A no-deal Brexit would cost Japanese carmakers in Britain more than $1bn a year if 10% tariffs were imposed on trade between the UK and EU, new analysis suggests.Nissan, Toyota and Honda together account for almost half of UK car production, but trade under World Trade Organization terms could cost the companies $1.17bn (£899m) in operating profit, according to calculations published on Monday by Moody’s Investors Service, an influential ratings agency. Carmakers view the prospect of tariffs on imports and exports between the UK and the EU as the greatest risk to their British operations, above the shorter-term threat of delays at the border causing major manufacturing delays.

NEW DELHI — A teenager from a north Indian village who was dragged from a field and raped by a group of men died of her injuries at a hospital in New Delhi on Tuesday, triggering nationwide outrage again after years of what experts describe as a gang rape epidemic in India.The 19-year-old woman, whom Indian law prohibits naming, had been transferred to the hospital just a day before, two weeks after she was gang-raped and mutilated by higher caste men near their village in the Hathras District in Uttar Pradesh State, her family said.The police chief in Hathras, Vikrant Vir, said that four men had been arrested on charges of gang rape and murder. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that “strictest action” should be taken against the attackers, according to a Twitter post by Yogi Adityanath, Uttar Pradesh’s top elected official and a leader of Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.But justice is unlikely: Of the tens of thousands of rape cases reported in India annually, only a handful result in prosecutions, National Crime Records Bureau figures show. Activists say the true scope of the problem is far worse, as many cases are never reported because of the stigma of sexual violence in India.When action is taken against suspects, it is often by vigilantes or by police officers acting extrajudicially, in killings that are usually widely praised but that also point out the justice system’s inability to deal with rampant sexual violence.ImagePolice officers outside the home of the 19-year-old woman in Hathras.Credit...Prakash Singh/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe woman was Dalit, on the lowest rung of India’s Hindu caste hierarchy. On Tuesday, hundreds of protesters from the Bhim Army, a party advocating for the rights of Dalits, thronged the Delhi hospital where the woman was treated and clashed with the police.A leader of the Bhim Army, Chandrashekhar Azad, urged Dalits across India to take to the streets to demand that the attackers be hanged.The anger was fueled by another rape and death that disclosed by the police on Thursday, also in Uttar Pradesh. In that attack in the district of Balrampur, a 22 year old woman was raped by two men, then died of her injuries while on her way to the hospital. Police said that the two suspects had been arrested. The 19-year-old woman was cutting grass to feed the family’s five milk buffalo in Hathras when she was taken away by a group of upper-caste men on Sept. 14, according to her brother.Her tongue was cut and her spinal cord was broken after she was dragged by her neck with a rope, the brother said. He said that arrests came only after days of complaints to the police. His sister was initially treated at a hospital in Uttar Pradesh before being transferred to New Delhi.Mr. Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, said in another tweet that a special investigative team had been formed to take on the case and that a report would be delivered within a week.After the woman died in the hospital in New Delhi, her body was taken back to Uttar Pradesh, where the police seized her body in the early hours Wednesday and took her to be cremated without the family, ostensibly to try to keep the case quiet, the brother said.“They took the body by force, assaulted the family members, and cremated my sister in the night itself,” he said. “Police did not allow us near the cremation place.”ImageProtesters clashing with police officers in New Delhi on Wednesday.Credit...Altaf Qadri/Associated PressThe Hathras police did not immediately comment on the family’s accusations. But the district magistrate, Praveen Kumar Laxkar, told reporters on Wednesday that it was untrue that family members were not allowed at the cremation.Dalits are particularly vulnerable to caste-based discrimination, and Dalit women are singled out for sexual attacks thousands of times a year, according to human rights organizations.Gruesome reports of rape, often followed by retaliatory violence if victims or their families speak out, have become painfully familiar in India. Whether a rape report rises above the din to receive national notice is often determined by class and caste dynamics.A student’s shocking gang rape aboard a bus in New Delhi in 2012, which later resulted in her death, galvanized a nationwide protest, with demonstrators clamoring for reform. But the country’s overburdened court system continues to move slowly. Four men convicted in the 2012 case were hanged earlier this year, after exhausting their appeals.The police killing of four suspects in the alleged gang-rape of a 27-year-old veterinarian last year in the southern state of Hyderabad was widely cheered as a swift workaround to Indian justice.Swati Maliwal, head of the Delhi Commission for Women, went on a hunger strike outside Mahatma Gandhi’s mausoleum in New Delhi last year, demanding that lawmakers pass a bill to force courts to carry out the executions of rapists within six months of being convicted.ImageA vigil in Ahmedabad on Wednesday.Credit...Sam Panthaky/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn Wednesday, Maliwal said in a public statement that the Hathras case had “embarrassed the entire nation” and that she had written to the chief justice of India’s Supreme Court, “pleading for justice for the girl child.”The teen’s death this week followed a string of disturbing rape reports in India as the country struggles with the coronavirus pandemic. In one case, in the southern state of Kerala, an ambulance driver is accused of raping a Covid-19 patient while taking her to the hospital. In August, the mutilated body of a 13-year-old was found in a sugar cane field in Uttar Pradesh, near the border with Nepal. In July, a 6-year-old girl was kidnapped and raped in the southern state of Madhya Pradesh, and her eyes were severely injured in an attempt to keep her from identifying her attackers.According to the latest Indian government data, the police registered 33,658 cases of rape in 2017 — an average of 92 per day and a 35 percent jump from 2012, when fast-track courts for rape cases were rolled out. About 10,000 of the reported victims were children.Hari Kumar reported from New Delhi, and Emily Schmall from Chicago.

