LOS ANGELES (AP) — Three people have died at the scene of Southern California wildfires this week, authorities said Saturday, as firefighters aided by diminishing winds beat back a blaze on the edge of Los Angeles that damaged or destroyed more than 30 structures and sent a blanket of smoke across a swath of neighborhoods.Los Angeles officials said the fire in the city’s San Fernando Valley area hadn’t grown significantly since Friday, and ground crews were tamping down lingering hotspots. Evacuation orders were lifted in all of Los Angeles County and in parts of Riverside County, where a second blaze was burning.Shortly before 5 p.m., the Los Angeles Police Department said in a tweet: “We thank members of the community for promptly heeding the evacuation orders and their patience as we worked to contain the fire.”Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told residents to be cautious returning home to neighborhoods where fire crews could still be operating.In Los Angeles, one man who tried to fight the blaze died of a heart attack, and one firefighter reported a minor eye injury.The fire’s cause is under investigation, and authorities warned that the threat of flare-ups remained.At the site of the second blaze east of Los Angeles, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said a second body was found at a mobile home park where 74 structures were destroyed Thursday in Calimesa. Officials previously reported one death at the community east of Los Angeles.The department said one of the Calimesa victims has been identified as 89-year-old Lois Arvikson. Her son Don Turner said she had called him to say she was evacuating, but he never heard from her again. Authorities are working to identify the other victim.Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Brian Humphrey said the bulk of the fire at the city’s edge had moved away from homes and into rugged hillsides and canyons where firefighters were making steady progress slowing its advance. Television footage showed plumes of smoke rising from the area but no walls of towering flame, as a water-dropping helicopter moved in to dump another cascade on the blaze.“The bulk of the fire has moved toward wildland,” Humphrey said.Firefighters worked under sunny skies, but air quality was poor as smoke dispersed over much of greater Los Angeles. Air quality officials urged people to limit outdoor activities.The forecast called for low humidity — in the 10% range — with light wind and an occasional gust up to 15 mph (24 kph).East of Los Angeles, firefighters were also gaining ground on a blaze that ripped through a Riverside County mobile home park, destroying dozens of residences.On Saturday night, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said the 1.5-square-mile wildfire is now 68% contained. Cal Fire announced in a tweet that firefighters are continuing to battle the blaze and that the evacuation order remains for the Villa Calimesa Mobile Home Park, where 74 structures were destroyed.In Northern California, the lights are back on for virtually all customers who lost power when Pacific Gas & Electric switched it off in an effort to prevent wildfires.About 100,000 residents were ordered out of their homes because of the wind-driven wildfire that broke out Thursday evening in the San Fernando Valley, though authorities began lifting evacuation orders in many areas Saturday. It spread westward through tinder-dry brush in hilly subdivisions on the outskirts of the nation’s second-largest city.Interstate 5, the main north-to-south corridor in the state, was shut down for much of the day Friday, choking traffic until finally reopening.The smoky scent spreading through much of Los Angeles was a reminder of the threat of a fire season just beginning.The region has been on high alert as notoriously powerful Santa Ana winds brought dry desert air to a desiccated landscape that only needed a spark to erupt. Fire officials have warned that they expect more intense and devastating California wildfires due, in part, to climate change.Fire danger remained high for much of Southern California, with warnings in place for large swaths of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties west of Los Angeles.The cause of the Los Angeles blaze wasn’t immediately known, though arson investigators said a witness reported seeing sparks or flames coming from a power line near where the fire is believed to have started, said Peter Sanders, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department.Jonathan Stahl was driving home to Valencia when he saw the smoke and immediately diverted to a mobile home park in Sylmar where his grandmother and aunt live together.The park had been nearly wiped out in 2008 when one of the city’s most destructive fires leveled 500 homes.Stahl helped his grandmother, Beverly Stahl, 91, who was in her pajamas, and his aunt to pack clothing, medication and take their two dogs. They saw flames in the distance as they drove away.“We just packed up what we could as fast as we could,” Stahl said at an evacuation center at the Sylmar Recreation Center, massaging his grandmother’s shoulders as she sat in a wheelchair with a Red Cross blanket on her lap. “If we’d stuck around, we would have been in trouble. Real big trouble.”___Associated Press writers Stefanie Dazio and Brian Melley contributed to this report.

With all of the other network late-night hosts taking Columbus Day (and the rest of the week) off, it was left to Jimmy Kimmel to fill the nation in on everything happening in Trumpworld Monday night. “Meanwhile in Washington, the impeachment train is picking up steam,” Kimmel told his audience, breaking down the various developments, from the testimony of Trump’s former Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, to the pending flip from Trump’s ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland. “And on top of that, the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani is said to be under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for his dealings in Ukraine,” Kimmel said, noting that Trump now seems unsure whether or not Giuliani is still his lawyer. “And that must have ruffled some feathers because over the weekend he had lunch with Rudy and then tweeted his support.” “Such a one sided Witch Hunt going on in USA. Deep State. Shameful!” Trump tweeted.“Is there such a thing as a two-sided witch hunt?” Kimmel asked. “Because I don’t know, was there a group of witches that hunted down regular people?” “The president is melting down like a creamsicle in July,” the host added. “He’s threatening to sue Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. Who is he going to get to sue them? All his lawyers are either in jail—or going there.”Then, Kimmel moved on to Trump’s unlikely feud with Fox News. As The New York Times reported over the weekend, the president personally called Fox CEO Suzanne Scott to complain that the network was not being sufficiently deferential to him.“He really is the snowiest, flakiest snowflake there ever has been, isn’t he?” Kimmel said. “You could ski on Donald Trump!”Monday was also Kimmel’s first episode since anchor Shepard Smith abruptly left Fox News after 23 years with the network. “Shepard Smith was one of the only reasons they were able to use the word ‘news’ after Fox with a straight face,” the host added. From there, Kimmel premiered his new promo for Trump’s potential Fox News competitor channel, complete with shows like “Broads on a Couch,” “Nugent at Noon” and “Killin’ Time with O.J. Simpson.”

