NEW YORK (Reuters) - A gauge of stocks around the world reached its highest point in about two months on Monday amid hopes for improving trade relations between the United States and China, while oil prices climbed further. Wall Street’s main stock indexes registered slim gains, pulling back from stronger increases during the session. U.S. President Donald Trump pledged on Sunday to help ZTE Corp “get back into business, fast” after a U.S. ban crippled the Chinese technology company, offering a job-saving concession to Beijing ahead of high-stakes trade talks this week. MSCI’s index of stocks across the globe .MIWD00000PUS gained 0.12 percent, hitting a roughly two-month high during the session. Growing trade tensions have worried investors, with concerns about a global trade war feeding into increased volatility in the stock market in recent months. “It seems like there’s a little less concern about a trade war with China given some of the overtures that President Trump made,” said Chuck Carlson, chief executive officer at Horizon Investment Services in Hammond, Indiana. “They’re hoping for a dying down of the trade war rhetoric and, quite frankly, they’re probably looking for some successful deals (to be) made.” The Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI rose 68.24 points, or 0.27 percent, to 24,899.41, the S&P 500 .SPX gained 2.41 points, or 0.09 percent, to 2,730.13 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC added 8.43 points, or 0.11 percent, to 7,411.32. Energy shares .SPNY were the top-performing major group, helped by oil price gains, while defensive sectors such as real estate .SPLRCR and utilities .SPLRCU lagged. Investors also pointed to improving sentiment about geopolitical tensions involving North Korea. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Sunday that Washington would agree to lift sanctions on North Korea if the country agrees to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, a move that would create economic prosperity that “will rival” that of South Korea. The pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index .FTEU3 lost 0.04 percent. Oil prices rose as OPEC reported that the global oil glut has been virtually eliminated, while U.S. crude’s discount to global benchmark Brent widened to its deepest in nearly five months. U.S. crude CLcv1 settled up 0.37 percent to $70.96 per barrel and Brent LCOcv1 settled up 1.44 percent at $78.23. A man looks at an electronic stock quotation board outside a brokerage in Tokyo, Japan February 9, 2018. REUTERS/Toru HanaiThe report from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries “was bullish. That absolute plunge in Venezuelan production ... just highlights how tenuous the market is in terms of the supply and demand balance,” said John Kilduff, a partner at Again Capital LLC. The dollar index .DXY rose 0.09 percent, with the euro EUR= down 0.05 percent to $1.1936. Benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury notes US10YT=RR last fell 7/32 in price to yield 2.9969 percent, from 2.971 percent late on Friday. Additional reporting by Stephen Culp and Ayenat Mersie in New York; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and James DalgleishOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Thousands of people across the United Kingdom took to the streets on Saturday to protest Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Wednesday decision to suspend Parliament for weeks ahead of the October 31 Brexit deadline. In London, Manchester, Glasgow, Leeds, Belfast, Birmingham, and elsewhere, protesters waved blue EU flags and protest banners, decrying what they describe as a “coup” to force the UK into embracing a no-deal Brexit strategy. Thousands of people have gathered in central London, protesting against plans to suspend Parliament, ahead of #BrexitMore than 30 rallies are taking place in locations across the UK todayhttps://t.co/LzVXLb2gmA pic.twitter.com/9MN9GX1ZMz— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) August 31, 2019 On Wednesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson suspended Parliament through October 14 in what Vox’s Jen Kirby described as an attempt to prevent Members of Parliament (MPs) from fully legislating around Brexit before the October 31 deadline at which the UK is set to exit the EU.The UK has yet to ratify the divorce deal negotiated with the EU by its previous prime minister, Theresa May. It could request more time to work on legislation to formally get the kingdom out of the European bloc, but Johnson has refused to do so — instead, he has promised to take the UK out of the EU on October 31 even without a deal, triggering what is known as a “no-deal Brexit.” Doing so could have devastating and long-lasting negative impacts on the UK’s economy, and could throw its supply chain in disarray in the near term, leading to shortages of food and medicine. Despite this, Johnson has announced a five week-long suspension of Parliament — also known as “prorogation” — that is set to go into effect during the week of September 9. As Kirby reports, this means that MPs now have just over three weeks to legislate Brexit — either passing a Brexit deal, or blocking the UK from exiting the EU without a deal in place. Johnson, a member of the Conservative party (also known as the Tories) and an early leader of the Brexit campaign who entered the UK’s top office on July 24, has defended his decision, saying he simply needed to draw the government’s legislative session to an end in order to prepare for “a new bold and ambitious domestic legislative agenda for the renewal of our country after Brexit.” Critics accused Johnson of sending the country to the edge of a constitutional crisis, and of running down the legislative clock in order to force a no-deal Brexit onto voters. The protests on Saturday centered on the message that prorogation, as Johnson has arranged it, is undemocratic, with many calling Johnson’s decision a “coup.”In London, the protesters marched outside of 10 Downing Street, home to Britain’s Prime Minister and the Palace of Westminster, home to the houses of Parliament. Some blocked Waterloo Bridge and the streets of busy Trafalgar Square. WATCH: Protesters have blocked London's streets in a challenge to PM Boris Johnson's suspension of Parliament pic.twitter.com/rzBCb8J5t1— Bloomberg TicToc (@tictoc) August 31, 2019 Others also marched toward Buckingham Palace, home of Queen Elizabeth II, who formally approved Johnson’s request for prorogation. (As Vox’s Jen Kirby has pointed out, although the queen has the right to deny such a request, she has opted to remain above the Brexit dispute for years now.)A petition against prorogation has reached more than 1.6 million signatures, but turnout on Saturday — tens of thousands of people across the kingdom — was relatively low compared to organizers’ expectations of several hundred thousand. Some counterprotesters emerged in London, too, chanting “You lost Brexit,” according to CNN.Top members from the opposition Labour party, including Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, spoke at the London protests. McDonnell called the protests “a fight to protect our democracy.” — Diane Abbott (@HackneyAbbott) August 31, 2019 And Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, addressed a crowd of protesters in Glasgow.”I’m proud to be here with all of you supporting that, to say to Boris Johnson: no way, it’s our Parliament,” he said. “No way do you take us out without a deal. We will stop you and give the people their rights and their say to determine their future.”Corbyn decried the Parliamentary suspension as an attempt to force through a no-deal Brexit and to curry favor with the Trump administration.“We will do absolutely everything we can to prevent a no-deal Brexit and the prime minister taking us into the hands of Donald Trump and a trade deal with the USA,” Corbyn said.The protests are a prelude to a series of legal challenges, both to the suspension of Parliament and to Brexit itself, that will soon be decided. Courts in Glasgow and London will begin hearing legal challenges to the suspension on Tuesday, and a court in Northern Ireland will decide whether to hear a third challenge to the suspension. Major figures in British politics, including former prime minister John Major and Jo Swinson, leader of the Liberal Democrats party, have agreed to support these legal maneuvers. Corbyn has also said he will be part of those efforts.“It’s not on, and we’re not having it,” he said of prorogation on Saturday at the Glasgow protests.Separately, lawmakers — who resume session on Tuesday, following their summer recess — plan to use their time before the prorogue begins to attempt to stave off a no-deal Brexit.Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader, is expected to introduce a draft bill on Tuesday to block a no-deal Brexit. He will be supported by Conservative MP Rory Stewart, and several Tory MPs are expected to sign on as well. Whether members of the rival parties can work together long enough — and whether enough Tories will defect from their prime minister — to succeed in stopping a no-deal Brexit remains to be seen, however.The protesters on Saturday claimed that the prime minister’s move to suspend Parliament violates the democratic process during what has consistently been a tumultuous battle over the UK’s decision to exit the EU. They want him to re-open Parliament and to allow lawmakers to fully use the limited time left before October 31 to negotiate Brexit.Although voters chose Brexit during a national referendum in 2016, the path to its implementation has been rocky; Theresa May, who was elected to guide the nation through the process, resigned in June after nearly three years of failed attempts to do so.As Vox’s Jen Kirby explains, prorogation is Johnson’s risky attempt to avoid May’s mistakes. Each time she brought her Brexit deal before lawmakers, it was rejected. With his prorogue, Johnson has created a narrow passage for Parliamentary debate, and has created conditions in which the rejection of the draft exit deal would mean a disastrous no-deal Brexit. It’s an attempt to win Brexit at any cost — even though many of the proposed deal’s important details have yet to be hammered out: In his campaign for prime minister, Johnson had promised to renegotiate May’s Brexit deal with the European Union. The EU repeatedly said it wasn’t going to reopen talks on the divorce deal, and that even if it did, it would not accept Johnson’s terms to get rid of the Irish backstop, a plan to avoid border checks on the boundary between Northern Ireland (part of the UK) and Ireland (which will remain part of the EU). Johnson tried it anyway; the EU, surprising no one, said no. The impasse continues. There’s no new agreement to be had. So the prospect of a no-deal Brexit on October 31 seems a lot more possible. The conundrum, of course, is that most of Parliament doesn’t want a no-deal scenario. The UK is extracting itself from a decades-long trading relationship, with unpredictable economic and political consequences. This doesn’t mean all MPs are supportive of staying in the EU; they just don’t want to be responsible for food and fuel shortages. But opponents to a no-deal Brexit in Parliament are numerous, Kirby continues, and even given the pressure of a smaller legislative window, lawmakers could choose to cross party lines to block an exit without a strategy:The suspension of Parliament is going to make no-deal legislation a lot harder to accomplish, especially since the body remains a fractious bunch. Those who support leaving without a deal, leaving with a deal, or remaining in the EU don’t split neatly along partisan lines. Even though a majority of MPs might oppose a no-deal Brexit, they’ll have to cross party lines, or join up with opponents to do so. Indeed, Labour leaders have said they have Conservative allies who have agreed to cross Johnson and join them in introducing legislation that would redefine the Brexit debate. Even if this coalition succeeds in bringing a bill to their colleagues, however, Johnson has left his government very little time to consider their work.And despite the efforts of protesters this weekend, as well as those of lawmaker in the week to come, time is running out. The choice under prorogation may end up being no-deal or May’s previously rejected deal. To avoid this choice, lawmakers will need to come up with a new plan in just a few short weeks after having failed to do so for more than two years. If they are unable to do so, they will have to follow Johnson into an unnegotiated future. How do you remove an egg from an omelette? Some say that’s how hard it is to remove the UK from the EU. Hear what happens when Boris Johnson’s Brexit strategy heads to the United Kingdom’s highest court. 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.