Donald Trump’s vision of executive power is so expansive that it would make Richard Nixon blush. The memo outlining unbridled presidential powers drafted by his lawyers for Robert Mueller goes far beyond what even the biggest fans of strong, unitary executive power, like the late US supreme court justice Antonin Scalia, ever dreamed. It essentially puts the president above the law.Trump’s legal claim of limitless power would mean that he can defy any subpoena from Robert Mueller and his lawyers also say he has immunity from obstruction of justice charges related to his firing of the former FBI director James Comey.Trump’s “actions here, by virtue of his position as the chief law enforcement officer, could neither constitutionally nor legally constitute obstruction because that would amount to him obstructing himself”, the lawyers John Dowd and Jay Sekulow wrote Mueller back in January.Their arguments are laughably unconstitutional, but who will stop them from drawing a curtain of infallibility around their client?Certainly not Congress, as long as the Republicans are the party in control. Any hope that Republican leaders would abandon their ethically stained and morally bankrupt president has vanished. The Republican base has remained steadfast in its support for Trump and congressional leaders are scared to death of alienating hardcore Trump supporters.Perhaps the US supreme court might take exception to Trump’s breathtaking legal chutzpah. But this might be a pipe dream, too, and after appointing the rightwing Neil Gorsuch, Trump is just a vacancy away from driving the court firmly to the right. Additionally, Mitch McConnell has certified a raft of Trumpian lower court judges.The rule of law and the sanctity of constitutional values are what make American democracy such a marvel to the rest of the world. But no president has done more than Trump to trash the American legal system.First came his war against the FBI. Then came the ridicule of the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and the false conspiracy allegations that a justice department cabal tried to engineer Trump’s electoral defeat. All of this is ridiculous background noise meant to undermine the validity of the criminal investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.None of this has been surprising and much has been foreshadowed. Trump’s unilateral approach to the presidential pardon, without adhering to any past practices by other presidents, was concerning. First came Scooter Libby and Joe Arpaio. Then Dinesh D’Souza and rumblings of others, like Martha Stewart. But the real question is whether Trump has the power, if need be, to pardon himself. Such a breathtakingly daring move of self-protection would seem to invite impeachment proceedings, but with this Congress, who knows?Other presidents have tested the limits of executive power, but nothing on this order of magnitude. FDR got brushed back when he tried to pack the US supreme court. Nixon attempted to defy court orders to turn over the White House tapes but after the US supreme court ruled against him, he resigned. Trump’s new lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, praised the letter as containing “excellent legal arguments”. Appearing on ABC’s This Week, he absurdly claimed that most presidential lawyers would make the same type of claims. “I mean, this is basically, I think, what most constitutional lawyers who tend to try to protect the presidency would say,” about the contention that a president by definition cannot obstruct justice. Almost immediately, respected constitutional scholars such as Lawrence Tribe debunked the memo on Twitter, calling it “not ready for prime time and not intended for any audience other than Trump’s base and gullible folks ready to buy whatever Trump is selling”.For his part, the president used the leaking of his lawyers’ memo to Mueller as an excuse to lash the “fake news media” once again and to blast the Mueller investigation as a baseless witch-hunt. On the afternoon of 2 June, he tweeted: “There was No Collusion with Russia (except by the Democrats). When will this very expensive Witch Hunt Hoax ever end? So bad for our Country. Is the Special Counsel/Justice Department leaking my lawyers letters to the Fake News Media? Should be looking at Dems corruption instead?”Trump’s reaction and his lawyers’ absurd claims are both attempts to create a curtain of legal immunity around the president. It’s tempting to assume these ploys won’t work and that they’ll wither in the face of a strong case of illegalities put together by Mueller.But we still don’t know much about the dimensions of any such case, while the wild assault from the White House on American legal norms continues, growing bolder by the hour. Jill Abramson is a Guardian US columnist Topics Donald Trump Opinion Trump-Russia investigation James Comey Trump administration comment

As an impeachment storm raged in Washington, former president Bill Clinton and former Florida governor Jeb Bush, son and brother to presidents, sought calmer waters in Maine.The two men appeared together at the University of New England in Biddeford on Friday, to mark the 30th anniversary of a two-day education “summit” held by President George HW Bush in 1989.All but one state governor attended that meeting, Clinton representing Arkansas three years before he beat Bush for the White House.“It sounds surprising now,” Clinton claimed of such bipartisan political action. “It was normal then.”“President Clinton and my dad set the example,” said Bush, “of how you can have a different view on things but be good friends. Public leaders can create aspiration.”The two men are pillars of American political dynasties. Bush’s brother, George W Bush, succeeded Clinton in the White House.Clinton’s wife, former secretary of state and New York senator Hillary Clinton, lost the presidency to Donald Trump in 2016 despite winning the popular vote in an election which US intelligence agencies agree was subject to Russian interference designed to help the Republican.Clinton has been outspoken this week, as House Democrats have announced an impeachment inquiry over Trump’s behaviour towards Ukraine and attempts to smear Joe Biden, the former vice-president who is a potential Democratic challenger in 2020.Speaking at Georgetown University in Washington on Friday, Hillary Clinton said Trump had “turned American diplomacy into a cheap extortion racket” and “endangered us all by putting his personal and political interests ahead of the interests of the American people”.In Maine, Trump and his travails were barely mentioned.Bill Clinton, who survived impeachment over his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, did not discuss that or the current occupant of the Oval Office.Instead he saluted his presidential predecessor’s work across the aisle and said he would “love to see ’em do it again”.“Do you think President Trump would stay for a meeting for two days?” said Bush.The audience laughed.Bush ran against Trump for the 2016 Republican nomination, beginning the primary as favourite but dropping out after being eviscerated by Trump in a brutal campaign marked by vicious personal attacks.“Attribute that quote to the person who made it,” Clinton said. Topics Bill Clinton Jeb Bush US politics Maine Trump impeachment inquiry Republicans Democrats news

“She called it crumbs when people are getting $2,000 and $3,000 and $1,000,” Mr. Trump said. “That’s not crumbs. That’s a lot of money.”Ms. Pelosi’s office responded by saying that Republicans were taking her words out of context to cover up the fact that their tax law enriches their wealthy donors at the expense of working people. “What’s deplorable is Republicans’ desperate effort to hide the multibillion-dollar corporate windfalls of the G.O.P. tax scam behind a handful of meager, one-time bonuses,” said Drew Hammill, her spokesman.As he addressed the Republican retreat, Mr. Trump took time to affirm that the past year had been filled with successes. He noted that months ago, critics were complaining that he had not kept his promises.“Now we’ve fulfilled far more promises than we promised,” he said, adding, “I call it ‘promises plus.’”In his remarks here, Mr. Trump reprised many of the elements of his State of the Union speech but put a particular focus on immigration, seeming intent on pressuring Republicans as well as Democrats to come to the table.“We’re going to have to compromise unless we elect more Republicans, in which case we can have it just the way everybody in this room wants it,” he said. “We have to be willing to give a little in order for our country to gain a whole lot.”

The acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, suggested that there was a quid pro quo in relations with Ukraine, only to walk back that statement later in the day.Mulvaney on Thursday morning said the Trump administration’s decision to withhold millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine was part of efforts to clean up corruption in the country. He was apparently referring, at least in part, to unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about a purported Ukrainian link to Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 presidential election.“The look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with that nation,” Mulvaney told reporters in the White House briefing room.“Did he also mention to me in the past the corruption that related to the DNC server? Absolutely, no question about that,” Mulvaney continued. “But that’s it. That’s why we held up the money.”Asked about mixing politics with foreign policy, Mulvaney replied: “We do that all the time with foreign policy … I have news for everybody. Get over it. There is going to be political influence in foreign policy. Elections have consequences.”Mulvaney’s statement contradicted Trump’s repeated denials that his administration had made military aid to Ukraine contingent upon Kyiv’s willingness to open an investigation into the debunked DNC theory and the dealings of Hunter Biden in Ukraine.Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow issued a pointed statement shortly after, distancing the president’s legal team from Mulvaney’s comments.“The President’s legal counsel was not involved in acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s press briefing,” it said.Trump, traveling in Texas, appeared to stand by his top aide, calling Mulvaney a “good man”.“I have a lot of confidence” in him, Trump said.Mulvaney himself later claimed in a statement that his comments had been misconstrued.“Let me be clear, there was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election,” he said. “The president never told me to withhold any money until the Ukrainians did anything related to the server.“The only reasons we were holding the money was because of concern about lack of support from other nations and concerns over corruption,” he continued. “There never was any condition on the flow of the aid related to the matter of the DNC server.”Adam Schiff, the Democratic chair of the House intelligence committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill that Mulvaney’s remarks made the impeachment situation “much, much worse”.Schiff would not comment on whether he would bring Mulvaney in for a deposition, but the House committees investigating impeachment have already requested documents from the acting White House chief of staff.Representative Eric Swalwell, a member of the House intelligence committee, said Mulvaney “co-signed the president’s confession”.Mulvaney’s comments were just one of several major developments in Washington on Thursday. Shortly after the press briefing, news broke that the energy secretary, Rick Perry, whose involvement in the Ukraine phone call has come under scrutiny, had informed Trump that he was resigning.Though Perry’s resignation was long expected, the news of his involvement with Ukraine probably added pressure to the decision. Perry told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that he spoke to Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani at Trump’s direction about Ukraine-related matters.Trump told reporters he has a replacement for Perry lined up.Also on Thursday, the US ambassador to the European Union testified before Congress. Gordon Sondland said Trump had instructed US diplomats to go through his personal lawyer to make the Ukrainian president’s access to the White House dependent on launching investigations into Trump’s political opponents.In his opening statement to Congress, Sondland said he had been “disappointed” Trump had chosen to conduct an important strategic relationship through Rudy Giuliani and only realized later that the aim of the investigations Trump was demanding was to target the Democratic party and Joe Biden.The ambassador was the latest in a series of witnesses, many of them career state department and foreign policy officials, providing new and detailed concerns about Trump and Giuliani and their attempts to influence Ukraine. Topics Trump administration Donald Trump US politics Trump impeachment inquiry news

