closeVideoSen. Lee: Comey blatantly accused President Trump of horrible things without factsUtah senator joins 'Fox & Friends' to discuss James Comey’s fuzzy memory of the Russia probe's origins.The political elite remain puzzled — and in agony — over how Donald Trump could still be in the race. A bullying debater! A purveyor of mistruths! A would-be autocrat! How has our country come to this?The answer sat staring at them on a videolink this Wednesday, in the smug countenance of James Comey.This obvious truth will be missed by the left and the media, which continue to comfort themselves with the fiction that Trump won in 2016 by preying on the weak and ill-informed. The opposite is true.FRED FLEITZ: REPORT CLAIMS HILLARY OK'D EFFORT TO DEFEAT TRUMP IN 2016 WITH FALSE RUSSIA COLLUSION CHARGE The businessman was propelled to office on the fury of those who had seen too much. They’d watched for decades as an insulated elected class — Democrat and Republican alike — broke promises, failed to solve problems, and blamed it on the system.These voters had watched the swamp take over — IRS targeters, self-righteous prosecutors, zealous regulators — armed with stunning powers and a mentality that they were entitled to make the rules, to tell the little people what was best for them.Voters fumed over the double standard. Hillary Clinton deleted government emails with abandon, while a 77-year-old Navy veteran went to prison for building a pond in contravention of “navigable water” rules.Comey personifies what enrages those Americans. His testimony this week was a vivid reminder that the election won’t hinge only on the issues as defined by the media elite.Tuesday’s brawl was mostly about the virus, the economy, violence in the streets, the Supreme Court. But November’s vote for many Americans will be a choice between an administration that believes we the people should run Washington, and those who believe the swamp should rule the masses. Biden wouldn’t challenge the mandarins; he’d unleash them.CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The House Judiciary Committee may now wish it had invited Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to join Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sundar Pichai at its upcoming hearing on antitrust. Microsoft, after all, was the defendant in perhaps the biggest antitrust case against a tech company in the last half-century, during the “browser wars” of the 1990s and 2000s. And now the company may be set to relive the whole thing after Slack complained to the European Commission about how Microsoft markets its Teams collaboration product.Slack says Microsoft is bundling Teams with its Office subscription suite in order to keep businesses from trying Slack by presenting Teams as a viable, and ostensibly free, alternative (the Office subscription product was formerly known as Office 365 and recently renamed Microsoft 365).“Microsoft is reverting to past behavior,” says Slack general counsel David Schellhase in a statement. “It created a weak, copycat product and tied it to their dominant Office product, force-installing it and blocking its removal, a carbon copy of their illegal behavior during the ‘browser wars.'”In the 1990s and 2000s, regulators in the U.S. and Europe punished Microsoft for bundling its Internet Explorer browser with its market-leading Windows operating system in order to freeze out the superior Netscape browser. Then, too, regulators accused Microsoft of hiding the real cost of Internet Explorer within the cost of the Windows operating system.Microsoft says Teams is beating Slack on its merits.“We created Teams to combine the ability to collaborate with the ability to connect via video, because that’s what people want,” the company said in an emailed statement. “With COVID-19, the market has embraced Teams in record numbers while Slack suffered from its absence of video-conferencing. We’re committed to offering customers not only the best of new innovation, but a wide variety of choice in how they purchase and use the product.” Slack does offer a videoconferencing function, but it’s designed only for company-internal huddles.During the browser-war years, Microsoft was shown to have given Explorer an unfair advantage via Windows’ market power, but the penalties were so soft (in the U.S.) and temporary (in Europe) that Explorer became the browser used by the vast majority of PC users.Microsoft’s bundling strategy worked then, and at least for now, it appears to be working in an enterprise messaging platform battle with Slack. At the end of April, Microsoft said Teams had 75 million daily active users, up from 44 million in mid-March. In the last quarter, business sales of Microsoft 365 increased 19%—solidifying Office software as a growth business for Microsoft.In contrast, Slack has stopped reporting daily active users (perhaps out of a reluctance to compare poorly with Teams). The last time it reported its daily active users was last October, when they numbered about 12 million.If European regulators are sympathetic to Slack’s argument, the case is likely to migrate to the U.S., which most of the biggest and most influential tech companies call home. And the reckoning over tech and antitrust that’s already brewing in the nation’s capital may come to a boil over a dispute between two players that have so far scarcely been mentioned in the debate.Apples versus oranges?Despite filing an antitrust complaint, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has said his product doesn’t even really compete with Teams. Slack is mainly an asynchronous channel-based messaging platform. Butterfield sees Teams as mainly a videoconferencing platform, more akin to Zoom, BlueJeans, or GoToMeeting.“The reality is Slack loses out not having a videoconferencing solution, and Teams loses out by only having chat that works best chatting while you are on a video meeting,” says Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin. (Slack introduced an internal videoconferencing system in 2016, but it’s not at the same level of maturity as Zoom or Teams.)Microsoft seems to be investing most of its development resources into improving the videoconferencing part of Teams, such as the recent addition of a “Together” mode that makes videoconference attendees appear in a virtual auditorium.So if Slack doesn’t compete directly with Teams, then why is Slack filing a complaint about Teams?So if Slack doesn’t compete directly with Teams, then why is Slack filing a complaint about Teams?As Slack sees it, the dispute is about more than just the two products. Microsoft is trying to sell a “suite” of products, while Slack is trying to sell a messaging platform that integrates with an ecosystem of other productivity software, some of which compete with various parts of the Microsoft 365 suite—for instance, Google Docs and Zoom. (Microsoft is also part of that ecosystem: It has apps for Slack that let you do some Outlook emailing and calendaring within a channel.)Slack’s VP of communications and policy Jonathan Prince tells me his company believes Microsoft is presenting Teams as a comparable product to Slack, and bundling it with Microsoft 365 so that it seems free, in an attempt to keep businesses from taking a serious look at Slack. If Slack finds its way in the door of a Microsoft shop, it could mean trouble for Microsoft. The more time a business’s employees spend inside Slack and the tools it integrates with, the less essential Microsoft’s products may seem, and the harder it may be to keep customers paying for them.Prince says Microsoft has yet to add features that Slack already has, like the ability to scale up to hundreds of thousands of users per team in large organizations (Teams is limited to 10,000), or unlimited channels for teams, or the ability to securely link in people from other organizations, as through the Slack Connect feature. He says Microsoft is bundling Teams with Microsoft 365 to buy it time to add the features it needs to be a truly comparable solution to Slack.Microsoft didn’t offer an interview for this story.Prince says Microsoft took the same tack to buy time while it added features to Internet Explorer to bring it to parity with Netscape back in the day. Before the browser wars, it followed the same strategy to help Word defeat WordPerfect and to help Excel beat