak have been rocketing in value by launching new cryptocurrencies, and some simply by putting the word blockchain in their name. Tiny US soft drinks firm changes name to cash in on bitcoin mania Topics Bitcoin Cryptocurrencies South Korea China Germany Asia Pacific Europe news

closeVideoYang: Our message is reaching the American people beyond the debates2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang reacts to his debate performance on 'Fox News @ Night.'Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang stands at 4 percent in a new national poll released Tuesday by Quinnipiac University -- which means the first-time candidate and tech-entrepreneur has qualified to take the stage at next week’s sixth Democratic presidential primary debate.Meanwhile, former Vice President Joe Biden leads with 29 percent support in the poll, with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont at 21 percent. Biden jumped 5 percentage points and Sanders climbed 4 points from Quinnipiac’s previous national poll in the Democratic nomination race, which was released late last month.YANG DIPLOMATICALLY RESPONDS TO AOC'S 'FREEDOM DIVIDEND' CRITICISMPrior to the release of the new survey, Yang’s campaign had said it remained one poll shy of reaching the thresholds to make the stage at the Dec. 19 showdown.Candidates must reach at least 4 percent in four surveys recognized as qualifying polls by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), or 6 percent in two polls in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. Yang has already reached the other qualifying criteria -- receiving contributions from at least 200,000 individual donors.Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii still remains one poll shy of qualifying for the debate. She grabbed the support of 2 percent in the new Quinnipiac University survey among Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party.On Monday, Gabbard announced that she wouldn’t attend the debate even if she qualifies. The candidate said instead, she’ll meet with voters in New Hampshire and South Carolina.Candidates have until the end of Thursday to reach the polling and donor thresholds. The Democratic National Committee will wait unit after the deadline to officially announce which White House hopefuls have qualified for the debate.By qualifying, Yang, an Asian-American, becomes the first non-Caucasian candidate to make the debate stage.Sen. Kamala Harris -- one of three black candidates running for the Democratic nomination -- had qualified, but the California senator last week ended her bid for the White House. The lack of a non-white candidate on the debate stage from a field that, at its zenith, was arguably the most racially diverse in history raised concerns with some voters."We are going to do something unprecedented on the debate stage next week, and that is show up as the lone person of color," Yang joked to reporters as he kicked off a bus tour in Iowa on Tuesday. "I'm excited to make the debate stage, not surprised. We've been showing consistent growth throughout."Yang -- once the longest of long-shots who has seen his campaign surge to middle tier status thanks in part to his promise of a $1,000-per-month Freedom Dividend payment to all adults -- has qualified for all of the Democratic primary debates.Meanwhile, Sen. Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts stands at 15 percent in the new poll, basically unchanged from last month. South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg plunged from 16 percent support in last month’s poll to 9 percent.“This is the first time Biden has had a double-digit lead since August, and Sanders' best number since June. While Warren's numbers seem to have stabilized, Buttigieg's numbers have dipped," Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy said.Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg grabbed 5 percent support in the Quinnipiac survey. The multi-billionaire business and media mogul, who declared his candidacy two and a half weeks ago, also stood at 5 percent in a Monmouth University national poll that was also released on Tuesday.Besides Yang and Gabbard, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota stood at 3 percent. No other candidate in the still-large field of Democratic White House hopefuls topped 1 percent.The poll also indicates that Biden, Sanders, Warren, Bloomberg and Buttigieg each with upper to middle single-digit advantages over President Trump in hypothetical 2020 general election matchups.The Quinnipiac University poll was conducted from Wednesday to Monday, with 1,533 registered voters nationwide questioned by live telephone operators. The survey includes 665 Democratic voters and independent voters who lean Democratic, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.Fox News' Alexandra Rego contributed to this report