closeVideoAndrew Yang on expectations for Iowa caucusesDemocratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang joins Chris Wallace on 'Fox News Sunday.'PLYMOUTH, N.H. – Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang let go of dozens of campaign staffers on Thursday in the wake of a lackluster finish by the tech entrepreneur in Iowa. According to nearly complete results from the Iowa Democratic Party that were delayed due to a reporting debacle, Yang has just 1 percent of state delegates from Monday’s caucuses, which kicked off the presidential nominating calendar.Yang campaign manager Zach Graumann emphasized that “as part of our original plans following the Iowa caucuses, we are winding down our Iowa operations and restructuring to compete as the New Hampshire primary approaches.”“These actions are a natural evolution of the campaign post-Iowa, same as other campaigns have undertaken, and Andrew Yang is going to keep fighting for the voices of the more than 400,000 supporters who have donated to the campaign and placed a stake in the future of our country,” Graumann stressed. Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang speaks at a campaign event in Plymouth, NH on Feb. 6, 2020 Among those let go are the campaign's national political director, the deputy national political director, multiple policy staffers and some staffers based in Iowa. The firings were first reported by Politico. But Yang national press secretary SY Lee insisted that “none of the positions Politico called out were considered senior in our organization.”A source close to the campaign said the New Hampshire staff is unaffected by this development.When Yang declared his candidacy two years ago, he was the longest of long shots for the Democratic nomination. But last year, thanks to the popularity of his proposed "Freedom Dividend" – a universal basic income that would pay each adult American $1,000 per month – and his unconventional and energetic approach to campaigning, Yang soared to middle-tier status in the polls. And his fundraising figures surged as well late last year early this year.But Yang registers at just 4 percent and 2 percent support the latest two poll in New Hampshire, ahead of next Tuesday’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary. But he will be on the stage at Friday night’s Democratic presidential debate. After failing to qualify for January’s Democratic nomination debate in Iowa, he made the stage for Friday’s primetime showdown in New Hampshire. Yang took to Twitter on Thursday afternoon to write, "It sure looks like Bernie won in Iowa. Excited to compete for the win in New Hampshire on Tuesday!"And Yang seems to be downplaying the results in Iowa, tweeting on Tuesday that "New Hampshire has always been the most natural home for this campaign."

Mick Mulvaney’s very candid and very public admission of a quid pro quo with Ukraine might seem like another blow to Donald Trump’s presidency and reelection bid. But in a very on-brand move, his campaign has made lemons into $30 T-shirts. The new apparel blares an all-caps message straight from the acting White House chief of staff himself: “GET OVER IT.” “America is ready for Congress to get back to work,” the merchandise’s description reads. “No more WITCH HUNTS! President Trump won in 2016 and he is going to win even bigger in 2020.” Mulvaney uttered the now-infamous phrase during a Thursday press conference a little more than 24 hours before the shirts went on sale — yet again showing the Trump campaign’s ability to seize upon political moments and turn them into moneymaking gimmicks. Time to stop the political theater and false accusations. Time to get back to work for the people of this country. Time to Get Over It!https://t.co/MEQNVxZEwU— Brad Parscale (@parscale) October 18, 2019 During the briefing, Mulvaney told reporters that U.S. military aid was temporarily withheld from Ukraine because of Trump’s suspicion that it would be irresponsibly spent. But he went on to say that Trump expressed additional concern over “corruption that related to the [Democratic National Committee] server,” referring to a disproven conspiracy theory that Ukraine perpetrated the 2016 Democratic Party email hack. The U.S. intelligence community has made clear its belief that Russia was the culprit. After Mulvaney said that “what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that [Trump] was worried about in corruption” in Ukraine, ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl pointed out that Mulvaney was outlining a quid pro quo. The acting chief of staff didn’t appear to see the problem. “We do that all the time with foreign policy,” he shot back. “I have news for everybody: Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.” Shortly after the conference, Mulvaney released a statement denying that there was ever a quid pro quo, attempting to reverse his earlier remarks. Trump and his allies have also repeatedly denied a quid pro quo, and the contradiction between those claims and Mulvaney’s “get over it” statement drew skepticism from one of the president’s major defenders, Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “What is Mulvaney even talking about?” Hannity asked on his radio show on Thursday. “I just think he’s dumb, I really do. I don’t even think he knows what he’s talking about.” For now, the messaging mix-up has been fashioned into a campaign tagline. Download Calling all HuffPost superfans! Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter Join HuffPost

MULVANEY: Yeah. No, the money held up had absolutely nothing to do with Biden. There’s no — and that was the point I made to you.QUESTION: — And you’re drawing the distinction? You’re saying that it would be wrong to hold up money for the Bidens —MULVANEY: — There were three — three factors. Again — I was involved with the — the process by which the money was held up temporarily, okay? Three issues for that: the corruption in the country, whether or not other countries were participating in the support of the Ukraine, and whether or not they were cooperating in an ongoing investigation with our Department of Justice. That’s completely legitimate.____________QUESTION: You just said you were involved in the process in which — you know, the money being held up temporarily. You named three issues for that —MULVANEY: Yeah.QUESTION: — The corruption in the country, whether or not the country would look — they were assisting with an ongoing investigation of corruption. How is that not an establishment of an exchange, of a quid pro quo? You just seem to continue to be establishing this —MULVANEY: Those are the terms that you used. I mean, go look at what Gordon Sondland said today in his — in his testimony. It was that — I think in his opening statement he said something along the lines of they were trying to get the — the deliverable. And the deliverable was a statement by the Ukraine about how they were going to deal with corruption, okay? Go read his testimony if you haven’t already. And what he says is, and he’s right, that’s absolutely ordinary course of business. This is — this is what you do when you have someone come to the White House, when you either arrange a visit for the president, you have a phone call with the president, a lot of times we use that as the opportunity to get them to make a statement of their policy or to announce something that they’re going to do. It’s one of the reasons we can’t, you know, you can sort of announce that at — he — on the phone call or at the meeting. This is the ordinary course of foreign policy.

Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry is causing chaos at Fox News, with reports of “management bedlam” as hosts battle over how to approach a political drama that threatens its ratings as well as its valuable presidential TV star.Fractures in coverage of the Ukraine whistleblower report were publicly exposed in on-air dispute between afternoon anchor Shepard Smith and prime-time host Tucker Carlson.On Tuesday, the semi-moderate Smith invited Judge Andrew Napolitano, a legal analyst, on to his show. Napolitano suggested Trump had committed a “crime” by pressuring Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to consider investigating former vice-president and current Democratic 2020 hopeful Joe Biden and his son Hunter.“It is a crime for the president to solicit aid for his campaign from a foreign government,” Napolitano said. “This is the same crime for which the Trump Organization was investigated by Bob Mueller.”That evening, the vociferous conservative Carlson called on his own judicial analyst, former prosecutor Joseph diGenova, who duly called Napolitano a “fool”.“I think Judge Napolitano is a fool and I think what he said today is foolish,” DiGenova said. “No, it is not a crime. Let me underscore emphatically that nothing that the president said on that call or what we think he said on that call constitutes a crime.”A day later, Smith was on air calling Carlson “repugnant” for not backing Napolitano.According to reports, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and Jay Wallace, the channel’s president, stepped in the quell the discord, directing Smith to cease his attacks on Carlson. “They said if he does it again, he’s off the air,” a source told Vanity Fair, though the development was denied by a Fox spokesperson.Other disputes broke out. Juan Williams, a host on the afternoon opinion roundtable show The Five, opined that Trump loyalists, including his colleagues, appeared to be repeating White House talking points.Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld bristled at the implication: “What does that mean?” Gutfeld yelled. “Are you saying I got talking points?! You got to answer to the accusation!”Watters added: “Are you telling me I was told what to say?”Gutfeld went on to accuse Williams of taking his lines from the liberal-leaning watchdog Media Matters.Against falling polling numbers, the impact of the Ukrainian whistleblower drama reportedly caused Trump loyalist Sean Hannity to remark that the allegations are “really bad” for the president, while Fox Corporation’s CEO, Lachlan Murdoch, is facing how to position the news channel toward an impeachment.Hannity responded, tweeting to Vanity Fair’s Gabe Sherman that his sources “had flat out lied”.“Not only did I not say what they told you,” the host added, “but I believe just the opposite. The insanity, obvious hypocrisy, and overreach of the Democratic Party on this issue is DRAMATICALLY helping [Trump] get re-elected.”“It’s management bedlam,” a Fox staffer remarked, according to Vanity Fair. “This massive thing happened, and no one knows how to cover it.”One dilemma for Murdoch is how to position Fox News as a defender of conservative-thinking viewers in a post-Trump world: a path advocated by former House speaker Paul Ryan, who joined the Fox board earlier this year.“Fox is about defending our viewers from the people who hate them,” the source told the magazine. “That’s where our power comes from. It’s not about Trump.”That logic may now be coming to the fore. Over the past several months Fox News management has noted that following Trump’s line has begun to cost the channel advertising revenue.After mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, Carlson disputed that Trump ever “endorsed white supremacy or came close to endorsing white supremacy” and dismissed white supremacy as “actually not a real problem in America”.According to Media Matters, the number of ads supporting Carlson’s show plummeted. The host left on vacation – which Fox New flacks claimed was planned in advance – as advertisers, including Stein Mart, HelloFresh, and Nestlé severed ties with Tucker Carlson Tonight and the fast food chain Long John Silver’s pulled advertising from Fox News entirely.Nearly 50 companies have issued statements dropping Carlson’s show since December, when he asserted that migrants make America “poorer and dirtier” – and dozens more quietly cut ties without saying anything publicly.Bloomberg News reported an overall decline in ad revenue for Fox, rejecting Fox claims that ad revenue is steady.• This article was updated on 28 September 2019, to include tweets by Sean Hannity. Topics Fox News Trump impeachment inquiry TV news features

DUBROVNIK, Croatia -- U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pledged Friday that Washington will remain engaged in the Balkans where China and Russia have been gaining political and economic influence.Pompeo spoke in the Croatian Adriatic Sea resort of Dubrovnik, the last leg of his European tour that also included stops in Greece, Italy and the Vatican.“The United States no longer leads from behind,’’ Pompeo told reporters at a news conference held on the terrace of a hotel overlooking the medieval walled city. “We’ve been incredibly engaged in this region on the diplomatic front.”He praised a White House-mediated economic agreement reached last month between Serbia and its breakaway former province of Kosovo.“We will continue to engage in a serious way,” he said, referring to the region that was torn by civil wars in the 1990s. “We are trying to leave these places in a way that they are connected to the West.”As Washington mostly took its eyes off the Balkans after the wars ended, Moscow and Beijing both rapidly increased their footprint in the region. China did it through its multi-billion-dollar belt-and-road economic program while Russia does it with political pressure, mostly through its traditional Slavic ally Serbia.“China is a global actor. They were very smart to devise this format of the relationship and the political dialogue and the economic framework with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe,” Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic told the joint news conference.“We are fully aware of all the aspects of this policy and our objective is to have a level playing field when it comes to both the relationship between Croatia or the other members of the European Union and China and its market, as well as the Chinese presence here,” Plenkovic said.Also discussed was Croatia’s planned purchase of 12 fighter jets for its air force, which includes an offer by the U.S. for new F-16 aircraft. The other bidders are Sweden, France and Israel.On the eve of the visit, Croatia’s left-leaning president, Zoran Milanovic, criticized Pompeo for allegedly wanting to pressure Croatia to buy the U.S. aircraft.“We also discussed how American defense technologies can grow our strategic and economic relationship,” Pompeo said, adding that the purchase of the fighter jets is Croatia’s “sovereign decision.”

Big Tech is hard to miss these days in Washington. So is its money.Lobbying expenditures by Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. are on pace to hit record highs this year. Facebook increased spending by nearly 25%, to $12.3 million, through the first nine months of the year over the same period in 2018, according to disclosures...

Amazon is beginning to open its cashier-less grocery stores outside of its hometown of Seattle. First stop: Chicago.The Amazon Go store in the land of the deep-dish pizza and vegetable-laden hot dog opens today (Sept. 17), and will keep the same 7am to 8pm operating hours. And beyond Chicago, Amazon has plans for stores in New York and San Francisco, the company confirmed last week, which signals that the machine-learning technology that powers the stores is leaving its testing phase. Amazon now has a total of four Go stores, with the other three in Seattle.In terms of US adoption, Amazon seems ahead of the curve. Globally, it isn’t alone in providing this kind of store experience. In China, Tencent, Alibaba, and JD.com are also trying to use facial recognition and radio-frequency tags on products to achieve the same goal.Analysts are expecting a massive rollout of Amazon stores, which replaces the traditional checkout process with cameras and sensors that recognize when a customer with the Amazon app picks out a product. Their account is charged automatically when they leave the store. Retail real-estate guru Joe Sitt, founder and CEO of Thor Equities, predicted last week that Amazon could expand to 1,000 locations in the next 10 years.

