WASHINGTON (AP) — The impeachment investigation into President Donald Trump has thrust Washington into a political crisis. And Trump keeps adding to the chaos. In the four weeks since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., launched the investigation, Trump has taken steps that have drawn more criticism, not less, repeatedly testing the loyalty of his stalwart Republican allies. His actions have both intensified the questions at the center of the inquiry and opened new areas of concern. “It is his persona to surround himself with chaos,” said Alice Stewart, a Republican strategist who advised Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign. Chaos has indeed been a hallmark of Trump’s presidency. Each controversy bleeds into the next — often so fast that the public doesn’t have time to absorb the details of any one issue. Whether that is a deliberate Trump strategy or simply the consequence of Americans electing a highly unconventional, nonpolitician as commander in chief remains one of the fundamental questions of his presidency. The most pressing question now is how the cascading controversies will impact Trump at one of his most vulnerable moments since taking office. Already saddled by low approval ratings, he could face reelection with the dubious distinction of being just the third American president ever impeached. Though conviction and removal from office by the Republican-controlled Senate seems virtually impossible, Trump’s handling of the coming weeks could linger with some of the voters he needs to hold in order to win in 2020. His response thus far has been pulled from the standard Trump playbook : hurling deeply personal, sometimes vulgar, insults at his opponents, questioning the legitimacy of the investigations into his actions and distracting with other jarring decisions. For example, there was his public call for China to investigate baseless corruption claims against Democrat Joe Biden just days after Democrats launched impeachment proceedings to probe Trump’s similar request of Ukraine. There are some signs that Trump’s words and actions are being received differently, both in Washington and across the country, from other points in his presidency. Polls now show more Americans in favor of opening the impeachment inquiry than those who are opposed, a shift since earlier this year. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 54% of Americans approved of the House decision to conduct an inquiry, while 44% disapproved. In a Pew poll conducted a few weeks earlier, the public was evenly divided on the question. A few prominent Republicans have moved in favor of the investigation, which centers in part on whether Trump used his office for personal political gain by asking Ukraine to investigate the unfounded accusations against former Vice President Biden. John Kasich, the former Republican governor of Ohio, is among the Republicans who now back an impeachment inquiry, though he told The Associated Press in an interview that he isn’t ready to call for Trump’s removal from office. “This is an extremely serious matter,” Kasich said. “I wrestled with it for a very long time.” Kasich was persuaded by the White House’s shifting story on why Trump withheld $400 million in military aid for Ukraine, one of the issues under investigation by the House. After insisting there was no quid pro quo at play — and allowing Republicans to use that as a rationale for opposing the impeachment inquiry — acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Thursday that one of the reasons the aid was held up was that Trump wanted Ukrainian officials to investigate a debunked conspiracy involving the Democratic National Committee. Mulvaney later tried to back away from that statement. His televised news conference left some Republicans flabbergasted. Many in the party were already reeling from Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from Syria, allowing Turkey to move into the country and attack Kurdish forces aligned with Washington. Reliable Trump allies such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., panned the president’s move as dangerous and deeply flawed. And Mulvaney opened his news conference by announcing another controversial decision: Trump plans to host world leaders next year at his golf resort near Miami, putting him in position to personally profit from his office. Some Republicans found the move difficult to defend as well. “I am not surprised at all that the president wanted to hold the G-7 at Doral. Never occurred to me that he would want to do anything different,” Stewart said. “I am surprised there’s no one in there who would advise him against doing that.” For now, the Republican frustration with Trump’s actions over the past few weeks isn’t affecting the party’s views on the impeachment investigation, which is opposed by the majority of GOP lawmakers and voters. “Republicans have already shown that they’re compartmentalizing this,” said Brendan Buck, an adviser to former House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. “They’re able to be very upset about Syria in the morning and rationalize the other issues in the afternoon.” ___ Associated Press writer Alexandra Jaffe in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report. ___ EDITOR’S NOTE — Washington Bureau Chief Julie Pace has covered the White House and politics for The Associated Press since 2007. Follow her at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC Download Calling all HuffPost superfans! 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Jerry Falwell Jr., the former president of Liberty University, sued the evangelical school for defamation and breach of contract on Thursday, claiming he’s the victim of political retribution after he was forced out in August amid several highly publicized personal scandals.In a lawsuit filed in Virginia state court, the 58-year-old claims the school founded by his father accepted false claims against him—including that he had an illicit affair with a Miami pool attendant and repeatedly used racist rhetoric—without investigation. The university then forced him out of the job he held for 13 years, seeking to “tarnish, minimize, and outright destroy” his legacy, the lawsuit alleges.“When Mr. Falwell and his family became the target of a malicious smear campaign incited by anti-evangelical forces, Liberty University not only accepted the salacious and baseless accusations against the Falwells at face value, but directly participated in the defamation,” states the lawsuit, which asks for unspecified damages and a court order barring the school from further defamation.In a statement announcing the lawsuit., Falwell Jr. said he was saddened that school officials “jumped to conclusions about the claims made against my character, failed to properly investigate them, and then damaged my reputation following my forced resignation.”“While I have nothing but love and appreciation for the Liberty community, and I had hoped to avoid litigation, I must take the necessary steps to restore my reputation and hopefully help repair the damage to the Liberty University brand in the process,” he added.Falwell’s battle with Liberty University began on Aug. 7 when the school announced it was investigating “rumors and claims” about the evangelical leader after a photo of him with his pants unzipped surfaced. Falwell apologized for the photo, which he said was taken at a costume party during a family vacation, but was put on an indefinite leave of absence.Then, in an Aug. 23 statement to The Washington Examiner, Falwell revealed that his wife had struck up an “inappropriate personal relationship” with the couple’s “pool boy,” who was threatening to come forward. Citing the “emotional toll” of the affair, Falwell claimed that while he and his wife have “tried to distance ourselves from him over time,” the man “became increasingly angry and aggressive.”“Eventually, he began threatening to publicly reveal this secret relationship with Becki and to deliberately embarrass my wife, family, and Liberty University unless we agreed to pay him substantial monies,” Falwell said in the statement to the Examiner.The next day, the pool attendant claimed in an explosive Reuters interview that he was involved in a seven-year sexual relationship with the couple that began in March 2013.Giancarlo Granda, who said his relationship with the couple began when he was a 20-year-old employee at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel, told Reuters that throughout the affair he would have sex with Falwell’s wife, Becki Tilley Falwell, in front of the evangelical leader.“Becki and I developed an intimate relationship and Jerry enjoyed watching from the corner of the room,” Granda said, noting that the liaisons took place “multiple times per year” at hotels in New York and Miami and at the couple’s home in Virginia before ending in 2018.Falwell’s lawsuit directly addresses Granda’s accusations, claiming the pair have been victims of the 29-year-old’s ongoing extortion scheme for years.The blackmail efforts, the lawsuit says, have recently been “absorbed into a smear campaign by political operatives who are opposed to Mr. Falwell’s support of President Trump.” Falwell’s lawyers allege Granda is working with the Lincoln Project, a political-action campaign formed by Republicans to prevent President Trump’s re-election, and began his “hit job” against the evangelical leader’s family after teaming up with them. (Rick Wilson, an editor-at-large for The Daily Beast, is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project.)After Falwell’s resignation, Liberty University also took steps to “systematically erase” him from the school’s history, the lawsuit states, including scrubbing any mention of him on the website, removing portraits of him from campus, and prohibiting communication with faculty and staff.“The University also moved quickly to destroy Mr. Falwell’s reputation in the Liberty community and nationwide,” the lawsuit says, including stating he had engaged in “disobedient” behavior “in secret” that was a “sin” during a community service event on Aug. 26.“Up until that point, Granda’s lies were just that—lies, vigorously denied by Mr. Falwell. But Liberty gave those lies an air of truth and righteousness,” the lawsuit states, calling the school’s action “antithetical to the teachings of Christ.” The lawsuit adds the school has declined to meet with Falwell since his resignation.In addition to the sexual scandals, Falwell was forced to make a public apology in June amid uproar over a tweet in which he said he’d only wear a coronavirus mask if it had the 1984 photo allegedly showing Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam in blackface emblazoned on it. At least three Black university employees resigned as a result of the tweet.“We attempted to meet several times with the Liberty University Board of Trustees Executive Committee but were unsuccessful in doing so," Robert Raskopf, the lead counsel representing Falwell, said in a statement. “Thus, we were forced to seek remedy for Mr. Falwell's ongoing injuries and damage to his reputation through the Court.”Liberty University did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.