The companies making the software many office workers depend on are at war with each other. And while battles over workplace communication software may sound mundane, they reflect a larger, more pressing debate about US antitrust laws and how they should be applied to tech companies.Over the past year, Big Tech has faced a regulatory reckoning of sorts: Local and federal regulators in the US are investigating some of the biggest tech companies in the world — Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook — for anticompetitive behavior. Notably absent from this list is the biggest tech company, Microsoft, which previously spent about a decade in antitrust regulators’ crosshairs.Microsoft is in fact currently waging a potentially unfair campaign to crush two of its smaller competitors in the workplace communication software industry, Slack and Zoom. But regulators aren’t focusing on it because they have more serious tech antitrust issues to deal with (like Facebook possibly facilitating the destruction of American democracy).Slack, founded in 2013, makes office chat software that’s beloved by the media and tech industry. Zoom, also launched in 2013, is touted as the best videoconferencing software out there. Both offer services necessary to the modern workplace, and Microsoft is aiming to beat them with the Teams software it debuted in 2017, which combines Slack’s and Zoom’s chat, file sharing, and videoconference features into one product. Crucially, for companies that already subscribe to Microsoft’s ubiquitous Office 365 suite for staples like Excel, Word, and OneDrive, Teams is essentially free — meaning it’s less likely they would shell out additional money to pay for access to Slack or Zoom.Still, Zoom and Slack are growing at breakneck speeds, even among coveted enterprise customers. Zoom had 466 companies spending more than $100,000 annually as of the end of the second quarter, more than double the same period a year earlier. In the same quarter, Slack reached 720 organizations spending $100,000+ a year, up 75 percent year over year.For now, more than 77 percent of customers with Office 365 also had subscriptions to so-called “best-of-breed apps” like Slack and Zoom, a number that has been ticking up, according to data from Okta, a secure login company. But there’s early data showing that growth might be in jeopardy as we approach a potential recession and the economic uncertainty that comes with an election year.Overall IT spending is expected to slow down as the year’s end approaches, according to the latest survey data of company software decision makers by market research firm ETR. The study found that adoption of new software is slowing to pre-2018 levels and that “redundancy is coming to an end” — which could apply to companies that pay for both Office 365 and Slack or Zoom.Already, Teams’ market share trounces that of the older Zoom and Slack, with 60 percent of businesses of all sizes saying they use or plan to use Teams this quarter.Additionally, some 11 percent of companies said they plan to decrease spending on Slack; just 3 percent say they are reducing spending on Zoom and 2 percent on Teams.The findings were similar among small and big companies alike.“Whenever a company goes into a keep-the-lights-on environment, that will always benefit megavendors who bundle and give away software for free,” Thomas DelVecchio, founder and chief executive officer of ETR parent company Aptiviti, told Recode. “Anytime there’s concern about a recession, the Fortune 500 is going to slow down IT spend.” What he’s saying is that if and when there’s a downturn in the economy, Microsoft is positioned to dominate.That’s because while many argue that Slack and Zoom are better products, it’s hard to argue with free. And as Microsoft pours money and ingenuity into Teams, it’s becoming more comparable to the software it’s copying, eroding the argument that companies will pay extra for notably better software. But Slack maintains that even when companies have subscriptions to both Teams and Slack, they actually end up using Slack more. Slack also contends it is better at scaling for larger enterprise customers because it uses “channels” that are more broadly accessible to the whole company. For what it’s worth, Microsoft said the same thing but argued that its more siloed “teams” model is more efficient for big companies. Zoom declined to comment. Still, these products seem pretty similar on the surface. “What you have is a very solid quantitative argument for why to go with Microsoft,” Craig Roth, Gartner’s research vice president, told Recode. User experience is harder to measure.Roth said, “There’s something in it they just like better and it’s hard to quantify what that is. But try telling that to the CFO who has to pay the bill. It’s hard to put a dollar figure on user experience.” What they can put a dollar figure on is security, and that’s an area where Microsoft is perceived to have the upper hand, thanks in part to the amount of resources it can allocate to the issue. In July, Slack reset thousands of user passwords after reporting new information from a 2015 security breach. Also in July, software engineer and security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh discovered a flaw in Zoom that could give hackers access to webcams (the issue has since been fixed, according to Leitschuh). Zoom also has a high number of R&D and product personnel in China, which it says in its IPO filings could expose it to “market scrutiny regarding the integrity of our solution or data security features.”All of these challenges might be easier to address were it not for a fast-moving battle against a company offering the same thing for free. Although Microsoft has gotten in trouble for practices similar to its approach to competing with Slack and Zoom, this situation is a bit different.Back in 2000, the United States District Court ruled that Microsoft had maintained its Windows monopoly through anticompetitive behavior. By bundling its Internet Explorer browser on its PCs and making it difficult to install its competitor Netscape, it was able to maintain its operating system monopoly and box out competition. There was no benefit to the consumer. The ruling was later appealed and its penalties defanged (Microsoft wasn’t, as originally ruled, forced to break up) but the finding that Microsoft violated antitrust laws held. A final settlement forced Microsoft to open its API to third parties but, importantly, it did not prevent it from bundling software in the future. Almost two decades later, as lawmakers bring a new wave of antitrust investigations against Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, Microsoft’s behavior just isn’t as pressing a concern. “Their operations are affecting democracy in a really direct way: Destroying journalism, destroying the essence of what truth is,” Daniel Hanley, a policy analyst with the Open Markets Institute, told Recode, in reference to companies like Google and Facebook. “Microsoft has tried with search, but they’re not as bad as that yet. [The others] are more of a systemic threat to our republic than Microsoft is right now.”More importantly, an antitrust case against Microsoft likely wouldn’t win because of current regulations. “Microsoft is engaging in anticompetitive behavior, but the case would never succeed because the courts have restricted antitrust laws to the most blatant of circumstances,” Hanley said. “The courts are actually creating a deterrent effect for anticompetitive enforcement because you’re making it so difficult to bring a case, which is not how it’s supposed to work. Antitrust laws are supposed to be a deterrent for anticompetitive behavior.”Probably as a result, neither Slack nor Zoom are making the case to lawmakers.“We are — one — doing fine on the enterprise front. If it wasn’t the case, maybe we would take a different tack,” Slack’s head of product Ilan Frank told Recode. “The second thing is that we feel that us focusing on our customers is a much better tack from an organization perspective and for delivering on our mission to make people’s working lives more simple and productive.”According to Tom Campbell, a law and economics professor at Chapman University and a former director of the Bureau of Competition at the Federal Trade Commission, in order to win an antitrust case against Microsoft you’d first have to prove Office is a monopoly. And its high market share isn’t enough. You’d also need to show Office has market power, meaning there’s such a high barrier to entry for competitors that Microsoft could raise prices without fallout. That’s unlikely because there are plenty of competitors to its products. You’d also have to show exclusionary behavior. Offering Teams for free is certainly exclusionary, but Campbell says that would be countered by its pro-consumer benefit. Antitrust law focuses on consumer good, and consumers love free. To defeat Microsoft in an antitrust case, Campbell said, “would require a change in the perspective of the settled American antitrust law for more than 50 years that the antitrust laws do not interfere with innovation that benefits consumers.”Hanley thinks, however, that current US investigations of other major tech companies could lead to rulings that would someday be applied to Microsoft. “Enforcement agencies only have so much staff,” Hanley said. “What I’m hoping is these investigations [into Google, Amazon, and other tech giants] are a turning point toward moving back to prosecuting anticompetitive practices.”