Nobody else is close to qualifying. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and the former housing secretary Julián Castro have met the donor threshold but have no qualifying polls. They each had 1 percent support in the Quinnipiac poll. In a national Monmouth University poll released earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Booker had 2 percent support and Mr. Castro had 1 percent.In terms of the overall contours of the race, the polls showed little change. Mr. Biden retained a clear lead, with Mr. Sanders in second place, Ms. Warren in third and Mr. Buttigieg in fourth. (In the Quinnipiac poll, the difference between Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren was within the margin of error.)Notably, former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, who entered the race less than three weeks ago, had 5 percent support in both polls. Mr. Bloomberg has already spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money on advertising and has not been seeking donors, a decision that will exclude him from debates regardless of his poll numbers unless the D.N.C. drops its donor requirement.Also working against Mr. Bloomberg: Voters who know of him tend not to like him. In both polls released Tuesday, he had the worst favorability to unfavorability ratio of any Democratic candidate for whom that question was asked.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. -- A Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, that became a rallying point for white nationalists has been vandalized again, this time with graffiti saying, “Impeach Trump.” News outlets report that the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was also spray-painted Thursday night with “This is Racist.” Tarps were put over the graffiti and city officials expect a clean-up effort to start Monday. The statue was vandalized earlier this year with an expletive directed at President Donald Trump. White nationalists seized on a city plan to remove the statue and flocked there in 2017 for a rally that turned violent and deadly. The city’s effort to remove the statue have been prevented by a judge amid ongoing litigation. The statue has been vandalized several times previously.

Listeners of Fox News host and conservative radio personality Laura Ingraham’s podcast have been forced to go elsewhere for their preferred helping of right-wing bigotry, and many of them are very unhappy about it. Ingraham’s podcast has shown diminishing signs of life in recent months after launching just one year ago, The Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona reports. Ingraham announced the suspension of her conservative talk radio show in 2018 and pitched her podcast as an alternative for listeners. The host has a thoroughly documented history of spreading anti-immigrant bigotry and has repeatedly used her platforms to harangue movements for racial justice by echoing white nationalist talking points. In a June podcast episode, for example, Ingraham spoke derisively of advocates pushing for reparations for slavery and implied that the conquest of Black people was just another blip in world history. “We won, you lost, that’s that,” Ingraham said. “That’s it.” But just a year into her new experiment, the apparent failure of “The Laura Ingraham Podcast” all but guarantees that her listeners will be forced to turn to the innumerable other founts of white nationalism on the internet to satisfy their needs. While Ingraham’s website says new podcast episodes would be posted three times a week, the most recent episode was posted in September, and Ingraham has scrubbed references to the podcast from her Twitter bio, as The Daily Beast noted. Ingraham did not immediately reply to HuffPost’s question about whether her podcast is indeed dead. A quick Twitter search shows Ingraham’s listeners hilariously shouting into the void, clamoring for the return of their dear leader. “Starving listeners need sustenance!” one wrote. For now, those interested in hearing the hysteria of a distressed white woman forced to share space with people of color can find still find Ingraham on Fox News at 10 p.m. nightly, where her views are comfortably nestled between commercials about catheters and colorectal exams. And although the podcast may be dead, the subscription link is still very much alive, meaning podcast listeners are still more than welcome to pay Ingraham $49.95 a year to receive what now looks to be nothing at all. Download Calling all HuffPost superfans! Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter Join HuffPost

In a taped segment midway through the broadcast, the show returned to diversity as a theme, with Mr. Che handing out “reparations Emmys” to black actors from past shows, including Jimmie Walker and John Witherspoon.The focus on diversity became ironic as the night wore on, with one white person after another delivering acceptance speeches. Before the ceremony was done, there were victories for actors and performers of color — including Regina King, for the Netflix limited series “Seven Seconds”; Ms. Newton, for her work on HBO’s “Westworld”; and RuPaul, of VH1’s “RuPaul’s Drag Race” — but the great majority of winners did not reflect the night’s theme.The “S.N.L.” influence held fast throughout the night, with Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen, stars of a new Amazon show, “Forever,” appearing in a series of awkward-on-purpose sketches and an out-of-breath Will Ferrell presenting the award for best comedy series.In a way, it was surprising to see the New York-based “S.N.L.” front and center at the Emmys. The Television Academy, the main body behind the awards, has looked askance at the show for most of its 43-year run. But that has changed, with “S.N.L.” having won half of its 62 Emmys in the past five years.For all of Mr. Michaels’s efforts to showcase performers he has worked with, perhaps the show’s most memorable moment came thanks to Glenn Weiss, the director of the 2018 Oscars broadcast. Mr. Weiss, who won in the category of best director for a variety special, proposed to his girlfriend, Jan Svendsen, from the stage. (She said yes.)