Enlarge this image Robert O'Brien, President Trump's new national security adviser, has dire warnings for U.S. allies considering Huawei as a partner for 5G networks. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images Robert O'Brien, President Trump's new national security adviser, has dire warnings for U.S. allies considering Huawei as a partner for 5G networks. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images President Trump's new national security adviser is warning of an information security doomsday scenario for U.S. allies that allow Chinese telecommunications company Huawei to build their next generation 5G networks.Robert O'Brien said countries that allow Huawei in could give China's communist government backdoor access to their citizens' most sensitive data."So every medical record, every social media post, every email, every financial transaction, and every citizen of the country with cloud computing and artificial intelligence can be sucked up out of Huawei into massive servers in China," O'Brien told NPR in an interview."This isn't a theoretical threat," O'Brien said before speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum, an annual gathering of defense industry and military officials. Technology Huawei Chairman Willing To Sign A 'No-Spy' Deal With The United States The Trump administration has taken measures to keep Huawei and other companies with ties to the Chinese government out of U.S. telecommunications systems. It's working hard to persuade allies to do the same.Australia, New Zealand and Japan block Huawei, but other allies such as Canada and Britain have said they are open to allowing the company to build some less sensitive 5G networks.O'Brien warned that it would be difficult to have full intelligence sharing information with a partner whose network was tied to Beijing. He described how China has assigned a "social credit score" to its own citizens based on information it gathers — information used to determine whether people can get on an airplane, buy a train ticket or get a particular job."But what if China had a social credit score for every single person in the world?" O'Brien said. "What if, for democracies, China knew every single personal, private piece of information about any of us and then could use that to microtarget people to influence elections?"O'Brien's concerns underscore the complexity of current relations between the United States and China. The Trump administration is in the throes of a bitter trade war with Beijing, has imposed visa restrictions on Chinese officials believed to be involved in human rights abuses and has proposed a $2 billion U.S. weapons sale to Taipei, which Beijing objects to, claiming Taiwan is part of greater China.O'Brien and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, both of whom have only been in their positions a few months, have already spent considerable time traversing the globe warning of the Chinese threat.During his own speech at the Reagan National Defense Forum on Saturday, Esper also warned of the spread of Huawei. And he said the United States needs to reallocate military forces and resources from Afghanistan and the Middle East to Asia. Esper pointed to the National Defense Strategy, released last year, which cites China's "predatory economics" and calls for building up military operations in the Pacific to counter China's global ambitions and military expansion. "China's economic rise has allowed it to triple its annual military spending since 2002, with estimates reaching close to $250 billion last year," Esper said in his speech. "Beijing continues to violate the sovereignty of Indo-Pacific nations and expand its control abroad under the pretense of 'belt-and-road' infrastructure investments." Europe Despite U.S. Pressure, Germany Refuses To Exclude Huawei's 5G Technology President Trump has also raised concerns with allies about Huawei and 5G but said there are limits to his powers of persuasion."Everybody I've spoken to is not going forward," Trump said last week at a summit with NATO leaders. "But how many countries can I speak to? Am I going to call up and speak to the whole world? It is a security risk, in my opinion, in our opinion. We're building it and we've started. But we're not using Huawei." China has been willing to provide cash, resources and equipment to foreign governments in ways the United States is not. Foreign diplomats say it's difficult to turn down China when they desperately need cash for infrastructure and job-creating projects like new roads, telecommunications equipment and energy systems.O'Brien said the Chinese government has made Huawei very attractive through subsidies. Western competitors like Qualcomm, Nokia, Ericsson or Cisco can't compete at the same price and still make a profit. But O'Brien said foreign governments lured by the cheaper prices are missing the big picture."It's great to get a discount," O'Brien said. "It's great to get something for free. But at the end of the day, it really isn't free. There's no free lunch. And folks, our allies, need to consider the long-term consequences of taking the cheap Huawei equipment now and what that's going to mean for them and their country in the long term."

NEW DELHI (AP) — The gang rape and death of a woman from the lowest rung of India’s caste system sparked outrage across the country on Wednesday, with several politicians and activists demanding justice and protesters rallying in the streets.The attack of the 19-year-old is the latest gruesome case of sexual violence against women to rile India, where reports of rape are hauntingly familiar.The victim, who belonged to the Dalit community, was raped by four men on Sept. 14 in the heartland state of Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras district. The woman’s family told local media that they found her naked, bleeding and paralyzed with a split tongue and a broken spine in a field outside their home. She died two weeks later, on Tuesday, after battling serious injuries in a hospital in New Delhi. ADVERTISEMENTPolice said the four men, all from an upper caste, have been arrested.Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, on Wednesday ordered a special investigation team to handle the case and said it will be tried in a fast-track court.In New Delhi, police detained several female activists after they tried to march in the street shouting slogans against Adityanath and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The demonstrators carried placards that read, “Stop rape culture.”Maimoona Mullah of the All India Democratic Women’s Association said Uttar Pradesh, which is ruled by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and ranks as the most unsafe state for women in the country, had become the “rape state of India.”“We do not accept rape culture in the name of new India,” Mullah said.Earlier on Tuesday, hundreds of protesters from the Bhim Army, a party championing the rights of Dalits, thronged the hospital premises in New Delhi and jostled with police. Party leader Chandra Shekhar Aazad urged Dalits across the country to flood the streets to demand that the perpetrators be hanged. Dalits — formerly known as “untouchables” and at the bottom of India’s unforgiving Hindu caste hierarchy — are victims of thousands of attacks each year. According to human rights organizations, Dalit women are particularly vulnerable to caste-based discrimination and sexual violence.Last month, a 13-year-old Dalit girl was raped and killed in Uttar Pradesh. In December last year, a 23-year-old Dalit woman in the same state died after being set ablaze by a gang of men as she made her way to court to press rape charges. Both cases are pending in court.In the latest case, questions were raised over a hasty cremation, with several politicians calling it an abuse of human rights.The woman was cremated early Wednesday, with the family alleging that police did not allow them to perform her final rites. Videos on social media show the family weeping as police insisted on cremating the body without allowing them to take it home. ADVERTISEMENTSenior Police Officer Vikrant Veer denied the allegations, while the leader of the opposition Congress party, Rahul Gandhi, described the cremation incident as “abusive and unjust.”In India, rape and sexual violence have been under the spotlight since the 2012 gang rape and killing of a 23-year-old student on a New Delhi bus. The attack galvanized massive protests and inspired lawmakers to order the creation of fast-track courts dedicated to rape cases and stiffen penalties for those convicted of the crime.In March, four men sentenced to death for the 2012 attack were hanged.Indians often rally for swift justice in a country where a woman is raped every 15 minutes, according to government data, and sentencing is notoriously delayed by backlogged courts.According to the government, police registered 33,658 cases of rape in 2017 — an average of 92 per day and a 35% jump from 2012. About 10,000 of the reported victims were children. The real figure is believed to be far higher due to the stigma of sexual violence. ___Associated Press videojournalist Shonal Ganguly contributed to this report.