Power shutdowns intended to prevent more devastating California wildfires are raising new concerns about another longstanding environmental threat: air pollution. As utilities halted service to more than 2 million people this week, lines formed at hardware stores selling portable generators, while many hospitals and businesses fired up their own. The prospect of emissions belching from untold numbers of the machines, some powered by diesel and gasoline as well as propane and natural gas, was troubling in a state already burdened with some of the nation's worst air quality. "It is a major concern," said Dr. Laki Tisopulos, executive officer of the Ventura County Air Pollution Control District. "Imagine if you are in a large metropolitan area like Los Angeles or the (San Francisco) Bay Area and you have hundreds or thousands of these engines kicking in. All of a sudden you have many localized sources of pollution that are spewing carcinogens right where we breathe. It can be next door to a school, a hospital." Questions also arose over how the blackouts might affect traffic patterns, potentially causing even more tie-ups and discharges than usual from vehicles. They are a leading factor in California air pollution, along with a warm, sunny climate that helps produce ozone and topographical features such as the Central Valley where polluted air often stagnates. "It's on people's minds in the air quality world," said Kristine Roselius, spokeswoman for the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which tracks air pollution and sets regulations in a nine-county region that includes San Francisco. "The wildfires that are driven by climate change and all the consequences of that are certainly a new normal and it's constantly emerging," Roselius said. The district had not detected any uptick in contamination levels at its more than 30 air quality monitoring gauges, although the high winds that prompted the power shutdowns could be dispersing them, she said Friday. Staffers will be watching for spikes in pollutants including nitrogen oxides and small, sooty particles, which generators tend to produce, she said. But it could be difficult to pinpoint the cause, since air quality is influenced by many factors, she added. Government officials and experts said pollution from emergency power during intentional blackouts is one more wrinkle for policymakers and planners dealing with a constant threat of catastrophic infernos and more extreme weather. Significant rises in diesel exhaust could worsen asthma symptoms and pose risks for people with heart and lung diseases, said Dr. John Balmes, a spokesman for the American Lung Association and a Bay Area resident among those temporarily without electricity. "There would have to be a lot used at the same time to have much of an impact outside the immediate area of the generator," he said. Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the state's largest electricity provider, announced its shutdowns as forecasts called for gusts that could knock trees and limbs into power lines and spark flames. The California Air Resources Board, the state's clean-air agency, described the power interruptions as necessary to protect people and property but acknowledged they would lead to widespread reliance on standby generators. "The use of these engines will generate additional emissions," board spokeswoman Melanie Turner said. "We will be assessing the impact as these public safety power shutoffs evolve." People using generators should check with their local air districts about rules and permit requirements, Turner said. But the board considers operation of stationary and portable diesel engines during a shutdown to be an emergency that meets state regulations. The Bay Area district already was offering incentives to encourage bigger customers such as wastewater treatment plants, municipal buildings and schools to switch from diesel generators to those powered with cleaner fuels such as natural gas or solar energy, Roselius said. Those efforts could be broadened to include small businesses and individuals, she said. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also regulates air contamination from the kinds of engines used in most emergency generators. "EPA is concerned about any emissions that have the potential to effect human health and the environment," a spokeswoman said. Southern California Edison said it had cut power to more than 20,000 customers in five counties, including Los Angeles, and was considering the same action for about 110,000 more. In Ventura County, air quality specialist Phil Moyal said there was no sign of contamination from generators. But the area was experiencing a blast of Santa Ana winds that originate inland and blow pollutants offshore. Once winds subside, generator emissions could contribute to a rise in ozone if power blackouts continue, he said. It could be hard to quantify the effects of power shutdowns on air quality because of the many factors to consider, including how to weigh the pollution they cause against the pollution avoided by preventing wildfires, said Joe Goffman, a former assistant administrator with EPA's Office of Air and Radiation during the Obama administration. "The kinds of fires California has seen in recent years have been major, catastrophic polluters in and of themselves," said Goffman, now director of the Harvard Law School Environment and Energy Law Program. "These shutdowns are being done precisely to prevent that from happening." ——— Follow John Flesher on Twitter: @johnflesher.

The best one could say about America’s abandonment of the Kurds is that they should have known we would sell them out eventually. (Patrick Cockburn quotes a new Middle Eastern proverb: “Never get into a well with an American rope.”) Turkey told us repeatedly that it would not accept a Kurdish state run by partisans of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has run a guerrilla war against Turkey, with pauses, since 1984. (See here an extraordinarily forthright admission that the PKK’s rebranding as the Syrian Defense Forces was merely cosmetic.) To some extent, the Obama administration deserves criticism for resting the fight against the Islamic State on an alliance it knew would lead inexorably to either a total renegotiation of our relationship with Turkey or betrayal of the Kurds in Syria. That reckoning has come, and it is totally in character for Trump to give up everything to Turkey (which hosts our military bases and nuclear weapons, and has the second-largest military in NATO) and betray the Kurds (to whom our only debts are moral).But the whole point of being a superpower is that we get to take our reckonings at times of our choosing, and not in chaotic conditions unfavorable to our interests. The situation before Trump’s about-face was not what an economist would call a stable equilibrium—we needed to watch things carefully and nudge them now and then—but we could manage them. Turkey would almost certainly have continued tolerating an unofficial Kurdish state, as long as the U.S. continued to guarantee that it would not be used as a platform for attacking Turkey. Turkey would not have waited for permission to attack the Syrian Kurds if the U.S. didn’t have enough leverage to forestall such an attack.Trump’s promise one week ago to remove U.S. soldiers from Syria, and clear the way for Turkey to invade and subdue our allies, amounted to a decision to hasten the reckoning and to force our debts to come due long before we had the resources to pay or refinance. Perhaps it was not ideal for the Ghostbusters to keep their ghosts imprisoned in a decrepit firehouse not built for that purpose. It is even less ideal simply to disgorge them into Tribeca.What will happen now that the prisons are emptying and the Islamic State is newly flush with manpower? Many of the foreigners have reportedly been trying to return to their home countries; they came to Syria to live in a caliphate, and with ISIS now reduced to a guerrilla force, they might prefer to wait in, say, Brussels for ISIS to rebuild its paradise on earth. Others will probably stay in Syria and will seek out jihadist groups willing to take them in. They will be spoiled for choices, particularly if they can make it to northwest Syria, where Turkish-backed rebels and jihadist groups continue to flourish. The celebration in ISIS’s propaganda does not automatically mean that the group is resurgent. (A car bomb here and there does not a caliphate make.) But ISIS is an opportunistic infection, and the chaos of the moment leaves the group with an attractive opportunity.

Three people are dead after wind-driven wildfires burned through 8,300 acres in Southern California, forcing thousands to evacuate their homes as firefighters sought to contain the fast-moving blazes.Two victims were discovered this week in the Villa Calimesa Mobile Home Park, where multiple structures burned in the Sandalwood fire centered in Calimesa, California, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department said Saturday.One of the victims was identified as Lois Arvikson, 89, and the other was not yet named. That blaze was 25 percent contained at 823 acres, the Riverside County Fire Department said.In Los Angeles, where the Saddleridge fire consumed 7,522 acres, a man suffered cardiac arrest Thursday night in the community of Porter Ranch and later died at a hospital, Mayor Eric Garcetti said Friday.Saddleridge was 19 percent contained Saturday, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department, which said 21 structures were destroyed and another 11 damaged.Evacuated Southern Californians were returning to their homes Saturday as winds died down and cooler breezes from the Pacific Ocean moved in.Overnight, as many as 100,000 people were under mandatory evacuation orders but by Saturday afternoon, most of those had been lifted.CalFire warned that the fall's dry, windy weather was not over yet."We all want to be on guard and not do anything that's dangerous," said CalFire spokeswoman Lynnette Round.In Northern California, where an estimated 2 million people were impacted by precautionary blackouts initiated Wednesday by Pacific Gas and Electric, power had been restored to nearly all customers, the company said in a statement.Downed power lines owned by the state's largest utility have been blamed for past deadly wildfires.

But it is also because the cover-up suggests a recognition of guilt. Aides who listened to or heard about the call quickly realized that it represented a gravely inappropriate abuse of his office and very possibly a crime. By all accounts, they moved quickly to try to shield him from his own errors of judgment. This was not an especially honorable, principled, or patriotic move, but it was a gesture of loyalty.No one has accused one key person of being part of the cover-up: Trump himself. While his aides tried to hide his behavior, the president himself has been fairly forthcoming. As I wrote on Monday, even before the transcript or whistle-blower report was public, Trump had admitted to pressuring Zelensky to investigate the Bidens. (Since then, he has made the semantic argument that he was not pressuring Zelensky, without changing his story materially.) He has said he wanted Ukraine to investigate corruption, and he has insisted that what he was doing was a proper exercise of his prerogatives in setting American foreign policy. Trump ordered the release of the transcript of his call, over the apparent objections of several of his aides, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.These aides were more clear-eyed about how serious Trump’s misconduct was than the president, but their cover-up has proved disastrous. It’s like a twisted version of O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.” The aides saw the misconduct, but not the political risk, while Trump didn’t see what he’d done wrong, but had a more acute political sense that a cover-up demonstrates awareness of guilt, even to reporters who are loath to draw conclusions about the substance of Trump’s behavior on its own.If his aides were right on the law, Trump might have had the better argument politically. This is hardly the first time Trump has misbehaved egregiously, and while it’s simpler to understand than, say, the various strands of the Mueller report, it’s no simpler than the Access Hollywood tape or hush-money payoffs to porn actresses. The president recognizes that when he brazens out a scandal, acknowledging the basic facts but insisting he did nothing wrong and attacking his opponents, he has been able to survive.It’s tempting to imagine a counterfactual history of this incident in which Trump talks with Zelensky and records of the call are disseminated as usual. In this scenario, someone leaks the call to the press, which asks Trump about it. He answers—as he did Monday—that of course he did it. After all, he’d made no bones about his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, going around trying to dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine. Why would he deny it now? Perhaps Trump’s blunt admission of the facts combined with a denial he did nothing wrong would have defused this case, just as it had others.