Lotus 1-2-3, both of which are a large part of how Office became dominant in the first place.Calling BrusselsSlack faces the same challenges competing with Microsoft and Teams in the U.S. as it does in Europe, but it had good reason to file its complaint with the European Commission. European courts’ interpretation of competition law has evolved on a different track than U.S. courts—they’re more sympathetic to arguments that consumers are harmed when companies such as Microsoft use their largess to promote their own products and freeze out alternatives. U.S. courts are more likely to take into account ways the alleged anticompetitive behavior might improve the product or service in question.In legal terms, the differences between the two doctrines are complex. I asked antitrust litigator Tina Sessions of Keker, Van Nest & Peters in Washington, D.C., to explain it in general terms. “In the U.S., an enforcer [like the FTC or DOJ] or a private plaintiff really needs to prove that the challenged practice has a detrimental effect on competition, and that those effects outweigh the benefit of the practice,” she explains. So, in the Slack case, a U.S. court might weigh the harm to competition caused by Microsoft’s bundling of Teams against the functional benefits of the tight integration of Teams with other Microsoft 365 apps. (One of those functional benefits might be the ability for a team to work together on a Word or Excel doc within Teams.)“Whereas in Europe the courts have given a lot less credence to the benefits of the practice that the defendant puts forward,” Sessions says. In Europe, a plaintiff such as Slack might prevail by proving that consumers are harmed by a lack of competition, while the functional benefits of the bundling weigh less in the analysis.William Kovacic, professor of law and policy at George Washington University School of Law. [Photo: courtesy of George Washington University]In that legal environment, European regulators are more willing to pursue antitrust cases against big companies than U.S. regulators. In a recent example, the commission announced in June that it has opened an investigation into Apple’s App Store and Apple Pay practices. The commission has also fined Google a total of $9.3 billion in three separate antitrust actions since 2017 and is contemplating a full-scale probe into the privacy implications of Google’s proposed acquisition of Fitbit.It’s also true that the European Commission has more, and more recent, experience with Microsoft and antitrust than U.S. regulators, points out George Washington Law School professor and antitrust expert William Kovacic.“When [the commission] prosecuted Microsoft in the 2000s, theories involving tying and bundling were important to their case,” says Kovacic, who was chairman of the Federal Trade Commission in 2008 and 2009. Those cases have contributed to the evolution of European antitrust case law, he adds.“So if you’re Slack and you’re thinking, ‘Where do I go?,’ then Brussels is a more compatible venue than Washington,” Kovacic says.What happens next?The European Commission will now decide whether or not to commence an investigation into Microsoft’s marketing of Teams. The best-case scenario for Slack would be for the commission to decide that Microsoft had violated antitrust law and order the company to unbundle Teams so that it competes head-to-head in the open market in Europe. It may also do something less drastic, such as require Microsoft to make Teams optional to all Microsoft 365 buyers, or require Microsoft to put a price on the Teams app within the bundle.So if you’re Slack and you’re thinking, ‘Where do I go?,’ then Brussels is a more compatible venue than Washington.”William KovacicIf Slack gets any kind of positive result in Europe, there’s a good chance it could decide to make a formal complaint to the FTC or DOJ. In fact, Slack’s attorneys are in dialogue with U.S. regulators, who are already asking questions, if informally, about the case.In one sense, a Slack victory in Europe may have its own reward, even outside Europe.Tina Sessions, partner at Keker, Van Nest & Peters in San Francisco. [Photo: courtesy of Keker, Van Nest & Peters]“If Slack is successful in getting the commission to launch an investigation into Microsoft and possibly get some enforcement action, that’s going to have the same effect on Microsoft as it would have if U.S. enforcers decided to take a look at this,” says antitrust litigator Sessions.That’s because it’s very expensive for a tech company to operate and monitor two different business models in two different major world markets, she explains. For example, it may be costly for Microsoft to sell Teams unbundled from Microsoft 365 to European customers while continuing to bundle Teams with the productivity suite for U.S. customers, Sessions says. Not that Microsoft hasn’t done this before: After Microsoft lost its European antitrust case in 2009, it offered a special version of Windows in Europe that let people pick one of 12 browsers as their default while keeping Internet Explorer as the default in the U.S.A shift in postureThe European Commission’s decision to investigate Slack’s complaint against Microsoft may reverberate far beyond the businesses of the two companies. It may end up playing a big role in the future direction of U.S. antitrust law, which has already begun to shift over the past few years.Beginning in the late 1970s, U.S. courts have interpreted antitrust law in a way that has narrowed the definition of antitrust liability, making it tougher for plaintiffs to win cases. Some of this narrowing has happened as a result of decisions in the high court. “In the last 40 years, the dominant theme of the Supreme Court cases has been a desire to preserve incentives for big firms to compete,” Kovacic says.On the other hand, U.S. regulators are under increasing pressure to bring antitrust cases against big companies, especially big tech companies. “One theme that’s been developing . . . is that the U.S. has been too timid,” Kovacic says. “There’s been a lack of imagination and a lack of courage.”Much of the pressure on regulators has come from the House antitrust subcommittee, led by Representative David Cicilline (a Democrat from Rhode Island). The subcommittee has held five public hearings to understand the antitrust implications of Big Tech’s business models and practices. It’s also questioned the leadership of the FTC and DOJ antitrust divisions to understand why regulators bring cases (or don’t). The House Judiciary Committee—the one that will question the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google this week—has announced its own investigations and has submitted hundreds of information and documentation requests to those companies, and to more than 80 smaller tech companies that may have been harmed by them.In times of economic uncertainty . . . there’s an increased interest in antitrust enforcement.”Tina SessionsAdd to this the high-profile calls from people such as Elizabeth Warren to break up big tech companies on antitrust grounds, a sentiment that’s played well with constituents outside the tech bubbles of the coasts.“In times of economic uncertainty, in times where income disparity becomes a hot issue . . . there’s an increased interest in antitrust enforcement,” Sessions tells me. “In a time when we’re concerned about tech companies getting very big—when it used to be the old U.S. Steel and things like that—I think people look to the antitrust laws to try to fix these problems.”All this has already influenced the posture of the DOJ and FTC with regard to Big Tech. The FTC said last summer it had opened an investigation into the business practices and models of Facebook and Amazon, while the DOJ is reportedly looking into the business practices and acquisitions of Google, Facebook, and possibly Apple. These investigations are at various stages within different agencies and are occurring at a number of different speeds.Such investigations have sometimes gone nowhere in the past. But Kovacic and Sessions both say the DOJ and FTC’s current work, and the work of a number of state attorneys general, seem to be headed toward some action.“I do think they will bring cases,” Kovacic says. “I don’t think they can stand in front of a press conference some months from now and say, ‘Never mind.'”