But just as Trump offered a quid pro quo to Zelensky, China has something to gain by currying favor with Trump. Beijing is embroiled in a trade war with the United States that has throttled the Chinese economy. Talks between the two governments have stalled. “I have a lot of options on China, but if they don’t do what we want, we have tremendous power,” Trump said a half minute before making the investigation request.This is not the first time Trump has openly requested that a foreign government intervene. During the 2016 election, he infamously called on Russia to attempt to hack into Hillary Clinton’s computers. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said. By contrast, one of the most unusual things about his attempt to strong-arm Ukraine into investigating the Bidens was the White House’s attempt to cover it up.Trump’s remarks today marked a return to form.Just as Russia is a major intelligence adversary of the United States, China is already engaged in a massive spying operation against the U.S. Trump has been clear-eyed about the scale and cost of Chinese espionage against American companies. Yet, by inviting an investigation into the Bidens, Trump implies that he’s extending a free pass, as he did with Russia three years ago.The U.S. government does sometimes ask foreign governments for assistance in criminal investigations. But that’s not what’s happening here. Trump isn’t requesting that China (or Ukraine) assist an existing FBI investigation. He’s asking it to open its own investigation, which would hurt a political opponent. And crucially, he’s doing so without ever actually lodging any accusation of criminal behavior.Trump appears to be referring to business dealings by Hunter Biden, former Vice President Joe Biden’s son. In 2013, Hunter rode to Beijing with his father on Air Force Two. According to some accounts, he conducted business while on the trip. Regardless, it’s clear that Hunter made lots of money in business deals in China, evidently by trading on his famous name. As Sarah Chayes recently wrote in The Atlantic, this is both gross and completely legal.Even Trump has not made any claim that Hunter or Joe broke any laws. “Nobody has any doubt that they weren’t crooked,” Trump said today. “That was a crooked deal, 100 percent.” This is just bluster. Take such a vague accusation to any police station or prosecutor’s office, and see how fast you get laughed back onto the street. If Trump has a claim of lawbreaking, he should bring it forward. Besides, it’s hypocritical: Trump’s own daughter has business interests in China that benefit from her father’s fame and position.Why would Trump so brazenly call on an American rival to interfere in the 2020 election, when he’s already in grave danger for calling on a country to interfere in the election? Because he doesn’t learn from his mistakes. Because his goal is not to defeat the impeachment inquiry, but to go around it. Because it worked for him in the 2016 election—and since winning is his paramount value, he’ll do whatever it takes to win in 2020, as well. David A. Grahamis a staff writer atThe Atlantic. Connect Facebook Twitter

BRUSSELS—Facebook Inc. has a message for regulators and policy makers concerned about the company’s harvesting of user information: Don’t treat data as a simple resource like oil.Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications, said Monday that antitrust officials should be careful not to treat data like other commodities that could be monopolized, but rather as something more complex that can be shared and kept at the same time.“We think it is legitimate to ask profound questions about how data is held,” Mr. Clegg said at a briefing with journalists on Monday. But he added that officials defining what he called the orthodoxy of competition policy should “reconfigure old concepts” and “relinquish themselves of the idea that [using data] is the same as using finite resources in finite, one-off ways.”Mr. Clegg’s statement comes as tech companies including Facebook and Alphabet Inc.’s Google face growing antitrust scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic for their control and use of user data. In the U.S., both the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are probing the companies.The European Commission, the European Union’s antitrust enforcer, is also in the early stages of probes into how both Google and Facebook gather and monetize data about their users for advertising purposes, according to a commission spokeswoman.

The memo was written by aides to Devin Nunes, chairman of the House intelligence committee and a member of the Trump transition team. The committee is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election but the inquiry has devolved into a fight about the ​separate FBI investigation​, now​ led by special counsel Robert Mueller​. On Friday, Nunes published the memo after Donald Trump declassified it. The memo revolves around a wiretap on Carter Page, an adviser to the Trump campaign, alleging the FBI omitted key information when it applied for the wiretap. The findings “raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain DoJ and FBI interactions” with the court that approves surveillance requests, the memo says. It also claims “a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses”.The memo criticizes investigators who applied for the wiretap, saying they used material provided by an ex-British agent, Christopher Steele, without sufficiently disclosing their source. The memo says Steele was “desperate that Trump not get elected”. The memo also says texts between an FBI agent and FBI attorney “demonstrated a clear bias against Trump” and says there is “no evidence of any co-operation or conspiracy between Page” and another Trump aide under investigation, George Papadopoulos.The memo casts deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein in a negative light. ​Rosenstein could fire Mueller. The president, said to dislike Rosenstein, could fire and replace him. The FBI ​argued against the memo’s release. Democrats wrote a rebuttal and sided with the bureau. ​The president reportedly told associates he believes the memo will help discredit the special counsel.Alan Yuhas

A few days before he died of a drug overdose, Sally’s (not her real name) younger brother called her to make plans.“Someone had given him gold-class movie tickets and he wanted to take me to see Batman v Superman,” she told a coroners court this week. “He was looking forward to our regular Sunday family dinner and he was talking about all the TV shows that he wanted to watch.“And then he was gone.”In May 2016, Sally’s brother, RG, who cannot be named because of a court order, was found dead in the unit where he lived alone on Sydney’s northern beaches. A “smart, funny and frustratingly charismatic” 22-year-old with a “quick wit, a cheesy grin and a cutting sense of humour”, RG nonetheless had a long history of drug abuse. Beginning from the age of about 15 when he began drinking alcohol and smoking cannabis, he had progressed to amphetamines, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine. He had attended drug rehabilitation and was on a methadone program but had apparently relapsed.On the day he was found dead, his parents had gone to pick him up from his apartment before the Sunday dinner he had been looking forward to. They found him slumped over on his knees on the lounge-room floor, surrounded by drug paraphernalia.A toxicology report found he had died of an overdose from a combination of drugs, including the prescription opioid fentanyl.RG’s death is one of six examined this week by the New South Wales deputy coroner, Harriet Grahame, as part of a special inquest into the rise of opiate addiction in the state. The inquest was established after the coroner’s office noticed a spate of opiate deaths across Sydney within a few weeks in May 2016. Initially, investigators feared the deaths might have been linked to a bad batch of imported opiates. The truth may be more unsettling. Far from an outlier, the deaths were what counsel assisting the inquest Peggy Dwyer described as merely a “snapshot” of the scale of opiate-related deaths in the state which she were at “record levels in Australia and internationally”. All six deaths examined by the coroner this week were the result of an overdose from various opiates. Fentanyl, in particular, was found to be a contributor in three of the six cases. But only one of the six had a valid prescription for the drugs they died from. Developed in the late 1950s by a Belgian chemist, fentanyl is a synthetic opioid up to 100 times more potent than morphine. It came into widespread use in medicine during the mid-1990s with the introduction of the transdermal patch that releases the drug into the patient’s bloodstream over two or three days.But like its prescription opioid cousins, misuse of the drug has become part of the problem of opiate addiction. Fentanyl abusers commonly extract the drug from patches in which it’s sold. It is then injected, smoked or even chewed. But the drug’s potency means it poses a particular risk of overdose: the difference between drug-induced oblivion and death is wafer-thin. According to the the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the rate of deaths caused by synthetic opioids such as fentanyl jumped from 3.1 per 100,000 in 2015 to 6.2 per 100,000 in 2016. In October last year the US president, Donald Trump, declared it a public health emergency.Now the question being asked by Australian health authorities is whether the same magnitude of crisis could be exported here. In Australia, opioid deaths increased by 60% in 2011 and 2015 compared with the previous decade. Deaths caused by pharmaceutical opioid overdoses now exceed heroin deaths by between two and two-and-a-half times. Most of those deaths were caused by accidental overdoses of oxycodone, morphine and codeine but over the past decade fentanyl has emerged as an increasing contributor to the spiralling casualty count. According to the National Coronial Information System, fentanyl was at least partly responsible for 130 opioid-related deaths between 2007 and 2011. Between 2013 and 2017 it had risen to 230. Dwyer said misuse of the drug was a “particular concern” for NSW police. Between March 2016 and February 2018, opiates were responsible for 26% of drug overdose deaths in the state, and 32% of those were directly attributed to fentanyl. But beyond sheer scale, there has remained an important distinction between the issue in North America and Australia. Dr Marianne Jauncey, who runs the medically supervised drug-injecting centre in Kings Cross, told the inquest this week that there was an important difference between misuse of prescription and illicit fentanyl.Opiate addicts access prescription fentanyl through either so-called “doctor shopping” or by buying on-sold prescription versions of the drug from dealers. Illicit fentanyl analogues meanwhile are produced mostly by chemical companies in China who custom-design variants of the drug. The drug’s potency makes it appealing for commercial dealers because they can charge more for smaller quantities but the drug’s analogues can be more dangerous than pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl because slight changes to the drug’s formula can make dosage harder to gauge for users. In the US and Canada, the importation of illicit fentanyl has been a major driver of the rise in overdose deaths. A recent US Senate subcommittee report investigated the presence of online fentanyl dealers and identified more than 500 sales totalling $230,000 involving six online sellers, mostly from China. The subcommittee also identified seven people who died from fentanyl overdoses after sending money and receiving packages from one of the online sellers.Authorities believe most users in Australia are still accessing prescription-grade fentanyl. A drug user who gave evidence at the inquest this week said a 100-microgram patch of fentanyl sold for about $100 in Sydney.But Jauncey said she feared it was only a matter of time before the more dangerous illicit fentanyl became more widely available. “The reality is I can’t gaze into a crystal ball and I don’t know what future holds [but] my concern is that as far as I’m aware much of illicit fentanyl is produced in China and we know that there are already strong illegal trade routes between Australia and China,” she said.“The only protective factor is the size of our market, which pales in comparison to North America. Other than that I can’t really see why we wouldn’t get it.”The inquest heard evidence that illicit fentanyl had been picked up by Australian customs in some seizures, and this week the Guardian contacted online sellers based in North America and China on a drug-selling marketplace on the dark web.All claimed to be able to distribute fentanyl analogue products to Australia. One China-based distributor said packages were sent via Germany or South Korea to avoid detection.Part of this week’s inquest in Sydney looked at the availability of naloxone, a drug which can overturn the effects of an opioid overdose.Naloxone is listed as a schedule 3 drug under the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, meaning it can be accessed from a pharmacist without a prescription.Dr Nicholas Lintzeris said that, in NSW, emergency departments would begin trialling handing out the drug to people who overdose. It follows a separate trial in which 500 take-home kits of naloxone were distributed to health workers and opioid users.But he told the inquest that there are still issues with its distribution. Prescriptions are limited to the intended user of the opioids, meaning family members of opioid users are not able to access the drug if they are no its intended user.And, he said, the stigma attached to drug users still acted as a barrier to access. “It’s the same kind of discussions that we were having 30 years ago,” he said.During the inquest – which will resume in August – the deputy coroner said RG’s story showed that “people who died from opiate overdoses are our brothers, our children, our community members.“This is not a strange class of people ... This is happening across our community.” Topics Drugs Sydney New South Wales Health news

