Donald Trump told reporters on Monday: “I never worked for Russia,” as his attorney general nominee said it was “vitally important” to protect the investigation of the special counsel Robert Mueller and to publicize its findings.The president was asked about Russia after the New York Times reported on Friday that law enforcement officials were so concerned about Trump’s behavior after he fired James Comey as FBI director that they launched a counterintelligence investigation into whether he was acting as a Russian agent, either intentionally or unwittingly.On Saturday, Trump was asked by a Fox News host whether he had ever worked for Russia and said: “I think it’s the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked,” but he did not give a yes or no answer.“I never worked for Russia,” Trump said on Monday in reply to a question as he departed the White House for a farmer’s convention in New Orleans. “And you know that answer better than anybody. I never worked for Russia. Not only did I never work for Russia, I think it’s a disgrace that you even asked that question because it’s a whole big fat hoax. It’s just a hoax.”Trump also called former FBI and justice department officials “known scoundrels” and “dirty cops”.Mueller is investigating Russian tampering in the 2016 presidential election and the nature of meetings and messages between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.While it is believed that Mueller will conclude his investigation with a report, the mechanism by which that report will reach the public has been the subject of some concern, particularly with a new Trump nominee, William Barr, preparing to take control of the justice department, including the special counsel’s office.As Trump spoke, remarks that Barr is preparing to make at his Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday were obtained on Monday by the Associated Press.The remarks attempt to address concerns that Trump intends for Barr to act as a firewall between him and the justice department or to sink the Mueller investigation.“I believe it is vitally important that the special counsel be allowed to complete his investigation,” Barr said in prepared remarks. “I believe it is in the best interest of everyone – the president, Congress, and, most importantly, the American people – that this matter be resolved by allowing the special counsel to complete his work.”Barr also said it was “very important” that Congress and the public be informed of what Mueller investigated and concluded.“For that reason, my goal will be to provide as much transparency as I can consistent with the law,” Barr said. “I can assure you that, where judgments are to be made by me, I will make those judgments based solely on the law and will let no personal, political, or other improper interests influence my decisions.”Before his nomination to be attorney general, Barr, a longtime Washington DC figure who last held the job during the George HW Bush administration, had emerged as a Trump apologist, defending the firing of Comey in an op-ed and submitting an ostensibly unsolicited memo to the justice department attacking Mueller’s investigation of alleged obstruction of justice by Trump as “fatally misconceived”.The status of any FBI counter-intelligence investigation into Trump is unknown. Trump told reporters he had done a “service” when he fired Comey.Trump also defended himself against a weekend Washington Post report that he had confiscated his translator’s notes of a meeting he held with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in Hamburg in 2017 and told the translator not to discuss what happened, and that he had walled off portions of at least four other meetings with Putin from top officials.“That was a very good meeting,” Trump said about Hamburg, claiming the discussion was about Israel and an oil pipeline. “It was actually a very successful meeting … We have those meetings all the time. No big deal.”A serial liar, Trump has in the past mischaracterized his dealings with Russia in particular, denying he had business interests in the country when he was in negotiations to build a tower there and claiming a campaign meeting to get dirt on Hillary Clinton from a Russian source was in fact about adoptions.Clinton, the former Democratic presidential nominee, jumped on the latest revelations, tweeting debate footage from 2016 in which she blasted Trump for bending to Putin’s will and writing: “Like I said: A puppet.” Topics Trump-Russia investigation Donald Trump Trump administration Robert Mueller Russia US politics US federal government shutdown 2019 news

The president lamented that Mexico was making a “fortune” off the United States, and said Mexico’s immigration laws were the “strongest immigration laws of anywhere in the world.” (Mexico is much weaker than the United States at enforcing its border laws.) Mr. Trump also again invoked migrant caravans — including one containing hundreds of people heading to the United States — as a reason Mexico needed to act.“Mexico is tough,” Mr. Trump said. “If they don’t stop them, we’re closing the border.”Americans would feel the effects in other ways. Border control agencies are already reviewing ways to slow down immigration processing at the border. A senior homeland security official confirmed on Friday that shutting down ports of entry along the southwest border was “on the table” to handle the surge in migrants seeking asylum.Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, said in a statement that she had asked volunteers to add more support at the border, and suggested that American citizens may encounter difficulty getting through as a result.“Make no mistake: Americans may feel effects from this emergency,” Ms. Nielsen said. “As personnel are reallocated to join the crisis-response effort, there may be commercial delays, higher vehicle wait times at the border and longer pedestrian lines.”She added that “despite these impacts, we cannot shirk our responsibility to the American people to do everything possible to secure our country while also upholding our humanitarian values.”Stephen H. Legomsky, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said there were a few options available to Mr. Trump if he wanted to move to stop the flow of people at the border, including slowing down processing at ports of entry. The administration has already limited the number of migrants who can apply for asylum each day.“He could pretend that this was necessary in the interest of national security,” Mr. Legomsky said, “and it could be that the courts would be hesitant to second guess a national security claim by a president.”

BALLARAT, Australia (Reuters) - Ballarat was the sort of regional Australian town where mothers with Irish surnames prayed their eldest sons would enter the priesthood, and fathers would reach for their soft brim hats whenever Catholic clergy walked by. It’s now the sort of place that is losing its faith, compounded by the imprisonment of one of its most famous sons, Cardinal George Pell, who was sentenced on Wednesday to six years in jail for sexually abusing two choir boys in the 1990s. Pell has maintained his innocence and his lawyers have appealed his conviction. Allen Stephens, a 76-year-old Ballarat resident, said Pell’s conviction was evidence of a broken institution. “The whole community of church-goers is diminishing dramatically,” said Stephens, who like many of his era was baptised as a child but is not active in the church. “The abuse has certainly hastened the lack of interest in the church.” Disillusionment with the Catholic church in Ballarat is reflective of a wider national trend, according to researcher IBISWorld, fueled by an inability by traditional Christian groups to attract younger people as well as anger over the spate of sexual abuse cases that have come to light in recent years. “Traditional churches are beginning to consolidate, with many churches with low attendance numbers merging with other nearby churches,” IBISWorld said. Catholicism remains Australia’s largest religious affiliation at 22.6 percent of the population, census data shows, but that is down from above 27 percent a quarter of a century ago. Mass attendances have been in a long-term state of decline, according to Catholic agency Pastoral Research Office, with the drop-off particularly evident in younger people. The Catholic Church established deep roots in Ballarat, now a town of 100,000 people 120 km (75 miles) west of Melbourne, in the late 1800s after Irish immigrants flocked in during a gold-rush. Irish Catholic-run schools also filled a void left by cuts to government-funded education. FILE PHOTO - A view of the gate of St Patrick's College, where Cardinal George Pell attended school, in Ballarat, Australia, February 27, 2019. REUTERS/Jonathan Barrett/File PhotoLess than a quarter of residents now identify as Catholic in Ballarat. The town saw an abrupt, 10 percentage point increase in residents with no religious affiliation to 37.7 percent in just five years to 2016, the most recent census data shows. Several Ballarat residents told Reuters even though they did not regularly attend mass, they had still identified as Catholic until as recently as last month when Pell was revealed as a sex offender after a suppression order banning reporting of his trial was lifted. “That’ll do me - I’m out,” said one Ballarat resident, passing the local cathedral, who declined to give his name. While Christianity is the world’s biggest religion, its historical stronghold in Western Europe has become very secular, according to the Pew Research Center. But Christianity has “marched southward” to grow rapidly in places like sub-Saharan Africa, the U.S.-based group said, and is practiced with more fervor in Africa generally and Latin America. Parish administrator for Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Ballarat, Father Justin Driscoll, said the once dominant role of institutional religion in much of the West had given way to a less centralized model with more input from parishioners. He said the cathedral was focused on giving all of its members a voice with equal participation over decision making. “I think Pope Francis is leading us in helping us to recognize some of the serious weaknesses around clericalism,” Driscoll said. Pope Francis has attacked clericalism, which he defined as a view that priests and bishops are the elite who exercise power as opposed to offering humble and generous service. John Dickson, a Sydney-based historian and pastor, said there was now no social pressure to attend church in modern Australia, prompting many nominal Christians to cut ties. “You don’t have the periphery anymore,” Dickson said. Slideshow (4 Images)He said the church now needed to recover its own soul, and adapt to live in a culture where there was no prestige attached to being a Christian. “Christians need to recover what the first Christians faced - they had no power or legislative clout, they just got on with serving, persuading and praying,” Dickson said. Reporting by Jonathan Barrett in BALLARAT; Editing by Lincoln FeastOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The controversial far-right candidate in Brazil's presidential election, Jair Bolsonaro, says he will not tone down his rhetoric ahead of the second round.Mr Bolsonaro won the first round on Sunday by a margin of 17 percentage points but fell short of the 50% of valid votes needed to win outright.He will face the left-wing Workers' Party candidate, Fernando Haddad, in the second round on 28 October.He said he would not turn into a "peace and love" character to win votes. Bolsonaro: Trump of the Tropics? Haddad: Betting on moderation Why Brazilian women are saying #NotHim In a radio interview the day after winning 46% of the votes, he said high crime rates were the main concern for Brazilians, including women.In the run-up to the election, women's groups held mass street protests against Mr Bolsonaro under the slogan #EleNao (NotHim).The combative former army captain has alienated many Brazilians with his misogynist, homophobic and racist comments."Safety is our priority! It is urgent! People need jobs, they want education, but it's no use if they continue to be robbed on the way to their jobs; it's no use if drug trafficking remains at the doors of schools," he wrote on Twitter on 11 September. "Political correctness is a thing of leftist radicals. I am one of the most attacked persons," he said in an interview with daily Correio Braziliense in June."I'd prefer [to see] a son of mine to die in an accident than [to be] a homosexual," he told Playboy in a 2011 interview.But he has also gained many supporters through his tough stance on crime and his promise to loosen gun laws should he be elected, In the interview, he said that record crime rates in Brazil were the main concern for Brazilians, including women. He argued that women's priorities were to know that their children would be safe if they went out.He said he would not back away from his views on human rights, gender issues and gun ownership just to attract centrist voters.He also told listeners that he would privatise state companies and reduce the number of ministries. Mr Bolsonaro has proven popular with the business community who like his free market policies. The São Paulo stock exchange soared by more than 4% on Monday following his first-round win. Mr Bolsonaro's rival, Fernando Haddad, meanwhile took to Facebook to publicise his message after he made it into the second round.He said that he would rally "all democratic forces" around his campaign to beat Mr Bolsonaro in the run-off.Mr Haddad trailed Mr Bolsonaro by more than 16 percentage points in the first round and is expected to face an uphill struggle in the second - many people associate his party with a number of high-profile corruption scandals.Mr Haddad only became the Workers' Party presidential candidate less than a month before the election when it became clear that a ban on the original candidate, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from running for office would not be overturned.Lula was barred after being jailed for 12 years on corruption and money laundering charges.Lula: Saint or sinner?On Monday, Mr Haddad visited Lula in his cell in the southern city of Curitiba. The move, while popular with the core supporters of the Workers' Party, was criticised by those who think the candidate should distance himself from his jailed mentor. Speaking during the news conference streamed on Facebook, he said he would continue to build on his party's history of delivering strong social programmes and would continue to push for social inclusion. He also said that Mr Bolsonaro's neoliberal policies would worsen Brazil's economic problems.