Xiaomi introduced its first phones compatible with the latest, fifth-generation cellular technology in China, as the country's once-biggest smartphone maker prepares for an uphill battle against domestic rival Huawei Technologies. From a report: At an event in Beijing, billionaire co-founder Lei Jun introduced the 5G-capable Mi 9 Pro, the latest of Xiaomi's classic product line, and gave the world a first look at a new concept phone called MIX Alpha, with a display wrapping all the way around the device. The Mi 9 Pro, built with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+ processor and a gluttonous serving of memory and storage, has seven antennas to ensure the fastest possible cellular speeds, with Lei showing off real-world speeds in China of over 2 gigabits per second. It will start at 3,699 yuan ($520), while a 4,299 yuan model will max out the storage at 512GB. The long-awaited phone upgrade cycle that 5G networking is set to trigger will be hotly contested ground among China's leading smartphone vendors.

Comments or questions? Send us an email anytime. Were you forwarded this email? Sign yourself up here. We appreciate your continued support for our journalism. (Martyn Aim / laif / Redux)As Turkey moves in on northeastern Syria after the removal of American troops, exposing America’s Kurdish partners in the fight against ISIS, take a moment to consider who exactly the American withdrawal leaves exposed.Mike Giglio has spent years tracking the rise and fall of ISIS. The stories he tells from on the ground with America’s Syrian, Kurdish and Iraqi allies fighting a version of a forever war will leave you breathless. ISIS made its car bombs in factories and outfitted them with metal armor and enough explosives to incinerate a building or a Humvee. For months they’d been coming, one after another, at the soldiers, the pilots speeding through the fields and streets like the War Boys of Mad Max, blazing forward in their clanking death machines, chasing suicidal glory. They had killed some of the battalion’s best soldiers in this way. Of all the forces aligned against ISIS, the soldiers of the ICTF were its deadliest enemy. They were elite and attacked with the support of America’s air force and intelligence, but at the same time they were soldiers of Iraq. They were men like Ibrahim Abu Hamra, a.k.a. Red, the Humvee’s driver, a meaty sergeant with cream-colored skin and strawberry hair who looked Irish. He was a longtime ICTF soldier and new father who had managed to maintain the fiction to his wife that he worked a desk job. → Read the rest of this selection from Mike’s forthcoming book, Shatter the Nations: ISIS and the War for the Caliphate.

Were Rudyard Kipling writing about Apple today, he might observe, “iPad is iPad and Mac is Mac and never the twain shall meet.” Devices that can act as either a laptop or tablet—also known as 2-in-1s—got their start in 2012 when Microsoft announced the original Surface as its response to the success of the iPad. When based on Windows or Chrome OS, modern 2-in-1s are better at being laptops than they are tablets. When based on Android, it’s the opposite.In either case, Apple hasn’t taken the bait. Instead, it’s vowed to stay away from combining the iPad and Mac. Tim Cook once called the idea like combining a toaster and a refrigerator. And at its last WWDC developer confab, the company held fast to that separation, resolutely decrying the idea while doubling down on iPad independence with a new operating system designed specifically for it.However, while Apple may never combine the Mac and iPad, each has followed a path toward the other. Today’s biggest iPad Pro has a display larger than those of some Windows laptops. Apple now offers keyboard cases for all but its smallest iPad, the iPad Mini. The iPad’s operating system continues to take on more Mac-like features such as a file system, support for USB-C, more flexibility in wrangling windows, and now even tentative mouse and cursor support. With the new Sideshow feature in MacOS Catalina, you can even use an iPad Pro as a secondary display for a Mac.And in the strongest tie between the two devices, Apple’s Project Catalyst handles much of the heavy lifting of converting iPad apps to Mac apps, which could eventually lead to the end of native Mac development. With Apple’s iPad chips becoming as powerful as they have, it’s no surprise that there has been widespread speculation that Apple will switch from the Intel processors in its current Macs to its own, much like Microsoft now supports Qualcomm processors in Windows laptops such as its own new Surface Pro X.No iPad laptop for youBut there’s one Mac domain that Apple had not let the iPad enter: it has not released a true laptop running iPadOS, using the clamshell design that has defined notebook PCs since the 1980s. The company may see this as the semantic distinction that would represent combining the two device types in a way it has actively avoided—the equivalent of releasing a toaster/refrigerator.Apple has good reasons for keep the iPad untethered from a keyboard. An iPad laptop would highlight deficiencies in keyboard and mouse control (such as the lack of “right-click” context menus) that have built up from years of focusing on a pure touch ezperience. It would further carve into a declining tablet market and likely steal share from the Mac as well as carve into the market for Apple’s high-margin keyboard cases (the Smart Keyboard Folio for the 12.9″ iPad Pro sells for $200). Microsoft may be able to get away with both a Surface Pro 2-in-1 and Surface Laptop, but that’s in part because a naked Surface isn’t as compelling as a naked iPad, so you give up less by using a Surface that’s permanently attached to a keyboard.But there would still be benefits to having a true iPad clamshell. Along with giving the company the ability to offer a comfier keyboard than its flat, fabric-covered Smart Keyboard Folio for the iPad Pro, it would offer better balance on the lap. The Smart Keyboard Folio provides more stability than the Smart Keyboard Case it replaced, but a tablet propped up on a thin keyboard still can’t compete with the dependability and flexibility of a conventional laptop hinge.There’s no iPad laptop, but even the entry-level iPad is now compatible with an Apple keyboard case. [Photo: courtesy of Apple]Apple isn’t the only company to struggle with this design challenge. Microsoft has touted improvements in the Surface Pro’s “lapability,” a sore point for its earlier devices. But even off the lap, the Surface’s kickstand can be a liability. The device can get off balance and fall if you carelessly push it over the rear edge of a narrow bar-like table such as those in many coffee shops or, less dangerously, an airline tray.Lenovo’s Yoga line and others Windows 2-in-1s use a swiveling hinge that provides more stability when you’re using them in laptop orientation. But one of the main problems with such designs is that they become thick and unwieldy with the keyboard rotated behind the display. Lenovo has tried to address this with its Yoga Book line that dispenses with a physical keyboard in favor of one based on E Ink, for a comfortable tablet thickness and weight. That’s a compromise that touch typists are unlikely to accept.Apple could avoid such conundrums by creating an iPad with a detachable keyboard, akin to Microsoft’s Surface Book. With iPadOS on board, such a machine would be better at serving as a tablet than the Surface Book, whose use of Windows gives it a bias toward keyboard and mouse input. But the Surface Book, which starts at $1049, is an expensive device aimed at power users. Apple is selling the 7th-generation iPad for only $299 to schools and playing up the use of AR that the iPad can offer in education settings. A reasonably priced, keyboard-equipped version could give Apple a cost-competitive, sturdy option as it does battle with Google’s Chromebooks in the school market.When Apple won’t, others willThe closest experience to an iPad laptop today is from a company called Brydge. It got its start seven years ago—well before Apple sold an iPad keyboard case of its own—with a Kickstarter campaign for a Bluetooth iPad keyboard made from study materials. The iPad is held in place via friction exerted from small receptacles at either end of the hinge that have a rubbery interior. There’s no support for Apple’s Smart Connector, which would let the Brydge draw power from the iPad and eliminate the need for charging. (Brydge says that supporting the Smart Connector would be expensive and tend to limit your ability to angle the screen.)Plugged into Bridge’s keyboard, an iPad feels a lot like a touch-screen MacBook. [Photo: courtesy of Brydge]After finding success as an iPad add-on, Brydge has since expanded to other platforms. It now has a model for the Surface Pro, even though Microsoft’s tablet has had an integrated stand and popular keyboard cover from Microsoft since the beginning. Brydge must also compete against Microsoft’s more laptop-like alternatives in the just updated Surface Laptop and Surface Book. And Google thought Brydge’s approach was valuable enough to bring it in as a third-party keyboard vendor for its Pixel Slate, although it wasn’t enough to salvage Google’s tablet efforts.Using the Brydge Pro with an iPad Pro is such a MacBook-like experience that I’ve found myself reaching for a trackpad that wasn’t there. When asked about adding such an input option to its iPad keyboards now that Apple supports cursors as an assistive device, Brydge co-CEO Nick Smith acknowledges that the company has seen a lot of interest in that but that “the overall experience isn’t amazing when you compare it to a traditional pointer-based environment.”Others aren’t waiting to release trackpad-equipped iPad keyboards, though. Recently, two Kickstarter campaigns have raised funds for iPad hinged keyboards with trackpads. The DoBox Pro is a thicker wedge that integrates a complement of ports on the back of the device. It thus relies on the USB-C connector on iPad Pros. The more Brydge-like Libra adds a magnetic back to the iPad Pro to even out the tablet/keyboard combination’s profile and add a bit of customization.The Libra, which supports a broader range of iPads than the DoBox Pro, has attracted about $160,000 with 35 days to go; that’s nearly 10 times the amount of funding that the DoBox Pro had received. People who back either gadget, or who buy a Brydge, are determined to literally fit the tablet Apple calls the future of the PC into a form factor that has defined the PC for decades.