Boris Johnson faced a grave threat to his control of parliament on Friday as he was warned that Conservative rebels could cross the House of Commons to foil Brexit in the aftermath of a byelection that reduced his working majority to just one MP.Overnight, the Liberal Democrats’ Jane Dodds won a crucial byelection in Brecon and Radnorshire by a margin of 1,425, overturning the Tories’ previous majority of more than 8,000.The result prompted immediate recriminations across the party. Conservative no-deal sceptics warned about the rapidly growing threat the government could face from the reinvigorated Lib Dems, while insiders blamed Theresa May’s administration for choosing a candidate who had already been ousted for expenses fraud.One of the most prominent Conservative supporters of a second referendum told the Guardian on Friday he was actively considering defecting to the Lib Dems or sitting as an independent, a move that would leave Johnson at the helm of a minority government.Dr Phillip Lee, the former justice minister, who first suggested he could quit the party in his own podcast, On the House, told the Guardian he was not alone among colleagues considering defecting or resigning if the government pursued no deal. “I have things to think about over the summer, but it is not just me,” he said.“There are a number of colleagues who are spending the summer reflecting on what is the right way for them to confront this no-deal scenario. Of course, it is difficult for all of us because we joined the Conservative party, but it has morphed into something a lot different to what I joined in 1992.”Although Johnson might be able to rely on Labour Brexiters and independents to vote for a deal, Lee suggested that the government could still be threatened by the many Conservatives in the party’s centre who had been alienated by the number of rightwingers in Johnson’s cabinet.“At the moment Boris Johnson has a very difficult pitch to play and that has been made even harder by the formation of this cabinet,” he said. “There are increasingly people who think, ‘Even if my career is over, I can’t put my name to this.’“I am doing my best to represent my constituents – I cannot think of a business in my patch that is enthusiastic about Brexit, let alone no deal. It is an odd situation for the MP being threatened with deselection for being on the side of virtually every business in his constituency. You never would have thought a Tory MP could be in that position.”One former cabinet minister said they believed swathes of seats were now at risk, including Cheltenham, Chippenham, Guildford and even Surrey Heath, the seat of Michael Gove.“Threatening no deal essentially hands our core seats across the south-west, south-east and south coast to the Lib Dems,” the ex-minister said. “We’ll lose tons of decent MPs. The Lib Dems will pick off lots of the big beasts in Surrey and have some spectacular gains. Worst of all the new northern core will never materialise – the Labour vote is tribal. It’s a suicidal vote strategy. I’m beginning to think Dominic Cummings is a Lib Dem sleeper agent.”Other Tory MPs have pointed out privately that the majority of seats where the Lib Dems are in second place are held by Conservative MPs.One former cabinet source pointed to warnings given by several cabinet ministers who have departed, including Jeremy Hunt, David Gauke and Rory Stewart, about the electoral threat of the Liberal Democrats and the need to attract moderate Tory voters in order for the party to have a functioning majority.The defeat in Brecon and Radnorshire came amid new warnings from the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, that the challenges posed by a no-deal withdrawal on 31 October should not be played down. “It may take a while to get to the sunlit uplands,” the outgoing governor told the BBC. “With no deal, the shock to the economy is instantaneous and instantly … you actually have businesses that are no longer economic.“One would expect prices to go up. It’s reasonable to expect – the markets are absolutely clear on this – that in the event of no deal, the exchange rate would go down for a period of time. And the area of the economy where that instantly translates into prices – it’s at the forecourt of the petrol station and in fruit and veg.”A senior Conservative source said there was no change to the government’s plans, regardless of the prime minister’s majority and any potential change to that in the coming months. “We have made clear we are leaving on October 31. The most recent polling of what happens to British politics if there is any more delay is really not pretty and it is not good for anybody,” the source said. “In terms of delivery, we are focused on that and there is not a single change in our planning.”The party is likely to begin to target potential Conservative-Lib Dem swing voters with messaging about the new government’s domestic priorities, as well as emphasising the unhealthiness of continued impasse at Westminster, one Tory source said. “This PM has a whole bunch of domestic priorities, things that voters really care about.“The party has to send the message that voting Lib Dem is not just a matter of potentially ignoring a democratic vote to leave the EU – and that’s going to be a key message for us that senior figures have discussed – but it also means more uncertainty, more malaise, more gridlock.“It means those domestic priorities don’t get delivered. And that’s the message to those Conservative voters who are moving away and why they should come back.”The Lib Dems’ new leader, Jo Swinson, hailed the victory in mid-Wales as the party “winning and on the up” – a win that was partially down to a remain alliance, with the Greens and Plaid Cymru standing aside to give her party a clear run at the seat.The selection of the former Tory MP Chris Davies to run again in the seat, after he was ousted in a recall petition over a conviction for expenses fraud, was the source of mass recriminations among Conservatives in Westminster, given that the Lib Dem margin of victory was relatively small.Mark Wallace, the executive editor of ConservativeHome, tweeted that it was “impossible to avoid the conclusion that, with a new candidate not mired in controversy, the Conservatives probably could have held the seat, given that margin”.One Tory campaign source said they believed there would have been a strong chance of keeping the seat with a few more days’ campaigning – and a different candidate. “Clearly, this candidate was not chosen by this prime minister – there are a lot of ‘what ifs’ that can be asked about this process,” the source said.“Another week to campaign with both a reinvigorated government and prime minister would have seen a different result. We definitely squeezed the Brexit party very heavily.”Steve Baker, vice-chair of the hard Brexit European Research Group, said the Brexit party had in effect helped to elect an anti-Brexit MP. “It is becoming obvious to all now that the Brexit party standing against the Conservative party would produce a massive own goal,” he tweeted.The party, which is led by Nigel Farage, has shown no sign of wanting to enter a pact with the Conservatives thus far. Overnight, the Brexit party announced a number of candidates it would stand in target seats at the next election, including in crucial Labour-Tory marginals.Candidates have been chosen in seats like Southampton Itchen, where the current MEP Alexandra Phillips will stand, the hyper-marginal seat of Dudley North, where Ian Austin quit the Labour party and sits as an independent, and the long-time Labour-Conservative battleground of Hartlepool.Other notable candidates include the former independent mayor of Mansfield, who will stand in the traditional Labour heartland seat that was unexpectedly won by the Conservatives’ Ben Bradley in 2017, and the MEP and journalist Martin Daubney, who will stand in Ashfield, a marginal Labour seat targeted by the Tories where the MP Gloria De Piero has said she will stand down. Topics Brexit Boris Johnson Conservatives Liberal Democrats Jo Swinson Byelections European Union news

LONDON/BELFAST (Reuters) - Thousands of people across Britain and Northern Ireland protested on Saturday against Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to suspend parliament for about a month before the deadline for the country to leave the European Union. Johnson has pledged to take Britain out of the EU on Oct. 31 with or without a deal on future relations with the bloc. The move to shut parliament for around a month in the period before that will hinder efforts by his opponents to stop him. About 2,000 people gathered outside his office in Downing Street, chanting: “Liar Johnson, shame on you!” A sign read: “#StopTheCoup. Defend our Democracy. Save our future.” The government says it is usual for parliament to be suspended before a new prime minister outlines his policy program in a Queen’s speech, now scheduled for Oct. 14. His supporters also say parliament usually breaks in late September, when the main political parties hold their annual conferences. But his critics say the suspension, known as a prorogation, is unusually long and describe the move as a thinly veiled attempt to reduce the time that lawmakers will have to debate before Britain leaves the EU at the end of October. Opposition lawmakers want to prevent the shutdown of parliament and pass legislation to avoid a no-deal Brexit when they return from summer recess on Tuesday. As well as London, protests were scheduled in other major cities in the four nations of the United Kingdom, comprising England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. About 100 people protested outside the city hall in Belfast, the capital of the Northern Ireland, which has become a particular focus in the Brexit negotiations as it has the United Kingdom’s only land border with the European Union. The “backstop” insurance policy, part of the withdrawal agreement negotiated between the EU and Britain’s former prime minister and which aims to keep the border with Ireland open, has become the main sticking point in negotiations. Johnson wants the backstop removed, saying it could leave Northern Ireland operating under different regulatory rules than the rest of the United Kingdom. The EU and Ireland say Britain has yet to come up with acceptable alternatives. A court case being heard in Belfast next week aims to block Johnson’s suspension of parliament on the grounds that a no-deal Brexit would breach the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to the British-run province of Northern Ireland. Slideshow (20 Images)Protesters said the government had failed to take into account the importance of the border issue. “The thing that scares me most is they have no appreciation of what is important for Northern Ireland. We are not on their radar,” said Graham Glendinning, 49, a software worker. “The border means nothing to them and they don’t give two hoots about it.” Reporting by Peter Nicholls in London and Amanda Ferguson in Belfast; Additional reporting by Conor Humphries in Dublin; Writing by Alistair Smout; Editing by Edmund BlairOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Hope Hicks, the White House communications director and longtime aide to Donald Trump, has announced her resignation.The White House confirmed news of Hicks’ departure on Wednesday, one day after Hicks testified before the House intelligence committee for nine hours as part of the panel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.