The fate of the Iran nuclear deal remained in the balance on Monday as the British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, was in to Washington for a series of meetings with the Trump administration in an attempt to keep the agreement intact.Trump, a fierce critic of the deal, has until 12 May to decide if he will again waive sanctions against Iran in exchange for limitations on its nuclear ambitions. In January, the last time he signed off on the pact, the president warned that it faced a “last chance”. Trump has called for stricter measures, including curbing Iran’s access to ballistic missiles. Speaking to CBS on Sunday, Britain’s ambassador to the US, Sir Kim Darroch, said: “The message we are hearing from all contacts in this administration is that although the president’s views on the deal are very clear and have been out there for months and months, and in fact for years, that a final decision hasn’t been taken.”On Saturday, however, the Observer revealed that aides to Trump hired an Israeli private intelligence firm to conduct a “dirty ops” campaign against key negotiators from the Obama administration in an attempt to undermine the deal.Johnson was not scheduled to meet Trump in Washington, but was expected to meet vice-president Mike Pence and the national security adviser, John Bolton, a foreign policy hawk who has long criticised the deal. The foreign secretary was also expected to appear on the Fox & Friends morning news show on Monday, his office confirmed. Trump is known to watch the programme avidly. Johnson is the last representative of the so-called “EU three” – France, Germany and Britain, key allies in negotiating the deal in 2015 – to meet administration figures before the deadline. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, have lobbied Trump directly.Writing in the New York Times, Johnson said: “Of all the options we have for ensuring that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon, this pact offers the fewest disadvantages. It has weaknesses, certainly, but I am convinced they can be remedied.”Barack Obama’s second secretary of state, John Kerry, who secured the agreement after years of negotiations, has quietly been involved in talks. According to reports, Kerry met the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, at the United Nations two weeks ago to discuss how the pact, among the most significant foreign policy achievements of the Obama years, could be salvaged.Republicans, including, on Sunday, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, have claimed that in doing so Kerry violated the Logan Act of 1799, which bars private citizens from conducting diplomatic work.On Sunday, Macron warned of grave consequences if the US abandoned the deal. “We would open the Pandora’s box,” the French president told the German magazine Der Spiegel. “There could be war.”He added: “I don’t think that Donald Trump wants war.”Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, said Trump would face “historic regret” if he pulled out of the deal. In an address on state TV, Rouhani said his government would “counter any decision Trump may take and we will confront it”. Darroch reiterated that the UK planned to remain in the deal, which also also includes China and Russia, should the US pull out. “Plan A is that the US stays in the deal,” he said. “That’s what we’re working towards. But, of course, we are looking at all the eventualities. My government has said that as long as Iran is in compliance with the deal and wants to stick with it, that will be our position as well. “We will be looking at options for maintaining the deal, which we hope they will, should the US administration choose to withdraw.”The Observer reported that according to leaked documents, Ben Rhodes, a senior national security aide to Obama, and Colin Kahl, a deputy assistant, were targeted by the Israeli firm hired by Trump aides in May last year.Responding to the report, Kahl posted a series of tweets on Saturday evening in which he discussed suspicious emails he said his wife received around the time he was targeted. His wife was approached, Kahl said, by an individual from the UK claiming to represent a private equity firm interested in including their daughter’s school in a funding network. At the time, his wife was serving on the fundraising committee of the school; the individual requested a meeting in Washington. Deciding the emails appeared to be an approach by foreign intelligence, the couple stopped responding. “Perhaps it was just a coincidence that this obvious scam targeting my family had all the hallmarks of an intel op and coincided with Team Trump’s reported efforts to ‘dig up dirt’ on me,” Kahl wrote. “But the fact that I even have to think about the possibility that my family was targeted by people working for the president is yet another sign of the fundamental degradation of our country that Trump has produced.” Topics Iran's nuclear programme Donald Trump Iran Boris Johnson Trump administration US foreign policy Iran nuclear deal news

After tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang ended his Democratic presidential campaign on Tuesday night, many experts said his run was a culturally significant moment for Asian Americans.Yang, who made history as the first Asian American man to run for president as a Democrat, dropped out after a poor performance in the New Hampshire primary. While Yang largely shied away from “identity politics,” claiming it was divisive, his heritage was a frequent topic of conversation on the campaign trail, particularly given the underrepresentation of Asian Americans in politics.“The Yang campaign is significant even if it's over,” Anthony Ocampo, a sociologist who focuses on race, immigration and LGBTQ issues, told NBC News. “The optics of an Asian American candidate commanding such widespread support, both in rallies and on social media, signals to aspiring Asian American politicians that there is a pathway for them — that they can legitimately aim for the highest office in the nation.”Yang ran his campaign on the nontraditional platform of offering a Universal Basic Income, or $1,000 a month, to every American citizen over 18. Though he has no experience holding public office, Yang outlasted political veterans like Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Sen. Kamala Harris of California, both of whom are African American (Harris is also of Asian descent).As the election cycle progressed, Yang managed to pick up prominent endorsements, including from Donald Glover, Dave Chappelle and former Rep. Mike Honda of California. He was also increasingly seen as increasingly viable, with BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief at the time Ben Smith, writing an article titled “Andrew Yang Could Win This Thing,” saying that “Yang is also worth treating as more than a curiosity because he has a grip on the thing that actually wins presidential campaigns: a clear message about the future.”Ocampo, a sociology professor at Cal Poly Pomona,noted that Yang’s longevity in the race and viability is important, given that Asian Americans have historically been stereotyped as good workers, not leaders.Research from the Harvard Business Review showed that Asian American white-collar professionals are the least likely to be promoted from individual contributor roles into management, compared with other races.“Asian Americans have seen time and again the way society sees them as qualified workers, but not necessarily qualified leaders,” Ocampo said. “That's what's so problematic about the Asian American model minority myth — implicit in it is the idea that Asian Americans will stay in line and not rock the boat too much.”“Yang running for the highest office in the land breaks barriers in the sense that he wholeheartedly believes in his electability,” he said.Ocampo also mentioned how Yang’s willingness to share his experiences with being bullied and discriminated against proved particularly powerful in helping young Asian Americans “feel seen.” On a few occasions, Yang revealed he was often beaten up for being the “skinny Asian kid” and said the experience shaped how he interacted with people as an adult.“I feel like when I was growing up, I always felt like I was the kid left out,” Yang said in an interview. “And you never forget that feeling. And so who's left out in America today?”Ocampo said that in sharing painful experiences, Yang highlighted “a serious problem about the way Asian Americans in this country — no matter the level of English proficiency or cultural assimilation — are subject to the very painful experience of racism, in schools, in the workplace, in the media.”“Granted, Yang did elevate a particular type of Asian American story — the idea of the successful immigrant story — but he also did shine a light on the fact that racism is something that continues to affect Asian Americans,” Ocampo said.Yang’s Asian Americanness also spurred discussions around the media and race. He was frequently left off graphics by mainstream news organizations, despite polling better than many other candidates who were included, and mistakenly identified several times. The omissions prompted a debate in the Asian American community of whether they were symptomatic of how the greater American society views them.