Joe Biden has raised the ambitions of his climate plan, in a clear sign his campaign is responding to demands for greater action among the progressive flank of his party.In a speech on Tuesday, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president announced proposals to spend $2 trillion on clean-energy projects and eliminate carbon emissions from the electricity sector by 2035, stepping up his primary targets in an effort to revive the economy and combat climate change.Biden also trumpeted plans to retrofit millions of homes and buildings to make them more energy efficient; create a Civilian Climate Corps that would put people to work on environmental restoration projects; install 500,000 charging outlets for electric vehicles; establish a cash-for-clunkers program to replace gas-guzzling cars and trucks with hybrids and EVs; and spark a “second great railroad revolution.”The plan on Biden’s campaign page specifies that it would implement an “energy efficiency and clean electricity standard” to achieve the 2035 power sector goal, a policy instrument that requires utilities and grid operators to gradually reduce the share of electricity coming from carbon-emitting sources. It’s a technology-neutral standard, meaning it could allow for generation from solar, wind, geothermal, or nuclear sources, or even fossil-fuel plants with effective carbon capture systems.Tuesday’s news comes on the heels of Biden’s “Build Back Better” announcement last week, in which he committed to spend $400 billion to boost US manufacturing and $300 billion in research and development funds for electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, and other areas.The new plan is far more aggressive than Biden’s earlier campaign proposal. It called for investing $1.7 trillion into clean energy and achieving “net zero” emissions across the economy by 2050. The earlier plan had no specific timeline for cleaning up the electricity sector, beyond a mention of unspecified 2025 “milestone targets.”The raised ambitions follow a set of climate policy recommendations issued earlier this month by a “unity task force,” created this spring with Biden’s primary rival, Senator Bernie Sanders. It had recommended the 2035 power sector target, among other goals.But even Biden’s new targets still fall short of the demands of many climate activists as well as the goals of Sanders’s original plans, which included $16 trillion in clean-energy spending, all-renewable electricity generation by 2030, and an immediate ban on fracking, a drilling method used for natural-gas and oil extraction.Biden’s sprawling climate plan had already called for new fuel economy standards, support for advanced biofuels, climate adaptation projects, and a restored commitment to the Paris climate agreement. He also pledged early on to spend $400 billion on clean-energy research over the next 10 years and set up a new agency, ARPA-C, to accelerate research on small modular nuclear reactors, carbon capture, grid-scale energy storage, carbon-free hydrogen, and lower-emissions methods for producing steel, cement, hydrogen, and food.The campaign said at the time the plan would be paid for by reversing the Trump tax cuts for corporations, ending subsidies for fossil fuels, and introducing additional tax reforms.Biden’s campaign also previously told the Washington Post he supports setting a price on carbon, either through a tax or a cap-and-trade program, though there’s no specific mention of it in his previous or newest climate plan.Biden is trying to walk a delicate line, appealing to the progressive voters demanding sweeping climate polices without turning off more conservative working-class voters in key swing states where coal and natural gas are still large contributors to the economy. He stressed near the start of his speech that the plan will create “good-paying union jobs that will put America to work.”Laying out an ambitious climate plan is the easy part, however. For any of this to matter, Biden first needs to clinch the election. And then he’d have to win over the next Congress, where Democrats may or may not seize control of the Senate, but where there’s been little appetite historically for such aggressive climate and spending proposals.Finally, the funding and policies would actually have to achieve their stated goals, and begin rapidly driving down the nation’s emissions. The trillions in spending coupled with a federal clean-energy standard would certainly help to spur the development of renewables and other clean-energy and climate projects. But the campaign has provided fewer details on the sorts of planning reforms that would be necessary to build a huge number of projects in the next 15 years, given the dragged-out approval process for any major developments in the US. And those hefty R&D investments will need to deliver some real breakthroughs to begin affordably cleaning up the trickier parts of the economy, like agriculture, aviation, steel, and cement.

Boris Johnson has often been compared to Donald Trump, and for reasons that go beyond their distinctive blonde hairstyles. The UK’s shift to the right—starting with the Brexit referendum in 2016, a few months before Trump’s victory—is said to resemble America’s. Now that Johnson’s Conservative party won a massive parliamentary majority in a general election this week, we’re going to see how apt the comparisons really are.One school of thought holds that Johnson’s majority will unleash his inner social liberal, veering him away from a populist agenda that feeds off a sense of grievance, a smirking ignorance, and thinly veiled xenophobia. The morning after his extraordinary victory, Johnson spoke about bringing “closure” to years of polarizing Brexit debate and declared, “let the healing begin.”With a clear majority, Johnson is, in theory, no longer in hock to the hardline Brexiteer faction within his party, which means that the UK’s now-assured exit from the EU can avoid the worst-case disruptions to trade and supply chains. On other issues, Johnson’s campaign pledges—cutting immigration, introducing voter ID rules—resemble something that US Republicans would support, but in the UK there is little serious debate on the right to abortion and none on gun control. Previous Conservative governments haven’t done enough to address climate change, but they don’t deny its existence. Johnson has promised not to privatize the National Health Service, the country’s pillar of social welfare, and appears less beholden to the austere spending stance of his predecessors.If Johnson embraces his liberal tendencies, it would be in line with a powerful force growing within the business community—putting purpose at the heart of strategy. Quartz recently published a series entitled “The New Purpose of Companies,” examining what firms are doing to improve themselves or the world. For a long time, traditional capitalism offered companies a get-out clause in the form of “shareholder accountability,” a narrow approach not unlike politicians pandering solely to their base.This tenet, championed by Milton Friedman, held that the best way a company could serve society was by making money for its shareholders. But that’s changing. A few months ago, the Business Roundtable group of CEOs of blue chip US companies said that business is accountable to a broader constituency that includes customers, employees, communities, and the planet itself.If Johnson lurches to the right, giving less room to environmental policy and caring less for the vulnerable, he’ll be on the wrong side of a movement many businesses are now demonstrably embracing. UK stocks and the British pound rose sharply on the election results, suggesting that business is banking on Johnson to do the right thing. Many expected the same from Trump.A version of this essay originally appeared in the weekend edition of the Quartz Daily Brief newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Boris Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings would have challenged the EU referendum result as “invalid” had Vote Leave lost the Brexit campaign.According to documents seen by the Observer, the prime minister’s chief aide told the UK’s data watchdog that he would have contested the result because UK elections are “wide open to abuse.”In an email sent in 2017 to the information commissioner’s office, Cummings, the former head of the Vote Leave campaign and architect of Johnson’s stunning election victory, said: “If we had lost by a small margin I would have sought to challenge the result as invalid.”The UK voted to leave the EU by the slim majority of 52% to 48% in the 2016 referendum, with many Brexiters subsequently attacking the losers as “Remoaners” who refused to respect democracy. On Friday, Cummings openly criticised “educated Remainer campaigner types” for failing to understand the country and “driving everyone mad”.The correspondence was sent by Cummings on 16 July 2017 to Steve Wood, deputy information commissioner, along with several officials from Vote Leave, whose high-profile supporters included Johnson and cabinet minister Michael Gove.It was sent in response to queries from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) which at the time was investigating concerns over the use of “data analytics” in political campaigns. The watchdog subsequently unearthed a “disturbing disregard for voters’ personal privacy” and castigated data firms, social media and political parties.The emails suggest that the reason Cummings would have challenged the result of the EU referendum and other polls if he had been defeated was because “the entire regulatory structure around national elections including data is really bad” and “wide open to abuse”. He cited allegations that individuals who claimed to have voted illegally in the 2016 EU referendum were seemingly ignored by the elections watchdog.“The Electoral Commission took no action in response to widespread public claims by people on social media that they had voted illegally to stay in,” the correspondence said.The emails added: “There has been no proper audit by anybody of how the rules could be exploited by an internal or foreign force to swing close elections.”Downing Street was recently accused of wilfully ignoring evidence of Kremlin interference in the 2016 referendum by refusing to publish an intelligence committee report into Russian infiltration of British politics ahead of the election.The emails were acquired by the parliamentary inquiry into disinformation and democracy after the Electoral Commission was compelled to hand over correspondence to MPs.Ian Lucas, a former member of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport committee (DCMS) which investigated the influence of fake news, said it was vital the correspondence was made public. “I thought it was crucial that the public saw this correspondence. I used every means possible to secure the publication of them by parliament but ultimately was blocked from doing so, so I have chosen to make them public myself,” said the former MP for Wrexham, who stood down before the election.The development follows a move by the data rights campaigners Open Rights Group, which last week threatened legal action against the three major parties’ use of personal data ahead of the election.The Electoral Commission found Vote Leave committed multiple offences under UK electoral law and has referred the matter to the Metropolitan Police. Last month Scotland Yard passed a file to the Crown Prosecution Service and said it was seeking advice on its investigation into the official Brexit campaign.The campaign group was also fined £61,000 last year after the commission found it had exceeded its £7m spending limit for the vote. Vote Leave said at the time its findings were “wholly inaccurate”. Topics Dominic Cummings The Observer Brexit European Union Foreign policy Information commissioner Data and computer security news