It was 2015, and Trump campaign chair to-be Paul Manafort had a problem. For years, he’d been flush with cash paid by Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych for his firm’s consulting work. When Yanukovych fled to Russia in 2014, however, that money dried up.According to special counsel Robert Mueller’s latest indictment (pdf), Manafort’s savings were illiquid, hidden offshore in Cyprus, and he didn’t want to bring them onshore legally and pay taxes on them. So he and his then-number two Rick Gates (later a fellow top Trump campaign aide) allegedly cooked up various schemes to use US properties, which Manafort had already bought with offshore funds, as collateral for loans from US banks.First, they had to convince banks that Manafort’s firm was still raking in money, explain Mueller’s charges. So the pair doctored profit and loss statements to claim that in 2015 that they had earned $4 million more than they actually had, and $3.5 million more in 2016, the indictment alleges. But doing that involved a technological trick that has vexed many a computer user: changing a PDF file into an editable Word document.Manafort, it seems, couldn’t get his head round the conundrum, but Gates—23 years younger—knew what he was doing. Their skill exchange created a potentially incriminating paper trail: Manafort, then 66, emailed Gates a 2016 profit and loss statement in PDF form, which showed a $600,000 loss. Gates then turned it into a Word document, the indictment says. Manafort edited the resulting document, topping up the balance by $3.5 million and sent it back to Gates to turn it back into a PDF. Manafort then allegedly sent the doctored file off to an unnamed bank for a loan application.The bank apparently didn’t see through these shenanigans—or didn’t act on them if it did. Mueller’s indictment says that bank gave Manafort $16 million in two loans between July 2016 and January 2017.

But as Mary’s Place settles into its new space after opening in March, the spotlight turns to the family homeless shelter as a symbol of the longstanding disparity that advocates insist large corporations help address. For Amazon, it's a stark display of have-and-have-nots, given that some blame the tech giant’s explosive growth over the past decade for making living in Seattle too costly for a growing number of people.When Amazon's offices reopen post-pandemic, the tens of thousands of high-paid tech workers who helped drive up housing costs in the region will now share its pricey downtown neighborhood with vulnerable families who can’t afford any place to live.Marty Hartman, executive director of Mary’s Place, said the shelter is a life-saving gift for the local community. The location near public transit is ideal, as is its proximity to Amazon workers who regularly volunteer and donate, she said.“I think it’ll take everyone to help and contribute. Homelessness is a crisis that isn’t going away,” Hartman said.Amazon estimates the new Mary’s Place building and ongoing utilities and maintenance will amount to a $100 million commitment to the homeless shelter program. It’s among the largest homeless shelters in the state and the company’s single largest charitable contribution to its hometown.The company has promised to host the shelter in the gleaming eight-story facility for as long as it’s needed.Mary’s Place offers private rooms and is expected to house 1,000 people a year, while the other end is dedicated to Amazon’s cloud computing unit. The shelter shares the “Amazonia” aesthetic throughout: exposed pipes, citrus-colored walls popping against concrete floors, even signs inscribed in the tech giant’s signature office font.Still, the shelter doesn't erase the history of resentment over the wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and its workers, which peaked after the company and other corporations successfully pressured the Seattle City Council to rescind a tax on large companies that would have funded homelessness services in 2018.Months later, Bezos, the world’s richest man whose stake in the company he founded is now worth more than $160 billion, announced his long-awaited private charitable fund would tackle homelessness — an irony noted by locals and philanthropy scholars alike.To date, the Bezos Day One Fund has given $196 million in grants to organizations working on family homelessness issues across the country. He is also creating free preschools, though little else is known about the organization since Bezos first announced the $2 billion private philanthropy fund in 2018. An Amazon representative declined to comment on Bezos' behalf.Sara Rankin, a homeless rights advocate and lawyer who leads the Seattle-based Homeless Rights Advocacy Project, said Mary’s Place is a safe investment for Amazon because the nonprofit caters to the most sympathetic kind of homelessness. But Rankin said the shelter ultimately does not address the epicenter of the city’s homelessness crisis.“It’s not bold and it’s not significant, at least with respect to the crisis,” she said. “It’s not as significant as it needs to be. It’s certainly not systemic.”Amazon’s decision to take in Mary’s Place, which has multiple locations around the region, Rankin said, means the company is largely ignoring the chronically homeless who are often suffering from mental health or addiction issues, who are the most expensive and controversial demographic to address.Companies like Amazon could virtually eliminate Seattle’s tent cities if they helped fund more permanent affordable housing with social services managers to support those struggling the most, Rankin said.Amazon notes it gave $6.6 million last year to Plymouth Housing, a local nonprofit trying to raise $75 million to build such programs.Amazon’s real estate chief John Schoettler said the partnership between the company and Mary's Place began when Amazon’s massive expansion of office space led it to acquire a former Travelodge hotel. Amazon in 2016 gifted it to Mary’s Place for one year while the company prepared to demolish and construct an office building. It later decided to give the nonprofit half of the new building permanently.Yet to some local critics, the move was seen as too little, too late. Amazon and Bezos had long been accused of not being nearly as generous as other corporate giants in the region, such as Microsoft and its founder Bill Gates, the world's most high-profile philanthropist.The globally focused Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has for years given to homelessness initiatives in the Seattle area. One of Gates' first projects when the foundation started in 2000 was funding a $40 million family homelessness initiative that built more than 1,400 units of transitional housing in the region.Meanwhile, Bezos’ wealth has funded high-profile side ventures including the space exploration company Blue Origin and The Washington Post newspaper.Bezos this year also launched his personal $10 billion commitment to fight climate change called the Bezos Earth Fund, his largest donation to date. Amazon then bought the naming rights to a Seattle sports venue and officially renamed it “Climate Pledge Arena." It's a nod to the company's push to get other companies to join it in being carbon neutral by 2040 and marks another unorthodox and unsubtle philanthropic gesture. Amazon’s growing portfolio of civic interests also includes funding a restaurant job training program and various school and educational causes.Defending Amazon, Schoettler called Mary's Place “an initial step” and that the company shouldn’t be blamed for Seattle’s homelessness crisis, as zoning laws restricting the building of housing and drug addiction are among the issues the city must first address.“We want to be a part of the collective process of helping to solve problems. And I as person and as a longtime Seattleite, I don’t want to be blamed for issues when we’re trying to do some really good things,” Schoettler said.This tension over what big businesses owe to their communities will always exist as long as there is inequity, said Nicole Esparza, a University of Southern California professor who studies urban inequality and philanthropy.Though she suggested Amazon could better support the poor if it increased wages for its hourly warehouse workers, Esparza said Amazon still deserves credit for being innovative with its charitable contributions.“Amazon doesn’t have to give to homelessness. And so it is a gift, and some people would say any gift is a gift,” Esparza said. “Who knows how long it will last?"———Follow Sally Ho on Twitter at http://twitter.com/—sallyho