“There is no way to prove these omissions are related to Yang’s being Asian, but it’s impossible to miss the similarities with the micro (and macro) aggressions people in the Asian American community experience daily,” Marie Myung-Ok Lee wrote in an op-edin The Los Angeles Times.Yang previously told NBC News that he personally felt that his Asian American identity, coupled with factors like his nontraditional background, could’ve played a role in the omissions.“I think you can make an argument that it’s somehow intersecting with some other dynamics.”Despite Yang’s background, Asian Americans had mixed feelings about him and his campaign, particularly as he leaned on Asian jokes to garner support. In the September Democratic debate, Yang quipped that he is “Asian so I know a lot of doctors.” His campaign slogan, “Make America Think Harder,” was often referred to as “MATH.” Critics said the shtick perpetuated the “model minority myth,” claiming it wasn’t a harmless offense.“The reality is that Asian Pacific Americans are much more diverse, and by playing into stereotypes without challenging them, Yang minimizes the challenges faced by many in the Asian Pacific American community,”John C. Yang, president of the public policy and civil rights nonprofit Asian Americans Advancing Justice, told NBC News before Yang dropped out Tuesday.When answering questions on the subject of race itself, Yang was also met with mixed reactions. During the most recent Democratic debate in New Hampshire, Yang responded to Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s claim that “we cannot just say that criminal justice is the only time that we want to talk about race specifically.” Warren called for “race-conscious laws” on issues including housing and employment.“We can’t regulate away racism with a patchwork of laws that are race-specific,” Yang, the only candidate of color on the debate stage, shot back, before promoting his universal income.Critics pointed out that Yang failed to acknowledge that discriminatory legislation has in part fueled the long history of the lack of buying power in communities of color, institutionalizing racism.While many were moved by Yang’s physical representation of the Asian American community, he failed to clinch the Asian American vote. He managed to secure the most amount of Asian American donations in the third quarter, according to filings with Federal Election Commission analyzed by AAPI Data, a demographic data and policy research firm for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The donor population, however, isn’t perfectly reflective of the Asian American voting population. A survey of Democratic favorability among eligible AAPI voters in California, the state with the racial group’s largest population, revealed that 22 percent found Yang favorable, while 41 percent "haven't heard enough" about him. In contrast, 45 percent found candidate Joe Biden favorable.With Yang now out of the race, questions around communities’ of color accessibility to political office have arisen.“Andrew Yang is just the latest casualty of a nominating system that is unrepresentative of the country, and of the Democratic Party,” Karthick Ramakrishnan, founder of AAPI Data, said. “With almost all of the candidates of color eliminated before Super Tuesday, there will be a lot of pressure on the Democratic Party to find a more representative set of states than Iowa and New Hampshire to kick off the nominations process.”Regardless of the diversity of opinions on Yang, Ramakrishnan noted that the candidate’s run prompted many Asian Americans to get involved in the political process.“It will be important to see what he does in the next few months,” he said, “to continue encouraging young voters and those disaffected by politics to get engaged.”

"Hong Kong's rule of law has been pushed to the brink of total collapse as masked rioters recklessly escalate their violence under the hope that they can get away with it," he told reporters, adding that Monday's attack on the pro-Beijing supporter was being investigated as attempted murder.

Kamala Harris attacked critics of “identity politics”. Elizabeth Warren insisted that Democrats could be both the “party of the white working class and the party of Black Lives Matter” while calling the American criminal justice system “racist”. And Cory Booker said it was time “to get folk woke”.At the Netroots Nation conference in New Orleans on Friday, leading Democratic presidential hopefuls embraced the concept of intersectionality, viewing any conflict between economic populism and racial and social justice as a false choice. “I have a problem with that phrase, ‘identity politics,’” said Kamala Harris, the junior Democratic senator from California, during a keynote address at the gathering of more 3,000 liberal activists. “Let’s be clear – when people say that, it’s a pejorative. That phrase is used to divide and used to distract. Its purpose is to minimize and marginalize issues that impact all of us. It’s used to try and shut us up.”Her remarks rebuked the argument – advanced by many on the left – that economic issues should be emphasized over those of race or gender. Harris, the daughter of an Indian-American mother and Jamaican-American father, faulted liberals for failing to elevate people of color, especially black women, who she said have “helped build the Democratic party and have been the backbone of the Democratic party”. The California senator pointed to the 2017 special election in Alabama when 98% of African American women supported Democrat Doug Jones for the US Senate over Roy Moore, the Republican who faced allegations of sexual assault.“It’s time to respect that leadership. It’s time we addressed the issues that they uniquely face,” she said. But she struck a note of optimism, remarking on her own rise to the US Senate.“I know we’re better than this because this city was once home to the nation’s largest slave market,” she said. “And today, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris are speaking to this conference as United States senators.” Elizabeth Warren, the liberal senator from Massachusetts, railed against the “politics of division” that pit white working class people against black working class people. She argued that progressives can and must put forward a strong economic platform without shying away from issues of race and gender. “The pundits will say it’s impossible for us to build a coalition that cuts across issues and communities – that Democrats have to choose between being the party of the white working class and the party of Black Lives Matter,” Warren said in her keynote speech, which was met with emphatic applause. “They will say it. Nevertheless: We will persist.”Warren departed the convention to attend a town hall with congressman Cedric Richmond, whose district covers a large swath of New Orleans. There, Warren amplified her critique of race in America. “Let’s just start with the hard truth about our criminal justice system: it’s racist,” she said to loud applause in front of a racially mixed crowd at Dillard University, a local historical black college. Warren emphasized that the system was fundamentally flawed “all the way, front to back.” She added “our prison system is something that America should be ashamed of. What we do to other human beings is fundamentally wrong.”In his speech to the progressive conference that has seen protests by minority activists in the past, Booker called for a “more powerful activism” and challenged Democrats to “reject the normalcy of injustice”. “I think a lot about the Democratic party nationally and how it seems that that connection to people – where they are, what their experiences are, their struggles, their hurts and their pain – how we seem to have lost our way,” said the New Jersey senator.“What we need to be doing is reconnecting ourselves to folk where they are. I will tell you this: the Democratic party is good for nothing if it is not standing up for the values and the issues.” Topics Elizabeth Warren US politics Democrats news

In 2014, Henry Burner started selling buttons online—the kind you pin to a shirt or jacket. Sales climbed quickly. Within a few years, his firm, Buttonsmith, had expanded into lanyards, magnets, and other doodads, and gross revenue crossed $1 million. It’s grown into the multimillions since.So far, that’s a not-uncommon story in the era of ever-rising online retail sales. But it has a twist: Burner was 10 years old when he launched his company six years ago.Burner’s mother, Darcy Burner, helped Henry incubate the business at home, encouraged its growth, and took the title of CEO as it outstripped a school-aged kid’s ability to manage day-to-day operations. At 17, Henry has remained strategically involved, including involvement in meetings with major retailers and patenting a new kind of badge reel that has a magnetically coupled, swappable front.In this 2016 video, Henry tells Buttonsmith’s origin story:As I wrote in 2017 when Buttonsmith was a $2 million business, the company isn’t just a maker of an assortment of geegaws. Rather, it’s a software and logistics company that acquires specialized manufacturing equipment and spreads products across its devices, fed by its understanding of customer demand and expertise in leveraging Amazon’s custom-ordering system. In normal times, customers can order items that use photos they upload or text they provide, and Buttonsmith can pop them out in under a few hours and have them in someone’s hands a couple of days later.Buttonsmith had seen a steady growth as it’s expanded into printed eyeglass cloths, shoelaces, magnets, and dog collars, as well as custom-printed items such as business cards and signs. But in January of this year, Darcy Burner realized that a significant disruption was about to hit the business. “We pay so much attention to the manufacturing supply chains,” she says. She ordered alcohol-based disinfectants—still readily available—and reworked Buttonsmith’s compact manufacturing space in the small town of Carnation, Washington, to space people at least 6 feet apart.It wasn’t until nearly two months later that the novel coronavirus slammed hard into Washington state. Schools sent students home, sports teams stopped playing, Emerald City Comic Con was postponed, and the governor issued orders progressively restricting everyday life and work. Buttonsmith had to stop making its products.