BORDER WARSInside Trump’s Assault on ImmigrationBy Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. ShearOn the morning of Jan. 11, 2018, Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, received a phone call from the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, summoning him to the White House. Durbin had been working for months with Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, on a deal to grant legal status to the so-called “Dreamers” — children who had been brought illegally into the country by their parents when they were very young, had grown up here and knew only the United States as home. The news from Trump was encouraging. “Wow,” Durbin told an aide. “I think we may actually have a deal.”Durbin and Graham — who received a similar call that morning — expected a private meeting with the president, but as they waited in the West Wing lobby a phalanx of hard-liners arrived, led by Stephen Miller, the young mastermind of Trump’s draconian immigration policies. Were they being ambushed? Durbin wondered. Indeed, they were. The meeting lapsed into a notorious Trump rant — about accepting immigrants from “shithole countries.” The president seemed amazed by the Durbin-Graham proposal: “Wait a minute — why do we want people from Haiti here?” Why not more people from Norway? Graham was flabbergasted: What had happened between 10 a.m., when the president called offering the deal, and noon, when the historic Oval Office tirade had taken place? “I don’t know where that guy” — the more amenable Trump — “went,” Graham told the homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen days later. “I want him back.”Trump’s bigoted eruption was instant news. But the context provided by the New York Times journalists Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear in their exquisitely reported “Border Wars” reveals the shattering horror of the moment, the mercurial unreliability and instability of the president. Davis and Shear perform this contextual service time and again throughout their book, which is essential reading for those searching for the “beating heart” of the Trump administration. The authors argue it is immigration policy, and who can dispute that? From his very first news conference as a presidential candidate, when he denounced Mexican border-crossers as rapists and criminals, a rancid nativism — aimed at people who have darker skins than Norwegians — has been Trump’s tribalist weapon of choice, his scalpel prodding the worst impulses of the American spirit.Nativism isn’t as American as apple pie — indeed, it is the very opposite of our country’s heterogeneous intention — but it has been with us since the Irish began arriving in droves in the mid-19th century. It has almost always been a minor chord in American politics, but it has flared from time to time — with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the harsh restrictions on southern and eastern Europeans in 1924, and again today, 50 years after Lyndon Johnson liberalized immigration policy in 1965.

From night shooting mode to ultra-wide lenses, Apple's latest iPhones have a bunch of new camera tricks. WSJ's Joanna Stern, with the help from the queen and some jousters, put all the new phones to the test at the New York Renaissance Faire. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann / The Wall Street Journal By Sept. 20, 2019 1:28 pm ET Apple Inc.’s store in Beijing’s trendy Sanlitun neighborhood was crowded Friday with shoppers checking out the latest iPhones—but the real test for the iPhone 11, analysts say, will be whether it can sustain interest in the months ahead as trade tensions simmer and competitors release 5G handsets. Apple stores world-wide began selling the new iPhones Friday. The base iPhone 11 model features a second-rear camera and a $699 price tag, $50 less than its predecessor’s. The iPhone 11 Pro models feature the same starting price... To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris was pulled Monday into a sexual assault dispute at the Silicon Valley law firm where her husband, Douglas Emhoff, is a partner.Emhoff works for DLA Piper, where a junior partner named Vanina Guerrero has charged last week in a complaint to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that she was sexually assaulted four times by a top deal-maker at the firm, Louis Lehot.In a letter to Harris published on Medium on Monday, Guerrero’s lawyer, Jeanne Christensen, asked for the California senator’s help in getting her client released from DLA Piper’s mandatory arbitration rules so she can “get her day in court.”Noting the press coverage of the Guerrero case and the open letter she sent to DLA Piper’s leadership last week, Christensen wrote, “I hope that you either read about the open letter yourself or that your husband Douglas Emhoff, a partner at DLA Piper, shared it with you.”Christensen wrote that DLA has not yet responded to Guerrero’s request.“I am sure that you would agree that silencing women though forced arbitration must end,” Christensen wrote. “No female employee, including a new partner, would knowingly agree to waive her right to our court system for claims involving sexual assault, battery, or rape,” Christensen wrote. “Given your profile as a candidate for the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, you are in a unique position to condemn the actions of DLA Piper and made clear that mandatory arbitration must stop.”“Again, I urge you to support Ms. Guerrero and let DLA Piper know that time is up for its draconian policy that disproportionately protects male predators at the expense of women,” Christensen wrote.In response to a request for comment, Harris' communications director, Lily Adams, sent the following statement: "Senator Harris has been and continues to be a staunch advocate for survivors and believes all people must be guaranteed their day in court. She has long opposed forced arbitration agreements and that position has not changed and she does not believe this is any exception."In June, Harris and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., urged JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon to eliminate a forced arbitration clause used in that company’s credit card contracts.“One of the fundamental principles of our democracy is that everyone should get their day in court," they wrote. "Forced arbitration deprives Americans of that basic right.”The Los Angeles Times reported in March that the California Department of Justice paid more than $1.1 million to settle claims by workers who said they were sexually harassed or retaliated against by co-workers during Harris' tenure as state attorney general from 2011 to 2017.NBC News has also emailed DLA Piper spokesman Josh Epstein, but so far there has been no response.Also, DLAPiper has resisted calls to get rid of mandatory arbitration.In her EEOC complaint, Guerrero wrote that Lehot lured her to his law firm with promises of fast advancement and attacked her the first time two weeks after she signed on.“Unable to take ‘no’ for an answer, Mr. Lehot sexually assaulted Ms. Guerrero in his hotel room in Shanghai,” the complaint alleges.Guerrero charged the attacks escalated over the next 10 months and that Lehot began sabotaging her career when she resisted his advances. She said she was too afraid to tell anybody at first.“Having moved my two toddlers and husband that I support financially from Hong Kong to California for this job, I was petrified to believe what was happening to me, much less tell anyone,” she wrote in the complaint.Lehot did not respond to a request for comment when the story first broke last week. He is the co-managing partner at the firm’s Silicon Valley office branch in Palo Alto.Dubbed a “Star Silicon Valley Lawyer” by Bloomberg News, Lehot works in an office down the hall from Guerrero.