A dozen venture capital investors in dark suits enter the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center on an overcast November afternoon, pass through security, and make their way to the basement, where a police officer guards the entrance to the Senate’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. Through the double doors, the VCs place their phones and Apple Watches in wooden cubbies; their host for the afternoon, Senator Mark Warner, has a clearly labeled cubby of his own, as do all 99 of his Senate colleagues.Warner, a Virginia Democrat who serves as vice chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, has invited the group to Capitol Hill for a classified briefing on China. They follow National Venture Capital Association president and CEO Bobby Franklin into the SCIF’s soundproof, spyproof underground auditorium and take their seats at a large round table alongside top officials from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, as well as Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican member of the Select Committee. The VCs sign nondisclosure agreements and are “read in” on the rules governing the sensitive information they are about to receive before Warner and Rubio spend half an hour framing the conversation that will follow.Warner will go on to organize 10 more briefings like this for civilian leaders in business and academia over the next seven months. The former entrepreneur and tech investor feels compelled to “sound the alarm” about China, he’ll tell me when we meet in his double-height corner office near the Capitol a few months later, an American flag shivering in the breeze outside the window. He is also trying to make up for lost time. “We were late,” he says, referring to 5G in particular—a technological shift involving faster wireless speeds that he likens to the leap from radio to television. China invested nearly $300 billion last year in research and development on technology like 5G, while supporting the rise of homegrown startups such as Huawei, a telecom giant that boasts more 5G patents than any other company in the world and 2018 revenues of $100 billion, making it roughly the same size as Microsoft. Warner believes that China is positioning itself, through companies like Huawei that operate internationally (Huawei does business in 170 countries), to export a model of internet governance that runs counter to U.S. priorities, not to mention existing U.S.-defined norms. At the most basic level, Huawei’s 5G hardware could serve as a back door for Chinese spies looking to listen in on foreign networks. In a more expansive way, China could use Huawei and its peers to export a tool kit for internet-enabled state surveillance. (A Huawei spokesperson dismissed such claims, describing the company as a “vendor” deeply integrated into complex global supply chains.)“For all our flaws, don’t call our [democratic] system equivalent to what the Chinese are practicing,” Warner says.Meanwhile, America remains stuck on the question of how to regulate 4G-era players such as Facebook and Google, which may soon face their comeuppance (in court, and perhaps in Congress) for anticompetitive and deceptive business practices that have prioritized profit over user privacy and had a corrosive effect on civic discourse and democratic elections worldwide.All of this is on Warner’s mind in the subterranean SCIF (pronounced skiff) as he introduces the classified information that the assembled VCs are about to hear. The investors have gathered today out of a sense of duty, and perhaps some curiosity. They may also be feeling the sting from China’s plunging direct investment in the U.S., down from $46 billion in 2016 to $5 billion last year.But they’re also here because of Warner himself. Given his background, the 64-year-old senator has a unique ability to connect Silicon Valley and Washington. He believes the time has come to rein in Big Tech by tackling how platforms make money, which should tell you something about just how bad it’s gotten for American consumers. And he is going out of his way to educate tech leaders on foreign policy issues like China, which should tell you just how woefully unprepared Silicon Valley is to manage its own influence over national security and world events. On China, Warner has become convinced that, with an assist from stolen intellectual property, President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party are laying the groundwork to control the next era of the internet. The VCs, in other words, are playing a more complicated global game than they may realize.One investor will later describe the confidential material about China’s zero-sum ambitions and the country’s success in exploiting American vulnerabilities as “eye-opening.” Another, echoing comments that Warner has heard from allies overseas, wonders what exactly the U.S. government plans to do about the situation.Two and a half hours later, the attendees emerge to fading daylight. They have been forewarned.Wired for politicsSenator Mark Warner has spent four decades at the intersection of tech and government.1973: The Indiana-born Warner enrolls at George Washington University and is the first in his family to finish college. After Harvard Law School, he works for Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and the Democratic National Committee.1982: In the wake of an FCC policy change that establishes a lottery system for awarding cellphone licenses, Warner has an idea. He begins applying for licenses on behalf of investor groups, negotiating a 5% stake in the ones he secures. He then resells these licenses at higher prices. The practice, which is entirely legal, reportedly earns him $150 million over 10 years. (The FCC reverts to an auction-based method of assigning licenses in 1994.)1989: Serves as campaign director for Douglas Wilder, who becomes Virginia’s first African American governor. This same year, he co-launches VC firm Columbia Capital. Warner later cofounds a telecom company that becomes wireless-services giant Nextel, which Sprint will acquire in 2005 for $35 billion.1993–1995: Chair of Virginia’s Democratic Party2002-2006: Governor of Virginia2009-present: U.S. senator for Virginia; vice chairman of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence (since 2017)A dealmaker on the riseWith a net worth of more than $230 million, the Indiana-born Warner is one of the wealthiest members of Congress. His fortune stems from a bet he made in the mid-1980s that wireless technology would be the future of telecommunications. After graduating from Harvard Law School, working for Democratic organizations, and experimenting with entrepreneurship, Warner noticed a change in how the FCC awarded wireless spectrum licenses and became a broker of sorts, connecting parties looking to buy and sell the rights. The first years were lean: Warner sometimes slept in his car rather than pay for a hotel while on the road. He kept at it, building a reputation as an honest and relentless deal maker, even though some viewed his practices as a brazen cash grab. “He had an almost pushy way about him that could force people to a conclusion,” says venture investor James Murray, one of Warner’s business partners at the time. Later, with Murray and three others, Warner began putting his own money into deals, eventually forming what would become the venture firm Columbia Capital.But Warner remained attracted to politics, which had first drawn him to Washington as an undergraduate at George Washington University. He applied his deal-making skills to fundraising in the late ’80s, taking a leave of absence from Columbia Capital to secure checks and run the campaign of Douglas Wilder, who became Virginia’s first African American governor. Years later, in his own successful 2001 campaign for Virginia governor, Warner out-raised his opponent 2 to 1—and served a single term with approval ratings consistently topping 70%. When Warner arrived in the U.S. Senate in 2009, he was viewed as a rising star within the Democratic Party; he delivered the keynote address at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, and his name was floated as a presidential or vice presidential nominee.[Photo: Benedict Evans]This was also an era in which Silicon Valley was esteemed in Washington. Tech leaders were being hailed as American innovators, and the White House, under President Barack Obama, made a habit of welcoming their input (a 2015 Wall Street Journal investigation found that Google employees had been meeting with senior White House officials pretty much once a week for six years). Warner made regular visits to the Bay Area for fundraising, collecting checks from the likes of Sheryl Sandberg and John Doerr. He also stayed current on tech innovation through the network he had built during his time at Columbia Capital. AOL founder Steve Case and former Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler both separately recall dining out with Warner and discussing the gig economy, long before Uber became a household name. (Warner later proposed a bill that would give gig economy workers access to portable benefits, one of the few proposals involving this new mode of labor at the federal level.)“I believe he’s pro-business, pro-tech, pro-innovation,” says Case. “But he also recognized that as the internet becomes part of everyday life, policy does become more important. It makes sense to take a fresh look at what the policies are with a Facebook that has 2 billion users and is more powerful than any media company.”Like most of his elected peers, Warner didn’t initially see a need to rein in Big Tech, let alone consider how the Chinese government might wield technology as an empire-building tool. “We were kind of nibbling around the edges,” he says. Several years ago, his office raised questions, for example, about fraud in online advertising markets and connected devices capable of spying on children. The turning point for Warner was Russia’s interference, via social media, in the 2016 presidential election, which the Select Committee on Intelligence has been investigating since 2017. “I still remember the totally arrogant and over-the-top reaction from [CEO Mark] Zuckerberg and the Facebook folks—well, that must be ‘crazy,’ ” he says, paraphrasing remarks that Zuckerberg made in 2016 regarding fake news on Facebook and its influence on the presidential election. The committee has yet to release its final report on the investigation, but Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians and 3 Russian organizations in February 2018, noting that Russia’s Internet Research Agency “had a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system.” In Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, the Russian IRA found the perfect weapons to do so.Bringing the Valley to WashingtonIt wasn’t until the spring of 2018 that Silicon Valley was officially brought before Capitol Hill, with Zuckerberg testifying for a combined 10 hours before Senate and House committees in April about privacy, political polarization, and the mechanics of how Facebook makes money. Facebook COO Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey got their moment under the lights in September, appearing before Warner and the Select Committee. Alphabet CEO Larry Page, invited by Select Committee chairman Senator Richard Burr, was a no-show. “I am deeply disappointed that [Alphabet-owned] Google, one of the most influential digital platforms in the world, chose not to send its own top corporate leadership to engage this committee,” Warner said at the time. (Google has privately admitted to lawmakers that the decision not to come was a mistake.)At the same time, Warner and his staff were talking with startup founders, academics, and privacy advocates—including Tristan Harris, cofounder and executive director of the Center for Humane Technology, and Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media. With their input, Warner published a white paper last summer that featured a menu of 20 policy proposals, culled from an initial 50, which has served as a starting point for discussion on tech policy regulation. Unabashedly designed for wonks, the white paper did not attract much attention on cable TV. But it got people talking on the Hill: In the months that followed, Warner was able to unveil three tech policy bills, with Republican cosponsors. More are in the works. “In my experience, time spent on Capitol Hill is almost always wasted time,” says one startup CEO who provided feedback. “With [Warner], it’s not.”One of Warner’s white-paper proposals would require the conspicuous labeling of fake accounts on social media, since they play a central role in amplifying misinformation. Another, which his office has expanded into a bill (cosponsored by Nebraska Republican Senator Deb Fischer), targets “dark patterns,” a term for intentionally deceptive interfaces commonly used by large tech companies. And yet another proposal would require platforms such as Facebook to calculate each user’s value, in advertising dollars, and make the information available on demand in order to demystify the platforms’ business models. He followed through on this idea in June, cosponsoring (with Republican Senator Josh Hawley) the Dashboard Act, which would compel big tech companies to disclose what individuals’ data—their relationship status, age, travel plans, and more—is worth. If the bill becomes law, it could shift the balance of power to consumers and antitrust enforcers.But the momentum has stalled on broader privacy legislation, making Warner’s individual bills appear less likely to pass, too, in large part because their fate rests in the hands of the Republican leaders who control the Senate, including Senator Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. One day last fall, before Google CEO Sundar Pichai was scheduled to sit down privately with lawmakers, including Graham, Warner spotted the South Carolina Republican at the Senate’s members-only gym. Warner cornered his colleague to talk up the policy ideas in his white paper, promising to get Graham a copy. “Read it before you see Sundar,” he implored. But Graham continues to show little interest in the minutiae of tech regulation, despite the fact that his committee can claim some jurisdiction. (Why bother, some might add: Only 17% of registered voters say that tech regulation should be a top priority for Congress.) Graham has also allowed his committee to serve as an amplifier of claims that platforms such as Google are biased against conservatives.Pichai testified at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in December, at last giving Google a public face in Washington. But this time, it was Congress that served to disappoint. One House member, for example, asked Pichai about iPhone settings—seemingly oblivious to the fact that his question would be better directed at Apple. Exchanges like this make Ro Khanna, the Democratic congressman representing the district that includes Silicon Valley, understand technology executives’ reluctance to engage. “The ignorance of some of the questions—I mean, fifth graders could ask better questions,” he tells me between House votes at the Capitol. “I do think [Google] should participate. But when you have [to have] the CEO explain that Google doesn’t make the iPhone—you can understand their skepticism.”Khanna also resists the idea that tech CEOs should be held personally responsible for mistakes made on their watch, an idea that has been floated in conjunction with the Federal Trade Commission’s multi-billion-dollar settlement with Facebook over privacy violations. “I still think these individuals have done more good for the world than bad,” he says.When pressed for an example of the good, he pauses and walks over to the large marble fireplace near our table at the Rayburn Room, where his iPhone has been charging at an outlet embedded in the walnut paneling. “These platforms have allowed for the Parkland students, for #MeToo, for civil disobedience in Iran, for people to keep in touch with families across the world . . . ,” he trails off, checking his notifications. While Washington dithers on tech regulation, we continue to live in Silicon Valley’s operating system.Related: 6 ways Big Tech is tricking you: A guide to recognizing Dark PatternsThe fight aheadOf the 20 proposals Warner includes in his white paper, none calls for making any of the big tech companies smaller, even as his party moves to assert its antitrust authority. “I’m not yet joining the cries for the breakup [of companies like Facebook], because I’d like to see if there are other rules of the road first,” he says. He’s encouraged by the fact that the government’s enforcers—the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission—have opened investigations that may lead to penalties. (Last week, the FTC announced a $5 billion settlement with Facebook.)Meanwhile, policy makers from both parties have heightened their rhetoric. Democratic senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has called for the breakup of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Republican Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri freshman, has gone one step further, writing in a May USA Today op-ed that social media is a “digital drug” and suggesting that “maybe we’d be better off if Facebook disappeared.” (Michael Beckerman, president of a trade association that represents Facebook and other big companies, called the op-ed “irresponsible” and “cavalier.”)Matt Stoller, of the think tank Open Markets Institute, is another voice agitating for policy makers to address Silicon Valley’s “concentrations of capital” and perverse incentives. “Facebook and Google have giant manipulation machines,” he says. “[They say to people], ‘You have to use us, we’re a communication network, and oh, by the way, we manipulate you, third parties pay us [for your data], and that’s our business model.’ So who’s willing to pay? Well, foreign adversaries are willing to do it. [The maker of] Snickers is willing to do it to sell more Snickers, but so is Saudi Arabia, to change [its] framing in D.C. That’s the problem here.”Warner recognizes this. But rather than break up Silicon Valley’s giants, he would prefer to hold them to higher standards. His Honest Ads Act, for example, would curtail foreign interference in U.S. elections and improve the transparency of political ads on social media. But, in keeping with the typical pace of congressional action, the bill has yet to come up for a vote since Warner cosponsored it in 2017. In the interim, Facebook has raced to implement an election-ad database of its own design, scoring some points for its efforts but drawing criticism from researchers who say its structure makes the types of analyses they would like to conduct difficult, if not impossible. And still no one is authorized to determine whether Facebook is, as the bill would require, making a reasonable effort to prevent foreign parties from targeting American voters. In other words, by “innovating” faster than lawmakers can act, Silicon Valley has found a way to elude regulation.“I think they have tried. But they tried the narrowest interpretation,” Warner says. (Facebook declined to comment for this article.) Calling Facebook proactive is “too generous,” in his view. “I think they’re trying to do small incremental things just to spare them from some of the most onerous of rules. But I don’t think they’re doing big stuff.”When Warner and I meet again at his office in late May, he has just had another meeting with Facebook’s Sandberg, whose well-publicized Capitol Hill charm offensive remains unrelenting. She has also tried to use fears about China’s rise to Facebook’s advantage, telling CNBC, “While people are concerned with the size and power of tech companies, there’s also a concern in the United States with the size and power of Chinese companies, and the realization that those companies are not going to be broken up.”Warner is used to hearing tech leaders evoke China as a bogeyman—a tactic they can hide behind. And he is losing patience with their stonewalling. “They’re always cordial, they’re always, ‘We want to work with you,’ but rarely are they [amenable to concessions on things like] valuation transparencies,” he says, referring to his push to make companies like Facebook reveal to people what their data is worth. “There’s a bit of rope-a-dope going on.”For a deal maker like Warner, the stalemate is excruciating. California and Maine have passed privacy bills echoing Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, which are set to go into effect on January 1. But GDPR, while encouraging in theory, has yet to restore meaningful market power to consumers. The new laws also threaten to create a tangle of regulatory arrangements that only large companies with armies of lawyers and lobbyists can navigate. “If we [in Washington] could reclaim the ability to set the rules, I think the rest of the world would follow suit,” Warner says. But so far, federal regulators have been unable to agree on how privacy should be protected. Layer on the complexities of a 5G-enabled world, from abstruse AI algorithms to “smart” and watchful cities and sensors, and a global standards-setting consensus emanating from Capitol Hill seems even more unlikely. “I have been pretty disappointed that I’ve not been able to put more points on the board,” Warner admits. “My mood, it goes up and down.”A version of this article appeared in the September 2019 issue of Fast Company magazine.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and fierce defender of Mr. Trump, told Fox News he was going to ask Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, if the bureau had begun a counterintelligence investigation of Mr. Trump.Mr. Graham said there should be checks inside the bureau to prevent such an investigation.“I find it astonishing, and to me, it tells me a lot about the people running the F.B.I.,” Mr. Graham said. “I don’t trust them as far as I throw them.”As Democrats press ahead in their investigation of Mr. Trump’s meetings with Mr. Putin, it is not clear what information they will be able to extract from the White House.There are no reports inside the government on what Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin discussed in their meetings, current and former officials said.Without official detailed notes about Mr. Trump’s conversations, senior officials in the administration have had to rely on intelligence reports about what the Russians were saying to one another after the meeting. There are limits to what officials could glean from the intelligence, current and former officials said. And the Russians could hardly be considered reliable narrators, even with one another.While that frustrated some in the government, the former senior administration official said he was not unsympathetic to Mr. Trump’s predicament. The official said the president feared that whatever he said to Mr. Putin would be twisted by critics.But because access to meetings and transcripts was tightened after early leaks, some officials believed Mr. Trump’s decision to take the notes was too extreme and raised questions about what he was trying to keep private, the former official said.