[Photo: courtesy of Buttonsmith ]CEO Burner was ahead of the curve, because her firm tries to source every button, metal fob, and scrap of fabric through American suppliers. But even with that domestic focus, the global logistics chain is an interlaced web of raw and partially made materials, and both Buttonsmith and the companies with which it works with could feel the vibrations when large portions of the Chinese manufacturing engine shut down.Being shut down is painful, but it’s so clearly the right thing.”Buttonsmith CEO Darcy BurnerWith an array of varied machines for dye sublimation, signmaking, and laser printing coupled with printing presses repurposed for box cutting, heat presses, sewing machines, and other tools, the company can also hatch new products almost instantly. On a recent pre-pandemic visit, Darcy Burner showed me a security-camera warning sign she designed in the morning and produced for sale the same afternoon.The pandemic has squashed Buttonsmith’s panoply of products for now. Like many states, Washington still allows only broadly defined essential businesses or essential employees to continue working except by telecommuting. The state will allow general manufacturing that meets safety guidelines to restart as part of a phased-in easing of restrictions, potentially as early as June 1. Some counties with high hospital capacity and a low incidence of cases have been given the go-ahead already, but Carnation is within commuting distance of—and in the same county as—Microsoft in Redmond and Amazon in Bellevue and Seattle.Buttonsmith’s developers are still tapping away at new code. And a few weeks ago, Darcy was able to get state permission to start back up—but only to make cloth masks. “We have sewing machines, we know how to work with fabric, and we have suppliers—this is something we can do,” she says. She adds of the state’s business limitations, “Being shut down is painful, but it’s so clearly the right thing.””Buttonsmith has worked with partners to develop and perfect mask designs. It can produce relatively small quantities in house, which it does intermittently, and contracts with other small manufacturers that lack its expertise in direct fulfillment. COO Jonathan Shapiro says between in-house capabilities and these third-party suppliers, Buttonsmith shipped just under 100 mask orders on April 25. Two days later, it scaled up to 1,500, most packaged that day. Darcy Burner says the company is constrained by how many it and its suppliers can make, not by demand.[Photo: courtesy of Buttonsmith ]The present and future of Buttonsmith isn’t a dispassionate business question for Darcy. The operation is a family affair beyond her and Henry. COO Shapiro is Henry’s stepfather; Henry’s father, Mike Burner, leads software development; and an uncle and other relatives are part of the staff of 13.Henry devoured and aced Harvard’s infamous economics course in summer 2019. Unlike many students, he’s continued with intensive daily sessions and homework, as he attends a school with highly focused instruction. His role at Buttonsmith is tricky at the moment, because, as he says, “It’s much harder to do strategic planning when you don’t know what’s going to happen two weeks from now.” (Henry’s step-brother, Alex, is not a Buttonsmith employee but is currently plotting to study toward an early bachelor’s degree online during isolation—he’s 15. It runs in the family.)Emergency measuresDuring this time of unprecedented disruption, Darcy Burner says that Buttonsmith has managed to pull off a few key financial and employment maneuvers. It’s an all-union shop, a choice that arises both from her progressive political bent and from the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades allowing management to join the union and work alongside employees at the same tasks when required. The union has been an ally through the company’s travails, she says. Buttonsmith provided some of its first masks to union members in essential jobs.Buttonsmith was forced to lay off workers when the firm had to shut down its operations initially, but the company applied to the Small Business Administration’s Payroll Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Emergency Advance (EIDL). Some employees, such as programmers, shifted to working from home; she bought some of them accoutrements such as second displays for their computers.She chose to continue to pay healthcare premiums and pick up employees’ share, which necessitated some discussion with the state over whether laid-off employees would lose the robust unemployment benefits offered if their employer paid that part of the bill. It worked out for everyone. “Everyone I’ve had to deal with at the state government level has been phenomenal,” she says.The company was able to get white-listed by Amazon in late April to sell masks.After receiving state approval for the essential task of mask-making, Darcy brought back workers to Buttonsmith’s facility, which she had already set up for distancing, and had PPP money approved. “The program fits us very well, but like everyone, we would like more clarity,” she says. She’s still waiting on the EIDL funds, as are most other applicants nationwide.Floating payments to partners and suppliers has been tough without the EIDL help, and banks won’t provide the firm with typical lines of credit at the moment. “We give off a big partial payment to the teams we’re working with on the masks at the point we place the order, so they can afford to buy materials and pay their people,” Darcy says. So far, Buttonsmith is managing it with funds it had on hand for expansion.The company was able to get white-listed by Amazon in late April to sell masks, which was aided by their multiyear relationship with Amazon’s customization program and Prime shipping programs. “If you’re not an Amazon seller with a good relation with Amazon and a long history with Amazon, you can’t sell masks,” explains Henry.[Photo: courtesy of Buttonsmith ]Even so, Darcy Burner notes that Amazon’s site is flooded with fraudulent mask listings. By her estimate, “close to 90% of face-mask listings on Amazon are fraudulent.” She notes that some Chinese-based sellers list deals as low as five masks for $10, accept orders, and mark them as shipped, at a time when China isn’t allowing much in the way of personal protective equipment—even cloth masks—to leave the country at all.Darcy has sourced everything for Buttonsmith’s masks within the U.S.: “I would not want to bring stuff in from overseas,” she says. While this attitude is often associated with conservatives and businesses in deep-red parts of the country, she’s a progressive and a former Democratic candidate for the U.S. House. She and Shapiro believe strongly in establishing and supporting U.S. manufacturing for strategic and economic reasons, which Burner says the current crisis has laid bare.During the present crisis, “the ability to get things cheaply and easily from China is severely disrupted or gone,” she notes. In her mind, the supply chain is “deeply broken” and the ease by which Americans could order cheap goods was always an illusion. Later this year, subsidized shipping of small packages from China—costing the USPS hundreds of millions of dollars a year—is slated to end after the Trump administration employed brinksmanship over long-standing international postal agreements.Uncertainty aheadWhen some kind of economic restart happens, Buttonsmith could be in an ideal position to regain its pre-COVID-19 cadence, because its varied abilities and rapid product development allow it to respond to a wide variety of consumer needs. Of course, as Darcy Burner notes, “We’re clearly staring into the face of what will be the worst recession in modern history.” And Buttonsmith currently faces competition from companies in states that didn’t shut down manufacturing, though many of those are facing outbreaks and rising infection counts. As Washington opens, other states may be forced to clamp down.“The hard thing isn’t so much that the shutdowns have happened—they were clearly necessary—or that they have been fairly long,” Darcy says. “The hard thing is that small businesses were told that they would get help to get through this in the form of immediate money to keep everyone afloat, and those promises haven’t been kept.”For the interim, however, masks keep revenue flowing, employees paid, manufacturing partners current, and programmers busy. Most of all, says Darcy, “We have created a product I feel very comfortable sending out to people and having them use.”