“There are no words to adequately express my gratitude to President Trump,” Hicks said in a statement. “I wish the President and his administration the very best as he continues to lead our country.”Hicks had served as the press secretary for Trump’s insurgent presidential campaign before taking on similar duties in the White House. She previously worked at the Trump Organization and went on to become Trump’s longest-serving political aide.“Hope is outstanding and has done great work for the last three years,” Trump said in a statement. “She is as smart and thoughtful as they come, a truly great person. I will miss having her by my side but when she approached me about pursuing other opportunities, I totally understood. I am sure we will work together again in the future.”The White House said Hicks’ exact departure date had yet to be determined, but that she would leave in the coming weeks. Hicks, 29, a former model, had no political experience when she joined Trump’s tumultuous campaign for the White House. She quickly rose as one of his closest confidantes, ranking among the few aides to develop an understanding of Trump’s brash persona and unpredictable temperament.Hicks initially served as a press secretary within the White House, before taking on the role of communications director following a series of high-profile departures last year.In that role, Hicks was tasked with bringing stability to Trump’s unruly press shop, which in its early stages was dominated by leaks and constant reports of infighting. Although Hicks maintained an unusually low profile over the past three years, she recently attracted more scrutiny in her role, as special counsel Robert Mueller escalated his investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Hicks’ proximity to the president, and presence on his campaign from its infancy, placed her in the spotlight as a potentially key witness to the FBI’s inquiry. Questions loomed in particular over her role in crafting a highly misleading statement about the infamous June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.The White House at first said the meeting was to discuss adoptions, but it was later revealed that the meeting had been arranged when the Russians offered to provide Trump Jr with highly sensitive and incriminating information about Hillary Clinton.Hicks allegedly promised that Trump Jr’s emails with the Russians “will never get out”. A lawyer for Hicks denied the claim. Trump Jr was forced to release the emails after reports uncovered the true nature of the meeting.Hicks told congressional investigators on Tuesday she occasionally had to tell white lies to appease Trump, but denied having lied about substantive matters pertaining to Russia.Hicks was also interviewed in December by the special counsel’s team, which has zeroed in both on the White House response to the 2016 Trump Tower meeting and Trump’s firing of the former FBI director James Comey.Hicks also became engulfed in the scandal involving Rob Porter, who served as Trump’s staff secretary until he was forced to resign this month amid accusations of domestic violence by both of his ex-wives. Hicks had been dating Porter, but the two reportedly split following the controversy.Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and aide, tweeted on Wednesday evening: “Hope Hicks is loved & admired by all who know her. It’s with a heavy heart, but tremendous gratitude, that I wish her well in her next steps.” Topics Trump administration US politics Trump-Russia investigation Donald Trump news

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is good at cutting to the heart of matters in her questioning of witnesses during hearings. That ability was on full display during today’s House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on facial recognition technology, where she asked a few pointed questions of Joy Buolamwini, the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, and got some direct answers about algorithmic gender and race bias. .@AOC: Are algorithms most effective on women? -No On POC? -Absolutely not On people of different gender expressions? -No, they exclude them So what demographic is it mostly effective on? -White men Who are the primary engineers of the algorithms? -Definitely white men pic.twitter.com/L1z2eLCVcg — Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) May 22, 2019After the segment shown in the clip, Buolamwini went on to explain that facial recognition systems trained and tuned to identify white males might return false positives on or misidentify persons of color, for example. This could result in someone being unfairly labeled a criminal for life, she said.The facial recognition hearing happened on the same day that Amazon’s investors voted down a measure seeking to stop the sale of Rekognition to government agencies. Shareholders also voted down a measure directing Amazon to perform a review of the civil liberties implications of its face recognition technology. The measures were proposed by activist investors and employees, partly based on Buolamwini’s research, but were vehemently opposed by Amazon, which argued that fears around bias and misuse of face recognition were “insignificant” to the company.You can watch the entirety of AOC’s questioning in the video below, and see the rest of today’s face recognition hearing on the committee’s YouTube page.

SACRAMENTO (Reuters) - California Governor Jerry Brown on Wednesday accused President Donald Trump’s administration of declaring war on the most populous U.S. state, after the Justice Department sued to stop policies that protect illegal immigrants against deportation. The Democratic governor made the charge shortly after Attorney General Jeff Sessions intensified the Republican administration’s confrontation with California. In a speech in the state capital, Sessions accused California of obstructing federal immigration enforcement efforts and vowed to stop the state’s defiance. Sessions addressed a law enforcement group in Sacramento, a day after the Justice Department filed suit against California, Brown and the state’s Democratic attorney general over so-called sanctuary policies that shield illegal immigrants. “California absolutely, it appears to me, is using every power it has - powers it doesn’t have - to frustrate federal law enforcement. So you can be sure I’m going to use every power I have to stop them,” Sessions, the top U.S law enforcement officer, said in his speech. Brown called the attorney general’s trip to California a political stunt and his description of California’s laws a lie. “Like so many in the Trump administration, this attorney general has no regard for the truth,” Brown told reporters, adding that the laws were crafted with input and support from California police chiefs. “This is basically going to war against the state of California.” Brown in October signed into law a bill that prevents police from inquiring about immigration status and curtails law enforcement cooperation with immigration officers. Sessions said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents carry out federal law and that “California cannot forbid them or obstruct them in doing their jobs.” “In recent years, the California legislature has enacted a number of laws designed to intentionally obstruct the work of our sworn immigration enforcement officers, to intentionally use every power the legislature has to undermine the duly-established immigration law of America,” Sessions told a California Peace Officers Association conference. FILE PHOTO - Governor Jerry Brown delivers his final State of the State address in Sacramento, California, U.S. January 25, 2018. REUTERS/Hector Amezcua/PoolThe lawsuit, filed late on Tuesday in federal court in Sacramento, takes aim at three state laws passed last year that the Justice Department contends violates the U.S. Constitution and the supremacy of federal law over state law. Trump has made fighting illegal immigration a signature issue, first as a candidate and now as president. Part of that effort involves a Justice Department crackdown on primarily Democratic-governed cities and states that Sessions calls “sanctuaries” that protect illegal immigrants from deportation. “Immigration law is the province of the federal government,” Sessions said. “There is no nullification. There is no secession. Federal law is the supreme law of the land.” “I would invite any doubters to go to Gettysburg,” he added. “This matter has been settled.” The Union army’s victory at Gettysburg in 1863 is often described as the turning point of the Civil War, in which the South declared for states’ rights and tried to secede from the United States. Brown later echoed the Civil War theme when he said the lawsuit was unprecedented, particularly because it was delivered by “a fella coming from Alabama talking to us about secession.” Sessions’ home state was part of the South during the Civil War. Sessions accused Democratic Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf of actively seeking to help illegal immigrants avoid ICE. Last month, Schaaf issued a statement alerting local residents that ICE agents were preparing to conduct an operation in the area, saying it was her moral obligation. A few days later, ICE announced the arrest of more than 150 people for immigration violations in the San Francisco-Oakland area, saying about half had additional criminal convictions. Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks to the National Association of Attorneys General 2018 Winter Meeting in Washington, U.S., February 27, 2018. REUTERS/Joshua RobertsThe White House has called Schaaf’s actions “outrageous” and said the Justice Department was reviewing the matter. “Here’s my message for Mayor Schaaf: How dare you. How dare you needlessly endanger the lives of law enforcement officers to promote your radical open-borders agenda,” Sessions said on Wednesday. Sessions also called Democratic California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom an “embarrassment” for supporting the mayor’s actions. Reporting by Sharon Bernstein; Additional reporting by Sarah N. Lynch in Washington and Dan Levine in San Francisco; Writing by Ben Klayman; Editing by Will Dunham and Rosalba O'BrienOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The human brain is a funny thing. Certain memories can stick with us forever: the birth of a child, a car crash, an election day. But we only store some details—the color of the hospital delivery room or the smell of the polling station—while others fade, such as the face of the nurse when that child was born, or what we were wearing during that accident. For Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the day he watched AI rise out of a lab is one he’ll remember forever.“This was 2012, in a room with a small team, and there were just a few of us,” he tells me. An engineer named Jeff Dean, a legendary programmer at Google who helped build its search engine, had been working on a new project and wanted Pichai to have a look. “Anytime Jeff wants to update you on something, you just get excited by it,” he says.Pichai doesn’t recall exactly which building he was in when Dean presented his work, though odd details of that day have stuck with him. He remembers standing, rather than sitting, and someone joking about an HR snafu that had designated the newly hired Geoffrey Hinton—the “Father of Deep Learning,” an AI researcher for four decades, and, later, a Turing Award winner—as an intern.The future CEO of Google was an SVP at the time, running Chrome and Apps, and he hadn’t been thinking about AI. No one at Google was, really, not in a significant way. Yes, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had stated publicly 12 years prior that artificial intelligence would transform the company: “The ideal search engine is smart,” Page told Online magazine in May 2000. “It has to understand your query, and it has to understand all the documents, and that’s clearly AI.” But at Google and elsewhere, machine learning had been delivering meager results for decades, despite grand promises.