The internet can make you feel like you have all of this control over the political Wait, sorry. How does this — wait. Did I just lose? “Internetting with Amanda Hess.” (ALL IMAGES SOURCED FROM THE INTERNET) “Pokemon Go to the polls.” Hillary Clinton was famously one of the least charismatic politicians. “I’m just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids.” But on the internet, her image took on a life of its own. It’s almost as if Hillary’s fans breathed charisma into her on social media. Hillary often seemed at her most charismatic in GIF form, when her most charming moments could be put on endless loop and passed around as totems of her character. Meanwhile, Hillary’s detractors were working in the opposite direction, isolating moments that made her look deranged, ugly and sick. This is political candidate as avatar. We’re no longer just analyzing how candidates express themselves. We want to express ourselves through them. On the internet, our support of candidates is being encoded through these moments where they seem to represent us, not as actual political representatives voting for our interests, but as people acting how we’d like to imagine ourselves acting. “I’m reclaiming my time, yeah.” Memes put a new twist on the old idea of charismatic authority in politics. Charismatic leaders used to imbue themselves with mythos, claiming to possess special qualities and cults of personality around themselves. But on the internet, a lot of that work has been transferred to citizens who take their leaders’ tics and blow them up into superhuman form. And as they do it, they’re creating really strong tribal and emotional ties around those personalities. If you make a meme about a candidate and then they become president, it can feel like you created a piece of the presidential persona, like a part of you is president. Memes give us the power to build leaders’ personalities or destroy them. We used to talk about gaffes. The idea seems quaint now. “Grab and grab and grab.” “Grab and grab.” There’s no longer any fixed idea of a candidate to be disrupted by a gaffe. “Such a nasty woman.” Our conception of politicians is now made up of sets of competing polarized memes. Any moment can be manipulated into a positive or negative, depending on your allegiance. And because memes can morph to accommodate almost any position it’s easier than e ver to take candidates’ images and twist them to our own ends. Facts don’t matter to memes. The meme of this confused blond lady started out as pictures of a Brazilian soap actress contemplating her character’s inner turmoil in jail. But when people started superimposing math equations on her face, she turned into a symbol of confusion or deep conspiratorial calculations. The Babadook was a horrifying movie villain before he was pushed in front of a rainbow flag and restyled as a fabulous gay icon. Because memes don’t need to grapple with reality, they spread a lot faster than typical forms of political speech. And in presidential politics, we’ve never seen anyone benefit from this more “You are fake news.” than Donald Trump. Trump had no clear ideology, the vaguest sketches of ideas, a bottomless thirst for attention, and a flair for drama: the perfect base for endless meming. His campaign rallies became like incubators for ideas with viral potential. Think about the defining meme of Trumpism. “We need to build a wall.” “We need to build a wall.” It never made any practical sense that the United States would build a 2,000-mile wall and that Mexico would pay for it, but “A big, beautiful wall.” Any time reality tried to get in the way, Trump would double down on the meme. “10 feet higher.” “The wall just got 10 feet higher.” For his biggest fans, Trump himself is the ultimate meme. They’ve become so invested in promoting his persona that his promises have become almost irrelevant, like outdated versions of a meme that have been replaced by the next amusing thing. That’s the seductive danger of democracy as meme. It can make us feel like we have more personal control over a politician, but it’s the politician who is seizing the real power, becoming immune to criticism and less accountable to us. Next time on “Internetting” — Why beauty apps make you feel ugly.

On stage at the Code Media conference last month, Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partnerships, fired a warning shot to publishers who think they get a raw deal from Facebook. ”My job is to make sure there is quality news on Facebook and that publishers who want to be on Facebook … have a business model that works,” Brown said. “If anyone feels this isn’t the right platform for them, they should not be on Facebook.”Brown’s barbed message to the media was a departure from Facebook’s promises of support for trustworthy journalism and local news subscriptions. It was also a sign of increased tension between dominant tech platforms and publishers, who are trying to seize on widespread concerns about big tech companies to gain a bigger share of the digital ad market, where Facebook and Google now control 73 percent of US revenue.This week, the media industry will gain a potential new weapon in that dispute. Representative David Cicilline (D-Rhode Island) plans to introduce a bill that would exempt publishers from antitrust enforcement so they can negotiate collectively over terms for distributing their content. Cicilline says the bill is designed to level the playing field between publishers and the tech giants, not dictate the outcome. Without an exemption, collective action by publishers could run afoul of antitrust laws around colluding over price or refusal to deal with competitors.The prime driver of the bill is the News Media Alliance, a trade association formerly known as the Newspaper Association of America, which represents more than 2,000 newspapers in the US and Canada; the group has been lobbying for such an exemption for a year. “Facebook and Google are our primary regulators,” says David Chavern, the group’s president and CEO. The digital duopoly determines how content is delivered, what gets prioritized, what shows up in searches and news feeds, all without input from publishers. Publishers shoulder all of the cost, the digital duopoly reaps most of the profits.Chavern says the alliance is seeking changes in five areas: platforms should share data about the publishers’ readers; better highlight trusted brands; support subscriptions for publishers; and potentially share more ad revenue and consider paying for some content.Silicon Valley companies swallowed a number of industries on their way to the top of the stock market. But Chavern believes the news business warrants intervention because of its role in a healthy democracy. “The republic is not going to suffer terribly if we have bad cat video or even bad movies or bad TV. The republic will suffer if we have bad journalism,” he says, pointing to data from Pew that shows newspaper advertising fell by $4 billion from 2014 to 2016, even though web traffic for the top U.S. newspapers grew 42 percent during the same time period.Facebook and Google did not respond to requests for comment.Chavern says, even on Capitol Hill, people don’t always understand that reporting and distributing news costs money. He said he was recently talking to a congressional staffer who suggested that coverage about events like hurricanes would always be free. “Why?” Chavern asked, pointing out the cost of sending reporters. “There’s no world in which you can build a future of journalism off of free.”Cicilline’s bill is the latest of several that seek to rein in tech companies on antitrust grounds. None have gained momentum. Given Congressional gridlock and decades of lax antitrust enforcement, Wednesday’s proposal is best interpreted as negotiating leverage. In a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Chavern raised the prospect of publishers collectively withholding content from Facebook.