Former FBI Director James Comey’s tell-all memoir is hitting the small screen, and Jeff Daniels is slated to play its leading role. CBS Studios announced Monday that the Emmy winner known for the “Dumb and Dumber” franchise, “Good Night and Good Luck” and “Terms of Endearment” will star as Comey in a four-hour miniseries adaptation of “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership.” Production is set to begin next month. Brendan Gleeson, another Emmy-winner famous for his role as Alastor Moody in the “Harry Potter” series, will play President Donald Trump, who fired Comey in 2017. The former FBI director’s memoir, which hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list following its release last year, takes stock of his decades-long criminal justice career. The title is inspired by Trump’s alleged demands for Comey’s allegiance regarding an investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. After he left the FBI, Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee and told lawmakers that the president said he expected “loyalty” from the then-FBI director when the two conversed during a private dinner months before he was unceremoniously fired. The memoir soon became a thorn in the president’s side, prompting him to lash out on Twitter, attempting to discredit Comey’s account before it even appeared on the shelves. Daniels has been a vocal critic of Trump, slamming the president in a May MSNBC interview for having “completely soiled the Oval Office.” No premiere date for CBS’ program has yet been announced. Download Calling all HuffPost superfans! Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter Join HuffPost Voting Made Easy Register to vote and apply for an absentee ballot today Register now

Violent clashes between Hong Kong protesters and police rocked the city for a second straight day on Tuesday. Schools were shut down, roads closed and train services disrupted. By,andRachel Yeo Updated Nov. 12, 2019 10:50 am ET HONG KONG—Antigovernment protesters wreaked havoc on the city for a second straight day, with train services disrupted, schools closed and roads blocked a day after one of the bloodiest episodes of unrest in more than five months of demonstrations. Protesters and police clashed across Hong Kong on Tuesday, including at universities and train stations, and in the city’s financial district. The violence intensified into the night, particularly at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where police fired tear gas, water cannon... To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In Continue reading your article with a WSJ membership View Membership Options

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey apologized Wednesday to Sarah Collins Rudolph, a survivor of a Ku Klux Klan bombing that left her severely injured and killed four Black girls, including her sister, in 1963.In a letter sent to Collins Rudolph's lawyers, Ivey offered a "sincere, heartfelt apology" for the "racist, segregationist rhetoric used by some of our leaders during that time."Ivey said there should be no question that Collins Rudolph, who was 12 when Klan members bombed 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham 57 years ago, and the four other girls "suffered an egregious injustice that has yielded untold pain and suffering over the ensuing decades."Lawyers for Collins Rudolph had said in a letter to Ivey this month that, while hard-line segregationist officials like Gov. George Wallace didn't place the bomb next to the building, they played an "undisputed role in encouraging its citizens to engage in racial violence."Collins Rudolph lost her right eye in the bombing. Glass fragments remained in her left eye, her abdomen and her chest for years after, according to The Associated Press.Her sister, Addie Mae Collins, 14, was killed. So were Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, also 14, and Denise McNair, 11."She has born the burdens of the bombing for virtually her entire life, and we believe her story presents an especially meritorious and unique opportunity for the State of Alabama to right the wrongs that its past leaders encouraged and incited," the letter to Ivey said.The lawyers, who are from the Washington, D.C., firm Jenner & Block and are representing Collins Rudolph pro bono, had asked for an official apology as well as compensation.Ivey's letter doesn't specifically address compensation, noting that the Legislature would have to be involved, and it says "other questions" raised by the lawyers will need to be reviewed."It would seem to me that beginning these conversations — without prejudice for what any final outcome might produce but with a goal of finding mutual accord — would be a natural extension of my administration's ongoing efforts to foster fruitful conversations" about race, Ivey said.Rudolph Collins' lawyers, Ishan Bhabha and Alison Stein, said in a statement that they were "gratified" by the apology and that they looked forward to future talks about compensation.

A member of the House intelligence committee said “We got Bannoned” on Tuesday, after a closed-door interview with Hope Hicks, a key aide to Donald Trump, as part of the panel’s Russia investigation.Bloomberg reported that Denny Heck, a Washington Democrat, invoked Bannon, Trump’s former campaign manager and White House strategist, who refused to answer some questions in front of the panel. The House is now considering whether to hold Bannon in contempt.A Republican, Chris Stewart of Utah, said Hicks would not answer questions about events and conversations since Trump took office.Hicks, Trump’s communications director, arrived on Capitol Hill after 10am through a rear entrance to the committee’s interview space. She did not answer shouted questions from reporters.The panel is investigating contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia, as is special counsel Robert Mueller. Hicks has been interviewed by Mueller.As one of Trump’s closest aides, she is a key eyewitness to his actions over the past several years. She was his spokeswoman during the 2016 campaign.Trump has denied any collusion with Russians interfering in the US election. In the hours before Hicks’ arrival the president tweeted several times, quoting cable news commentators who said they had not seen evidence of collusion. One tweet encouraged investigations of his Democratic presidential rival, Hillary Clinton. A last tweet simply said “WITCH HUNT!”In the White House press briefing on Tuesday afternoon, press secretary Sarah Sanders denied any collusion between Trump aides and Russia and said of Hicks’ appearance: “We are not going to comment on any individual’s specific interactions with the committee.” Topics Trump-Russia investigation Trump administration House of Representatives US politics news