A mob in eastern India has beaten to death three men suspected of trying to steal cattle, police say.They say the suspects were caught by villagers in the Bihar state as they were trying to load a buffalo and a calf onto a lorry on Friday morning.This is the latest in a spate of "cow vigilante" attacks that have provoked alarm among religious minorities and socially underprivileged classes.Hindus consider cows sacred and killing them is taboo.Three villagers were later arrested in connection with the lynching. The Hindu chant that became a murder cry A night patrol with India's cow protection vigilantes How WhatsApp helped turn an Indian village into a lynch mob Is India descending into mob rule? Critics have accused the governing Hindu-nationalist BJP of not doing enough to rein in such violence.Several dozen people have been killed and hundreds injured in mob attacks since 2014, when the BJP came to power, but there have been convictions in only a handful of cases.Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been criticised for not condemning the attacks quickly or strongly enough.

Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has sparked outrage, disgust and ridicule after tweeting a pornographic video in an apparent attempt to hit back at criticism of his administration during this year’s carnival.Revellers across the country have used the annual street party as an opportunity to protest against their extremist leader who is notorious for his homophobic and racist remarks, and whose landslide election last year horrified progressive Brazilians.In the north-eastern town of Olinda, carnivalgoers reportedly showered a giant carnival doll of Bolsonaro with beer cans, blocks of ice and expletives.In Rio de Janeiro, members of one carnival group gathered outside Bolsonaro’s seafront home to denounce his family’s alleged ties with mafia gangs.Dissenting partygoers up and down the country have uploaded footage of huge crowds chanting obscenities at Bolsonaro under the hashtag #EiBolsonaroVaiTomarNoCu, which politely translates as #GetScrewedBolsonaro.The chants were heard even at the heart of Brazilian carnival, in Rio’s Sambadrome.Bolsonaro, who basks in comparisons with Donald Trump, appears to have taken the criticism badly.Brazilian culture had been “destroyed by decades of governments with a socialist slant”, he tweeted on Tuesday morning.Later that night Bolsonaro went further, tweeting a sexually explicit clip – reportedly filmed during a carnival event in São Paulo – which showed one man pleasuring himself before being urinated on by another.“I don’t feel comfortable showing it, but we have to expose the truth so the population can be aware and always set their priorities. This is what many street carnival groups have become in Brazil,” Bolsonaro tweeted to his 3.4 million followers.Anger, perplexity and a slew of previously inconceivable headlines ensued in some of Brazil’s top news outlets.“Bolsonaro shares video of man fiddling with his anus and suggests it is a common scene during carnival,” wrote the Folha de São Paulo broadsheet.“A porno tweet embarrasses the government,” said a headline in O Globo.The rightwing website O Antagonista was also unimpressed and used a two-word headline to denounce Brazil’s president as “the pornographer”.Bolsonaro’s critics lambasted him.“He is a fascist, but he is also a failure the likes of which we have never seen in the history of our country,” tweeted the Brazilian anthropologist Rosana Pinheiro-Machado.“Where is the decorum and the respect?” wondered Mônica Francisco, a leftist congresswoman from Rio de Janeiro.“A president should, at the very least, show some respect for the country’s greatest party. A party that is a symbol of our diversity and our culture,” Francisco added. “All he is showing with this … is that he doesn’t know how to deal democratically with the spontaneous protests against him [during carnival].”As the internet storm raged, many in Bolsonaro’s online army of supporters expressed support for his position, using the hashtag #BolsonaroTemRazão –Bolsonaro is right.“Did the president lie? The carnival is really like this, an open-air asylum,” tweeted one user.Antônio Carlos Costa, a church leader and human rights activist, tweeted: “The president of the republic owes an apology to the nation.”There was no sign of such an apology on Wednesday morning.Instead, Bolsonaro posted a bizarre second message in which he wondered: “What is a golden shower?”Bolsonaro’s politician son, Eduardo, followed that by retweeting his father’s offending video with the message: “The left is sick.”“What does Jair Bolsonaro make you feel?” the writer Lula Falcão asked his followers on Twitter. “Fear, shame or pity?”Additional reporting by Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro Topics Jair Bolsonaro Brazil Americas news

For all the money AI has made for big companies like Google and Facebook, this year companies have woken up to some of the pitfalls of the technology: It can easily become biased, there’s no set code of ethics for the technology, and putting research into the real world too soon can cost lives.While much of this catalyzed around Uber’s self-driving car fatality, when a research vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in March, research showing racial and gender disparities in facial recognition, as well as reports highlighting the potential misuses of artificial intelligence have also brought new attention to the issues.Here are a few of the key events in 2018 highlighting the problems with modern AI:Speakers at a February USCongressional hearing on artificial intelligence warn of AI’s longstanding difficulty with bias, especially towards people of color.A February report from experts in industry and academia highlighted the myriad ways AI could be weaponized and used in digital, physical, and political domains.Also in February, researchers Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru release Gender Shades, a paper showing huge disparities in facial recognition accuracy between white men and women of color.In March, Uber’s experimental self-driving car kills a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona.Facebook announces its tool for identifying biases in data, called Fairness Flow, and begins testing it for hiring algorithms.Google releases its tools for identifying biases in data.IBM launches its own tool for combating bias.Members of Congress send letters to federal agencies like the FBI and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to see if they had tools or policies for mitigating bias.A Reuters report in October says Amazon tested a recruiting tool that was biased against women.Microsoft executives pushed for regulation of bias in facial recognition algorithms.Experts say the social sciences some AI is based on isn’t as solid as being advertised, and suggest ways to regulate the technology.Google Translate claims to have fixed its biased gender pronouns in translations.The EU publishes a draft of ethical guidelines for AI, coupled with a goal of $20 billion in AI investments.The AI industry is still booming in Silicon Valley and beyond, but 2018 was a turning point where lawmakers and industry groups started ask less about “the singularity” and Terminator doomsday scenarios, and instead realized the potential harms that careless AI implementation could wreak in government and the private sector. This means that instead of the mentality of quickly turning AI research into AI products may well be met with greater resistance in the future, as the public has a greater understanding of AI’s potential shortcomings due to bias or a lack of ethical design.Rumman Chowdhury, Accenture’s lead for responsible AI, told Quartz that this change is happening in industry as well—it’s just another part of a company’s business plan.“We were finding that 25% of companies were having to do a complete overhaul of their system at least once a month because of inconsistent outcomes or bias, or they were just unsure. I’m calling that ethical debt,” she said. “If you don’t build ethics in from the ground up, it’s just like cybersecurity, you’re going to spend time later trying to patch up a fix. It’s much easier to do the work up front.”