The change in electoral strategy also coincided with a staff reorganization, including a campaign role for Ms. Harris’s Senate chief of staff, Rohini Kosoglu. The campaign denied reports that the changes indicated discontent with the structure of Ms. Harris’s current senior staff.However, people inside the campaign said that the overlapping roles of Ms. Harris’s political consultants from California; springtime hires such as Jim Margolis, the Democratic advertising guru who has worked with the party’s last three presidential nominees; and Maya Harris, the senator’s sister, campaign chair and close confidante, have at times contributed to organizational confusion.Ms. Harris’s supporters online and in early voting states have come up with their own reasoning for her recent downturn: a biased news media that is favoring white candidates such as Ms. Warren and Mr. Buttigieg.Lance Pringle, president of United Auto Workers Local 2162 in Reno, said even if Ms. Harris stumbled, it had been amplified by a press that treats women of color more harshly. “I notice it, definitely,” Mr. Pringle said. “Warren came out of nowhere and Kamala was on top at the beginning. Like I said, skin color matters — whether we like it or not.”Allen Warner, 41, said he believed impeachment would help springboard Ms. Harris’s candidacy.“Other candidates may have clearer plans, but I just feel like we’re fighting for our democracy, and she’s the one who I connect with and who resonates leadership,” Mr. Warner said.For all the technical changes the campaign is making, which also include holding more intimate events in Iowa rather than large rallies, there remains the question of message. Ms. Harris has, at times, embraced large-scale solutions such as a mandatory gun buyback program and ending the Senate filibuster to pass the Green New Deal. But she has rarely advocated for them consistently or with conviction, frustrating the very progressive activists such policies are meant to please.

What about the air base though? “Incirlik [the base the U.S. Air Force uses in southern Turkey] is an albatross,” said one former senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “But there are people in [the U.S. government] for whom Turkey is sacrosanct and all of its problems—busting U.S. sanctions, holding Americans hostage, threatening other NATO allies like Greece, supporting jihadists, buying Russian weapons, not to mention internal oppression and ongoing purges —are our fault. Truth is, we can’t do much at Incirlik. We need Turkey’s permission to blow our nose there.”On the Turkish side, too, the marriage has been one of serial disappointments and misunderstandings. A February article in the pro-government Daily Sabah ran through a litany of issues with the alliance: Turkey, wrote the paper’s politics editor, Seyma Nazli Gürbüz, is the second-largest military in the alliance, is a key partner in Afghanistan and elsewhere, hosts NATO initiatives around its own territory, and contributed more than $100 million in 2018. (This is short of the 2 percent of its defense budget that Trump has insisted all NATO members pony up.)But “NATO disappointed Turkey more than once over the years”—when the U.S. refused to side with the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, when Germany accused Turkey of killing civilians in its battle with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in its own country in the 1990s, and through America’s ongoing refusal to hand over Fethullah Gülen, the U.S.-based leader of a Turkish political movement that Erdoğan blames for orchestrating the 2016 coup attempt. “Over time, siding with terrorists rather than Turkey became a pattern for many NATO member countries, particularly the U.S.,” Gürbüz wrote.Two U.S. presidential administrations running have now sided with Kurdish fighters in Syria tied to the PKK over Turkey’s strenuous objections. Since Sunday, however, the dynamic seems to have shifted, and Trump—who has been sharply critical of the NATO alliance himself, and who has touted his administration’s achievements against ISIS—opted to take a NATO partner’s side over the Kurdish forces who did so much to help defeat the Islamic State. The shift was so sudden, it left officials at the State Department and the Pentagon scrambling to explain it and contain the fallout. In a phone call with the Turkish defense minister yesterday, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said “the incursion risks serious consequences for Turkey,” according to the Pentagon’s readout.Once again, as Erdoğan sees it, some of his allies are siding with the terrorists. “Hey, European Union, pull yourself together,” he said in a speech yesterday. “If you try to label this operation as an occupation … we will open the gates and send 3.6 million refugees your way.”Separately, at the United Nations Security Council, the NATO allies France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Poland introduced a statement condemning Turkey’s incursion into Syria. Turkey did have an ally on its side there. Ironically, given the alliance’s Cold War roots, America joined with Russia and declined to endorse it.Yara Bayoumy contributed reporting. Kathy Gilsinanis a staff writer atThe Atlantic, covering national security and global affairs. Twitter Email