NEW YORK -- A former New York gynecologist accused of sexually abusing dozens of patients, including the wife of former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, was charged Wednesday with attacking girls and women for nearly two decades using the cover of medical examinations.Prosecutors described the doctor, Robert A. Hadden, 62, as a “predator in a white coat,” accusing him of singling out young and unsuspecting victims, including a young girl he’d delivered at birth.The federal charges will be the second time Hadden is prosecuted over alleged abuse of patients. He surrendered his medical license in a 2016 plea deal with Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. that didn't require him to serve any jail time.Outrage over that light punishment built as the #MeToo movement gained momentum and more women told their stories publicly, including Evelyn Yang, who earlier this year told CNN that Hadden assaulted her in 2012, including when she was seven months pregnant.Hadden was arrested at his home in Englewood, New Jersey, a community 10 miles outside Manhattan.He pleaded not guilty at a court hearing Wednesday evening to six counts of inducing others to travel to engage in illegal sex acts and was ordered released on $1 million bail over the objections of a prosecutor who said he should be held as a threat to flee.Isabelle Kirshner, Hadden's attorney, declined comment.One of the women who says she was abused by Hadden spoke at the hearing, and unsuccessfully urged the judge to hold him pending trial.“I don’t think he deserves any opportunity to prevent justice in whatever means he could potentially do that," Jessica Chambers said. "He has injured many, many, many women and he has to be held accountable for that.”The Associated Press generally withholds the names of sexual abuse victims from stories unless they have decided to tell their stories publicly, which Chambers and Evelyn Yang have done.Wednesday’s charges represented the second recent instance when federal prosecutors in Manhattan sought to revive a concluded sex abuse prosecution criticized as lenient. Financier Jeffrey Epstein faced federal sex trafficking charges last year after a Florida state prosecution and accompanying federal non-prosecution agreement was criticized as lax. He then killed himself in a federal jail.Audrey Strauss, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said Hadden, had “inappropriately touched, squeezed and even licked his victims” and subjected a young girl he’d delivered as a baby “to the same sort of sexual abuse he inflicted on his adult victims."“He used the cover of conducting medical examinations to engage in sexual abuse that he passed off as normal and medically necessary,” Strauss said. “His conduct was neither normal nor medically necessary.”The indictment said Hadden sexually abused dozens of patients, including multiple minors, at his medical offices and Manhattan hospitals from 1993 through at least 2012 while he worked as a medical doctor at Columbia University and at New York Presbyterian Hospital.The indictment detailed what it described as the abuse of one minor female and five adult women who traveled from out of state to see Hadden. It said Hadden invited his victims to meet with him alone in his office, where he frequently raised “inappropriate and irrelevant sexual topics” and asked women questions about their own sexual activities.Strauss and William F. Sweeney Jr., the head of New York's FBI office, urged victims who had not reported their abuse to call the FBI.Sweeney called the alleged crimes “just outrageous” and said Hadden manipulated dozens of women including several minors who had “no understanding of what to expect, what was normal and what was not.”After Hadden’s arrest, Andrew Yang tweeted: “So proud of @EvelynYang - this guy belongs behind bars. Thank you to everyone who supported her.”Previously, Evelyn Yang had called Hadden's earlier punishment under the state plea deal, under which he admitted to forcible touching and one count of a criminal sex act, a “slap on the wrist.”Hadden faces a civil lawsuit brought by more than two dozen accusers who say he groped and molested them.Danny Frost, a spokesman for Vance, said state prosecutors provided “substantial assistance” leading to federal indictment. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is still conducting its own “intensely active” investigation into “potential failures by Dr. Hadden’s employer and hospital to disclose additional incidents of abuse to our office and to regulators when required.”Marissa Hoechstetter, another Hadden accuser, has said Vance’s office misled her about the statute of limitations in Hadden’s case and was already negotiating the plea deal when she was still talking to prosecutors about testifying at a potential trial.The federal indictment Wednesday “only puts into high relief the betrayal I and his other victims experienced by the Manhattan DA,” she said.“I hope that through the course of this, the world will finally see the full extent of Hadden’s decades of sexual abuse and the institutional cowardice that protected and enabled him for so long,” Hoechstetter said in a statement to The Associated Press. “He and his enablers must be held accountable if we are to make change in a system that harms those it is meant to protect.”Vance has defended his office’s handling of the case, saying his “career prosecutors do not shrink from the challenge of prosecuting powerful men.”“Because a conviction is never a guaranteed outcome in a criminal trial, our primary concern was holding him accountable and making sure he could never do this again – which is why we insisted on a felony conviction and permanent surrender of his medical license,” Vance said in a statement.———Associated Press Writer Tom Hays contributed to this story.