The company placed that same staff in charge of reporting any sales of its painkillers that appeared to be suspicious, including to distributors or pharmacies requesting extreme volumes of its most potent formulas. Asked during a federal court deposition last year whether she believed it was appropriate to put incentive-motivated sales staff in charge of calling out questionable sales, Karen Harper, who oversaw Mallinckrodt’s suspicious order monitoring system, said yes.In fact, as the nation's opioid overdose crisis began to explode, not a single order with the company between August 2008 and October 2010 rose from the level of “peculiar” to “suspicious,” the category that would have triggered a report to authorities, according to Harper's deposition.The court documents reveal a company culture that allowed Mallinckrodt to become one of the giants of the prescription opioid market at a time when overdoses were claiming tens of thousands of American lives. The company, based in England, announced a tentative $1.6 billion settlement Tuesday with state and local governments in the U.S. If finalized, the deal would end lawsuits nationwide over the company's role in the epidemic.Purdue Pharma has been the poster child for the U.S. opioid crisis, mostly because of aggressive marketing of its signature painkiller, OxyContin. Lesser known is the role of generic opioid manufacturers like Mallinckrodt that produced the vast majority of painkillers during the height of the overdose epidemic. While they may not have been sending sales representatives to encourage prescribing like Purdue, they were filling more and more orders for the drugs — so many that Mallinckrodt couldn't always produce enough to fill them all.Nationwide distribution data released in a sprawling federal court case and analyzed by The Associated Press shows that Mallinckrodt’s U.S. subsidiary, SpecGX, and another generic drugmaker, Actavis Pharma, produced the vast amount of prescription opioids distributed throughout the country.From 2006 to 2014, Mallinckrodt's subsidiary shipped more than 2.2 billion high-potency oxycodone pills, nearly one-third of its total in that time period, according to the data analysis. Actavis was even more prolific, shipping more than 2.4 billion pills.The court records made public last year by the U.S. District Court in Cleveland showed some Mallinckrodt employees were more focused on sales than public safety. At least one joked about the rising use of the drugs with a customer.In January 2009, Victor Borelli, a Mallinckrodt salesman, exchanged emails with Steve Cochrane, who worked at drug distributor KeySource.“Keep them coming,” Cochrane wrote. “Flying out of here. It's like people are addicted to these things or something. Oh, wait, people are.”Borelli responded: “Just like Doritos. Keep eating, we'll make more.” After the comment become public, the company disavowed it, calling it “callous.”Borelli said that as a reward for sales, he got bonuses ranging from $101,000 to $119,000 from 2008 through 2010, and that he twice received the company’s President Club award. That scored him vacations to St. Thomas and other tropical getaways.Borelli and other Mallinckrodt employees answered lawyers' questions under oath ahead of what was expected to be the first federal trial over the toll of opioids. The company ended up settling with the plaintiffs — the Ohio counties of Cuyahoga and Summit. Other major defendants also reached deals.Another opioid trial is scheduled to begin next month in Central Islip, New York, which has created a renewed push among drugmakers and distributors to settle thousands of opioid-related lawsuits.Mallinckrodt agreed with lawyers suing on behalf of local governments nationwide to pay its settlement amount over eight years. Most of the money is to go into a fund intended for drug treatment and other programs to aid recovery from an epidemic that has been linked to more than 430,000 deaths in the U.S. since 2000.The deal is still subject to some negotiations and must be approved by a bankruptcy court. It's the first proposed opioid settlement that has overwhelming support from the key lawyers for the governments suing to try to hold the drug industry accountable for the crisis. Teva, which now owns Actavis, is negotiating a separate settlement.In a deposition last year, Douglas Boothe, who was CEO of Actavis in the U.S. and the Americas from 2008 through 2012, was asked about the company's responsibilities for flagging large and suspicious orders of prescription painkillers.“I don't think we had responsibility for, accountability for preventing diversion,” he said. “We had responsibility and accountability for making certain that the orders that we received were valid from licensed pharmacies and were within our suspicious order monitoring thresholds. ... Once it goes outside of our chain of custody, we have no capability or responsibility or accountability."One of the main destinations for both companies' opioids was Florida, where so-called pill mills drew people from Appalachia and beyond. One deposition from a Mallinckrodt sales representative says that 47 percent of the company's high-potency opioids made in 2010 ended up in Florida.Steve Becker, a former Mallinckrodt salesman who worked for the company from 2000 to 2014, said he wasn't aware of a system for monitoring suspicious orders. When asked if employees had incentives to report such orders, he said no.But there were incentives to sell more, Becker said in a 2018 deposition. Employees said they frequently had back orders for pain pills.“We're doing our due diligence in selling our product to the various accounts, and we're doing what we're supposed to be doing, according to the DEA,” Becker said. “When (distributors) then sell their product, it's their due diligence to know where that product is going.”———Mulvihill reported from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Fenn, a data journalist, reported from New York.———Associated Press writers Mark Gillispie in Cleveland and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this article.———Follow Mulvihill at http://www.twitter.com/geoffmulvihill

A strange night, introducing what will be the new awards show normal for the foreseeable future as the television academy brought their annual party to living rooms, green rooms and event spaces around the world. It was an unusual ceremony, intriguing to start with and a little boring by the end but then the Emmys, with its lack of musical performances or breaks between awards, is never the most entertaining night of the year.Jimmy Kimmel was a sturdy if a little safe choice of host whose lack of bite was countered somewhat by a string of deserving and diverse victories, some were genuine surprises while most were at least given to newer, more daring shows. Without Game of Thrones and Veep to dominate and with The Marvelous Mrs Maisel left to pick up the scraps, Schitt’s Creek, Succession and Watchmen were the big winners, a strong showing for HBO but a disappointing night for Netflix.It was a mostly slick night, devoid of big glitches, but there was a sense of spirit or at least fun missing, something that the upcoming awards ceremonies will hopefully work to figure out by the time they come around. This was a patchy start but a start nonetheless.

LONDON -- A committee of British lawmakers is urging the government to consider banning Chinese technology giant Huawei from next-generation mobile phone networks two years earlier than planned.Prime Minister Boris Johnson's government in July blocked Huawei from having any role in building the country's new 5G networks, amid security concerns fueled by rising tensions between Beijing and Western powers. British wireless carriers are prohibited from buying Huawei network equipment but have until 2027 to remove Huawei gear they've already installed in the new networks.Parliament's defense committee said in its report released Thursday on 5G security that while the 2027 deadline was sensible to avoid signal blackouts, delays and extra costs, it warned that the government might have to act faster.“Should pressure from allies for a speedier removal continue or should China’s threats and global position change so significantly to warrant it, the Government should consider whether a removal by 2025 is feasible and economically viable," the report said. “Clearly these restrictions will delay the 5G rollout and economically damage the U.K. and mobile network operators."The report also accused Huawei of colluding with China's communist party though it didn't go into details. The company denied the accusations, which were based on testimony from witnesses about its ownership and financing.“This report lacks credibility, as it is built on opinion rather than fact,” Huawei said in a statement. "We’re sure people will see through these accusations of collusion and remember instead what Huawei has delivered for Britain over the past 20 years.”