HELSINKI (AP) — Estonia, which is among Europe’s most wired and technologically advanced nations, is set to restrict the use of equipment and technology from Chinese telecom giant Huawei in its government sector, citing security concerns and recommendations by the U.S., a key NATO ally.The Estonian news site Delfi reported Friday that Foreign Trade and Technology Minister Kert Kingo began an expert group in June with the aim of setting policies and standards this year for the use of technology in Estonian government institutions.Its leader, Raul Rikk, said the group had already taken a clear position that Huawei should not be allowed to provide technology for 5G networks in Estonia.Rikk said the issue isn’t the quality of Huawei’s software and hardware “but whether these devices can be used for political purposes in the future.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Donald Trump’s former Russia adviser testified for more than nine hours on Monday behind closed doors, the latest witness summoned in the impeachment inquiry against the U.S. president over his request that Ukraine investigate a political rival. The Democrats’ rapidly progressing inquiry could prompt the House of Representatives to approve articles of impeachment - formal charges - leading to a trial in the Senate on whether to remove Trump from office. Fiona Hill, former senior director for European and Russian Affairs on Trump’s National Security Council, recounted a July 10 meeting in Washington that she attended with senior Ukrainian and U.S. officials, including U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, according to a person familiar with her testimony. Hill said Sondland raised the matter of investigations, which she and others took as a reference to a probe into Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Alarmed at what she heard, Hill said she left the meeting and was advised to see National Security Council lawyer John Eisenberg, the person said. Hill said Sondland appeared to be coordinating with Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, the person said. The meeting happened about two weeks before a July 25 phone call in which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate unsubstantiated allegations against the Bidens, the call at the center of the investigations. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin told reporters Hill, who spoke to the House Intelligence Committee and two other panels, “was a remarkably thorough and authoritative witness” who recalled “particular events and particular meetings”. As they have done in the past, Republican lawmakers who have shown little inclination to remove Trump complained that the hearings were closed to the public and that transcripts were not being released. Related CoverageFormer top Pompeo aide expected to testify in closed U.S. House sessionTrump says Ukraine whistleblower's identity should be revealedThe pace of the House Democrats’ investigation quickened on Monday as they lined up additional witnesses to testify in closed sessions. Michael McKinley has agreed to appear voluntarily for a closed transcribed interview on Wednesday, just days after he announced his resignation as a senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Also, a person familiar with the proceedings confirmed Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper would be interviewed by the committees on Friday. Trump has denied wrongdoing in his dealings with Ukraine. Adding to the almost dizzying number of developments, the Wall Street Journal reported federal investigators for at least the past couple of months have been questioning witnesses as they look into Rudy Giuliani’s business dealings in Ukraine. Giuliani has been acting as Trump’s personal lawyer. Justice Department officials in Washington referred a request for comment to the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, where a spokesman declined to comment. Giuliani faces a Tuesday deadline to produce documents related to the Ukraine matter subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee. He has not said whether he will comply. The former New York mayor has defended his actions as proper in his role as Trump’s lawyer. The Trump administration’s removal in May of Marie Yovanovitch as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine may have figured in Hill’s testimony. Fiona Hill leaves the Capitol building after giving a full day of testimony during the ongoing House of Representatives impeachment inquiry into U.S. President Trump on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., October 14, 2019. REUTERS/Leah Millis TPX IMAGES OF THE DAYOn Friday, Yovanovitch testified she had been ousted based on “unfounded and false claims” after coming under attack by Giuliani. Giuliani had been working to get Ukraine to investigate Biden, a former vice president and contender for the Democratic nomination to face Trump in the November 2020 presidential election. Democrats have accused Trump of pressuring a vulnerable U.S. ally to dig up dirt on a domestic rival after withholding $391 million in U.S. security aid. Zelenskiy agreed to investigate and Trump eventually allowed the aid. The British-born Hill, who left her White House job shortly before the July 25 call but remained on the payroll into August, had advocated a tough U.S. approach on Moscow even as Trump was more accommodating toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. The White House demanded Hill limit her testimony to the contents of the July 25 telephone call and warned she could not discuss internal deliberations or diplomatic communications about the conversation, according to a letter dated Monday from a White House lawyer to Hill’s attorney that was seen by Reuters. In the letter to attorney Lee Wolosky, White House Deputy Counsel Michael Purpura cited the doctrine of executive privilege, which is intended to protect communications between the president and close advisers to ensure candid, private advice. Purpura acknowledged that because Trump released the summary of his call with Zelenskiy, it was not covered by executive privilege. But, he wrote, Trump had not waived executive privilege applying to internal deliberations surrounding the call or to other classified materials. Representatives for Wolosky and the White House did not immediately respond to a requests for comment on the letter. On Thursday, committees are scheduled to receive testimony from Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the EU. Sondland, a Trump backer and not a career diplomat, participated in a text message exchange with Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine. Democrats say it reveals concern among aides that Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate Biden was improper. Sondland is expected to be asked why he relayed from Trump to other diplomats that the president said no “quid pro quos” connecting the Biden investigation with the U.S. aid. Quid pro quo is a Latin term meaning a favor for a favor. Slideshow (7 Images)As talks continue over whether the whistleblower from within the U.S. intelligence community who prompted the inquiry will testify, Trump weighed in on Twitter, demanding the person testify and the individual’s identity be revealed. Negotiations between representatives for the whistleblower and congressional committees were deadlocked over Senate Intelligence Committee requests that the individual provide testimony in person, while the House committees were willing to exchange questions and answers in writing, according to two people familiar with the negotiations. The House panels also are scheduled this week to hear from Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent and State Department Counselor Ulrich Brechbuhl, a top aide to Pompeo. Lawmakers also may debate whether to seek to compel testimony from Giuliani. On Thursday, two Giuliani associates - Ukraine-born Lev Parnas and Belarus-born Igor Fruman - who helped him with his efforts to investigate the Bidens - were charged with scheming to violate U.S. campaign finance laws. Reporting by Jonathan Landay and Patricia Zengerle; Additional reporting by Karen Freifeld, Mark Hosenball, Makini Brice and Lisa Lambert; Writing by Will Dunham and Richard Cowan; Editing by Grant McCool, Peter Cooney and Lincoln FeastOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

It said recent court rulings blocking the administration’s attempts to deport criminals, deter migrant families and tighten asylum standards, in addition to Friday’s rulings, are examples of the administration “being ordered to comply with the flawed or lawless guidance of a previous administration instead of the actual laws passed by Congress.”The other injunctions against putting the public charge rule into effect came from Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton of the Federal District Court in Northern California and Judge Rosanna M. Peterson of the Federal District Court in the Eastern District of Washington; all of Friday’s rulings came from judges appointed by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.The administration had argued that the public charge rule, developed by Stephen Miller, the White House aide who is the architect of several of the government’s hard-line immigration policies, was designed to ensure that immigrants are self-sufficient and do not become a drain on the nation’s coffers. Judge Peterson said the new regulations would undermine the interest of the states in promoting the health and well-being of their residents, as well as their financial security.“The harms to children, including U.S. citizen children, from reduced access to medical care, food assistance, and housing support,” she wrote, are a threat to states that must reallocate resources to deal with those needs.New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, who brought the case decided in New York, said the rule would have had a “devastating impact” on citizens and noncitizens alike.“The history of our nation is inextricably tied to our immigrant communities, and because of today’s decision, so too will be our future,” she said in a statement. “Once again, the courts have thwarted the Trump administration’s attempts to enact rules that violate both our laws and our values.”

The first time Porter Goodman went to Iraq was in 2006 as a mechanic in the U.S. Army.He was a private citizen when he returned a decade later to use his first-aid training to serve as a volunteer combat medic with the Kurdish militia.He emphasizes that he went back not just to battle the evil that is ISIS.“I didn’t need to fight something,” he said.His primary purpose was to support the Kurds in their effort to create what he considers to be a democracy such as any American—from liberals to conservatives such as himself—should applaud. “A self-built democracy in the Middle East,” the 31-year-old told the Daily Beast this week. “It is everything we hoped for in Afghanistan and Iraq.”He added, “Iraq cost a lot of money and it cost a lot of American soldiers’ lives. The outcome was not fabulous.”And the Kurds, he noted, do not expect Americans to do their fighting for them. They actually took the lead again ISIS.“They have our back,“ Goodman said. “They really do.”He has seen the Kurds not just preach, but also practice gender equality and religious tolerance. He does not understand why feminists fail to be more vocal in backing the Kurdish military’s unqualified inclusion of women in combat roles, at a grunt command levels.“Here is an army of women, AK-47s in hand, fighting for human rights,” Goodman said. “And there is not solidarity with them.”When he flew off from Utah in January 2016, Goodman understood that parents might not view the Kurds a cause worthy of risking his life. So he said he was heading to a new job in Connecticut. “I know that if I had told my parents and my siblings that they would make a huge effort to prevent me from going,” he would recall.He told them the truth after he had landed in back in Iraq, this time having deployed himself. “I really got an earful from every member of the family,” he remembered. “I was on the phone for hours and hours.”He then arranged to get smuggled across the border into northern Syria.“I wake up to some pretty sad and depressing postings by my Kurdish friends.”— Porter GoodmanInitially, he assisted the Kurds as he might have if he had been a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English and helping to build a radio station. He then decided to put his first-aid training from his Army days to use. He joined a group of other volunteers of various political persuasions who were training Kurds in such basics as applying tourniquets and connecting IV lines. When the Kurds prepared to drive ISIS from the city of Manbij, Goodman and several of his fellow volunteers put their knowledge to direct use. They set up a casualty control point just inside the frontline, at a chicken farm they shared with a detachment of U.S. Special Forces operators who were providing military support. Goodman understood the S.F. operators were a whole other kind of soldier than he had been.“I was a mechanic. I’m not like a hard-core guy,” Goodman told The Daily Beast.The S.F. operators were all the more special because they did not try to impress anybody,“They were pretty humble,” Goodman said. “Just really cool, solid people.”He figured that the operators had undertaken an unspoken added mission concerning him and the other volunteers during the time they were at the farm.“Keep an eye on us, make sure we were safe,” Goodman said.He was reminded of what they were fighting against as well as what they were fighting for when terrorized civilians escaped from ISIS territory.“They would break down crying,” Goodman said.As the Kurds battled their way into the city, there was an increasingly urgent need for Goodman and other medics to attend to casualties in the middle of the action rather than wait for somebody to get the wounded to the control point.“It was really intense fighting,” Goodman later said.Goodman encountered a 23-year-old fellow Amercian named Levi Shirley who had been rejected by the U.S. Marine Corps due to poor eyesight and was now a combat volunteer with the Kurds. Another volunteer had managed to trade some ISIS flags to the American S.F. operators for a case of MRE rations. “Stale bread and imitation tuna fish,” Goodman recalled.That can seem a delicacy in a war zone. Shirley suggested there might be more tradable souvenirs in a house that he said his unit had earlier cleared of hazards such as ISIS fighters and booby traps.“He said, ‘I think I saw something they might want in the house,” Goodman recalled. “I said, ‘I’ll go with you.’”Goodman does not remember what transpired after they entered. An improvised explosive device killed Shirley. Goodman survived. “A lot of minor shrapnel wounds, I mean a lot of them,” Goodman later said. “I was really lucky. I was conscious but I don’t remember it.”The S.F. operators decided Goodman might have suffered traumatic brain injury and arranged for him to be evacuated from the combat zone. He was later billed for the $3,200 airplane ticket for his flight back to the states.He returned home in the summer of 2016, having risked and almost lost his life for what he continued to see as one cause that all of us could support even as the country’s political divisions deepened.He remained what he describes as a moderate conservative.“The left, they don’t lose an opportunity to criticize Trump for everything,” Goodman said. “A lot of people on the right, it makes it easy to shrug off the criticisms…”With regard to his own views, he said, “I’m not of the opinion that everything Trump does is stupid and wrong. I was never a Trump supporter but I wasn't a Trump hater either.”He did remain a Kurd supporter, and stayed in touch with his comrades via the internet as he went to work as a software engineer. “Turkey, they are not going to be nice when they come over the border.”— Porter GoodmanAt the start of this week, Goodman saw a sudden flurry of postings and learned of Trump's shocking announcement following a phone conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The U.S. was withdrawing its military support of the Kurds in advance of an impending Turkish invasion.“Turkey, they are not going to be nice when they come over the border,” Goodman noted.Goodman said the only terrorists he saw in Northern Syria were with ISIS. He believes that in putting that label on the present-day Kurds, Erdogan to justify his authoritarianism as a necessary protection against a dire threat.Goodman reasoned from afar that Trump does not listen to his advisers because he considers them subordinate, but views foreign leaders such as Erdogan as his peers. “[Trump] doesn’t know how to handle a hard phone call; I think it’s a peer pressure thing,” Goodman suggested.Goodman described the decision with a single word.“I would call it evil,” he said. He was speaking not as some reflexive Trump hater, but as the lover of a worthy cause.“I wake up to some pretty sad and depressing postings by my Kurdish friends,” he reported.Others who have spoken out in favor of the Kurds include such Trump supporters as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. Lindsey Graham and evangelist Pat Robertson.Goodman reports that the Kurd supporters have come to include a constituency of particular personal importance.“I think my family see it as a really good thing,” he told The Daily Beast. He allowed, “I don’t think they want me going away again.”