Senator Lindsey Graham, once among Donald Trump’s harshest critics, is set to lead the charge to defend him in the court of public opinion as Democrats make the case for impeachment.The Republican senator from South Carolina has rejected the allegation that Trump betrayed America’s national security interests by pressing the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to investigate political rival Joe Biden days after freezing some military aid to the country.Graham and other allies of the president have sought to fight back by arguing that a whistleblower who raised the alarm was not on the call between Trump and Zelenskiy but based his complaint on officials’ recollections of it.“In America you can’t even get a parking ticket based on hearsay testimony,” Graham tweeted on Saturday. “But you can impeach a president? I certainly hope not.”The senator played golf with Trump, as well as professionals Gary Player and Annika Sörenstam, at the president’s club in Sterling, Virginia on Saturday morning, according to a White House pool report. It seemed likely Trump and Graham had plenty of time to strategise how to reclaim the political narrative.Q&AHow do you impeach the US president?ShowArticle 1 of the United States constitution gives the House of Representatives the sole power to initiate impeachment and the Senate the sole power to try impeachments of the president. A president can be impeached if they are judged to have committed "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" – although the US Constitution does not specify what “high crimes and misdemeanors” are.The formal process starts with the House of Representatives passing articles of impeachment, the equivalent of congressional charges. According to arcane Senate rules, after the House notifies the Senate that impeachment managers have been selected, the secretary of the Senate, Julie Adams, tells the House that the Senate is ready to receive the articles. Then impeachment managers appear before the Senate to “exhibit” the articles, and the Senate confirms it will consider the case.The presiding officer of the Senate notifies the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, of the impending trial. Roberts arrives in the Senate to administer an oath to members.The presiding officer will then administer this oath to senators: “I solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald Trump, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the constitution and laws, so help me God.”The Senate must vote on a resolution laying out ground rules for the trial including who the key players will be, how long they will get to present their cases and other matters. After the Senate is “organized”, the rules decree, “a writ of summons shall issue to the person impeached, reciting said articles, and notifying him to appear before the Senate upon a day and at a place to be fixed by the Senate”. A president has never appeared at his own impeachment trial. Trump will be represented by the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, and his personal lawyer Jay Sekulow, among others.After the oath, the trial proper will begin. Senators may not speak during the proceedings but may submit written questions. The question of witnesses and other matters would be decided on the fly by majority vote. A time limit for the proceedings will be established in the initial Senate vote.The senators will then deliberate on the case. In the past this has happened behind closed doors and out of public view.The senators vote separately on the two articles of impeachment – the first charging Trump with abuse of power, the second charging him with obstruction of Congress. A two-thirds majority of present senators – 67 ayes if everyone votes – on either article would be enough to convict Trump and remove him from office. But that would require about 20 Republicans defections and is unlikely. The more likely outcome is a Trump acquittal, at which point the process is concluded.Two presidents have previously been impeached, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Andrew Johnson in 1868, though neither was removed from office as a result. Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 before there was a formal vote to impeach him.Tom McCarthy in New YorkGraham has changed his tune on impeachment. In 1998-99, as a member of the House of Representatives, he helped manage the impeachment of Democratic president Bill Clinton, insisting the process was “about restoring honor and integrity to the office”.But Graham distinguished himself in Trump’s eyes a year ago with his furious defence of Brett Kavanaugh, whose nomination to the supreme court was almost derailed by allegations of sexual assault.On Friday the senator sent a fundraising email to supporters that said: “I can still remember the exact moment it started, one year ago today … I spoke from the heart against the false and uncorroborated accusations leveled against Brett Kavanaugh for political purposes.”Graham added: “My remarks on the Democrats’ despicable treatment of Justice Kavanaugh had struck a powerful chord with folks who enthusiastically supported President Trump’s pick to our nation’s highest court.”The email contained a photo of a smiling Graham with a distressed protester in the background, and the caption: “Stand with me against the left’s angry mobs!”Graham, who chairs the Senate judiciary committee, will appear on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, along with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, a key figure in the impeachment inquiry given his attempts to pressure Ukraine.The New York Post’s PageSix reported that Graham was overheard on a flight coordinating talking points with the White House.“We’re told that the South Carolina pol was on a JetBlue flight from Washington DC, to Charleston and was chatting loudly with ‘Jared’ – presumably White House adviser Jared Kushner – before takeoff,” it said.“It was a ‘full-blown, loud conversation’ according to an airborne spy. ‘His phone rang and he answered, “Hey, Jared!” He was … saying he’s going to be on Face the Nation on Sunday. He said, “Listen – this is what I’m going to lay out,”’ we’re told.”Q&AWhat is the Trump-Ukraine scandal at the heart of impeachment?ShowIn a July 2019 phone call, Trump asked Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to mount an investigation of his potential rival for the White House in the 2020 election, Joe Biden, and son Hunter Biden – and also to investigate a conspiracy theory that Ukraine, instead of Russia, was behind foreign tampering in the 2016 election.Trump framed the requests as a “favor” after he reminded his counterpart that “the United States has been very, very good to Ukraine”. Overshadowing the conversation was the fact that Trump had recently suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid that Congress had approved for Ukraine to defend itself against Russia .News of the call emerged in a Washington Post report on 18 September that an internal whistleblower complaint, filed in August, involved “communications between Trump and a foreign leader”.Trump’s attempted dealings in Ukraine caused a scandal in US diplomatic ranks. The Democrats have obtained text messages between top US envoys in Ukraine establishing that diplomats told Zelenskiy that a White House visit to meet Trump was dependent on him making a public statement vowing to investigate Hunter Biden’s company.Trump does not dispute public accounts of what he said in the call, as established by the whistleblower’s complaint, released on 26 September, and a call summary released by the White House itself.But Trump and allies have argued that the conversation – “I’ve given you that, now I need this” – was not actually as transactional as it appears to be.Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has pressured Ukraine to smear Biden, and the whistleblower said White House officials had caused records of Trump’s Ukraine call to be moved into a specially restricted computer system. The vice-president, Mike Pence, has acknowledged contacts with Ukrainian officials while claiming to have no knowledge of Trump’s Biden agenda.On 3 October 2019, Trump even suggested that: “China should start an investigation into the Bidens.” Unlike when he was a candidate, Trump’s invitations for foreign powers to attack his domestic political opponents now have all the power of the White House behind them. Critics say this is a plain abuse of that power and it undermines US national security because it places Trump’s personal agenda first.The Trump administration also stands accused of obstruction of Congress for resisting congressional subpoenas for documents and testimony relating to the crisis.A lot of people – from the whistleblower, to career government officials swept up in the affair, to legal scholars, to Democrats and even some Republicans – believe it’s plausible that the president has committed an impeachable offense.Tom McCarthy in New YorkThe report added that Graham was overheard saying: “This is Kavanaugh on steroids! This is hearsay – and this person has bias.”Graham and others might find the Ukraine case tougher than Kavanaugh or the Mueller report, which summed up special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference, links between Trump and Moscow and possible obstruction of justice by the president.David Brock, a political activist and founder of the progressive watchdog Media Matters for America, told the Guardian: “Their playbook is very predictable. It’s one we’ve seen before. We’re seeing it play out now. But I do think that they’re dealing with a weaker hand this time and at least so far they’re struggling to find a counter-narrative they would like to tell.“I don’t think they have it yet and so it feels like they’re throwing a lot at the wall to see what sticks but there’s not as much of a coordinated counter-offensive as there has been in the past.“And that’s because they’re overwhelmed with the reality of what this complaint says and it’s very hard to spin your way out of it. They’re certainly trying but I wonder about the effectiveness of it.”Trump continued to punch back on Saturday, branding Democrats “savages”. He tweeted: “Can you imagine if these Do Nothing Democrat Savages … had a Republican party who would have done to Obama what the Do Nothings are doing to me. Oh well, maybe next time!” Lindsey Graham speaks to the media on Capitol Hill. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPAGraham may find it difficult to target Biden, an old friend. And his bellicose defence of Trump represents a striking u-turn. In May 2016 the former Republican primary candidate and close friend of late senator John McCain wrote on Twitter: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”House Democrats are determined to move fast. On Friday they issued subpoenas demanding documents from secretary of state Mike Pompeo and scheduling legal depositions for other state officials.On Saturday, Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, expressed concern over a Washington Post report that the White House restricted access to the transcript of a 2017 Oval Office meeting in which Trump told two senior Russian officials he was unconcerned about interference in the 2016 election because the US did the same in other countries.If true, Schumer said, the reports “are extremely harmful to both our national security and the integrity of our elections. It’s one of the most disturbing things we’ve learned yet.”He added: “The White House should immediately provide the congressional intelligence committees with all the records of that meeting so we can get to the bottom of it.”Trump tried to defend himself by sharing an old report in which his then national security adviser, HR McMaster, described conversation as “wholly appropriate”.The president wrote: “Thank you to General McMaster. Just more Fake News!”