It started with an algorithm. No, wait, the baby came first and then the algorithm. When creative technologist Jonathan Plackett and comic writer and artist Karrie Fransman had a daughter, they wondered if it would be possible to create a program that “swapped all gendered language in any text”, he to she, daughter to son and so on. Having built it, they applied it to the ur-narrative text, the fairytale, choosing the Fairy Books, edited by Andrew Lang, published at the back end of the 19th century and into the 20th. The result is blunt and impartial, deliberately so: there’s no finer human judgment applied story by story (is a pantaloon male or female? What about a ruffle?), it’s a straight computer-says-she switcheroo. The illustrations are quite special, particularly when they veer into fantasy. I loved the forest full of parrots in “Little Red Riding Hood”, the lizards and mice in “Cinder”.Plainly, the core audience is the malleable young mind, a child at the age of such innocence that they haven’t yet internalised the gender prejudice all around them, and who will head into the world thinking of women as adventurers and men as very much in touch with their emotions. But more fascinating – particularly if your children are too old and cynical for such an enterprise – is to read it yourself for what jars, what surprises, what seems implausible, what repels.While in life I have no problem with a female chief executive, for some reason I can’t get my head around a lady miller. Dads who cook? Sure, I had one of those myself. Yet when “One day [Little Red Riding Hood’s] father, having made some custards, said to him …” I couldn’t even concentrate on the instruction (which is “take these to your grandfather”, obviously) for the din of my interior monologue, saying: “DADS DON’T COOK CUSTARD”.The obvious and persistent bias – and I wonder whether, also, the most life-defining – is the beauty standard, the fact that a woman is judged by her appearance in a way a man is not, that her ugliness or beauty both inform the world’s view of her and become the whole of her, excluding all other traits. It’s revealed in a fact as simple as “beauty” functioning as a noun where “handsome” does not. How could a handsome man contract into “a handsome”? How would we know how daring he also was? “The Sleeping Handsome in the Wood”, “Handsome and the Beast”, all ram home, with a light, rueful humour, the timeless message to a woman in fiction: be beautiful, or be evil, or go home.The requirement of thinness is separate to beauty – to be not thin enough, to break “above a dozen laces in trying to be laced up close, that they might have a fine slender shape”, is to make yourself ridiculous, a truism that I tended to swallow unexamined until the ugly sisters were ugly brothers. These tales are not voicing the modern obsession with an emaciated female body shape; rather, they iterate the Fay Weldon principle, that societies throughout history have wanted women to be smaller, not to be desirable but just so we take up less space.Beauty being the paramount quality, it stands to reason that female envy would be a powerful force – indeed, in many myths, the only force: why else are stepmothers always so damn mean? Yet only when six sisters become six brothers do the more casual allusions to it leap out: there isn’t really a beautiful heroine in folklore whose sisters don’t hate her and wish she’d go and live with some ogre – or failing that, almost anybody.Under every rock, I found dozens of my own unconscious biases, wriggling like earwigs under the exposure. When the merchant in “Handsome and the Beast” loses all her money, having been double-crossed by her trading agents, there was – so help me – a tiny interior voice going “why are women so gullible, they’re always getting ripped off by their agents”. When I chased this voice down to its source, it turned out I was thinking of Leonard Cohen, who is apparently an honorary woman in my subconscious purely by dint of having been ripped off by his manager.Absolutely stark and unignorable is the prejudice against an older, or uglier woman, trying to sexually exploit a beautiful young man: the female Beast, even the Queen in “Cinder” (mother to the Princess who throws the ball, who “old as she was, could not help watching” Cinder) seem predatory and unnatural as cougars, while as men they were sinned against or harmless. Likewise, the expectation of maternal altruism vexes what were previously totally sound scenarios: sure, a father might give his daughter to a beast to save his own skin, but how could a mother do that? Of course there are stories that make more sense with a gender-swap. It’s totally legit for a princess to choose a mate by the size of his feet.I found myself wanting an algorithm that swapped rich for poor, aristocrats for ordinary folk, to bring the same spirit of interrogation to class bias, the assumption that the nobler you are, the braver and more moral. One thing I’d forgotten about the genre is how loaded it is with stuff: chests full of gold, the finest silks – paragraph after paragraph just shopping lists of luxury items. I’d love to see that turned on its head, so that the stuff-afforders weren’t necessarily always the dragon-slayers. That’s the problem with liberals, give us an inch …• Gender Swapped Fairy Tales is published by Faber (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Topics Fairytales Book of the day Children and teenagers reviews

Two militant fighters for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a foreign terrorist organization, are expected to arrive in the United States today in FBI custody on charges related to their participation in a brutal hostage-taking scheme that resulted in the deaths of four American citizens, as well as the deaths of British and Japanese nationals, in Syria.Former British citizens Alexanda Amon Kotey, 36, and El Shafee Elsheikh, 32, are expected to make their initial appearances in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia this afternoon.“These charges are the product of many years of hard work in pursuit of justice for our citizens slain by ISIS. Although we cannot bring them back, we can and will seek justice for them, their families, and for all Americans,” said Attorney General William P. Barr. “Our message to other terrorists around the world is this — if you harm Americans, you will face American arms on the battlefield or American law in our courtrooms. Either way, you will be pursued to the ends of the earth until justice is done.”“Today, we remember the victims, Jim Foley, Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig, and Kayla Mueller, and their families who are forever affected by these senseless acts of violence,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. “These families have suffered with the painful loss of their loved ones at the hands of brutal killers; today's charges demonstrate the FBI's dedication and commitment to giving them the justice they deserve. We, along with our partners in the U.S. Government, remain steadfast in our duty to bring to justice those who have harmed our citizens -- no matter where they are, and no matter how long it takes. I'm grateful to the men and women of the FBI, the victims' families, and our domestic and international partners, for their tireless efforts to bring us to where we stand today with the prosecution of these men on U.S. soil.”According to allegations in the indictment, from 2012 to 2015, Kotey, Elsheikh, Mohamed Emwazi (deceased), and a fourth British citizen (CC-1) currently incarcerated in Turkey, were ISIS fighters and participated in the abduction of American and European hostages in Syria. The men also allegedly engaged in a prolonged pattern of physical and psychological violence against the hostages, including against American citizens James Wright Foley, Kayla Jean Mueller, Steven Joel Sotloff, and Peter Edward Kassig. Due to their English accents and their history together in the United Kingdom, the four men were often referred to by hostages as “The Beatles”.From August 2014 through October 2014, ISIS released videos depicting Emwazi’s barbaric beheadings of Foley, Sotloff, and British citizens David Haines and Alan Henning. In November 2014, ISIS released a video depicting the decapitated head of Kassig. In January 2015, ISIS released videos with images of two dead Japanese citizens.“Kotey and Elsheikh are alleged to have committed horrific crimes in support of ISIS, including hostage taking resulting in the deaths of four American citizens,” said G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. “Their alleged acts have shattered the lives of four American families. What each these families have sought more than anything else is for these defendants to have their day in court. Well, that day has come. While we cannot return their loved ones or undo the pain that these families face each day, we can do everything possible to ensure that the defendants are held accountable for their alleged savage actions.”According to allegations in the indictment, Kotey, Elsheikh, and Emwazi, worked closely with Abu Muhammed al-Adnani, a former leading ISIS commander and chief media spokesperson. Until he was killed in a United States military airstrike in August 2016, Adnani reported directly to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the former self-proclaimed leader of ISIS. Baghdadi was killed during a United States military operation in Syria in October 2019.“The indictments of Alexanda Kotey and Elshafee Elsheikh are the result of more than eight years of tireless work by the FBI Washington Field Office and personnel across the U.S. Government and the international law enforcement community,” said Acting Assistant Director in Charge James A. Dawson, FBI Washington Field Office. “These individuals allegedly conducted a litany of heinous and barbaric crimes as part of their duties as members of ISIS and for too long, the families of their victims have suffered while awaiting the day they would finally see justice for their loved ones. The men and women of the FBI remain dedicated to bringing the full force of the US justice system upon those who harm our citizens in furtherance of terrorism.”Kotey, Elsheikh, and Emwazi met repeatedly with Adnani concerning the hostage-taking scheme and other matters. Between November 2012 and February 2015, Kotey, Elsheikh, Emwazi, and other ISIS fighters committed acts inflicting pain, suffering, cruelty and mistreatment on American, British, and other hostages in captivity. Throughout the captivity of the American hostages and others, Kotey, Elsheikh, and Emwazi allegedly supervised detention facilities holding hostages and were responsible for transferring hostages between detention facilities, in addition to engaging in a prolonged pattern of physical and psychological violence against hostages. From November 2013 to February 2015, Kotey and Elsheikh allegedly coordinated the Western-hostage ransom negotiations conducted by email. Kotey and Elsheikh knew and understood that the release of American and other hostages was conditioned on the transfer of large sums of money or concessions from the United States government, such as the release of Muslim prisoners.According to allegations in the indictment, on or about April 25, 2014, Kotey, Elsheikh, and Emwazi forcibly moved the Italian, Danish, and German citizens, along with two other European humanitarian aid workers, to an isolated area approximately two miles from their prison to witness the execution of a Syrian prisoner. Kotey and Elsheikh knew and understood this execution was part of the hostage negotiation process. Emwazi executed the Syrian prisoner by shooting him in the back of the head and then numerous times in the torso as he fell into a grave. Kotey instructed the hostages to kneel at the side of the grave and witness the execution while holding handmade signs pleading for their release. Elsheikh videotaped the execution of the Syrian hostage, and after the execution the three men returned the European hostages to the prison with Elsheikh telling one hostage, “You’re next, [First name].”The indictment alleges that ISIS fighters also forcibly seized the following additional individuals: Two United Kingdom citizens, an Italian citizen, a Danish citizen, a German citizen, four French citizens, three Spanish citizens, a New Zealand citizen, and a Russian citizen.Kotey and Elsheikh were captured together in January 2018 by the Syrian Democratic Forces as they attempted to escape Syria for Turkey. Emwazi was killed in a United States military airstrike conducted in November 2015 in Syria. The American VictimsJames Wright Foley – In November 2012, Kotey, Elsheikh, Emwazi, and other ISIS fighters forcibly seized and detained Foley, a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. On or about Aug. 19, 2014, ISIS’s media center released a video depicting Emwazi beheading Foley.Kayla Jean Mueller – In August 2013, ISIS fighters forcibly seized and detained Mueller in Syria. Beginning in or about October 2014, Baghdadi sexually abused Mueller against her will while she was held captive in Syria. On or about Feb. 7, 2015, Mueller’s family received an email from ISIS fighters confirming Mueller’s death in Syria.Steven Joel Sotloff – In August 2013, ISIS fighters forcibly seized and detained Sotloff in Syria. On or about Sept. 2, 2014, ISIS’s media center released a video depicting Emwazi beheading Sotloff.Peter Edward Kassig – In October 2013, ISIS fighters forcibly seized and detained Kassig in Syria. On or about Nov. 16, 2014, ISIS’s media center released a video depicting the decapitated head of Kassig.Kotey and Elsheikh are each charged with conspiracy to commit hostage taking resulting in death; four counts of hostage taking resulting in death; conspiracy to murder United States citizens outside of the United States; conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists — hostage taking and murder — resulting in death; and conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization resulting in death. If convicted, each defendant faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.The Department of Justice expresses its profound appreciation to the United Kingdom government as well as the Syrian Democratic Forces for their dedicated commitment to assist the United States in seeking justice for all the victims of the alleged crimes. This case is being investigated by the FBI’s Washington Field Office. The Justice Department’s National Security Division and Office of International Affairs provided valuable assistance.First Assistant U.S. Attorney Raj Parekh, and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Dennis M. Fitzpatrick, John T. Gibbs and Aidan Taft Grano, and Trial Attorney Alicia Cook of the National Security Division‘s Counterterrorism Section (CTS) are handling the prosecution, with the assistance of CTS Deputy Chief Bridget Behling.An indictment is merely an accusation. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