It's no coincidence it falls on thefirst day of spring. The Iranian calendar is a solar calendar, meaning time is determined, through astronomical observations, by Earth's movement around the sun. So, the first day of the year always kicks off with the natural phenomenon of the vernal equinox.It's not a religious holiday but rather a universal celebration of new beginnings: wishing prosperity and welcoming the future while shedding away the past. That's why families use this time to deep clean their homes and closets and buy fresh clothing. It's a monthlong celebration, filled with parties, craft-making, street performances and public rituals. And yes, lots of food. March 21 was officially recognized in 2010 as International Nowruz Day by the United Nations at the request of countries including Afghanistan, Albania, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Turkmenistan. But it's reach is even wider. More than300 millionpeople worldwide celebrate Nowruz -- and have celebrated it for more than 3,000 years -- from the Balkans to the Black Sea Basin to Central Asia to the Middle East and elsewhere.Hundreds of US communities celebrate Nowruz, too. Los Angeles, home to one of the largest Persian populations outside Iran, prides itself on hosting the largest Nowruz festival in the country, with daylong festivities for visitors of any age. You can also find a Nowruz celebration in almost every state in the nation.As with most holidays, Nowruz comes with its own set of traditions. They include the "Haft Sin" table, which includes seven symbolic items starting with the Farsi letter "S." They include wheat grass, herbs, dried food and vinegar, all representing various hopes for the new year, including health, wealth and prosperity. For example, "Sir," the word for garlic, represents protection from illness and evil, while vinegar, or "Serkeh," represents longevity and patience. The tables also includemirrors, candles, decorated eggs, water and various fruits.Many families also place a goldfish on the table for good luck and poetry books or the Quran to symbolize education and enlightenment.Iranian families also welcome the new year with sparkling homes and new clothes. They visit friends and neighbors and share meals and host parties. Communities come together to celebrate the beginning of spring and do so in hopes they will always be surrounded by healthy and clean surroundings, like their home. Spring, the unsung seasonAnd the celebrations don't end when people ring in the new year. Thirteen days after Nowruz, families head outdoors and throw the wheat grass they've been growing (and using to decorate Haft Sin tables) into flowing waters. The tradition is maintained on the 13th day after the new year, a number usually considered unlucky. To ensure good luck for the year, communities throw out the wheat grass, which is said to absorb all the negative energy from each home. Yes! The activity is one of two major traditions that mark the final few days of the old year. Before spring rolls in, children run through the streets banging loudly on pots and knocking on doors, asking for sweets or money. It's sort of like Halloween. On the last Wednesday of the year, Chaharshanbe Soori (or, "Red Wednesday"), crowds gather in public places and jump over bonfires, singing traditional songs and repeating the phrase, "Give me your beautiful red color and take back my sickly pallor!" The fire serves as a symbol of light and good, while families wish for enlightenment and happiness for the new year, the Iran Chamber Societysays.Nowruz also traces its origins to the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism, in which fire was a central focus. Light and fire in the religion were "essential elements for sustaining life," according to the Heritage Institute.Iranians also have their version of Santa Claus -- Amoo Nowruz, or Uncle Nowruz -- and a small, cheerful jester who works for him. Haji Firooz, the second figure, pops up during the Persian New Year to bring good wishes. He is depicted with blackface. Also known as Haji Firuz, the character is an African slave who serves an Iranian master, a reference to Iran's long history of slavery, writes Beeta Baghoolizadeh, with the Ajam Media Collective."The nonsensical rhyme and direct reference to his status as a slave reaffirm his role as a minstrel in Iranian society -- a role that, despite the end of slavery in Iran, still persists in Norooz celebrations today," Baghoolizadeh says. "Haji Firuz, in fact, hails from the Afro-Iranian community in southern Iran."While jumping fires and pot-banging sound tempting, nothing compares with the dishes brought out during the Iranian New Year. The Persian cuisine, already famed for its variety of grilled meats and fluffy rice, leaves the old year behind with feasts of stews, spicy foods and colorful cookies and pastries.Herbs are key. Fish, meat, rice, noodles and beans in various dishes are all peppered with fresh mint, tarragon, basil and other green herbs. The main Nowruz dish is Sabzi Polo Mahi: fried fish beside rice filled with green herbs. Another, Dolmeh Barg, includes cooked meat and rice stuffed inside grape leaves. And Fesenjan, one of Iran's most famous stews, offers meat, usually chicken and sometimes duck, in pomegranate and walnut sauce. The list goes on and on. What's most important about the food of Nowruz is that it's shared by family, friends and neighbors. Yes! And when the final countdown begins, hit play on this song, which traditionally plays while communities ring in the new year. Eide shoma mobarak!

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (Reuters) - An accountant for U.S. President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort testified on Friday that she knew an accounting treatment for a loan was wrong when preparing Manafort’s tax return. The accountant, Cynthia Laporta, said the accounting treatment involved the 2014 tax year. “I very much regret it,” she told the courtroom. Reporting by Nathan Layne; Writing by Mohammad ZarghamOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

By Updated Aug. 16, 2018 10:24 pm ET Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai defended to employees the internet giant’s controversial push to do more business in China but said the company is “not close to launching a search product” in the country, according to a person briefed on the comments. Mr. Pichai, speaking Thursday at a weekly all-hands meeting in Mountain View, Calif., was responding to criticism from employees, human rights groups and others who in recent days have voiced concerns over the Alphabet Inc. unit’s work with the Chinese government.... To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In

CURITIBA/RECIFE (Reuters) - It is Thursday outside a government building in this tidy city in southern Brazil. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the country’s former president, is receiving visitors to plot his political future. Never mind that this compound, the regional federal police headquarters, doubles as a prison for corrupt politicians. Or that Lula, as this leftist icon is universally known, is serving a 12-year sentence for graft. Despite his predicament, Lula is still calling the shots in his Workers Party (PT) and engineering another presidential run, underscoring his stature as the most popular modern political figure in Brazil. During his two presidential terms, which ran from 2003 to 2011, the economy soared, poverty plunged and Brazil basked in the international spotlight, winning bids to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. PT lieutenants regularly visit Lula in prison to map out strategy ahead of October’s presidential balloting, eight party insiders told Reuters. This day’s crop included Vagner Freitas, head of Brazil’s most powerful trade union. Lula’s vice presidential running mate Fernando Haddad, and Gleisi Hoffmann, the PT’s president, showed up the following day. Outside the lock-up, vendors sold T-shirts with Lula’s bearded visage to the partisan crowd. Occasional chants of “Lula president, Lula innocent” filled the air. His candidacy is the longest of long shots. Convicted felons are banned from running for office. An electoral court is expected in coming weeks to declare him ineligible for October’s race. Critics decry Lula’s bid as a stunt aimed at motivating the base and propping up Haddad, his likely stand-in. The former mayor of Sao Paulo, Haddad is little-known outside that city - and disliked by many in it. But in a chaotic political season in Brazil, Lula could be the kingmaker. The presidential contest is unpredictable, loaded with candidates struggling to connect with voters. Brazilians are despondent over their nation’s stagnant economy, rampant violence and ineffective political class. The PT is betting Lula’s star power can remind voters of more prosperous times when he ran the show. At 72, the charismatic former metal worker still dominates the party he founded and shows no signs of letting prison constrain him. “There is no question that Lula is a key political actor,” said Ricardo Ismael, a political scientist at the Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro. “Lula will have tremendous influence even if he is not a candidate. He has prestige and is a political force, mainly with the poorer voters.” In handwritten letters and conversations relayed by visitors tasked with carrying out his orders, the former president has quelled infighting that had threatened his leadership, both inside the PT and in a coalition of allied parties, several senior party members who have met with Lula in jail told Reuters. They say he effectively knee-capped a political rival with designs on his mantle, and arranged for his surrogate Haddad to take his place atop the PT ticket should he be barred from running. Federal prosecutors are fed up with Lula’s maneuvering. The team whose investigation put him in jail has asked a judge to restrict his jailhouse visitors. In a sealed court document dated June 28 and obtained by Reuters, they said Lula has transformed his cell “into his campaign headquarters.” They want to limit the list to family, clergy and lawyers working specifically on his legal defense. The judge has yet to make a decision. Meanwhile, polls show Lula leads a pack of 13 candidates in a potential first-round matchup; the top two vote-getters advance to a run-off if no one wins a majority. Still, plenty of Brazilians despise the former president, whose big-spending policies and scandals they blame for plunging Brazil into a tailspin. Others are eager to move on to fresh leadership. Some fear his meddling could ultimately deliver the presidency to the race’s most extreme candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right ex-military man who has cheered Brazil’s former dictatorship and delights in sullying Lula’s legacy. Pictures of former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva are seen inside community radio, in Caetes, Brazil August 3, 2018. REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino Until Lula arrived, Curitiba was best-known as the base of Judge Sergio Moro, who is overseeing a sweeping corruption probe known as Operation Car Wash. That ongoing investigation revealed a massive bribes-for-public works scheme that ensnared Lula along with scores of business leaders and politicians from all major parties. Lula was convicted last year for accepting renovations to a luxury beach apartment from a construction firm in exchange for helping it win contracts with state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA or Petrobras. He faces five additional corruption trials. He maintains his innocence. Since Lula was jailed on April 7, the area around Curitiba’s federal police headquarters has morphed into the epicenter of leftist resistance. Supporters have proclaimed Lula a political prisoner. They allege right-wing enemies conspired to drive the PT from power by jailing him and impeaching his hand-picked successor, former President Dilma Rousseff. She was tossed from office in 2016 for fudging government accounts, which she denies. Now unions, the Landless Workers Movement and private citizens have rented a few houses in Curitiba to stay while keeping vigil. Among the roughly 150 supporters who assemble daily outside the jail is Adinaldo Aparecido Batista, an unemployed construction worker. He recounted the abundant jobs, anti-poverty programs and consumer credit that flourished under Lula. “I was able to buy three cars and even a little inn,” said Batista, 52. “Now, I have almost nothing.” These faithful gather every morning to chant “good morning, President Lula!” After night falls, they call in unison to bid him sweet dreams. On weekends, musicians belt out ballads to raise his spirits. Lula occupies a 160-square-foot room at the federal police building that once housed visiting officers. A handful of other politicians and businessmen are incarcerated in formal, shared cells. Lula is not allowed to mix with other prisoners. Those familiar with his routine spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly. They said Lula is allowed to wear his own clothing, often a soccer jersey, and can spend up to two hours daily in an open courtyard. His room contains a TV and a treadmill where he logs four miles daily. He has access to books and devotes hours to writing. Still, the gregarious Lula lives for his visitors, the people said. Clergy come on Mondays. Thursdays are for family and friends. But the real access belongs to Lula’s legal team, whose members can come at any time and stay as long as they like, without supervision or electronic eavesdropping from jailers. The PT’s Haddad and Hoffmann, both lawyers, are on that team, enabling them to carry out Lula’s directives and spread his message. Among the most visible moves, people familiar with the situation say, was Lula’s order to undercut the presidential chances of Ciro Gomes of the center-left Democratic Labor Party (PDT). Gomes appeals to some Brazilian progressives and could siphon votes from Lula or Haddad. So the PT struck a deal with another leftist party. The Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) agreed to withhold support from Gomes and remain neutral in the presidential contest, the people said. In exchange, the PT agreed to back a PSB candidate in a gubernatorial contest. Gomes, who has yet to catch fire in the polls, is steaming at what he sees as betrayal. Long an ally of Lula and the PT, Gomes said in a TV interview that he has been repaid with “disrespect and hostility.” The PT acknowledges playing hardball. Slideshow (24 Images)“The number one priority was Lula’s candidacy,” a PT spokesman said. Such bare-knuckle tactics have not dissuaded true believers like retired teacher Gliceria Polak. She was among those chanting to Lula on a recent morning in Curitiba. “If he has to serve out his 12-year sentence here, I will never leave this place,” she said. “Under no circumstances will I abandon Lula.” Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu in Curitiba and Anthony Boadle in Recife; Additional reporting by Ricardo Brito in Brasilia and Brad Brooks in Sao Paulo; Editing by Brad Brooks and Marla DickersonOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Nine countries, including Russia, Egypt and Indonesia, have brought back about 200 children. Western governments, including France, have so far demurred, both for legal reasons and for fear of infuriating public opinion, according to experts.The return of the French children on Friday, therefore, surprised many, including their families. Laurent Nuñez, the junior interior minister, had said on Wednesday that children would not be repatriated in the near future.Although France’s foreign ministry did not provide an exact number, announcing only the return of “orphan and isolated minors, all aged 5 and less,” three French lawyers who represent French families of ISIS militants said that five children had returned.That includes Ms. Maninchedda’s three grandchildren, a 5-year-old girl who was held in the same camp, known as al-Hawl, and a 5-year-old boy who was in another camp, also controlled by the Kurds in northern Syria.Marie Dosé, a lawyer for one family, welcomed their return but argued that French authorities should repatriate all children, not only those who had lost their parents. At least 100 French children are stranded in Iraq and Syria, according to human rights groups.“France plans to leave some French children, who still have their mother, die of exposure and hunger, while rescuing some others on the pretext that they are orphans,” Ms. Dosé said. “If that’s what France has become, we have fallen very low.”