President Trump is abruptly reimposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from Brazil and Argentina. Trump announced the move in a pair of tweets Monday, saying he was acting in response to "massive devaluation" of the two countries' currencies. Brazil and Argentina had been exempted from Trump's 25% tariff on imported steel and his 10% tariff on imported aluminum since May of last year.Brazil is a major supplier of imported steel to the U.S. The declining value of currencies from Brazil and Argentina has given their exports an advantage in international markets, which Trump said is bad for U.S. farmers. During the global trade war, China has cut back on purchases of U.S. farm goods such as soybeans and turned to South America for alternative supplies. In his tweets, Trump also called on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates further in hopes of weakening the dollar, which would give a lift to U.S. exports. "Lower Rates & Loosen," Trump wrote, arguing that a strong dollar "makes it very hard for our manufacturers & farmers to fairly export their goods."While interest rates do affect the value of the dollar, the Federal Reserve has not traditionally been guided by that. Instead, the central bank aims for stable prices and maximum employment, leaving currency policy to the Treasury Department.Trump has repeatedly urged the Fed to cut interest rates. The central bank has cut rates three times since July, by a total of 0.75%. Fed officials are widely expected to leave rates unchanged when they meet next week. Trump originally imposed the steel and aluminum tariffs in March of 2018, relying on authority from a seldom-used law from the 1960s, designed to protect domestic industries deemed vital to national defense. The move did give a temporary lift to American steel and aluminum makers. However, it also raised prices for U.S. companies that use the metals. Since then, steel prices have fallen amid slumping demand. U.S. Steel announced layoffs this fall and posted a third-quarter loss of $35 million.

Slide 1 of 74,Regina King, who won for lead actress in a limited series or movie for her role in “Seven Seconds.”Jordan Strauss/Invision, via Jordan Strauss/Invision/Ap

Talk of impeachment, Donald Trump said in remarks broadcast on Monday, is a sign Democrats know they cannot beat him in 2020.In the interview with CBS Face the Nation, recorded last week and first broadcast on Super Bowl Sunday, Trump said: “The only way they can win, because they can’t win the election, is to bring out the artificial way of impeachment.”Impeachment would begin in the House, which Democrats control, but success would require a two-thirds majority in the Republican-held Senate, a vastly unlikely outcome.Nonetheless, efforts to initiate proceedings have been pushed by elements of the House Democratic caucus. The billionaire Tom Steyer, who flirted with a presidential run, is funding a drive from outside Congress.Most calls for Trump’s impeachment and removal centre around the work of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian election interference, ties between Trump aides and Moscow and potential obstruction of justice by the president.Numerous Trump aides have been indicted or convicted and some former close associates of the president are cooperating with the investigation.The acting attorney general, Mathew Whitaker, said last month Mueller’s work was nearly done. In the same CBS interview, Trump said it would be up to William Barr, his nominee for the permanent role, to release Mueller’s report or not, presuming he is confirmed.Retreading a familiar argument, Trump said: “The problem is you can’t impeach somebody for doing the best job of any president, in the history of our country, for the first two years. And people have seen and people have watched what we’ve done whether it’s tax cuts …”Asked if he was saying impeachment would be a political call, he said it would be and added of the constitutional language governing the process: “But you know, it’s supposed to be high crimes and misdemeanours. Well, there was no high crime. There was no misdemeanour. There was no problem whatsoever.”Trump then said Democratic candidates to fight the election against him were “horrible” on abortion rights – apparently a reference to recent remarks by Ralph Northam, the scandal-plagued Democratic governor of Virginia – and on border security, and wanted “to cut our military, they want to take our wealth and give it away”.Seemingly referring to calls among Democrats for tax rises on the very rich to pay for such policies as Medicare for all, he added: “They want to tax people. Not 70%. It’s 100%. Because what they want to do, you’d have to quadruple taxes. You wouldn’t have enough money anywhere, throughout the whole world you wouldn’t have enough money.“So, if you look at what they’re running on, they can’t win. So the only way they could possibly beat me, because they’re not going to win the election [is impeachment].”The US economy is by most measures booming, Friday bringing further impressive numbers in terms of jobs creation.But on the eve of a State of the Union address delayed by a historic government shutdown for which most Americans blame the president, Trump’s popularity rating is drastically low. The website fivethirtyeight.com puts it at an average of 39.5%.Last week, 56% of respondents in an ABC News/Washington Post poll said they definitely would not vote for Trump. Topics US news US politics Donald Trump Trump administration US elections 2020 news