The first question Fox News host Sandra Smith asked her colleague Chris Wallace when he joined her to talk about the whistleblower complaint against President Trump at the end of a week packed with bombshell news was: “Did it change anything?” “Oh, I think it’s changed quite a lot, Sandra,” the Fox News Sunday host replied. “And the spinning that has been done by the president’s defenders over the last 24 hours since this very damaging whistleblower complaint came out, the spinning is not surprising, but it is astonishing, and I think deeply misleading.” Wallace did not name names, but he could have easily been referring to other Fox News colleagues like Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery, who moved goalposts to claim quid pro quo isn’t “necessarily illegal” or Tucker Carlson, who has been waging all-out war against any suggestion of wrongdoing by Trump, including directly mocking his own colleagues. A source close to Wallace, however, claimed the Fox News anchor was not referring to his colleagues when he referenced the spin coming for the president’s defenders.After Wallace spent several minutes laying out just how credible the whistleblower complaint has proven to be so far—and praising him or her for going through proper channels, Smith attempted to point out “major inconsistencies,” echoing White House talking points directly as she claimed there was no “quid pro quo” in the phone call.“You don’t think that dirt on Joe Biden and Joe Biden’s son is a thing of value?” Wallace asked. As she tried to interrupt him, he continued, “You asked me a question, let me answer it, Sandra.” Wallace said he doesn’t necessarily believe there is a “hot solid case” for the president to be impeached, “but what is clear from reading the complaint is that it is a serious allegation” and that “a lot of it has proven to be borne out already.” “To dismiss this as a political hack,” Wallace said, as Trump and his Fox News loyalists have done, “seems to be to be an effort by the president’s defenders to make nothing out of something, and there is something here.” “For all of the efforts of a lot of people defending the president to pretend this is nothing, it’s not nothing,” he added. “It’s something.” Then, after Smith casually quoted Trump calling those who helped the whistleblower “close to spies,” Wallace stopped her in her tracks. “Can I say something about that?” he said. “That is very, deeply troubling. These are people inside an administration that are saying that something was going on that they were very, deeply troubled by.” He said, “To call them spies and to suggest that perhaps we should deal with them the way we’ve dealt with other people, with treason, which is in effect to execute them, really seems to be to strike at the very heart of what whistleblowers are all about.” Finally, in teasing his Fox News Sunday show for this weekend, Wallace said he “hopes” he’ll have someone on from the White House who can address the scandal, but so far no one has agreed to appear.

Huawei is the world's largest supplier of telecoms equipment, and its market share in Europe is estimated at between 35% and 40%. The EU announcement is a setback for US officials who have pressed European allies to take a much tougher line on Huawei. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made the costs explicit during a trip to Europe last month, when he warned allies that using Huawei equipment makes it "more difficult" for the United States to partner with them. Vice President Mike Pence has issued similar warnings, and the US Ambassador to Germany has threatened to curtail Berlin's access to US intelligence if Huawei products are used in its 5G networks.Yet Europe appears to be going its own way on the sensitive issue. "We need to do [the review] for ourselves," European Commissioner Julian King told reporters. "Not because anybody else has suggested that we need to do this or because we are reacting to steps taken anywhere else." BT (BT)said in December that it would not buy Huawei equipment for the core of its next generation 5G network. AndVodafone (VOD)has paused the installation of Huawei equipment in its core networks in Europe while it speaks with regulators, governments, security agencies and the Chinese company.Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said earlier in March that the US government's campaign against his company risks damaging America's international reputation.US warns Germany that using Huawei tech will come at a cost"If this US administration always treats other countries, companies or individuals in a ferocious way, then no one would dare invest in the United States," he told CNN.The company recently made its most aggressive move yet to counter American pressure, filing a lawsuit against the US government for barring federal agencies from using Huawei products.Ren claims that the US attempts to get other Western countries to block Huawei aren't a big concern."If they don't buy from us, then we sell to others," he told CNN. "We can downscale a little. We are not a public company, so we don't have to worry about lower profits leading to collapsing stock prices."Europe's approach to the 5G issue does not mean security officials aren't paying attention. The European Union will set equipment standards and identify products or suppliers that are "potentially non-secure."UK spies think they can handle Huawei in 5G networks."We have some kind of specific concerns connected with some producers, so everybody knows I'm talking about China and Huawei," European Commission vice president Andrus Ansip told reporters. "Do we have to worry about this, or not? I think we have to be worried about this."Huawei said it welcomed the "objective and proportionate" approach taken by the European Commission, adding it understood the cybersecurity concerns European regulators have. "We are firmly committed to continue working with all regulators and partners to make the 5G rollout in Europe a success," said Abraham Liu, Huawei's vice president for Europe.