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. In a new article in The New Yorker, titled "The Case Of Al Franken," my guest Jane Mayer investigates the accusations of sexual misconduct that led Franken to resign under pressure from the Senate. She's found that the story told by Franken's chief accuser, Leeann Tweeden, is full of holes. Mayer also looked into the accusations against Franken made by seven other women who came forward after Tweeden.Three weeks after Tweeden's accusations, Franken resigned after being pressured by some of his fellow senators. Seven of those senators told Mayer they now regret having called for Franken's resignation. An eighth came forward after the article was published.Mayer is one of the leading journalists who's been reporting on sexual harassment and assault, from Anita Hill's accusation against Clarence Thomas to the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh. Last year, Mayer joined with Ronan Farrow to break the story of four women who accused New York's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of physical abuse. Three hours after the story was published, Schneiderman resigned.During my interview with Mayer, we're going to hear a recording of Leeann Tweeden in which she talks about Al Franken's behavior when they did a USO tour together in 2006. And we'll hear an excerpt from my 2004 interview with Al Franken about the USO tour he'd just completed. Listening back to that interview now puts Tweeden's accusations in a different context.Jane Mayer, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Why did you want to write this piece, and why now?JANE MAYER: Well, both Al Franken and his central accuser, Leeann Tweeden, had called for independent investigations of their charges, and they never got them. So I was just interested in what you would find if you ever went back and took a look at it.GROSS: So his main accuser, Leeann Tweeden, was on a USO tour in 2006. She made her accusations public in 2017. Can you sum up what her accusations are?MAYER: They're sort of a twofold - two main parts of it. The first was that in 2006, on this USO tour, she acted in a skit with Al Franken and that he had written a skit just for her as a way of forcing her to kiss him and that when there's a kiss scene in the skit - that he took advantage of her and stuck his tongue in her mouth. So it was a description, basically, of a kind of a sexual assault that was this forced sexual kiss that came out of a skit that she said he wrote just for her.And she said as soon as she saw the skit, she suspected what he was up to. And then he went ahead and made her rehearse when she didn't want to. And he overpowered her and sort of basically assaulted her. So that was one part of it.The second part of her accusation was that he asked a photographer to take a picture humiliating her and had it released and sent to her in a CD of some sort. And that was sent to her to make her feel humiliated. And what the picture showed was that when she was asleep on an air transport plane and she was wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest - that he did this kind of mock lechery thing where he approached her with his hands above her breasts - not quite touching them, but quite close - and made it look like he was leering at her.GROSS: OK. I want to play Leeann Tweeden, in her own words, describing a little bit of what happened. And later, we'll hear Al Franken describing a similar sketch that he did on an earlier tour. So this is Leeann Tweeden, recorded in November of 2017 on KABC in LA. This is the AM station that she was working on. So at this point, she's talking about how she and Franken were alone backstage, going over their lines one last time.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)LEEANN TWEEDEN: He's like, well, we need to practice the kissing scene. And I'm like, yeah, OK, whatever. And I just sort of blew him off because I didn't - like, we don't need to practice the kissing scene. It's just a quick little thing, you know? And then he persisted. And he's like, no, we really need to practice the kissing scene. And - like, OK, Al. You just turn your head right. I'll turn my head right. We got this, you know? Whatever.And he kept persisting, and I'm like, Al, this isn't "SNL." We - we're not really going to kiss, so we don't really have to practice. And he just kept persisting. And it just reminded me of, like, the Harvey Weinstein tape that you heard the girl when she was wired up for the NYPD and he - just persistent and badgering and just relentless, you know?And so I was just like, OK, fine - just so he would shut up, you know? And he just sort of came at me. And we did the line, and he came at me. And before you even know it - I mean, you kind of get close. And he just put his hand on the back of my head, and he mashed his face against - I mean, it happened so fast. And he just mashed his lips against my face, and he stuck his tongue in my mouth so fast.And all I can remember is that his lips were really wet, and it was slimy. In my mind, I called him Fish Lips the rest of the trip because that's just what it reminded me of. I don't know why. And he stuck his tongue down my mouth, and I remember I pushed him off with my hands. And I just remember I almost punched him so - 'cause every time I see him now, like, my hands clench into fists, and I'm sure that's probably why.And I said, if you ever do that to me again, I'm not going to be so nice about it the second time. And I just walked out away from him, and I walked out. And I just wanted to find a bathroom, and I just wanted to rinse my mouth out because I was just disgusted, you know?It was just one of those - I don't know. I was violated. I just felt like, you know, he betrayed my trust. And it - obviously, that is not what I wanted. And that's - I felt like he wrote that just to get that piece in because he knew he wasn't going to get it on stage, and that was why he was badgering me to do it then when we were alone because that's what he wanted.GROSS: OK. So that's an excerpt of what Leeann Tweeden said on her station KABC after she made her accusations public, and that was recorded in 2017.So Jane, when I heard Leeann Tweeden's accusations and when I saw the photo that she talked about, accusing Al Franken of touching her breasts - and by the way, in that photo, she's wearing a Kevlar vest, and his hands don't seem to be touching - all of it reminded me of a sketch. I mean, like, the photo seemed like a callback to a sketch that he told me about on the air in early 2004, just a couple of weeks after returning from a USO tour in Iraq and Afghanistan entertaining the troops. And he describes the sketch that I'm referring to in that interview. You quote an excerpt of that interview in your piece.I want to play a slightly longer version for our listeners so they can hear what Al Franken said about this sketch. And he is positioning this sketch, like, in the manner of the old Bob Hope USO tours in which, like, Bob Hope would always be surrounded by beautiful women, like cheerleaders and models and gorgeous actresses. And he'd make a lot of double entendre kind of sexual innuendo jokes, knowing that he had an audience of young men who were the troops in the audience. And these were always broadcast on TV, so everybody who grew up in the '50s and '60s saw these tours on TV. And I'm sure Franken was in the audience for those as well.So this was recorded in 2004 about the 2003 USO tour that he'd just come back from. Leeann Tweeden's tour - her USO tour with Al Franken - was a few years later in 2006.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)AL FRANKEN: You know, I did a very kind of Bob Hope or Mighty Carson Art Players attack on the show. I did really dumb, stupid stuff. And there's a lot of sex and a lot of stuff about the military. And the USO knows that I do that. They know that I've done that in the last three tours. And they know - they totally trusted me.GROSS: Well, what's your material like when you're doing - what was your material like for this latest USO tour?FRANKEN: So what we did was - again, we approached it sort of like a Bob Hope show. So what would happen is Karri would come out. And Karri Turner is an actress on "JAG," a show that goes on armed forces' television and that - the guys love it. I've never seen it. But it's a very popular show on CBS in its ninth season. And Karri is terrific. And she's a pretty blonde. And she would come out and say some very sincere thoughts of her own and then introduce me. And I'd come out, and my first line was, so anybody here from out of town?GROSS: (Laughter).FRANKEN: And then (laughter) - and then my next line was, boy, this Army chow is not agreeing with me. You know, these - I've had five of these MREs. Those are meals ready to eat. I've had five of these MREs, and none of them seem to have an exit strategy.GROSS: (Laughter).FRANKEN: And then I just do, like, but it's an honor to be here with Karri - nine seasons on "JAG." And she goes, well, yeah. I said, well, you must have had a lot of - thousands of guest hosts on - or guest stars on the show. She says, well, yeah, we - not thousands, but we've had a lot. We've been very lucky. I said, well, I noticed that I haven't been a guest on "JAG." And she said, well, you know, it's - we've been very lucky. And I said, well, I hope maybe by the end, now we've done this together, that I could be a guest. And she said, well, you know, it's a drama; it's not a comedy. And I said, well, actually, that's why I've taken the liberty of writing an audition piece...GROSS: (Laughter).FRANKEN: ...For my - as an - you know, for "JAG." And then it's just a piece in which I play a visiting prosecutor who's been sent to JAG ops by the Pentagon to shake things up - Lieutenant Lance Hargrove (ph). And in it - and it's just stupid. Honestly, I think I brought it so I could read...GROSS: Oh, great. Oh, great.FRANKEN: ...A little bit of it.GROSS: Good.FRANKEN: She goes - I gave her the script. I say, it's your line. She goes, Lieutenant Hargrove, what are you doing here in JAG ops? I told you, Harriet. Call me Lance. They laughed at that. Lieutenant Hargrove, this is JAG ops. It's all business here. Is it? Then why are you wearing that negligee? And then they cheered that. She says, Al, my character would never wear a negligee in the office. You would if you were madly in love with Lieutenant Lance Hargrove. Al, I'm married on the show to Lieutenant Bud Roberts. I have two kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Keep reading.And then she reads, Lance, I've been wearing this - I'm wearing this negligee because I want to be - tonight to be very special. I want to give myself to you completely. Now, kiss me. Then I kissed Karri. I just grabbed her and kissed her. And she fights me off. And she says, now, wait a minute, Al. You just wrote this so you could kiss me. And now they're cheering - the guys. And she says, if I could kiss anybody, it'd be a real soldier, like one of these brave men - now they're cheering - or women.GROSS: (Laughter).FRANKEN: Who wants to help me out? And then we get a volunteer - you, soldier. And then I go, OK, I guess we're here to entertain the troops. And then they'd read the script again, and the soldier would kiss her. And a real - you know, we wrote in the script, they kiss a long, deep kiss. And God, the guys went nuts. It was this - what I loved about this was as if each guy had kissed her.And then I'd - after the kiss, I'd go wait, wait, wait, wait. It's not over. There's another line. And Karri says, there is? I said go ahead; read it to the soldier. And the soldier would read, you know, Harriet, a woman your age really should have a thorough breast examination every year.GROSS: (Laughter).FRANKEN: Lucky for you, Dr. Al Franken is here. And then Karri - and I'd approach her with my hands out. She'd go, Al, at ease. And I'd say, too late for that now. And she'd go, oh, get out of here, you know? So that was sort of the Bob Hope thing of getting a guy onstage to kiss a pretty girl.GROSS: OK. So that was Al Franken on FRESH AIR, recorded in January of 2004. Leeann Tweeden's USO tour with him was several years later. That tour was in 2006. So this is three years before he toured with Leeann Tweeden.And I know some people listening will think, that was, like, really sexist sounding, and Terry's laughing so much. And so I'll cop to that. Yeah, I was laughing a lot. This was during the Iraq War in 2003. And I thought Al Franken was kind of, A, mocking himself, and B, doing some meta comedy about Bob Hope's sexist jokes on USO tours.Maybe that was a misreading of it. And now I'm also thinking about, well, I'm sure there were women who were in the military in the audience, too, during that. A lot of women were exposed to sexual harassment in the military. So maybe in that respect, too, these jokes might not have landed that well to the women in the audience. But I wasn't there. I don't know how it went over, though, online - 'cause there was a video of it - it seems to have played pretty well.There's a lot more to talk about, but we have to take a short break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, and she has covered sexual harassment issues from Clarence Thomas to Brett Kavanaugh. Her new piece is called "The Case Of Al Franken: A Close Look At The Accusations Against The Former Senator." We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Jane Mayer, who has a piece called "The Case Of Al Franken: A Close Look At The Accusations Against The Former Senator" in the current issue of The New Yorker. And this piece has gone viral.So Jane, you've heard Al Franken in 2003. You've heard Leeann Tweeden's comments about how she feels like she was sexually abused by him in 2006. So you say none of her accusations hold up. So run through some of her accusations that you checked out that don't hold up. Let's start with the sketch. Let's start with the connections between the accusations she's making and the jokes that Franken was trying to tell in the sketch.MAYER: Well, so I'm the reporter. I'm trying to figure out what happened here, and I'm doing my research as a reporter. And one of the things I do is click on an interview that Al Franken gave to you back in 2003 in which he is describing the entire skit that Leeann Tweeden is claiming he wrote just for her in 2006. So clearly, there's some problem here. There's a factual issue because he didn't just write it for her in 2006. He is describing it to you three years earlier, and he's played it with a different actress.And the picture that we've all seen that has - talk about something that's gone viral. That picture of Al Franken with his hands out towards Leeann Tweeden's breasts when she's in her bulletproof vest or whatever - that picture is exactly what he's describing is part of a skit. It's not what it looks like when they put it out. They put it out, and it looked like something that he was, you know, spontaneously doing. And she described it as unbelievably humiliating and not funny.And it turns out, as you could hear him describing on your own show, that in 2003, he wrote this skit, and she performed in it regularly - that is, several actresses performed it before Leeann Tweeden. They did it in 2003, 2004, 2005. And then in 2006, Leeann Tweeden comes along and plays the role. And then all these years later, in the middle of the #MeToo movement, in a statement that compares Al Franken to Harvey Weinstein, as you played earlier, she says, he just did this in order to basically sexually harass me.So I'm trying to figure out, what's the story here? And one of the sort of pieces of evidence is your own interview here, which is so - it's interesting to me, you know? I mean - and so what do you do when you're a reporter and you're looking at this kind of thing? Well, you go see if you can reach the actresses who played the part to see what they thought of it and to see if they'll confirm this.And so I did. I spoke - I got a statement from Karri Turner where she talks about it. And she, like I am, is a supporter of the #MeToo movement, and she wants to make that clear. But she also wants to say, I played that part. I had no problem with it, and I had no problem with Al Franken.So I call up, then, the second actress who played that role - and she played it a couple of times - and that's Traylor Portman. And I - she speaks to me on the record in this piece, and she says, well, you know, I just have to say it's just not correct. Leeann Tweeden is not correct in saying that Al Franken wrote this for her because I played the same part a couple of years earlier. And I said, well, what was - you know, how did you feel about the kissing scene? Did you feel that it was taking advantage of you in some way? And she says, well, no. I mean, you know, of course you're going to rehearse. Professionals rehearse.And, you know, certainly in her case, there was none of this kind of French kissing thing. I mean, that's not to say - and I'm very careful in the piece because we're in a period here - and I think we should have always been in a period where we listen to women and we hear what they say about whether or not they feel that they were sexually harassed.So Leeann Tweeden didn't want to speak to me, but I put in the story, well, maybe she felt upset about it anyway. She's actually not an actress. She's a model - a lingerie model - and it could be that she wasn't accustomed to rehearsing the way these actresses were and that she did maybe feel surprised, even though she had read the script before. But at any rate, what you've got is a big hole in her story.So I spoke to eight of the other people who went on that USO tour, including the military escort whose job it was to stay really close to Leeann Tweeden physically, make sure she was almost never out of her sight except when she was asleep. And Leeann Tweeden had described what she said was kind of constant harassment coming from Al Franken and a sort of - that he was getting back at her and humiliating her because she had rejected his sexual advance in the kiss scene. And so I said, you know, what was the dynamic like between them? And do you remember any kind of tension? She said, no, I never saw anything like that, and neither did any of the other eight people that I talked to who were on the USO tour.And that's not to say that there might not be somebody. I've done enough of this kind of reporting to know that it takes a lot of digging and, you know, maybe there's somebody out there who saw something who I couldn't reach. And so I called Leeann Tweeden again, and I texted and talked to people who knew her and said, you know, I'm having trouble finding anybody who corroborates her story, and she mentioned there were a number of corroborators. I hoped that maybe she'd give me the names of someone who remembered her story and could corroborate it, and she never responded.GROSS: My guest is Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her new article, "The Case Of Al Franken," investigates the allegations against him of sexual misconduct. After a break, we'll talk about some of the things Al Franken told Mayer, and we'll discuss what Mayer learned about the allegations seven other women made against Al Franken after Leeann Tweeden came forward. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.(SOUNDBITE OF JOSHUA REDMAN'S "COURAGE")GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Jane Mayer about her article "The Case of Al Franken" published in the New Yorker. Mayer investigates the allegations against Franken of sexual misconduct that led him to resign from the Senate under pressure in 2017. Mayer found that the story told by his chief accuser Leeann Tweeden was full of holes.Tweeden is a conservative radio talk show host and former model who was with Franken on a USO tour in 2006 and performed in a sketch he wrote. She alleged that he wrote a new sketch that involved his character kissing her character, and that he wrote it just to have an excuse to kiss her. As a piece of evidence of his misconduct, she posted a now famous photo taken on a military plane during the tour, where she's asleep, dressed in a helmet, fatigues and a bulletproof vest, and he's standing over her with his hands above her breasts mugging for the camera with a comical, leering look on his face. But the photo appears to be a reference to a joke that was in the sketch.You interviewed Al Franken. How did he describe the photo in question to you?MAYER: He actually feels really badly about that photo because he said she's asleep, it's always wrong to take a picture of someone asleep because they're not consenting. You know, it was something that he's not proud of. But he also said that he did not sexually harass her. He said what it was, was they were busy towards the end of the tour. They were punchy, and it was a body tour. And it was a - they were goofing around, I think is the word that he used.And I think you can, you know, many people would object to the pose, the taste, the look, the sexism of the joke and especially that she was asleep. But what he's saying is it was not harassing her. It was not malicious. It was being a dope. And his persona that he often plays as a comic, and he was a comic at the time, is to play the part of the jerk. And I think he did a pretty good job playing the jerk in that picture.GROSS: And did he see that picture as a callback to a joke in the sketch that they'd done together?MAYER: He did. I mean, you know, you can see it's exactly the same pose.GROSS: And just one other thing about the sketch. You know, Tweeden says that he did the rehearsal just as an excuse to kiss her. In this sketch, the actress in the sketch says, Al, you wrote this line just so you'd get to kiss me. So that accusation in a way has an odd echo with the actual sketch.MAYER: Yeah, completely. I didn't - and it was - I had a hard time even figuring out how to write about this because it was - what you've got is a woman who played a part that Al Franken wrote in which she says you wrote this part just to kiss me. And then all these years later, she comes out and accuses him of sexual harassment. And her line as she's talking to everybody about it is, he wrote this line just to kiss me.So it is a complete sort of borrowing of the line from the skit that he wrote in which she's supposed to push back and be annoyed. And she is pushing back and being annoyed. So I finally settled on trying to describe it as kind of like he was in a position of having to sort of describe an Escher drawing. It's, like, you don't - it just sort of - it's dizzying, really. And he had a hard time figuring out what to say, he told me about all this. And he didn't want to accuse anybody falsely. But he also wanted to defend himself. So he was - he, I think - he and his staff, I interviewed all of them, they felt in kind of a bind and weren't - really weren't sure how to handle it.GROSS: You learned about how Leeann Tweeden made her accusations public. At the time, she was working at KABC-AM, where she's still working, but then she was co-hosting a morning show. You described the station at the time as a struggling conservative talk station, whose survival plan was to become the most pro-Trump station in LA.You say that people at the station helped her with the statement that she put on the website. How did they help her?MAYER: Well, so I interviewed them. And they worked through the details with her in meeting after meeting. And they had these sort of secret meetings where the news director, whose name was Nathan Baker, and Doug McIntyre, who was her co-host on the morning drive-time show, both of them are quite conservative, but maybe not quite as conservative as the station, which has really become the pro-Trump station in LA. And they've both left since.So I spoke to both of them about it, and I wanted to know as a journalist what was the level of care that they put into the journalism here. Did they check out her story? And what they told me was - and you can read the piece. They're on the record - what they told me was no. Both of them said they did no fact-checking. They did not call anybody else on the tour. They did not ask the names of any corroborators. They certainly didn't speak to any corroborators. They didn't look at the script. They didn't look at the photographs to see what the dates were on them. So they didn't recognize that there were all these holes in her story. They trusted her on faith because one of them, Doug McIntyre, said, you know, she's a person he knew, and he felt she was a person of integrity. And so they took her at her word.But the other thing that they did that journalistically is so questionable if you ask me, and I've been a journalist for many decades, is that they never got any comment from Al Franken before they put this story online. So KABC sent a note, some kind of email to Al Franken after the story was already live on the internet, saying would you like to comment. By then, it was, you know, spreading everywhere. They actually literally gave it to the Drudge Report 24 hours ahead of the time when they contacted Al Franken.So they wanted this - they thought through how to make this story spread everywhere. But they never asked Al Franken, you know, was it true, does he have anything to say about it. By the time he heard about this story, it was kind of a fait accompli.GROSS: You mention in your piece that Tweeden was pro-Trump and was also a birther. Is that relevant to the story?MAYER: Well, I mean, I think, you know, everybody's political agendas are interesting to know. They - I think that in this case, you've got a woman who is very much a political opponent of Al Franken. She's an outspoken conservative. She's been a fan of Trump, and I have her talking about that.And Al Franken is, of course, a big opponent of Trump's. He was one of the most, sort of, liberal and outspoken anti-Trump senators. He was a very aggressive questioner of Trump administration figures when he was in the Senate.So you've got a kind of, you know, it's, again, trying to flesh out who are these people, what happened here.GROSS: When KABC-AM, the radio station where Leeann Tweeden works and where she first posted her statement, when they posted her statement, her accusations against Franken, did it look like one woman's personal statement? Or did it look like a reported story that they were posting, like, you know, a reported news story?MAYER: Well, I mean, they put it out under the banner of the station. So it looked like a legitimate news story, which one would ordinarily think had been checked and that maybe they'd, you know, at least gotten comment from the person than it was about. And so I think that was part of the problem. When I looked back at this to try to figure out, well, what happened, I mean, one of the things I wondered was why didn't Franken, if he feels that this story was so wrong - which he really does, he thinks it's - he thinks that she wasn't telling the truth - why didn't he push back harder, I wondered.And I think when I talked to his staff and him about this, part of the problem was by the time they learned about this story, they felt that it was almost impossible to turn the media narrative around about it. It had come out, and he was already being besieged by press reports. And the reporters were not doing what I did here, which is take a long time to go see what lay behind these charges. They rushed to get it right up on the internet.And he - and so he began to think, and his staff began to think that the only way that they were going to be able to try to get the truth out as he saw it was to have a hearing in the Senate Ethics Committee. And he could bring his witnesses. And he could call the photographer in who took that picture. And he could bring in the actresses and the other people who were on tour with him. And that's what he was trying to do and wanted to do, but the story just kind of got a life of its own and took off.GROSS: My guest is Jane Mayer, the New Yorker's chief Washington correspondent. Her new article is titled "The Case of Al Franken." After a break, we'll talk about the accusations made by the seven other women who came forward after Leeann Tweeden and accused Al Franken of sexual misconduct. This is FRESH AIR.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, whose new article is titled "The Case of Al Franken." She investigated the allegations of sexual misconduct that led Franken to resign under pressure from the Senate in 2017.So after Leeann Tweeden made her accusations against Al Franken, seven other women came forward. Can you sum up their accusations?MAYER: Yeah. I mean, you know, it's a big number. And it makes it pretty hard to imagine that Al Franken did nothing. You know, as a reporter looking at this, a lot of what reporting on sexual harassment comes down to is looking for patterns of behavior. By the time you've reached, you know, the additional seven women, you're thinking something must be wrong here, you know?And so what was it? And so what I did was try to take a look at the other cases. I'm not, you know, his defense lawyer. I'm just trying to sort of scrutinize what's going on here. And I guess if you tried to summarize what they are, you've got two other cases of women who felt that he was about to kiss them, one of whom he kissed on the cheek because she turned her head away, and the other who said it looked like he was going to kiss her.And then you've got four other women who were posing for photographs with him and said he touched them in some way that made them uncomfortable while they were posing - maybe either touched a breast, touched their rear ends, touched their waist. And they felt that it was in a creepy way. And then there's one more accusation, which is a woman who said that at a fundraiser, he somehow touched her - I think it was maybe on the breast - and then she excused herself to go to the bathroom. And she says that he said can I come with you. It was in, sort of, the middle of a crowded fundraiser.Almost all of these, you know, if you could go through them, they took place in crowded places in public. And these were moments that lasted - I asked the women, those who I could reach, how long did this go on. And it was usually sort of three to four, maybe five seconds. So these were sort of fleeting touches and, you know, sort of weird. So I tried to figure out what that was.GROSS: When you say weird, what do you mean by weird? Who's weird? Like...MAYER: Well, I just, you know, I - it - I think this came down to kind of a close look at a subject that we as a culture are grappling with right now, which is sort of the politics of touching. You know, are these touches harassment? Are these touches friendly? Are they molestation? Are they accidental? Are they sexual advances that are being made on people?I thought probably the only way you could begin to figure this out is by talking to the women as much as possible and trying to get from them what they experienced, taking a look at their credibility so you could sort of figure out what did they bring to these accusations and trying to talk to not just Franken, but the people he worked with about what they made of these accusations. And so I set out to interview all of them.GROSS: And what were some the insights you got from these interviews?MAYER: Well, to me, one of the most interesting things as I was looking at this was a picture of Franken and how he moves fruit through the world physically. He is, by his own admission, oblivious a lot of the time. Obtuse is what I call him. I spoke to - in terms of how he touches people. He's playful. He pulls them together for photographs. He takes kids and sort of puts them in a hammer hold. And he often, as somebody who used to be in the entertainment world, spins people around towards the light when he's taking pictures in order to get a good picture with them.So he's touching all these people. And the other thing is people are always touching him. All the way through the years, people have wanted to have their pictures taken with him because he's a TV celebrity on "Saturday Night Live," and he's a best-selling book author. So everywhere he goes, people are asking for pictures. And I get this from talking to his staff. And they say, you know, he's constantly posing for pictures. He's constantly mugging it up. He'll put his cheek right next to somebody else's, and, you know, all this stuff is going on. And he is kind of a slob.And this I knew from - (laughter) I have to say the one time I ever met him, I was on Air America on the radio show that he used to host. And I don't remember too much about it except that he seemed quite gruff in terms of his personal interaction with me. And he, I think, was eating throughout the whole interview. There was like a sort of a paper plate with food on it.And it was kind of like, you know, the food and the eating was all mixed up with the interview. So I kind of remembered this. And so I asked a lot of his staffers, you know, is he a bit of a slob? Could it be that he's touching these women sort of without a lot of care? You know, is he not careful about how he touches people? And they said, well, actually, it's been an issue. So I'm thinking, huh, what does that mean? What kind of issue is this?And it turned out that if you do enough reporting on Al Franken, what you learn is he's a hugger. He used to be a kisser. If he knows the person, sometimes, he'll kiss them on the lips. So you've got two of his friends from comedy talking about that - or one of them's Randi Rhodes, so she's on the radio with him. The other's the comic Sarah Silverman. She says he's a lip kisser. And he also is a hugger. He comes out of the entertainment world. He comes out of sort of New York kind of Borscht Belt humor. It's his culture.And when he started running for office, which was really in earnest in 2007, one of the things that's in the story that I found most interesting was he kissed somebody on the lips who he knew - a woman who he's not married to. And a young staffer who's named in the story who's quite conservative in - sort of - as culturally. He's from South Dakota. He said to Al Franken - he's working for Al Franken. He says, don't do that. And Al Franken says, really? And the staffer says, yes. People might misinterpret it. So you're talking 2007. He stops doing it. He says he tried - you know, that was a wakeup call to him.So then I look at these allegations. An awful lot of them happened before he got that warning. And, you know, you can make of it what you want. But I think, you know, to me, as someone trying to figure out where the truth lies in this, it's important to know that when this man was called on his behavior and told it was making people uncomfortable and he shouldn't do it or told that it just looked wrong and he shouldn't do it, he was surprised. And he stopped. So, you know, it shows - it's not exactly the same as like a predator. You know, Leeann Tweeden put him in the category with Harvey Weinstein. It's - you're talking about something different. It's a different - there's a different category of behavior taking place here.GROSS: My guest is Jane Mayer, The New Yorker's chief Washington correspondent. Her new article is titled "The Case Of Al Franken." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.(SOUNDBITE OF PATTI SMITH SONG, "WITHIN YOU WITHOUT YOU")GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Jane Mayer. She's a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her new article is titled "The Case Of Al Franken." She investigated the allegations of sexual misconduct that led him to resign under pressure from the Senate in 2017.Franken hoped to get a hearing before the Senate Ethics Committee. That never happened. Why didn't the Democrats pursue that?MAYER: Well, in the beginning, they said they would do so. But as each allegation broke in the news against Al Franken and they started to pile up, there was a lot of pressure put on the Democrats in the Senate by the media and by women's groups, saying, how can you possibly condemn others, including our president, Donald Trump, for the way they treat women when you're not condemning one of your own colleagues, Al Franken? And the pressure was especially strong on the women senators who had made sexual harassment a crusade - fighting sexual harassment a crusade. And so they were being put under a lot of pressure daily, and the pressure was growing. And eventually, they went and met with Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the Senate, and said they thought that something had to be done about this.GROSS: And then Schumer asked Franken to resign, and you described that scene from Franken's point of view 'cause he told you about it.MAYER: Right. And I also spoke with Schumer's staff about it and got a statement from Schumer about it, so we've got both sides of that story too. And I spoke with the women senators. You'll see that Kristen (ph) Gillibrand, who's taken a lot of heat for being the first to call for Franken to resign, spoke to me about why she made her decision, when she made her decision and how she sees it. You know, I think in reporting a story like this, it's so important to get everybody's input because there are a lot of different sides here to hear from, and they're all in this story as much as I could possibly get them.And so, anyway, what happens is there's this - there becomes, like, a - what one of the senators described as a stampede. Senator Whitehouse from Rhode Island says, this stampede of Democrats starts calling for Franken to resign, and Chuck Schumer comes out among them and calls for Franken to resign. And before that, behind the scenes, Chuck Schumer has met with Franken and says, you have to step down. You've got to step down by 5. And Franken says, but I want my ethics hearing. I - you know, I want due process.And basically, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, Schumer, tells him, no. You know, you're - you got - have to resign for the good of the party and the good of the country. And if you don't, you could be stripped of your committee positions, and you could be censured by the others in the Senate. And people basically, he's warned - Franken is told - will treat him like a pariah.GROSS: So Franken's strategy was to not spend a lot of time fighting back in public, but to rather wait for an ethics committee in which he could present, you know, witnesses and, you know, people who would corroborate his story and also explain the context of what happened. But then he was denied the ethics committee, and then he seemed to disappear afterwards.MAYER: He did. I mean, and to give the other side of his disappearance and - you know, that he didn't get the ethics committee hearing - I mean, people do point out - and, I think, fairly - that if Al Franken had really wanted to, he could have stayed in the Senate. Nobody can make a senator resign. You can expel someone from the Senate, but that has not happened since the Civil War.So he and his staff and his family all got together, and they met about what to do. And it was an tremendously sort of fraught night. And they decided all together that, really, he wouldn't be able to serve his constituents well in Minnesota if he was treated and ostracized by the other senators 'cause it takes a lot of teamwork to get anything done in the Senate. And so he decided to resign.GROSS: So Jane, you've reported so many sexual harassment and sexual assault stories, dating back to the Clarence Thomas hearings. What's the moral of the story regarding the Al Franken case? Where does that fit in in the #MeToo movement in your judgment?MAYER: I talked to a number of incredibly smart feminists about how they saw it, and they're quoted in this story trying to evaluate it, too. And I end the story with a quote from Debra Katz, who was the lawyer for Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Justice Kavanaugh of having sexually misbehaved towards her many years ago.And so Debbie Katz, in this story, says she feels it's a kind of a cautionary tale, that the #MeToo movement - which she is a tremendous supporter of, as am I - needs to make sure that there is some kind of due process. You need to make sure that there is proportionality in terms of, you know, being able to distinguish different gradations of bad behavior. Not everybody is Harvey Weinstein, but there may be other kinds of misconduct that also need to be addressed, but in different ways. And nobody is saying you need to put up with sexual misconduct, but there are just different levels of it.And then, finally, you know, I think what she's saying is that if you confuse less serious charges with serious ones, you feed a backlash against the whole movement that could hurt the movement. And there are number of women who are really strong feminists who worry about that in this story.GROSS: Jane Mayer, thank you so much for talking with us, and thank you for your reporting.MAYER: My pleasure. It's great to be with you.GROSS: Jane Mayer is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her new article is titled "The Case Of Al Franken."If you'd like to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed, like our interview about heart disease and new ways of treating it or our interview about sleep disorders, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews.(SOUNDBITE OF JON BATISTE'S "KINDERGARTEN")GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Mooj Zadie and Seth Kelley. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. I'm Terry Gross.(SOUNDBITE OF JON BATISTE'S "KINDERGARTEN")Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