In 2017, President Donald Trump told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak he believed Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential to be unimportant, according to a report from the Washington Post — and access to the memo describing the meeting was restricted to very few people out of fear that the president’s comments would be made public.Trump has repeatedly downplayed fears about Russian election interference in public. But the Post’s report, from Shane Harris, Josh Dawsey, and Ellen Nakashima, is the latest allegation that the White House has treated potentially embarrassing records about Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders with a high level of official secrecy.That same concern is contained in a whistleblower’s report alleging the White House used a secure electronic system to classify a conversation between Trump and the Ukrainian president. That report is at the center of House Democrats’ newly launched impeachment inquiry. And it was compounded Friday night by CNN and New York Times reports that access to notes from conversations with Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was similarly restricted.It is unclear whether the memo prepared following the Russia meeting was placed in the same secure system as the Ukrainian transcript. Three former officials reportedly said the memo was accessible only to officials with incredibly high security clearances, and that because of that, it was available only to a very, very small number of people. These latest reports come as the president is immersed in a growing scandal about his willingness to have foreign governments — in the latest case, Ukraine — work to his benefit during an election cycle. And they also put more scrutiny both on Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders and the White House’s attempts to keep those conversations from becoming public.Trump reportedly made the comments on interference during the same May 2017 meeting at which he shared classified US intelligence on ISIS with Russia, causing his critics to fear both that the president could not be trusted with classified information and that he may have inadvertently revealed US intelligence sources and methods. He also said firing FBI director James Comey had relieved “pressure” from the Russia investigation.Beyond dismissing Russia’s involvement in the 2016 elections, officials the Post spoke with said Trump also appeared to give Russia permission to meddle in the elections of other countries as well. It’s not clear exactly what he said to give this impression.Trump is said to have blamed US-Russia tensions on journalists, saying, “I could have a great relationship with you guys, but you know, our press.”In fact, the officials said Trump and top administration officials have often used the press to defend Russia’s actions, arguing that Voice of America — a government-funded independent news agency that broadcasts and publishes around the world — is of a kind with Russia’s digital propaganda push ahead of 2016. Voice of America’s critics have long argued it is US propaganda, and Russia itself designated it a foreign agent, but US presidents have supported it. And unlike Russia, it has not taken out Facebook ads aimed at dividing countries on racial lines or sponsored events meant to sow chaos and division.The Post’s report comes as other US officials and outside experts are emphasizing the risk election meddling poses to American democracy. Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire issued a similar warning during testimony to Congress this week, calling protecting elections his “most fundamental priority.” Officials involved in Mueller’s Russia investigation — including the special counsel himself — have warned that Russia will continue to try to influence elections during the 2020 cycle; this week, G. Zachary Terwilliger, a US attorney who investigated election interference during the 2018 midterms, said of Russian interference in 2020, “They’re going to do it. In an open setting like this there’s not a lot I can get into, but I think it wouldn’t be irresponsible for me to say they’re definitely going to try.”Officials who spoke with the Post said the manner in which top administration aides handled a memo of the president’s Russia meeting is reminiscent of the security around a conversation between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky that is at the center of a whistleblower’s complaint and a newly launched impeachment inquiry. According to the whistleblower, records of the US-Ukraine phone call were removed from the system that is designated for storing such materials (and that is accessible by cabinet-level officials) and was moved to a highly secure system reserved for “codeword information,” intelligence at the highest level of classification there is in the US. The ISIS intelligence Trump shared with the Russians was considered codeword-level information before he declassified it; phone calls with world leaders are rarely, if ever, given that classification. The whistleblower alleges the record transfer was an attempt by top administration officials to conceal the call because there was some concern “they had witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain.”The Trump administration claims that this was the norm for all calls with foreign leaders. All of the officials quoted in the Post story said top aides had begun working to restrict access to records of meetings following the leaks of Trump’s calls with Mexican and Australian leaders, not only because those leaks were personally embarrassing for the president but because officials feared more leaks could lead to world leaders being unwilling to speak with the US. But three former officials reportedly said the memo was kept under tighter control than most and that people normally able to access such memos, even following the leaks, were not able to see the Russia notes. This would seem to suggest the administration was working to keep Trump’s comments from view. The whistleblower alleged that the Ukraine call was “‘not the first time’ under this Administration that a Presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive — rather than national security sensitive — information.” This line has led some of the president’s critics to worry about what else might be hidden within that codeword-level system and to question whether it contains evidence of comments of even greater concern than those the president made on the Ukraine call. It’s not clear if the codeword system was used for the Ukraine call or if access was restricted in some other way. But the fact that Trump reportedly told top Russian officials their country’s interference in a presidential election was not a big deal and that his aides reportedly worked to conceal that statement will do little to quiet those critics. The House Intelligence Committee released the whistleblower complaint minutes before Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire began his testimony before Congress.Looking for a quick way to keep up with the never-ending news cycle? Host Sean Rameswaram will guide you through the most important stories at the end of each day.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.