Paul Manafort secretly paid a former chancellor of a European country to lobby US politicians for the Ukrainian government, special counsel Robert Mueller’s latest indictment charges (pdf).The accusations against the onetime manager of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and his number two Rick Gates give a thorough account of what anti-corruption experts call “reputation laundering.”Prosecutors say the scheme’s aim was seemingly to clean up the reputation of the government of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, particularly following his jailing of political rival and former prime minister Yulia Timoshenko.Here is how Mueller’s team lays out the case, according to the indictment:First, two Washington-based firms hired by Manafort and Gates in 2012 to act as lobbyists were told they would be “representing the government of Ukraine.” The indictment doesn’t name the firms, though previous reporting suggests these are likely to be the Podesta Group and Mercury. The firms set about lobbying members of Congress on issues such as sanctions against Ukraine, the validity of the country’s elections, and Timoshenko’s imprisonment.Those who are paid to do that kind of lobbying by a foreign power must register with the US government as “foreign agents,” under a system designed to reveal any paid political motivations. Instead, the firms allegedly acted as if they were representing the Brussels-based Center for a Modern Ukraine, a bogus organization set up by Yanukovych’s regime in 2012. To pay the firms, Manafort and his number two Rick Gates wired them more than $2 million from offshore shell companies in noted money-laundering hubs Cyprus and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Neither Mercury nor Podesta has been charged in the probe.Barack Obama’s State department had condemned Timoshenko’s imprisonment, so Manafort and Gates hired a law firm to write a report on whether the case was legitimate. The law firm is unnamed in the indictment but would seem to be top New York outfit Skadden Arps, which allegedly wrote a “whitewash” of the imprisonment. The indictment says Manafort and Gates secretly wired the law firm $4 million from an offshore account—money that allegedly wasn’t disclosed in the report. Manafort and Gates then hired a third lobbying firm to roll out the report, paying them $1 million from an offshore account.Finally, they hired a former chancellor of a European country to lead what they called the “Hapsburg group.” This was a “SUPER VIP” cabal of top European ex-politicians, who headed to the US to lobby more members of Congress and the executive branch. Manafort created a nongovernment agency that they would nominally work for, while acting at his “quiet direction.” He allegedly paid these politicians more than 2 million euros via four offshore accounts.Manafort has pleaded not guilty to all previous charges made by Mueller’s team. Gates today (Feb. 23) pleaded guilty to charges of a “conspiracy against the United States” and lying to the FBI. He has been cooperating with Mueller’s probe, the judge in the case said.

The search for talent outside Silicon Valley and Seattle has also been prompted by issues in the companies’ hometowns, which have not built enough housing to keep up with their growing work forces. San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland and Seattle are the four most expensive major cities in the country based on home values, according to data from Zillow. The median home in San Francisco is valued at almost $1.4 million and more than $733,000 in Seattle. Questions also abound over the quality and funding of the areas’ public school systems.“Every day as a C.E.O., you have employees coming to you saying, ‘I don’t make enough to buy a house for my family,’ and you already feel like you are paying through the nose,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, the real estate site based in Seattle. “Almost everyone is looking at other affordable places where you can open an office.”Some economists said the Trump administration’s tougher immigration policies could also restrict the tech giants from importing skilled workers from abroad to their West Coast headquarters. The Trump administration has increased the red tape in applying for H-1B visas for highly skilled workers and has denied petitions more often. Over a five-day window this April, employers submitted petitions for more than 190,000 specialized work visas, but only 85,000 can be granted annually.That has helped push some tech companies into building major outposts in Canada, particularly in Toronto and Vancouver. Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economics professor, said that even if H-1B workers were to come through in abundance, it would still make sense to put them in cheaper cities, like Austin. He said, “$100,000 goes a lot further in Austin than in Silicon Valley.”Yet even as the tech companies move beyond the West Coast, their choices to converge on cities or towns that are already highly educated, wealthy and well employed do not spread the wealth.More than 44 percent of all digital-service jobs in the United States were located in just 10 metro areas last year, including Seattle, San Francisco and San Jose, as well as New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Boston, according to research by Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. From 2015 to 2017, only nine metro areas increased their share of the nation’s tech work force, including the West Coast tech hubs, as well as Austin and Denver.“The tech industry concentrates in very few markets,” said Amy Liu, director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. “Our biggest concern is how do we make sure more cities, particularly midsized cities in the middle of the country, can be players in the tech economy?”

Mr. Trump may live for the cheers, but he did himself no favors with the firing. It led to the appointment of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, whose investigation soon proved to be far more of a headache for the White House than Mr. Comey. Already Mr. Mueller has secured indictments of some of Mr. Trump’s top aides and guilty pleas from others.Naturally, Mr. Trump has threatened or tried to fire Mr. Mueller and Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who appointed Mr. Mueller, and whom Mr. Trump appointed himself. Last week, enraged by Mr. Rosenstein’s refusal to turn over to congressional Republicans certain documents related to the Russia investigation, Mr. Trump tweeted that soon he “will have no choice but to use the powers granted to the Presidency and get involved!”It’s breathtaking and yet, by now, so predictable. Like aspiring authoritarians everywhere, Mr. Trump sees law enforcement in intensely personal terms. When the law investigates you, it’s a witch hunt; when it’s used to punish your enemies, it’s an essential tool.“Rule of law” is a generic-sounding term, but Mr. Comey’s firing, and all that has followed in its wake, provides an opportunity to reaffirm its true meaning. In brief, it’s the idea that all of us are equal under the law, and that government actors are both limited by it and accountable to it. Mr. Trump and his crew see it differently. Consider Vice President Mike Pence’s praise last week for a former Arizona sheriff, Joe Arpaio, who routinely violated the constitutional rights of black and brown people and then openly disobeyed a federal court order to stop. Mr. Pence called Mr. Arpaio a “champion” of the “rule of law.” That could only be true if “rule of law” meant the rule of whoever happens to be in office.Officials like Mr. Comey, Mr. Mueller and Mr. Rosenstein — Republicans first appointed by Republican presidents — stand for a principle that Donald Trump and his supporters not only don’t understand, but find deeply threatening. For this reason, Americans should remember May 9, 2017, as the beginning of one of the great tests of American democracy.

BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s interior minister is suggesting that his country can’t build a 5G mobile network without Chinese tech giant Huawei, at least for now, intervening in an issue that has caused tensions between the U.S. and its allies.Washington has been pressuring its allies to ban Huawei, the world’s biggest supplier of telecom gear, from new 5G networks. It alleges that the company poses an espionage threat.Germany, however, has decided not to ban Huawei from competing for contracts to build the country’s 5G networks, instead agreeing that companies must meet strict standards, which still could end up excluding the Chinese firm.ADVERTISEMENTInterior Minister Horst Seehofer, Germany’s top security official, was quoted Saturday as saying he is “against taking a product off the market just because there is a possibility that something might happen.”Seehofer said Germany must be protected against espionage and sabotage, but estimated that shutting out Chinese providers could delay building the new network by five to 10 years, the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported.“I don’t see that we can set up a 5G network in Germany in the short term without participation by Huawei,” Seehofer told the newspaper.