[Illustration: Gabriel Silveira]Now, though, powerful forces were stirring inside Google’s servers. For a little more than a year, Dean, Andrew Ng, and their colleagues had been building a massive network of interconnected computers, linked together in ways modeled on the human brain. The team had engineered 16,000 processors in 1,000 computers, which—­combined—were capable of making 1 billion connections. This was unprecedented for a computer system, though still far from a human brain’s capacity of more than 100 trillion connections.To test how this massive neural net processed data, the engineers had run a deceptively simple experiment. For three days straight, they had fed the machine a diet of millions of random images from videos on YouTube, which Google had acquired in 2006. They gave it no other instructions, waiting to see what it would do if left on its own. What they learned was that a computer brain bingeing on YouTube is not so different from a human’s. In a remote part of the computer’s memory, Dean and his peers discovered that it had spontaneously generated a blurry, over­pixelated image of one thing it had seen repeatedly over the course of 72 hours: a cat.This was a machine teaching itself to think.The day he watched this kind of intelligence emerge from Google’s servers for the first time, Pichai remembers feeling a shift in his thinking, a sense of premonition. “This thing was going to scale up and maybe reveal the way the universe works,” he says. “This will be the most important thing we work on as humanity.”The rise of AI inside Google resembles a journey billions of us are on collectively, hurtling into a digital future that few of us fully understand—and that we can’t opt out of. One dominated in large part by Google. Few other companies (let alone governments) on the planet have the ability or ambition to advance computerized thought. Google operates more products, with 1 billion users, than any other tech company on earth: Android, Chrome, Drive, Gmail, Google Play Store, Maps, Photos, Search, and YouTube. Unless you live in China, if you have an internet connection, you almost certainly rely on Google to augment some parts of your brain.Shortly after Pichai took over as CEO, in 2015, he set out to remake Google as an “AI first” company. It already had several research-oriented AI divisions, including Google Brain and DeepMind (which it acquired in 2014), and Pichai focused on turning all that intelligence about intelligence into new and better Google products. Gmail’s Smart Compose, introduced in May 2018, is already suggesting more than 2 billion characters in email drafts each week. Google Translate can re-create your own voice in a language you don’t speak. And Duplex, Google’s AI-powered personal assistant, can book appointments or reservations for you by phone using a voice that sounds so human, many recipients of the calls weren’t aware it was a robot, raising ethical questions and public complaints. The company says it has always disclosed to consumers that the calls are coming from Google.[Illustration: Gabriel Silveira]The full reach of Google’s AI influence stretches far beyond the company’s offerings. Outside developers—at startups and big corporations alike—now use Google’s AI tools to do everything from training smart satellites to monitoring changes to the earth’s surface to rooting out abusive language on Twitter (well, it’s trying). There are now millions of devices using Google AI, and this is just the beginning. Google is on the verge of achieving what’s known as quantum supremacy. This new breed of computer will be able to crack complex equations a million or more times faster than regular ones. We are about to enter the rocket age of computing.Used for good, artificial intelligence has the potential to help society. It may find cures to deadly diseases (Google execs say that its intelligent machines have demonstrated the ability to detect lung cancer a full year earlier than human doctors), feed the hungry, and even heal the climate. A paper submitted to a Cornell University science journal in June by several leading AI researchers (including ones affiliated with Google) identified several ways machine learning can address climate change, from accelerating the development of solar fuels to radically optimizing energy usage.Used for ill, AI has the potential to empower tyrants, crush human rights, and destroy democracy, freedom, and privacy. The American Civil Liberties Union issued a report in June titled “The Dawn of Robot Surveillance” that warned how millions of surveillance cameras (such as those sold by Google) already installed across the United States could employ AI to enable government monitoring and control of citizens. This is already happening in parts of China. A lawsuit filed that same month accuses Google of using AI in hospitals to violate patients’ privacy.Every powerful advance in human history has been used for both good and evil. The printing press enabled the spread of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” but also Adolf Hitler’s fascist manifesto “Mein Kampf.” With AI, however, there’s an extra dimension to this predicament: The printing press doesn’t choose the type it sets. AI, when it achieves its full potential, would be able to do just that.Now is the time to ask questions. “Think about the kinds of thoughts you wish people had inventing fire, starting the industrial revolution, or [developing] atomic power,” says Greg Brockman, cofounder of OpenAI, a startup focused on building artificial general intelligence that received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft in July.Parties on both the political left and right argue that Google is too big and needs to be broken up. Would a fragmented Google democratize AI? Or, as leaders at the company warn, would it hand AI supremacy to the Chinese government, which has stated its intention to take the lead? President Xi Jinping has committed more than $150 billion toward the goal of becoming the world’s AI leader by 2030.Inside Google, dueling factions are competing over the future of AI. Thousands of employees are in revolt against their leaders, trying to stop the tech they’re building from being used to help governments spy or wage war. How Google decides to develop and deploy its AI may very well determine whether the technology will ultimately help or harm humanity. “Once you build these [AI] systems, they can be deployed across the whole world,” explains Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn cofounder and VC who’s on the board of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University. “That means anything [their creators] get right or wrong will have a correspondingly massive-scale impact.”“In the beginning, the neural network is untrained,” says Jeff Dean one glorious spring evening in Mountain View, California. He is standing under a palm tree just outside the Shoreline Amphitheatre, where Google is hosting a party to celebrate the opening day of I/O, its annual technology showcase.This event is where Google reveals to developers—and the rest of the world—where it is heading next. Dean, in a mauve-gray polo, jeans, sneakers, and a backpack double-strapped to his shoulders, is one of the headliners. “It’s like meeting Bono,” gushes one Korean software programmer who rushed over to take a selfie with Dean after he spoke at one event earlier in the day. “Jeff is God,” another tells me solemnly, almost surprised that I don’t already know this. Around Google, Dean is often compared to Chuck Norris, the action star known for his kung fu moves and taking on multiple assailants at once.“Oh, that looks good! I’ll have one of those,” Dean says with a grin as a waiter stops by with a tray of vegan tapioca pudding cups. Leaning against a tree, he speaks about neural networks the way Laird Hamilton might describe surfing the Teahupo’o break. His eyes light up and his hands move in sweeping gestures. “Okay, so here are the layers of the network,” he says, grabbing the tree and using the grizzled trunk to explain how the neurons of a computer brain interconnect. He looks intently at the tree, as though he sees something hidden inside it.Last year, Pichai named Dean head of Google AI, meaning that he’s responsible for what the company will invest in and build—a role he earned in part by scaling the YouTube neural net experiment into a new framework for training their machines to think on a massive scale. That system started as an internal project called DistBelief, which many teams, including Android, Maps, and YouTube, began using to make their products smarter.But by the summer of 2014, as DistBelief grew inside Google, Dean started to see that it had flaws. It had not been designed to adapt to technological shifts such as the rise of GPUs (the computer chips that process graphics) or the emergence of speech as a highly complex data set. Also, DistBelief was not initially designed to be open source, which limited its growth. So he made a bold decision: Build a new version that would be open to all. In November 2015, Pichai introduced TensorFlow, Dist­Belief’s successor, one of his first big announcements as CEO.It’s impossible to overstate the significance of opening TensorFlow to developers outside of Google. “People couldn’t wait to get their hands on it,” says Ian Bratt, director of machine learning at Arm, one of the world’s largest designers of computer chips. Today, Twitter is using it to build bots to monitor conversations, rank tweets, and entice people to spend more time in their feed. Airbus is training satellites to be able to examine nearly any part of the earth’s surface, within a few feet. Students in New Delhi have transformed mobile devices into air-quality monitors. This past spring, Google released early versions of TensorFlow 2.0, which makes its AI even more accessible to inexperienced developers. The ultimate goal is to make creating AI apps as easy as building a website.TensorFlow has now been downloaded approximately 41 million times. Millions of devices—cars, drones, satellites, laptops, phones—use it to learn, think, reason, and create. An internal company document shows a chart tracking the usage of TensorFlow inside Google (which, by extension, tracks machine learning projects): It’s up by 5,000% since 2015.Tech insiders, though, point out that if TensorFlow is a gift to developers, it may also be a Trojan horse. “I am worried that they are trying to be the gatekeepers of AI,” says an ex-Google engineer, who asked not to be named because his current work is dependent on access to Google’s platform. At present, TensorFlow has just one main competitor, Facebook’s PyTorch, which is popular among academics. That gives Google a lot of control over the foundational layer of AI, and could tie its availability to other Google imperatives. “Look at what [Google’s] done with Android,” this person continues. Last year, European Union regulators levied a $5 billion fine on the company for requiring electronics manufacturers to pre-install Google apps on devices running its mobile operating system. Google is appealing, but it faces further investigations for its competitive practices in both Europe and India.By helping AI proliferate, Google has created demand for new tools and products that it can sell. One example is Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), which are integrated circuits designed to accelerate applications using TensorFlow. If developers need more power