NEW YORK (AP) — Al Franken, who resigned his U.S. Senate seat in 2017 amid sexual misconduct charges, will re-emerge into the public sphere on Saturday when he starts a new weekly radio show on the SiriusXM satellite service.The Minnesota Democrat is perhaps the most prominent public figure felled by the #MeToo movement to step back into public life. He said he has no plans to return to politics, but as an author, former “Air America” radio host and “Saturday Night Live” writer and comedian, he’s returning to a realm he inhabited before becoming a senator.“I miss the Senate a lot but I’m not there so I want to be a voice,” he said in an interview. Of the public’s acceptance, he said “a lot of that will depend on me and whether folks think what I’m saying is important and fun at the same time.”The one-hour interview show with figures from politics, entertainment and other fields will air Saturdays at 10 a.m. ET on the Sirius Progress channel, with replays available on demand. Comic Chris Rock will be the first guest, with former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and comic Patton Oswalt lined up for future shows.Franken said he’s been talking for a few months with Sirius about the show, the conversations an outgrowth of a podcast he’s been hosting.He said there’s a lot of public issues he wants to talk about, particularly with the 2020 election looming, mentioning health care and education specifically.“When Harry’s (Reid) on, I’ll be the funny one,” he said. “When Rock is on, I’ll be the one who served in the Senate.”Franken’s support among fellow Senate Democrats crumbled quickly in 2017 after conservative radio host Leeann Tweeden and several other women accused him of unwanted kissing or touching. A photo that showed him with his hands appearing to reach for the breasts of Tweeden as she slept while returning from a USO tour — an apparent joke badly gone awry — mobilized public opinion against him.An investigation by The New Yorker magazine published this summer called some of the charges against him into question. In the piece, seven current or former senators who had demanded his resignation now said they regretted doing so. An eighth, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, said so after the article was published. But New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, widely seen as the leader of the movement to remove Franken, has expressed no such regrets.“I was very gratified that eight of my colleagues have apologized and done so publicly and expressed regret for not giving me due process,” he said. “It’s pretty rare that you get one senator admitting that he or she had done something wrong. I think the American people believe in due process as well.”He said he doesn’t plan further discussion on his show about what happened to him and, if anyone is interested, he’ll point them in the direction of the New Yorker piece. In that article, Franken said he “absolutely” regretted stepping down and that he was angry at fellow senators who pressured him to leave.Franken told the AP that he didn’t expect that any feeling of betrayal by colleagues will be a problem when he has to discuss issues that involve, for instance, Gillibrand or Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. He said he’s had no potential guest turn him down out of skittishness about being involved in controversy.“When I’m doing that it won’t be about personalities,” Franken said. “It will be about where people stand.”He said he had no comment about the fate of Gillibrand’s presidential campaign, which she ended in late August.SiriusXM did not make its executives available for an interview. Megan Liberman, the company’s senior vice president of news, talk and entertainment programming, said in a statement that “Al Franken is an important and influential progressive voice, whom many have missed. SiriusXM is the perfect platform for him to re-enter the public conversation.”The company said that in addition to his weekly show, Franken will participate in elections coverage, including on the nights of debates, primaries and the election.