The events of the past 48 hours bring up a simple question: Based on what we know about the Ukraine-Trump saga, could any of the key players be charged with a crime? Allegations of wrongdoing are flying around — a record of a July 25 phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reads more like a mafia shakedown than a conversation between two world leaders. Trump asks Zelensky to do him a “favor,” i.e. dig up dirt on his political rival Joe Biden. Trump then suggested that Zelensky take this offline and talk with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and US Attorney William Barr about it. In the background, Trump had frozen American aid to Ukraine, a strong-arm move that some on the internet pointed out would make Tony Soprano proud. A day later, a whistleblower’s report was declassified and made available to the public. Among other things, the anonymous author said he feared that White House officials tried to conceal Trump’s conversation with Zelensky by placing the transcript of the call on a “separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature.” All of this was just in time for acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire to spend much of his day Thursday being grilled by members of the House Intelligence Committee about whether he helped cover up this report. A lot of Americans seem to think this is bad stuff. Already polls show a spike in support for impeaching the president. But is any of it illegal? It’s worth noting that the House, which has the sole power to impeach a president, can do so without a finding of criminal wrongdoing by the president. In other words, a president who hasn’t violated the law can still be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” a term that includes many actual federal crimes but that also includes what Alexander Hamilton described as “abuse or violation of some public trust.”That said, it’s nonetheless important to know if the president and his associates broke the law. I spoke with four legal experts about the developments in the whistleblower scandal so far. Based on those conversations and other analysis that’s been published so far, four areas of federal criminal law could be troublesome for Trump, Barr, and Giuliani based on what we know: statutes dealing with campaign finance, bribery, extortion, and obstruction of justice. Federal law makes it illegal to “solicit, accept, or receive a contribution or donation” from a foreign national. The question of whether or not the president ran afoul of that law certainly seems in play in light of what we saw in the transcript. For purposes of this statute, a “contribution or donation” is defined as “money” or another “thing of value.” So a prosecution of Trump would hinge upon whether the opposition research Trump sought on Biden constitutes such a “thing of value.” Barr and Giuliani, meanwhile, could be considered accomplices in Trump’s effort to obtain opposition research from Ukraine’s president.The Justice Department reportedly has already decided that this statute does not apply to Trump’s actions. According to BuzzFeed’s Zoe Tillman, DOJ’s “Criminal Division explored whether the July call merited opening a criminal investigation into potential campaign finance violations by the president.” But the DOJ ultimately concluded that “the information discussed on the call didn’t amount to a ‘thing of value’ that could be quantified, which is what the campaign finance laws require.”Special counsel Robert Mueller, however, disagreed with this interpretation of the statute after a similar issue arose in his investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign. “Political campaigns frequently conduct and pay for opposition research,” he noted. Moreover, “a foreign entity that engaged in such research and provided resulting information to a campaign could exert a greater effect on an election, and a greater tendency to ingratiate the donor to the candidate” than if they gave the candidate money. The idea that opposition research isn’t a thing of tremendous value to political candidates ignores very basic realities about how political campaigns operate.Even if an argument like Mueller’s prevails in the courts, however, a prosecution of Trump, Barr, or Giuliani would still need to overcome other hurdles. Among other things, any information obtained from a foreign national must be worth at least $2,000 to make a violation of the campaign finance statute a crime, and at least $25,000 to make it a felony. So, while Mueller’s interpretation may be correct, prosecutors would still need to prove that any information Trump obtained from Ukraine would meet this threshold.Prosecutors might also look to a federal anti-bribery statute, which imposes criminal sanctions on a public official who “corruptly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally or for any other person or entity, in return for ... being influenced in the performance of any official act.”Any prosecution under this statute would raise similar issues to the ones that arise under the campaign finance law. Does opposition research constitute “anything of value”? Ultimately, that question would need to be resolved by the courts.Additionally, prosecutors would need to prove that Trump committed an “official act” in return for the opposition research against Biden. And, in its 2016 decision in McDonnell v. United States, the Supreme Court defined the term “official act” very narrowly.McDonnell involved former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R), who was convicted of doing numerous favors for a wealthy businessman who lavished gifts upon the governor and his wife — including a Rolex watch for the governor and $20,000 worth of clothing for Maureen McDonnell. The governor, meanwhile, connected the businessman with top state officials and researchers who could aid the businessman’s company.Yet the Supreme Court tossed out McDonnell’s conviction, holding that these favors did not constitute an “official act.” The law, according to McDonnell, “prohibits quid pro quo corruption.” And the favors McDonnell did for his benefactor — “hosting an event, meeting with other officials, or speaking with interested parties” — were not enough to constitute such corruption. Prosecutors needed to show that McDonnell agreed to make an actual policy decision in return for a bribe or that the governor somehow pushed another official to make such a policy decision.Which brings us back to Trump’s phone call with Zelensky. There’s an argument that Trump’s actions are criminal, even under the McDonnell framework. If prosecutors can show that Trump agreed to provide aid to Ukraine in return for opposition research on Biden, that would arguably clear the bar set in McDonnell.Nevertheless, prosecutors struggled to meet this high bar in another high-profile corruption case. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) allegedly received paid vacations and other gifts from a wealthy doctor in return for Menendez allegedly pressuring government agencies to take actions that would benefit that doctor.But the case ended in a mistrial and the Justice Department eventually decided to abandon the case.Writing in the Daily Beast, former United States Attorney Barbara McQuade points to the Hobbs Act, a federal anti-extortion law, as another possible source of criminal liability against Trump.The Hobbs Act prohibits actions that “in any way or degree obstructs, delays, or affects commerce or the movement of any article or commodity in commerce, by robbery or extortion.” The word “extortion,” is defined as “obtaining of property from another, with his consent, induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear, or under color of official right.”The magic words here are “under color of official right.” This language refers to public officials who use their office to pressure another person. As the Supreme Court has explained, to show that a criminal defendant acted under color of official right, “the Government need only show that a public official has obtained a payment to which he was not entitled, knowing that the payment was made in return for official acts.”Thus, if Trump blocked military assistance to Ukraine in order to extract a payment from that country, that could form the basis for a Hobbs Act prosecution.That said, the Hobbs Act also defines extortion as “the obtaining of property from another.” So a Hobbs Act prosecution could hinge on whether opposition research against Biden constitutes “property.”Several other federal laws make it a crime to tamper with documents related to a federal investigation. One statute, for example, imposes criminal liability on anyone who “knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence” a federal investigation. If Trump or one of his associates committed such an act to cover up other potentially criminal activity, they could face prison time (though, again, any prosecution of Trump would have to wait until he leaves office).At this stage, however, we can’t know for sure whether such a cover-up took place — although a whistleblower accused White House officials of moving the transcript of Trump’s call with Zelensky to a “separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature.” The White House, in other words, may have tried to shield Trump from political damage by hiding the transcript in a system normally afforded to the most sensitive national security information.Whether this attempt to conceal the transcript was done at Trump’s behest and whether it was done specifically to obstruct a federal investigation are not yet known. So it remains to be seen whether an obstruction case could be built against Trump or against other Trump administration officials.The criminal case against Trump and his closest associates, in other words, remains uncertain. Again, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel has held that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted, so at least in Trump’s case, any criminal case would have to come when he’s out of office. Whether Trump will ultimately face criminal charges when he’s no longer in office will turn on as yet unknown facts, on how courts resolve untested questions of law, and on whether prosecutors want to roll the dice on a conviction in the face of such uncertainty. It could also turn on whether the next administration wants to deal with the political circus that would arise from prosecuting a former president.All of this uncertainty, moreover, helps demonstrate why the impeachment power reaches broadly to allow a public official to be removed for non-criminal acts. As Justice Joseph Story said in 1833, “political offences are of so various and complex a character, so utterly incapable of being defined or classified, that the task of positive legislation would be impracticable, if it were not almost absurd to attempt it.”Congress cannot possibly anticipate in advance every single way that a public official may betray the nation’s trust. And so the Constitution does not make impeachment contingent upon whether a prosecutor could prove that the president committed a specific crime. President Donald Trump arrives at the White House on September 26, 2019. Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images The House Intelligence Committee released the whistleblower complaint minutes before Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire began his testimony before Congress.Looking for a quick way to keep up with the never-ending news cycle? Host Sean Rameswaram will guide you through the most important stories at the end of each day.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Will you help keep Vox free for all? Millions of people rely on Vox to understand how the policy decisions made in Washington, from health care to unemployment to housing, could impact their lives. Our work is well-sourced, research-driven, and in-depth. And that kind of work takes resources. Even after the economy recovers, advertising alone will never be enough to support it. If you have already made a contribution to Vox, thank you. If you haven’t, help us keep our journalism free for everyone by making a financial contribution today, from as little as $3.

BERLIN -- Germany's interior minister is suggesting that his country can't build a 5G mobile network without Chinese tech giant Huawei, at least for now, intervening in an issue that has caused tensions between the U.S. and its allies.Washington has been pressuring its allies to ban Huawei, the world's biggest supplier of telecom gear, from new 5G networks. It alleges that the company poses an espionage threat.Germany, however, has decided not to ban Huawei from competing for contracts to build the country’s 5G networks, instead agreeing that companies must meet strict standards, which still could end up excluding the Chinese firm.“I don't see that we can set up a 5G network in Germany in the short term without participation by Huawei,” Seehofer told the newspaper.