Silicon Valley’s executives kept a low profile in politics until Donald Trump arrived in the White House. Since then, employees, customers, and sometimes their own beliefs have demanded they take a stand. And tech leaders are stepping into the political spotlight, whether they like it or not. If you want to follow how Silicon Valley is getting involved, start with these five people. You’ll hear more from them soon.Never TrumpSam Altman

The Apple credit card, launched in August, ran into major problems last week when users noticed that it seemed to offer smaller lines of credit to women than to men. The scandal spread on Twitter, with influential techies branding the Apple Card “fucking sexist,” “beyond f’ed up,” and so on. Even Apple’s amiable cofounder, Steve Wosniak, wondered, more politely, whether the card might harbor some misogynistic tendencies. It wasn’t long before a Wall Street regulator waded into the timeline of outrage, announcing that it would investigate how the card works to determine whether it breaches any financial rules.The response from Apple just added confusion and suspicion. No one from the company seemed able to describe how the algorithm even worked, let alone justify its output. While Goldman Sachs, the issuing bank for the Apple Card, insisted right away that there isn't any gender bias in the algorithm, it failed to offer any proof. Then, finally, Goldman landed on what sounded like an ironclad defense: The algorithm, it said, has been vetted for potential bias by a third party; moreover, it doesn’t even use gender as an input. How could the bank discriminate if no one ever tells it which customers are women and which are men?This explanation is doubly misleading. For one thing, it is entirely possible for algorithms to discriminate on gender, even when they are programmed to be “blind” to that variable. For another, imposing willful blindness to something as critical as gender only makes it harder for a company to detect, prevent, and reverse bias on exactly that variable.The first point is more obvious. A gender-blind algorithm could end up biased against women as long as it’s drawing on any input or inputs that happen to correlate with gender. There’s ample research showing how such “proxies” can lead to unwanted biases in different algorithms. Studies have shown, for example, that creditworthiness can be predicted by something as simple as whether you use a Mac or a PC. But other variables, such as home address, can serve as a proxy for race. Similarly, where a person shops might conceivably overlap with information about their gender. The book Weapons of Math Destruction, by Cathy O’Neil, a former Wall Street quant, describes many situations where proxies have helped create horribly biased and unfair automated systems, not just in finance but also in education, criminal justice, and health care.The idea that removing an input eliminates bias is “a very common and dangerous misconception,” says Rachel Thomas, a professor at the University of San Francisco and the cofounder of Fast.ai, a project that teaches people about AI.This will only become a bigger headache for consumer companies as they become more reliant on algorithms to make critical decisions about customers—and as the public becomes more suspicious of the practice. We’ve seen Amazon pull an algorithm used in hiring due to gender bias, Google criticized for a racist autocomplete, and both IBM and Microsoft embarrassed by facial recognition algorithms that turned out to be better at recognizing men than women, and white people than those of other races.Keep ReadingThe latest onartificial intelligence, from machine learning to computer vision and moreWhat this means is algorithms need to be carefully audited to make sure bias hasn’t somehow crept in. Yes, Goldman said it did just that in last week’s statement. But the very fact that customers’ gender is not collected would make such an audit less effective. According to Thomas, companies must, in fact, “actively measure protected attributes like gender and race” to be sure their algorithms are not biased on them.The Brookings Institution published a useful report in May on algorithmic bias detection and mitigation. It recommends examining the data fed to an algorithm as well as its output to check whether it treats, say, females differently from males, on average, or whether there are different error rates for men and women.