for their TensorFlow apps—and they usually do—they can pay Google for time and space using these chips running in Google data centers.TensorFlow’s success has won over the skeptics within Google’s leadership. “Everybody knew that AI didn’t work,” Sergey Brin recalled to an interviewer at the World Economic Forum in 2017. “People tried it, they tried neural nets, and none of it worked.” Even when Dean and his team started making progress, Brin was dismissive. “Jeff Dean would periodically come up to me and say, ‘Look, the computer made a picture of a cat,’ and I said, ‘Okay, that’s very nice, Jeff,’ ” he said. But he had to admit that AI was “the most significant development in computing in my lifetime.”Stage 4 of the Shoreline Amphitheatre fits 526 people, and every seat is taken. It’s the second day of I/O, and Jen Gennai, Google’s head of responsible innovation, is hosting a session on “Writing the Playbook for Fair and Ethical Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.” She tells the crowd: “We’ve identified four areas that are our red lines, technologies that we will not pursue. We will not build or deploy weapons. We will also not deploy technologies that we feel violate international human rights.” (The company also pledges to eschew technologies that cause “overall harm” and “gather or use information for surveillance, violating internationally accepted norms.”) She and two other Google executives go on to explain how the company now incorporates its AI principles into everything it builds, and that Google has a comprehensive plan for tackling everything from rooting out biases in its algorithms to forecasting the unintended consequences of AI.After the talk, a small group of developers from different companies mingles, dissatisfied. “I don’t feel like we got enough,” observes one, an employee of a large international corporation that uses TensorFlow and frequently partners with Google. “They are telling us, ‘Don’t worry about it. We got this.’ We all know they don’t ‘got this.’ ”These developers have every right to be skeptical. Google’s rhetoric has often contrasted with its actions, but the stakes are higher with artificial intelligence. Gizmodo was first to report, in March 2018, that the company had a Pentagon contract for AI drone-strike technology, dubbed Project Maven. After Google employees protested for three months, Pichai announced that the contract would not be renewed. Shortly thereafter, another project came to light: Dragonfly, a search engine for Chinese users designed to be as powerful and ubiquitous as the one reportedly used for 94% of U.S. searches, except that it would also comply with China’s censorship rules, which ban content on some topics related to human rights, democracy, freedom of speech, and civil disobedience. Dragonfly would also link users’ phone numbers to their searches. Employees protested for another four months, and activists attempted to enlist Amnesty International and Google shareholders in the fight. Last December Pichai told Congress, Google has no plans to launch the search engine in China.[Illustration: Gabriel Silveira]During that turmoil, a Google engineer confronted Dean directly about whether the company would continue working with oppressive regimes. “We need to know: What are the red lines?” the engineer tells me, echoing Google’s own verbiage. “I was pushing for: What are things you would never do? I never got clarification.” The employee quit in protest.When asked today about the dark side of AI, the amiable Dean turns serious. “People in my organization were very outspoken about what we should be doing with the Department of Defense,” he says, referring to their work on Maven. Dean invokes Google’s list of AI applications that it won’t pursue. “One of them is work on autonomous weapons. That, to me, is something I don’t want to work on or have anything to do with,” he says, looking me straight in the eyes.Amid the initial Project Maven controversy, The Intercept and The New York Times published emails that revealed Google’s internal concerns about how the extent of its AI ambitions might be received. “I don’t know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons,” Fei-Fei Li, then Google Cloud’s chief AI scientist (and one of the authors of Google’s AI principles), told colleagues in one of them. “Avoid at ALL COSTS any mention or implication of AI. Weaponized AI is probably one of the most sensitized topics of AI—if not THE most. This is red meat to the media to find all the ways to damage Google.” She also suggested that the company plant some positive PR stories about Google’s democratization of AI and something described as humanistic AI. “I’d be super careful to protect these very positive images,” she wrote. (Li declined to be interviewed for this story. She has since left the company to co-lead Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute.)These AI protests have created an ongoing PR crisis. In March, the company announced an Advanced Technology External Advisory Council, colloquially known as its AI ethics board, but it fell apart just over a week later when thousands of Google employees protested its makeup. The board had included a drone-company CEO and the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, who had made public statements that were transphobic and denied climate change.Pichai himself has stepped in several times. Last November, he wrote to employees, acknowledging Google’s missteps. “We recognize that we have not always gotten everything right in the past and we are sincerely sorry for that,” he said. “It’s clear we need to make some changes.” But controversy continues to dog Google on how it deploys technology. In August, an employee organization called Googlers for Human Rights released a public petition with more than 800 signatures asking the company not to offer any tech to Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or the Office of Refugee Resettlement. (A representative for Google responds that the company supports employee activism.)When I ask Pichai about how Google’s AI principles influence his own work, he connects it to another corporate priority: assuaging concerns about what Google does with all the user data it possesses. “What I am pushing the teams on is around AI and privacy,” he says. “It’s a bit counterintuitive, but I think AI gives us a chance to enhance privacy.” Last spring he discussed efforts within Google to use machine learning to protect data on a smartphone from being accessed by anyone other than its owner.He says fears about the dangers of AI are overblown. “It’s important for people to understand what not to worry about, too, which is, it’s really early, and we do have time,” he explains. Pichai hopes that Google can quell any disquiet over AI’s dangers by showcasing its virtue. Under an initiative dubbed AI for Social Good, Google is deploying its machine learning to solve what it describes as “the world’s greatest social, humanitarian, and environmental problems.” There are teams harnessing AI to forecast floods, track whales, diagnose cancer, and detect illegal mining and logging. At I/O, one young entrepreneur from Uganda, invited by Google, spoke of using TensorFlow to track army worms across Africa, a cause of famine throughout the continent. Google’s AI Impact Challenge, launched in 2018, offers $25 million in grants to charities and startups applying AI to causes such as saving rain forests and fighting fires.The company has also pulled back on two controversial initiatives amid the AI debate. Last December, Google shelved its facial-recognition software, even as rival Amazon moved forward with its own version despite its own employee protests and charges that it enables law enforcement to racially profile citizens. One insider estimates that the move could cost Google billions in revenue. The company also withdrew from bidding on a $10 billion project to provide cloud computing to the Pentagon, citing ethical concerns. Amazon and Microsoft are still in the running.When asked how Google determines whether a project is good or bad for society, Pichai cites something called “the lip-reading project.” A team of engineers had an idea to use AI in cameras to read lips. The intention was to enable communication for nonverbal people. However, some raised concerns about unintended consequences. Could bad actors use it for surveillance through, say, street cameras? The engineers tested it on street cams, CCTV, and other public cameras, and determined that the AI needs to be close-up to work. Google published a paper detailing the effort, confident that, for now, it can be used safely.It’s a sunny afternoon in Santa Barbara, California, but the thermometer inside Google’s lab reads 10 millikelvin, about 1/100th of a kelvin above absolute zero. “This is one of the coldest places in the universe,” Erik Lucero, a research scientist working in the lab, tells me. “Inside of this,” he says, pointing to a shiny metal container, “is colder than space.” The vessel is the size and shape of an oil drum, made of copper and plated with real gold. Thick wires made out of niobium-­titanium emerge from the top, octopus-­like, carrying control and measurement signals to and from its processor.This barrel encases one of the most fragile and potentially most powerful machines on earth: a quantum computer. If all goes as planned, it will turbocharge the capabilities of artificial intelligence in ways that may well reshape how we think about the universe—and humanity’s place in it.The dream of quantum computing has been around since the ’80s, when Richard Feynman, an original member of the Manhattan Project, which built the atomic bomb, began theorizing ways to unlock computing power by adapting the quantum mechanics used to create nuclear science. Today, our computers run on bits of information that equal either zero or one in value; they have to calculate outcomes, probabilities, and equations step-by-step, serially exhausting every option before arriving at an answer. Quantum computers, by contrast, create qubits, where zeros and ones can exist simultaneously. This allows qubits to process certain kinds of information far faster. How much faster? One widely cited example is that a 300-qubit computer could perform as many simultaneous calculations as there are atoms in the universe.“Those are actually qubits,” Lucero says, directing me to look under a microscope, where I see some fuzzy black Xs. There are 22 of them. This is the smaller batch. Elsewhere in the lab, Google has created 72 qubits. For now, they can only survive for 20 microseconds, and conditions have to be colder than outer space.In order to create a commercially viable quantum computer, Google will need to produce enough qubits and keep them stable and error-free long enough to be able to make any major computing breakthroughs. Other labs are competing here, too, but Google has assembled some of the world’s foremost experts to find ways to create an environment in which qubits can survive and thrive. It’s moving faster toward this goal than anyone expected: Last December, Google tested its best quantum processor against a regular laptop, and the laptop won. A few weeks later, after some adjustments to the processor, it beat the laptop, but still lagged behind a desktop computer. In February, the quantum computer outmatched every other computer in the lab.Hartmut Neven, who leads Google’s quantum team, presented the lab’s advances during Google’s Quantum Spring Symposium in May, describing the increases in processing power as double exponential, a mind-­bending equation that looks like this:221, 222, 223, 224Within computer science circles, this growth rate for quantum computing has been dubbed Neven’s law, a nod to Moore’s law, which posits that “classical” computing advances by doubling the number of transistors that can fit on a chip every 18 months.Now Google’s team is honing in on the major milestone known as quantum supremacy. It will still be years before Google’s quantum computer reaches its full potential. But in the lab, the anticipation of this moment is palpable. “There are currently problems that humanity [will] not be able to solve without a quantum computer,” Lucero says, standing next to the machine poised to achieve this feat. “The whole idea that you are jumping into a new potential for humankind, that’s exciting.”The room hums rhythmically, the sound of qubits hatching. What will it mean for humanity when computers can think and calculate at exponentially faster speeds—and on parallel planes? This emerging science may be able to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe—dark matter, black holes, the human brain. “It’s the ‘Hello, World!’ moment,” Lucero says, referring to the 1984 introduction of Macintosh, the computer that launched a new era for a generation of coders. As Google opens the door to this new cosmos, we all need to get ready for what’s on the other side.A version of this article appeared in the October 2019 issue of Fast Company magazine.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Trade Commission is set to announce on Wednesday that Facebook Inc has agreed to a sweeping settlement of significant allegations it mishandled user privacy and pay $5 billion, two people briefed on the matter said. FILE PHOTO: A 3-D printed Facebook logo is seen in front of displayed binary code in this illustration picture, June 18, 2019. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/File PhotoAs part of the settlement, Facebook will agree to create a board committee on privacy and will agree to new executive certifications that users’ privacy is being properly protected, the people said. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg will have to certify every three months that the company is properly safeguarding user privacy, a person briefed on the matter said. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the FTC will allege Facebook misled users about its handling of their phone numbers and its use of two-factor authentication as part of a wide-ranging complaint that accompanies a settlement ending the government’s privacy probe, citing two people familiar with the matter. Separately, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to announce a related settlement with Facebook for around $100 million over allegations it failed to disclose risks to investors over its privacy practices. The Wall Street Journal reported the SEC settlement earlier. The Post also reported the FTC also plans to allege Facebook provided insufficient information to about 30 million users about a facial recognition tool, an issue identified earlier by Consumer Reports. The settlement comes amid growing concern among U.S. policymakers about the privacy of online users and have sparked calls for new legal protections in Congress. Separately, the U.S. Justice Department said late Tuesday it is launching a broad antitrust probe into the competitive practices of large tech companies like Facebook. Two people briefed on the matter confirmed the Post report the FTC will not require Facebook to admit guilt as part of the settlement. The settlement will need to be approved by a federal judge and will contain other significant allegations of privacy lapses, the people said. The fine will mark the largest civil penalty ever paid to the FTC. The FTC and Facebook declined to comment. The FTC confirmed in March 2018 it had opened an investigation into allegations Facebook inappropriately shared information belonging to 87 million users with the now-defunct British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The probe has focused on whether the data sharing violated a 2011 consent agreement between Facebook and the regulator and then widened to include other privacy allegations. A person briefed on the matter said the phone number, facial recognition and two-factor authentication issues were not part of the initial Cambridge Analytica probe. Some in Congress have criticized the reported $5 billion penalty, noting Facebook in 2018 had $55.8 billion in revenue and $22.1 billion in net income. Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican, said last week the fine should be $50 billion. While the deal resolves a major regulatory headache for Facebook, the Silicon Valley firm still faces further potential antitrust probes as the FTC and Justice Department undertake a wide-ranging review of competition among the biggest U.S. tech companies. Facebook is also facing public criticism from President Donald Trump and others about its planned cryptocurrency Libra over concerns about privacy and money laundering. The Cambridge Analytica missteps, as well as anger over hate speech and misinformation on its platform, have prompted calls from people ranging from presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren to a Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes, for the government to force the social media giant to sell Instagram, which it bought in 2012, and WhatsApp, purchased in 2014. But the company’s core business has proven resilient, as Facebook blew past earnings estimates in the past two quarters. Facebook is set to report earnings on Wednesday. Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington; additional reporting by Vibhuti Sharma in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila and Lisa ShumakerOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday the gunman who killed 12 people in a crowded South California bar this week was a “very, very sick guy,” as investigators tried to determine what could have motivated the 28-year-old Marine combat veteran. Even as Thousand Oaks, a suburb 40 miles (64 km) northwest of downtown Los Angeles, mourned the dead, the city faced a fresh threat on Friday as wildfires raged in the area, forcing thousands of people from their homes. Victims of Wednesday night’s rampage in the city of Thousand Oaks included an 18-year-old freshman student at Pepperdine University, a security guard at the bar, a graduate of California Lutheran University and a Marine Corps veteran. Ian David Long, who served with the Marines in Afghanistan, walked into the Borderline Bar and Grill, which was packed with dancing college students, and opened fire, fatally shooting 12 people before apparently killing himself, law enforcement officials said. CNN reported that Long had written on Facebook around the time of the massacre: “I hope people call me insane ... wouldn’t that just be a big ball of irony?” He added, “Yeah.. I’m insane, but the only thing you people do after these shootings is ‘hopes and prayers’.. and wonder why these keep happening.” Long’s Facebook page appears to have since been deleted. “He is a very sick puppy,” Trump said of the gunman, speaking at the White House before leaving on a trip to Paris. The FBI was seeking a motive for the country’s latest mass shooting. Ventura County Sheriff Geoff Dean told reporters on Thursday that Long may have suffered from PTSD. “He was a Marine, he was in the war, he served time, he saw some pretty bad things,” Trump said. “And a lot of people say he had PTSD and it’s a tough deal.” Richard Berge, who lived near Long and looked after his mother’s dogs, told Reuters she had told him earlier this year she worried her son might take his own life but did not fear he would hurt her. The Thousand Oaks massacre took place less than two weeks after a man shot dead 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, fueling the debate over gun ownership in America. One of the dead, Telemachus Orfanos, had survived the mass shooting at a country music concert in October 2017 in Las Vegas that killed 58 people, the worst such incident in modern U.S. history, ABC News said, citing a friend. It was time for politicians to act, Orfanos’ mother, Susan Schmidt-Orfanos, told ABC News. Mourners attend a vigil for the victims of the mass shooting, at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza in Thousand Oaks, California, U.S. November 8, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake“I don’t want prayers. I don’t want thoughts,” she said. “I want gun control and I hope to God nobody else sends me any more prayers.” The shooting came a day after the election of a Democratic governor who has pushed for tighter gun control in a state that already has some of the strictest firearms laws in the country. The wildfire that started on Thursday has destroyed some homes on the outskirts of Thousand Oaks and forced the mandatory evacuations of 75,000 people, as well as closing some highways. A large plume of smoke grew on the horizon to the northeast of the city on Friday. Andrea Campbell Conant, a public relations executive who grew up in Thousand Oaks, said even as she drove to one of the vigils for the 12 people killed on Wednesday night roads had begun to close. “It’s almost like we haven’t had enough time to process how we feel,” she said in a telephone interview as she described a head-spinning shift from a tear-filled vigil to her and her friends getting calls from relatives who needed help after getting evacuation orders. Although mass shootings have become commonplace in modern American life, Wednesday’s carnage still came as a shock to the 127,000 residents of Thousand Oaks, which was named the third safest city in the United States for 2018 by the Niche research company. Heather Wynalda, 47, in Conejo Valley, a few miles west of Thousand Oaks, said her brother’s home had burned but he and his family were safe. Slideshow (5 Images)“It’s just devastating,” she said via Facebook messenger. “This community pulled together so beautifully in the midst of yesterday’s shooting ... and today, it is being frantically scattered in an effort to escape the fires.” Evacuation centers have been set up in Thousand Oaks, including a teen center where frantic parents awaited news of their children after Wednesday’s shooting. Pepperdine University, which held a prayer service in Malibu following the shooting, said Friday it was closing its Malibu and Calabasas campuses due to the wildfires. Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton in Washington, Bernie Woodall in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, Dana Feldman in Marina del Rey, California, and Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Writing by Nick Carey; Editing by Frances Kerry, Bill Tarrant and Tom BrownOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Has social media – that ad-guzzling tyrant of a teenager – reached a turning point on the way to adulthood? Scandals over electoral fraud and misuse of data appear, for the first time, to be affecting the behaviour of Facebook and those who use it.Journalists love to announce a watershed moment and the relationship between those who produce most of the world’s news, and those who host it online, is still as fractious as that between parent and teenage child. But two hefty reports last week show signs of a shift. First, the Reuters Institute digital news report found that the use of social media – such as Facebook – for news has started to fall for the first time since records began seven years ago. Then, the latest study by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism found that social media groups themselves were responding to evidence of dysfunction, not by citing market forces but with “civic duty and fear of regulation”.What matters most is what this means for a news ecosystem that has seen its economic foundations shaken by social media. This issue is live, not because of weighty research, or changing patterns of behaviour, but because of what any turning point could mean for the ongoing sustainability of news.Both of last week’s studies, which focused on the end of 2017 and early 2018 and, in the institute’s case, involved more than 74,000 people around the world, suggest that doubts over possible electoral abuse by foreign agents in Russia, combined with the misuse of personal data by shadowy groups such as Cambridge Analytica, has affected public and political opinion.Add in concerns over the increasingly toxic nature of political and social discourse online, and Facebook’s algorithmic changes which prioritise interactions with family and friends, the changes have all made more impact than news publishers’ catastrophic warnings.Users accessing Facebook for news fell from 42% to 36% during 2017. In the most polarised countries – Spain, with its issues over independence, and the US – concerns over what is real and what is fake news is highest.Not that either report suggested news publishers have less to fear. The term “fake news” may refer solely to manufactured information made up to attract clicks and therefore finance, but it hurts publishers, too. Slightly more people (75%) thought publishers were responsible for unreliable news than platforms (71%).Turning points can go several ways, of course, and the news industry must hold its nerve. The use of private encrypted social media such as WhatsApp for distributing information has almost tripled in four years, which brings a whole set of new headaches. Who monitors these? Who holds them to account?There are other healthy signs with the proportion of those who have paid for online news rising, and those willing to donate on the up too, especially among the young.Media executives can still sound like slightly sad uncles excited about what their teenage nieces are up to when they talk about young people and media consumption. Whatever platform or publishers the young turn to, some things are timeless.As the century and the social media comes of age, the idea that with power comes responsibility should never go out of fashion. Topics Social media Opinion Digital media Facebook Social networking comment

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said on Wednesday that Facebook’s (FB.O) plan to build a digital currency called Libra “cannot go forward” until serious concerns are addressed, comments that pressured the project and dented the price of the original cryptocurrency bitcoin. The strong comments from the most powerful U.S. financial regulator underscored the growing regulatory hurdles facing the proposed cryptocurrency, which has drawn scrutiny from policymakers globally. “Libra raises many serious concerns regarding privacy, money laundering, consumer protection and financial stability,” Powell said during his semi-annual testimony on monetary policy before the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee. “I don’t think the project can go forward” without addressing those concerns, he added later. Powell said any regulatory review of the project should be “patient and careful.” He noted that existing rules do not fit digital currencies. “It’s something that doesn’t fit neatly or easily within our regulatory scheme but it does have potentially systemic scale,” he said. “It needs a careful look, so I strongly believe we all need to be taking our time with this.” “We are very much aligned with the Chairman around the need for public discourse on this,” Facebook spokeswoman Elka Looks said in an email. “This is why we along with the 27 other Founding Members of the Libra Association made this announcement so far in advance, so that we could engage in constructive discourse on this and get feedback.” Powell’s comments about Libra hit the price of bitcoin, which fell as much as 7% during his three hours of testimony. Late last month, bitcoin climbed back to near $14,000 and has rallied by more than 30% since June 18, when Facebook announced plans to launch Libra. By mid-afternoon on Wednesday bitcoin was trading at $12,268.99, down 2.4% on the day. Facebook shares, too, took a hit during Powell’s appearance before the committee, although they largely recovered that lost ground and were trading 1.3% higher at $201.89 a share. It was unclear exactly how the Fed could slow the project if it wanted, given the murky regulatory treatment of digital currencies, but Powell’s perspective looms large. Facebook officials are scheduled to testify about the project later this month in Congress, where senior lawmakers have raised data privacy and other concerns. “What Facebook is planning raises serious privacy, trading, national security, and monetary policy concerns for consumers, investors, the U.S. economy and the global economy,” said Representative Maxine Waters, who chairs the House banking panel. Powell said the Fed has established a working group to follow the project and is coordinating with other central banks across the globe. He also expects a review from the U.S. Financial Stability Oversight Council, a panel of regulators charged with identifying broad risks to the financial system. Slideshow (3 Images)Powell noted that he supports financial innovation as long as appropriate risks are identified, but he said the massive platform enjoyed by Facebook immediately sets Libra apart from other digital currency projects. “Facebook has a couple billion-plus users, so I think you have for the first time the possibility of very broad adoption,” he said. Any problems that could emerge through Libra “would arise to systemically important levels just because of the mere size of Facebook.” Reporting by Pete Schroeder and Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington, and Katie Paul in San Francisco; Editing by Paul Simao, Jonathan Oatis and David GregorioOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

9 U.S. ‘Can The President Be Impeached?’ We Answer Your Questions

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Shares of California power utilities plummeted on Friday as wildfires in California left thousands of customers without gas and electricity. A Pacific Gas & Electric lineman cuts a downed power line during the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, U.S. November 8, 2018. REUTERS/Stephen LamPG&E Corp (PCG.N), which operates in the northern part of the state, sank 15 percent and was on track for its biggest one-day decline since 2002. Edison International (EIX.N), the owner of Southern California Edison Company, dropped 13 percent. PG&E was blamed for wildfires in 2017 that ravaged wine country north of the San Francisco Bay area and killed 46 people, and this week’s fires create new uncertainties for investors in California’s utilities. In June, PG&E said it would record a $2.5 billion in pre-tax expenses for the second-quarter related to last year’s fires after a report said some of them were sparked by trees toppling into PG&E power lines. Three wind-whipped wildfires burned, with one in the northern part of the state advancing to the outskirts of the city of Chico, forcing thousands to flee after it left the nearby town of Paradise in ruins. Voluntary evacuations of 75,000 homes were called for in Ventura County northwest of Los Angeles because of a spreading fire, while parts of the oceanside city of Malibu, about 30 miles (48 km) west of downtown Los Angeles, were under evacuation orders. PG&E said in a statement on Friday that 25,000 customers in Butte County were without electricity due to the fire near Chico. It said it turned off gas to about 12,000 customers. Southern California Edison said on its website it notified 74,000 customers that it could shut off their electricity if high winds create a danger of power lines starting a fire. Both utilities said the causes of the fires were not yet determined. In September, the state passed a bill allowing PG&E to pass on to customers some of the costs incurred from liabilities related to wildfires and protect it from going out of business. Shares of PG&E have lost 40 percent since early October 2017, when the fires broke out. Reporting by Noel Randewich; editing by Diane Craft and Cynthia OstermanOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

“This is not a normal confirmation hearing,” said Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, during Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing on Sept. 4. “Courts are under assault by the president of the United States…Our democracy is on trial. Our nation’s highest court must serve as a ballast in these turbulent times.” Kavanaugh’s hearing, which began today, is proving particularly turbulent. Protestors are vociferously expressing their opinions, and Democrats kicked things off by demanding that the hearing be delayed due to a 42,000-page document dump last night.“As a former prosecutor, I know that no lawyer goes to court without reviewing the documents,” Klobuchar said, adding that Kavanaugh himself should be opposed to the proceedings. “A good judge would not allow a case to move forward if one side dropped 42,000 pages of documents,” she said. “It’s our duty to speak out.”Senator Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said his staff was able to review all documents ahead of the hearings, thanks to automated document-review technology—machines that read, basically.During the hearing, Klobuchar said she believes Donald Trump picked Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court because of one attribute: his expansive view of executive powers. The conservative judge, who served president George W. Bush and investigated president Bill Clinton as part of special prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s investigation, wrote in a 2009 Minnesota Law Review article (pdf) that he sees the president’s role as uniquely difficult and feels the commander-in-chief should be shielded from civil and criminal investigations. “The indictment and trial of a sitting president, moreover, would cripple the federal government, rendering it unable to function with credibility in either the international or domestic arenas,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Such an outcome would ill serve the public interest, especially in times of financial or national security crisis.”Kavanaugh’s position works out well for Trump, who is under investigation for colluding with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election. Klobuchar warned Tuesday that she would be asking Kavanaugh whether he thinks the president is “above the law.”The nominee has also expressed the opinion that a president may decide a law is unconstitutional, even when a court has already found otherwise. Klobuchar called this one of many “troubling” aspects of his expansive view of presidential powers, noting that “the rule of kings ended in 1215 with the Magna Carta.”As a young girl, Kolbuchar didn’t dream of being a lawyer. When she was a teenager, her father took her to watch a day of proceedings in misdemeanor criminal court; she came away understanding that behind every judicial decision is a person and a story.“All of the attacks on the rule of law and on our justice system in the past year have made me pause and think many times about why I decided to come to this committee…and why I decided to go to law school,” Kolbuchar said on Tuesday. The government and legal system may be imperfect, she told senators, but it is their privilege to help address those imperfections. ”We are at a crossroads,” she said. “Are we going to dedicate ourselves to improving our democracy?”