Enlarge this image Sadie Roberts-Joseph founded the Odell S. Williams Now & Then African American Museum in Baton Rouge, La., in 2001. She was a prominent civil rights activist and community leader. James Terry III/NAACP Baton Rouge Chapter hide caption toggle caption James Terry III/NAACP Baton Rouge Chapter Sadie Roberts-Joseph founded the Odell S. Williams Now & Then African American Museum in Baton Rouge, La., in 2001. She was a prominent civil rights activist and community leader. James Terry III/NAACP Baton Rouge Chapter Police say they are searching for the "person or persons" responsible for the death of Sadie Roberts-Joseph, a prominent community activist in Baton Rouge, La., and the founder of the city's African American history museum. Roberts-Joseph, 75, was discovered on Friday afternoon in the trunk of a car about 3 miles from her home. Police did not explain what led them to the car where they found her body. According to The Associated Press, investigators are waiting for a coroner to determine the cause of death.Roberts-Joseph was a respected civil rights leader in Baton Rouge. In 2001, she founded the Odell S. Williams Now & Then African American Museum, which features exhibits of African art and tells the stories of minority inventors. It also includes displays of historical artifacts from the civil rights era, including a 1963 bus used during the civil rights boycotts in Baton Rouge. Roberts-Joseph was also the founder of the nonprofit organization Community Against Drugs and Violence, and each year, she organized a Juneteenth celebration, a commemoration of the emancipation of slaves in the American South. "We have to be educated about our history and other people's history," she told The Advocate newspaper in 2016. "Across racial lines, the community can help to build a better Baton Rouge, a better state and a better nation." Roberts-Joseph's sister, Beatrice Johnson, told The Advocate that Roberts-Joseph had come to her house, which was two doors away, last Friday because "she had mixed some cornbread, but her oven went out, and she brought it here to put in the oven." "The bread is still there," Johnson said. "She never came back to get it."In Baton Rouge and across social media, the news of Roberts-Joseph's death prompted an outpouring of grief and remembrances. "She was one of the last black oral street historians of Baton Rouge and dedicated her life to telling the story of freedom fighters in my hometown with the most beautiful art," wrote one Twitter user. "Rest in Power, Miss Sadie. You didn't deserve this." In a post on Facebook, the Baton Rouge Police Department wrote, "Ms. Sadie was a tireless advocate of peace in the community. We had opportunities to work with her on so many levels. From assisting with her bicycle give away at the African American Museum to working with the organization she started called CADAV. (Community Against Drugs and Violence) Ms. Sadie is a treasure to our community." The post added, "Our detectives are working diligently to bring the person or persons responsible for this heinous act to justice." State Rep. C. Denise Marcelle wrote in a Facebook post, "My heart is empty ... as I learned last night that Ms. Sadie Roberts Joseph was found murdered! This woman was amazing and loved her history. She never bothered anyone."