RIO DE JANEIRO -- Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday called young Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg a “brat” after she expressed concern about the slayings of indigenous Brazilians in the Amazon. Bolsonaro questioned the coverage news media have given Thunberg, 16, who on Sunday tweeted a link to a story about the murder of two indigenous people in Brazil's Maranhao state. “Greta said that the Indians died because they were defending the Amazon,” Bolsonaro told a group of journalists. “It's impressive that the press is giving space to a brat like that,” he added, using the Portuguese word ”pirralha." Following Bolsonaro's comments, Thunberg changed the bio on her Twitter profile to say “Pirralha." Thunberg became a symbol for youth demanding radical change to confront climate change when she sparked global school strikes. Her comments about the deaths of the indigenous people came as the U.N. was hosting its international climate change conference, where Brazil's environmental policies have been the subject of criticism. Deforestation of its Amazon rose nearly 30% in the 12 months through July. “Indigenous people are being literally murdered for trying to protect the forrest (sic) from illegal deforestation," she tweeted. "Over and over again. It is shameful that the world remains silent about this.” The remark by Bolsonaro —and Thunberg's reaction— caught the attention of Brazilian environmental activists at the COP25 climate talks in Madrid. Gabriela Baesse, 27, said that the exchange showed the Brazilian president “doesn't understand the youth." Marina Silva, a center-left politician and former environment minister under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's administration, said Bolsonaro's move was “incoherent” with his leadership position. “He should not worry about fighting Greta because she showed solidarity with the indigenous that were murdered,” Silva said. “He should fight the criminals that murdered the indigenous instead of fighting Greta.” The comment by Bolsonaro, who has frequently expressed his admiration for his U.S. counterpart, follows Donald Trump's sarcastic dig at Thunberg in September. Trump responded to a video of Thunberg discussing suffering people, dying ecosystems and looming mass extinction, saying, “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” ——— Alves contributed from Madrid.

The race for the 2020 US presidential campaign is already underway, and one of the election’s most unconventional candidates is Andrew Yang, a New York entrepreneur. His biggest worry? Machines.Yang explained the basics of his campaign platform during a March 26 Ask Me Anything session on Reddit. Intelligent robots and software are coming for Americans, and our best hope lies in a universal basic income and free health care for all.First among Yang’s concerns is the potential for automation to take Americans’ jobs. Technology will claim a massive swath of jobs over the next decade, Yang argues, affecting everyone from truck drivers to retail workers and insurance agents. (Not all experts agree that this will happen.) Automation-induced joblessness could ignite widespread social unrest.Secondly, Yang warned artificial intelligence (AI) is “one of the few real species/civilization-wide threats we face, which is AI development that runs amok.” He added that one AI expert had compared the weaponized algorithms to “nuclear weapons, but worse,” since off-the-shelf AI could be deployed by poor countries and rogue actors.Yang’s perspectives on automation and AI reflect his disenchantment with the fruits of capitalism and technology in recent years. The lawyer-turned-businessman ran startups, one of which was acquired by Kaplan in 2009, before starting Venture for America—a fellowship program that helps recent graduates create new companies, and new jobs, in cities outside the existing tech hubs.To pay for the effort, Yang would levy a value-added tax that returns $1,000 per month to every adult US citizen regardless of work status or other factors. The idea, Yang says, is to give all Americans enough money to pay for their essentials, education, time with family, and even enough to start a business. “I’m a capitalist,” he told The New York Times (paywall), “and I believe that universal basic income is necessary for capitalism to continue.”Yang encountered plenty of fans during his Reddit appearance. His conversation rarely veered beyond wonky policy questions and the dangers of AI. To be competitive as an insurgent presidential candidate, however, Yang will need to tap into the broad, mass outrage that fueled the rise Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.So far, he’s styling himself in their image. Yang strikes an appropriately populist note in his new book, The War on Normal People, and his motto is “Humanity First.” His simple website, decked out in patriotic reds and blues, rails against the status quo while raising proposals that, not long ago, would have been seen as radical.Yet Yang’s campaign still faces the same challenges that confront his signature UBI proposal: “Funding, even for a major proposal like this, isn’t that difficult,” wrote Yang on Reddit about the $2 trillion measure. “Convincing people is though.” So far, his campaign has raised about $130,000 (paywall) since last November. He plans to raise “millions” more from the tech community, and prominent alumni at Facebook, Google, and other tech giants have backed his campaign. There’s no doubt that he’s a long shot—but as Donald Trump proved, political outsiders sometimes have a chance.

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Brazil's main steel industry body said on Monday that it was "perplexed" by U.S. President Trump's decision to restore tariffs on Brazilian steel and aluminum, calling the move "retaliation" and saying that the Brazilian government was not artificially devaluing its real currency BRL=. In a statement, the body, known as Instituto Aco Brasil, said the decision ultimately hurts U.S. steelmakers who are dependent on Brazilian steel components for their operations. Reporting by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Chizu NomiyamaOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.