Two weeks after a terrorist used Facebook to broadcast live video while he massacred 50 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand, the company has broken its silence in the country by publishing a letter from Sheryl Sandberg in the New Zealand Herald.Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said the company is “exploring” placing restrictions on who can live stream video on Facebook, but did not announce any actual policy changes.“All of us at Facebook stand with the victims, their families, the Muslim community and all of New Zealand,” she wrote. “Many of you have also rightly questioned how online platforms such as Facebook were used to circulate horrific videos of the attack … We have heard feedback that we must do more – and we agree.”The letter follows weeks of sustained criticism in New Zealand over Facebook executives’ lack of responsiveness to the grieving nation.“It would be very difficult for you and your colleagues to overestimate the growing frustration and anger here at Facebook’s facilitation of and inability to mitigate the deep, deep pain and harm from the live-streamed massacre of our colleagues, family members and countrymen broadcast over your network,” privacy commissioner John Edwards wrote in a letter to Facebook executives following the massacre, according to the Herald.“Your silence is an insult to our grief.”A Herald opinion column published on 21 March challenged Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to “to explain how his company will prevent its platform being abused in future, or to look into the faces of victim’s families and explain why not”.“If it had happened in America, Zuckerberg would be talking,” continued business writer Chris Keall. “Why is New Zealand any different?”Zuckerberg still has not commented publicly on the attack, nor on Facebook’s role in amplifying the reach of the act of terror.The potential restrictions on livestreaming would be based on “factors such as prior Community Standards violations”, Sandberg wrote. A spokeswoman for Facebook declined to comment on whether the Christchurch shooter would have been barred from live-streaming if such a policy had been in place, citing a request from New Zealand police “not to go into specifics” while the investigation continues.Facebook is also “investing in research to build better technology to quickly identify edited versions of violent videos and images and prevent people from re-sharing these versions”, Sandberg wrote.The company is also cracking down on hate groups in Australia and New Zealand, pledged to support four Kiwi mental health organizations, and voiced support for the recently announced royal commission that will investigate the circumstances surrounding the attack.Sandberg also touted Facebook’s decision, earlier this week, to reverse its previous policy and ban content that supports white nationalism and white separatism. The company had previously made a distinction between white supremacy, which it banned, and white nationalism, which it allowed, despite expert consensus that any such distinction is merely rhetorical.Sandberg’s letter was also published on Instagram’s blog, and a company spokeswoman said all Facebook and Instagram users in New Zealand will receive a platform alert with a link to the op-ed. Topics Facebook Christchurch shooting New Zealand Christchurch Social networking news

At least six people were killed and 28 injured in an attack on a children's organization in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, authorities said. Interested in Afghanistan? Add Afghanistan as an interest to stay up to date on the latest Afghanistan news, video, and analysis from ABC News. Afghanistan Add Interest A vehicle packed with explosives was detonated outside the office of Save the Children in Jalalabad. At least three men then stormed the office with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, officials told ABC News. The attack began around 9 a.m. local time, according to Attaullah Khogyani, a spokesman for the provincial government. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.— SavetheChildren News (@SaveUKNews) January 24, 2018 Four of the six killed worked for Save the Children. Of the 28 injured, 25 were civilians and three were members of the police special forces, authorities said. Four attackers were also killed. "This incident was a senseless and malicious act of violence which has devastated the families of those who lost loved ones in the attack as well as colleagues across our organization," Save our Children said in a statement. "Our humanitarian staff remains dedicated to resuming operations, and have already taken first steps to do so, carrying out critical safety and security assessments across the areas we work." London-based Save the Children has operated in Afghanistan since 1976, aiming to provide better access to education, health care and essential supplies.

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Over the weekend, the New York Times broke news about a previously undisclosed sexual misconduct allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But while the story has resulted in fresh calls for Kavanaugh’s impeachment, controversy has also swirled around at least three aspects of the Times’s presentation.The piece, authored by Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly and adapted from their forthcoming book about the Kavanaugh allegations, describes a “previously unreported story” about how Kavanaugh allegedly “pushed his penis into the hand of a female student” during a “drunken dorm party” when he was a student at Yale. Although said to be a separate incident, this story mirrors the account of Deborah Ramirez, who came forward during Kavanaugh’s SCOTUS confirmation process to accuse him of sexual misconduct while they were students at Yale.The new allegation was brought to the Times’ attention by one of Kavanaugh’s classmates, Max Stier, who runs a nonprofit in Washington, DC. The story also indicates that Stier “notified senators and the FBI about this account, but the FBI did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly.” Similarly, the FBI declined to interview witnesses Ramirez offered to provide to corroborate her story.In short, Pogrebin and Kelly’s reporting provides new evidence not only that Kavanaugh may have engaged in a pattern of sexual misconduct that he wasn’t truthful about during his confirmation hearings, but also that the FBI did little investigative work — just enough to give Republicans who supported the justice cover from their critics to ensure Kavanaugh’s confirmation. But the way the Times presented the story distracted from these revelations, and instead put some of the scrutiny on itself.The Times’s rollout of Pogrebin and Kelly’s got off to a disastrous start. In a tweet sharing the story that was posted on Saturday, the New York Times Opinion section used language that seemed to downplay, if not excuse, sexual assault.“Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun,” the tweet began. oh my god this is a real tweet pic.twitter.com/82avBH4o4I— Benjamin Dreyer (@BCDreyer) September 14, 2019 The Times Opinion editors ultimately deleted the widely criticized tweet and apologized, characterizing the language used as “offensive.” We deleted a previous tweet regarding this article. It was offensive, and we apologize. https://t.co/gbUdweKbDg— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) September 15, 2019 But the bad tweet wasn’t the only aspect of the Times’s presentation that has been the subject of controversy. The new misconduct allegation against Kavanaugh was somewhat buried in the 11th paragraph of a story that mostly focuses on Ramirez’s personal tale. And the story was published in the Sunday Review section — one that includes both news analysis and opinion pieces. While Ramirez’s account certainly serves to both highlight and explain a culture in which sexual misconduct goes unpunished, considering that the new misconduct allegation is a big revelation in its own right, it would have made sense for the Times to highlight it in a separate news piece. Instead, the lede was buried.In a Twitter thread addressing controversy surrounding the story, Times PR staff explained that Sunday Review “frequently runs excerpts of books produced by Times reporters,” and that “[t]he new revelations contained in the piece were uncovered during the reporting process for the book, which is why this information did not appear in The Times before the excerpt.” The excerpt of the book was published in the Sunday Review, a section that includes both news analysis and opinion pieces. The section frequently runs excerpts of books produced by Times reporters.— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) September 15, 2019 The Times’s presentation of the new Kavanaugh allegation was reminiscent of how it treated E. Jean Carroll’s sexual assault allegation against President Donald Trump when she came forward with it last June. Carroll’s allegation was initially covered in the Times’ online Books section, and later buried in the 23rd page of the front section of the print edition. As controversy swirled about those choices, Times executive editor Dean Baquet acknowledged that the story “should have been presented more prominently.” But it appears lessons were not learned.Concerns about presentation aside, the substance of the Times piece dominated the news cycle on Saturday and Sunday and put fresh scrutiny not only on Kavanaugh’s presence on the nation’s highest court, but also on the process that placed him there. President Donald Trump quickly took to Twitter and tried to discredit the story, urging Kavanaugh to “start suing people for libel, or the Justice Department should come to his rescue. The lies being told about him are unbelievable.”While Trump didn’t cite any specific “lies,” on Sunday the Times added an “Editors’ Note” that provided ammo to those seeking to dismiss the latest misconduct allegation against Kavanaugh. According to the editors’ note, friends of the woman who was the alleged victim of Kavanaugh’s misconduct at the dorm party claim she doesn’t remember the incident, and the woman herself wouldn’t speak to the reporters — details that weren’t included in the original version of the story. Editors’ Note: Sept. 15, 2019 An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book’s account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party. The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article. On Monday morning, Fox & Friends coverage of the Kavanaugh story centered around the editors’ note, not the new allegation itself. Trump, taking cues from his favorite show, seized upon the note as a way to turn the allegation into a line of attack against the media. “The New York Times walks back report on Kavanaugh assault claim.” @foxandfriends The one who is actually being assaulted is Justice Kavanaugh - Assaulted by lies and Fake News! This is all about the LameStream Media working with their partner, the Dems.— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 16, 2019 Just Out: “Kavanaugh accuser doesn’t recall incident.” @foxandfriends DO YOU BELIEVE WHAT THESE HORRIBLE PEOPLE WILL DO OR SAY. They are looking to destroy, and influence his opinions - but played the game badly. They should be sued!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 16, 2019 Trump, however, is getting ahead of himself. The editors’ note does not suggest that the incident didn’t happen. It just indicates that the person said to have been victimized may not remember it — something that isn’t necessarily all that surprising given that the context was a “drunken dorm party.” And it’s not as though the allegation is completely devoid of corroboration. The story notes that Times reporters corroborated Stier’s story “with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier,” though it doesn’t provide details beyond that.But the addition of the note, coming a day after the story was published and fueled new calls for Kavanaugh’s impeachment, raised questions about what other pertinent details may not have been included in the Times’s piece, and provided grist for conservatives to dismiss the entire thing. BOMBSHELL: New York Times corrects Kavanaugh smear to note alleged victim does not recall any such incident. pic.twitter.com/yigeOyOCzo— Mollie (@MZHemingway) September 16, 2019 The bottom line is that Kavanaugh now faces (at least) three separate sexual misconduct allegations. Each of them is corroborated to some extent, but during his confirmation hearing Kavanaugh issued blanket denials. And in addition to detailing the new allegation, the Times reporters who spent months digging into the Kavanaugh allegations also note they found two previous allegations made against him to be credible. (Ramirez’s allegation of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh came on the heels of Christine Blasey Ford coming forward to accuse Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her during a party when the two of them were high school acquaintances in Maryland.) [W]hile we found Dr. Ford’s allegations credible during a 10-month investigation, Ms. Ramirez’s story could be more fully corroborated. During his Senate testimony, Mr. Kavanaugh said that if the incident Ms. Ramirez described had occurred, it would have been “the talk of campus.” Our reporting suggests that it was. At least seven people, including Ms. Ramirez’s mother, heard about the Yale incident long before Mr. Kavanaugh was a federal judge. Two of those people were classmates who learned of it just days after the party occurred, suggesting that it was discussed among students at the time. This is a big deal. But because of foreseeable, avoidable missteps, the Times ended up transforming what should’ve been a controversy about the newest member of the nation’s highest court into one that’s partially about itself. The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

What is Wi-Fi 6? This latest version of Wi-Fi, also called 802.11 ax, is touted as having faster speeds than the current wireless standard, 802.11 ac (potentially 10... 0:50