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hong Kong protesters clashed with police on Saturday in a town near the boundary with mainland China where thousands rallied against the presence of Chinese traders, seizing on another grievance following major unrest over an extradition bill. Protesters in Sheung Shui, not far from the Chinese city of Shenzhen, threw umbrellas and hardhats at police, who retaliated by swinging batons and firing pepper spray. “Our lovely town has become chaos,” resident Ryan Lai, 50, said shortly before the protest turned violent. “We don’t want to stop travel and buying, but please, just make it orderly and legal,” he added, referring to so-called “parallel traders” who buy large volumes of duty-free goods in the town, to be carried into mainland China and sold. “The extradition bill was the tipping point for us to come out. We want Sheung Shui back.” The traders have long been a source of anger among those in Hong Kong who blame them for fuelling inflation, driving up property prices and dodging taxes. Later, police urged protesters to refrain from violence and leave. By about 8:30 p.m. (1230 GMT), most had retreated as police in riot helmets and wielding large shields swept through the town to clear the streets. Early on Sunday, the Hong Kong government condemned violent acts during the protests, adding that it had already taken steps to tackle parallel trading. Anti-extradition protesters plan another demonstration on Sunday in the town of Sha Tin, in the so-called New Territories between Hong Kong island and the border with China. Saturday’s protest, which had begun peacefully, was the latest in more than a month to roil the former British colony, grappling with its worst political crisis since it returned to Chinese rule in 1997. Sometimes violent, the protests have drawn in millions of people, with hundreds even storming the legislature on July 1 to oppose a now-suspended extradition bill that would have allowed criminal suspects in Hong Kong to be sent to China to face trial in courts under ruling Communist Party control. Critics see the bill as a threat to Hong Kong’s rule of law. Chief Executive Carrie Lam this week said the bill was “dead” after having suspended it last month, but opponents vow to settle for nothing short of its formal withdrawal. Protests against the bill had largely centered on Hong Kong’s main business district, but demonstrators have recently begun to look elsewhere to widen support by taking up narrower, more domestic issues. The Sheung Shui protests opposed small-time Chinese traders who make short trips into the territory to buy goods they then haul back to China to sell. Protesters chanted demands in Mandarin, China’s official language, for the traders to leave. In a statement on Sunday, Hong Kong’s government said that over the last 18 months it had arrested 126 mainland visitors suspected of contravening the terms of their stay by engaging in parallel trading, and barred about 5,000 mainland Chinese also suspected of involvement. At Britain’s handover 22 years ago, Chinese Communist leaders promised the city a high degree of autonomy for 50 years. But many say China has progressively tightened its grip, putting Hong Kong’s freedoms under threat with measures such as the extradition bill. Hong Kong’s lack of full democracy was behind the recent unrest, said Jimmy Sham of the Civil Human Rights Front, which organized protests against the extradition bill. Riot police stand guard during a march at Sheung Shui, a border town in Hong Kong, China July 13, 2019. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu“The government, Carrie Lam, some legislators in functional constituencies are not elected by the people, so there are many escalating actions in different districts to reflect different social issues,” he said. “If political problems are not solved, social well-being issues will continue to emerge endlessly.” One protester said Saturday’s scuffles started when demonstrators charged police who sought to help mainland traders who had assaulted protesters. “Some people were attacked and got injured in a stampede,” said the man, who would only give the name Ragnar. “I tried to save some girls so I was also attacked by pepper spray by police. Now I feel so bad. The cops are dogs.” Protesters ripped up median barriers and fences to set up roadblocks and defenses. A young man was treated for a bloody head wound a few meters from where police surrounded by crowds were hitting activists armed with umbrellas. Police in riot gear wielded batons to clear the street minutes later and free trapped officers. “We have no weapons and we were peaceful. When we saw them taking photos of us in the crowd we had to react,” said another protester, surnamed Chan, who declined to give his full name. “We are all scared now. How can they hit us with batons?” he said, staring at a pool of blood where one of his peers was treated. The police public affairs office did not have an immediate comment when asked about police actions against the protesters. Last week nearly 2,000 people marched in the Tuen Mun residential district to protest against what they saw as the nuisance of brash singing and dancing to Mandarin pop songs by middle-aged mainland women. On Sunday, tens of thousands marched in one of Kowloon’s most popular tourist shopping areas, trying to persuade mainland Chinese tourists to back opposition to the extradition bill. Slideshow (18 Images)“We want to raise awareness in Washington that the United States has to do more now to help Hong Kong become fully democratic,” said a resident of the nearby town of Fanling, who was one of five people in Saturday’s crowd carrying U.S. flags. “They are the most important power left that can stand up to China,” added the 30-year-old man, who gave his name only as David. Additional reporting by Joyce Zhou and Anne Marie Roantree; Writing by John Ruwitch; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Clarence FernandezOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Race-baiting allegations have mired the home stretch of the US mid-term elections, turning it into one of the ugliest campaigns in recent times.US networks have withdrawn President Donald Trump's ad about a cop-killing illegal immigrant.Meanwhile, racist automated calls targeted prominent African-American candidates in Florida and Georgia.Control of Congress is up for grabs in Tuesday's poll, which is being seen as a referendum on Mr Trump.His ability to govern in the final two years of his term will hinge upon the outcome of votes for all 435 seats in the House, and 35 of the 100 Senate seats. All you need to know ahead of mid-terms Your simple guide to the US mid-terms The Republican president - who has been holding barnstorming rallies nationwide, even though he is not up for re-election this year - campaigns in Ohio, Indiana and Missouri on Monday.In the weeks leading up to the polls, Mr Trump has escalated his rhetoric about his opponents and divisive issues such as immigration, warning voters against Democratic "socialism" and "an invasion" of criminals from the Central American migrant caravan.His sharp language has appeared to energise conservative voters, but critics have condemned Mr Trump's tactics as fear-mongering.On Monday, Facebook, NBC and even the president's favourite network, Fox News, announced they would stop broadcasting a 30-second ad paid for by his campaign.The clip falsely claimed Democrats let into the US an undocumented Mexican immigrant who murdered two California sheriff's deputies in 2014.The president last week tweeted the clip, but CNN refused to air it at the weekend, calling it "racist".Asked about the ad on Monday, Mr Trump told a journalist: "A lot of things are offensive. Your questions are offensive a lot of times." The A-Z of US mid-terms Can we tell yet if the Democrats will win? What's it all about? Why US mid-term elections matter Automated phone calls in Florida and Georgia have dragged an already toxic political campaign to new lows, targeting two candidates who could become the first African-American governors of those states.One message falsely claiming to be from US celebrity Oprah Winfrey called Stacey Abrams in Georgia "a poor man's Aunt Jemima" among other racial slurs, referencing a controversial image of a black woman depicted as a slavery-era "mammy" figure.Calls in Florida targeting Andrew Gillum featured a background of jungle and chimpanzee noises.They came days after Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, speaking in Florida, described the election as "cotton-pickin' important" - a term with overtones of slavery.According to the Wesleyan Media Project, no other US general election in the last decade has seen close to so many attack ads as this one.President Trump is galvanising supporters by arguing that a Democratic takeover of Congress would trigger an influx of illegal immigrants and a crime wave.The president has also been warning the Democrats will destroy a healthy US economy if they win the keys to power.Most Democratic candidates have tended to avoid directly confronting the president, focusing instead on "kitchen table" issues such as healthcare and economic inequality. The party hopes the president's hard-line rhetoric will help them win over younger voters, suburban moderates and minorities to the polls.The Democrats have rolled out their biggest gun: former President Barack Obama, who travelled to Virginia on Monday to get out the vote for its candidates."The character of this country is on the ballot," he said.Turnout is traditionally low in the US mid-terms, with the 2014 election seeing a post-war record low of just 37%.But analysts say a sharp rise is likely this year.Some 34.3 million people have already voted and the real number is probably higher, according to the US Elections Project, a University of Florida-based information source. The figure in 2014 was just 27.5 million.In Texas, early voting has exceeded the entire turnout in 2014.However, thunderstorms are forecast for Tuesday along the eastern coast and snowstorms in the Midwest, which could dampen turnout.Pollsters say Democrats may win the 23 seats they need to take over the House of Representatives, and possibly 15 or so extra seats.However, the Democrats are expected to fall short of the two seats they need to wrest control of the Senate from Republican hands. Governors are also being chosen in 36 out of 50 states. The first polls close at 23:00 GMT (18:00 EST) on Tuesday. US mid-terms in seven charts Democrats dazzled by rising star in Texas The most surprising candidates The celebs who want to influence the US elections Mid-terms: You choose what happens

Deforestation in Brazil’s portion of the Amazon rainforest rose more than 88% in June compared with the same month a year ago, the second consecutive month of rising forest destruction under the rightwing president Jair Bolsonaro.According to data from Brazil’s space agency, deforestation in the world’s largest tropical rainforest totaled 920 sq km (355 sq miles).The data showing the 88.4% deforestation increase is preliminary, but indicates the official annual figure, based on more detailed imaging and measured for the 12 months to the end of July, is well on track to surpass last year’s figure.In the first 11 months, deforestation has already reached 4,565 sq km (1,762 sq miles), a 15% increase over the same period in the previous year.Environmentalists have warned that Bolsonaro’s strong support for development in the Amazon and criticism of the country’s environmental enforcement agency for handing out too many fines would embolden loggers and ranchers seeking to profit from deforestation.“Bolsonaro has aggravated the situation,” said Paulo Barreto, a researcher at Brazilian non-governmental organization Imazon.The surge in deforestation comes as Brazil faces more pressure to protect its environment under the terms of the free trade deal between the European Union and South American bloc Mercosur agreed to last week.The rainy season through April appeared to have held off a spike in deforestation that subsequently came with the dry season starting in May.Deforestation rose 34% in May compared with the same month a year ago.Bolsonaro’s office declined to comment, saying questions would be addressed by the environment ministry. “We are adopting all measures to combat illegal deforestation,” said the environment minister, Ricardo Salles.Brazil is home to 60% of the Amazon, which is the world’s largest tropical rainforest and is seen as vital to the global fight against climate change.While the final text of the EU-Mercosur deal has not been released, an outline from the EU states the agreement includes a provision that the Paris agreement on climate change must be effectively implemented along with other commitments to fight deforestation.The French president, Emmanuel Macron, had warned last week before agreement on the deal that he would not sign off on it if Brazil leaves the Paris accord.Paulo Adario, a Greenpeace forest strategist, said “all indications” were that deforestation will worsen under Bolsonaro, but he hoped news of a large increase would put pressure on the government to take action.“When they have the final numbers, if it is really a lot, this will be a nightmare for Bolsonaro,” Adario said. “This is something that is really important from an international and Brazilian point of view because the Amazon is an icon.” Topics Brazil Amazon rainforest Americas Deforestation Conservation Trees and forests news