The first half of Sunday night’s Primetime Emmy Awards might as well have been named the Schitt’s Creek awards. The Canadian sitcom swept cleanly through all seven categories it was eligible for during the televised ceremony, including Best Comedy Series, making it the first comedy in Emmys history to pull off such a feat.It was a classic Emmys move: In one fell swoop, the Television Academy (which oversees the Emmys) turned a comedy that could have been accurately described as under-the-radar for most of its six-season run into an overexposed behemoth of a show, to the point that you could see the backlash building in real time. “Oh, no, the internet hates me now,” said Dan Levy, Schitt’s Creek showrunner and star and understander of the internet, during one of his many acceptance speeches.But there’s a good reason Schitt’s Creek walked away with the comedy portion of the evening. Its seven Emmys weren’t just recognition for the show’s quirky-sweet joke construction and its cast’s rock-solid central comedic performances in the sixth and final season. At least in part, those awards were “thank you for getting us through quarantine” Emmys, because there is perhaps no show in 2020 that is better suited for making the overwhelming boredom and fear of long days spent at home turn bearable. The premise of Schitt’s Creek is that the wealthy Rose family has lost everything in a tax scandal. As the show begins, the Roses are relocating to their sole remaining asset: Schitt’s Creek, a small town they purchased years ago as a joke. There, they proceed to move themselves into a cramped and dingy motel suite, where they live out the next six seasons struggling at first to escape and then to make the best of their new lives.What that means is that Schitt’s Creek is about a family whose large, open, luxurious world suddenly becomes narrow and circumscribed and difficult to live in. The fantasy the show offers is that the Roses manage to find warmth and meaning and love within their new, much more confined surroundings, and in the middle of quarantine, that fantasy is extremely, deeply welcome. It’s “binge the show twice in a row and maybe start reading some fanfic” welcome. It’s “here are seven Emmys plus two more from the Creative Arts ceremony” welcome. But if you are interested in firing up Netflix, where all six seasons of Schitt’s Creek are streaming, to experience this pop culture comfort food for yourself, you’re going to need to strategize. Because maybe the worst way to experience Schitt’s Creek is to start from the beginning. In its first season, most of Schitt’s Creek’s jokes are an off-putting combination of the Roses being snobbish and awful and the Schitt’s Creek townspeople being gross and crass. The whole thing is just terrible people being terrible, but not in an insightful Succession-y way, and there’s not that much fun to mine from it. If you are a completist and you are already committed to watching the whole show, then you may start at season one, but I would strongly recommend making it a “play in the background while you do chores” show for the early going. Otherwise, just skip it. You’re smart, Schitt’s Creek has a pretty basic premise, and you’ll be absolutely fine figuring out what’s going on if you start later on in the run. If you are willing to stick with it through some moderate growing pains, you can start at the beginning of season two. That’s the point at which the gross-out comedy starts to fall away and the Roses’ snobbishness starts to acquire some purpose and some direction. The show is still a little unfocused, but the talent of the cast has started to shine through.But the point at which Schitt’s Creek acquires its true statement of purpose is in its season two finale, “Happy Anniversary.” That’s when the Roses commit to making the most of their time in Schitt’s Creek. It’s also when you can see the show palpably decide to stop being about terrible people and start being about terrible people who are earnestly trying to be good. There are still a few weaker episodes throughout the rest of the series, but by the end of season two, Schitt’s Creek has finally found a direction and a voice, and the characters are all rock solid. Which means you can start with “Happy Anniversary” and experience the best of Schitt’s Creek, with just a few off-notes sprinkled in occasionally. But if you are short on time and demand only the best from your comfort watching, then skip ahead to the middle of season three and start with “General Store.” That episode kicks off one of the show’s most rewarding storylines, and it marks the point at which bad episodes stop happening. What lies ahead from “General Store” includes one of TV’s sweetest love stories, Catherine O’Hara repeatedly saying “bébé” in a truly ridiculous assortment of wigs, and the pure joy of watching Annie Murphy pretending to be a sexy baby helicopter as she performs her character’s critically reviewed single “A Little Bit Alexis.” It’s a celebration of love and family and finding the best in the worst of times. It’s exactly the kind of TV that can bring a little bit of warmth and light into a very dark year. And it’s all right there on Netflix waiting for you. Help keep Vox free for allMillions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.

Whether he’s ranting about how Americans think “everything sucks,” or hammering states for their revealing mottos, comedian Ronny Chieng has earned a reputation for being brutally honest and aggressively real, even bordering on curmudgeonly.So fans may be surprised to find that the comedian is, deep down, a truly optimistic guy.Chieng, whose Netflix special “Asian Comedian Destroys America” was released Tuesday, is celebrating his fourth anniversary in the states, having immigrated to the U.S. from Malaysia, where he was born, during the last election cycle. While Chieng's set touches on a variety of topics, much of it takes a close look at American culture through the eyes of an Asian immigrant. It’s evident that underneath the snark, Chieng, who is Chinese, is happy to be in the U.S. and isn’t afraid to rib Americans who are oblivious to their privilege.“There’s so much stuff in America, there’s so much abundance. It’s hard to see if you’ve been born and raised here, but if you come from somewhere else, it’s so obvious,” he jokes in his special. “The abundance in this country is out of control. It’s like Christmas every day. Hyperloops, electric cars, SpaceX, robot vacuums, iPhone 8s and 10s at the same time. Can’t even wait in America.“Chieng is now one of the most visible Asians in comedy, appearing as a correspondent on the “Daily Show” and acting in last summer’s blockbuster hit “Crazy Rich Asians." So it’s natural the comedian, who has primarily lived in Singapore and Australia before moving to the U.S., has done some ruminating over his place in Asian America. He often brings up the generational gap between those who uproot their lives to come to the country and others who were born in the U.S.“We chose to come here. Yeah, it took us 10 years or however long it took to sacrifice to come here, but if it were really that bad, we’d go back,” he told NBC News of being a first-generation immigrant. “There’s definitely a lot of stuff that’s not working right in America, and the way that I see it is that a lot of these ideals America has, they’re aspirational. When they’re not met, I don’t go ‘this place f------ sucks.’ I go, ‘Well this is a work in progress.’”He isn’t alone in his optimism. A study on working Asian Americans in California found that 69 percent of Asian Americans born outside of the U.S. believe in the American Dream, defined as “if you work hard, you will get ahead,” while 43 percent of those born in the states do.From his point of view, Chieng understands why Asian immigrants aren’t the most civically engaged group or aren’t known to speak out against injustice. He feels that many have accepted the trade-off of giving up certain freedoms as newcomers for the opportunities that come with living in the U.S. It’s a matter of perspective, he says.“I think the first generation of immigrants, we see institutional racism or some problem blocking us, we just go around it,” he said. “You don’t feel like America owes you citizenship. So when you’re here, you’re like: “Is this place good or not? If it’s better than where I came from, I”m just going to stay here.’”In his time in the U.S., Chieng has also witnessed the Trump administration’s crackdowns on legal and illegal immigration. Though he’s called much of the policies and other actions from the administration “presidential bulls---,” Chieng maintains that there’s yet to be anything about the country that’s made him regret his move.With another election cycle upon us, Chieng has taken a particular interest in Democratic candidate Andrew Yang’s campaign, especially since historically the field hasn’t exactly been crowded with Asian candidates.Yang remains the first Asian American man to run for president as a Democrat. His campaign is undeniably significant, considering Asians have been stereotyped as obedient, hard workers rather than strong, pioneering leaders. Research on several industries from tech to the legal profession to finance found that Asians were least likely to be promoted to management.“When’s the last time an Asian person was running for president this late in the game?” Chieng asked. “I just think it’s fun to see this Chinese guy run for president. I don’t think we’ve ever seen someone do it. He’s doing better than a lot of people thought when he started."He added, “He can’t be worse than the guy in charge.”Chieng is transparent that he’s been looking at the election through the lens of a comedian, which is why he often thinks of Yang’s run in terms of jokes. But it raises the question: What does he think of Yang’s Asian jokes, which have been the subject of controversy within the Asian American community.Turns out, Chieng is impressed Yang has brought a bit of levity to the campaign, saying that people “don’t expect a presidential candidate to joke like that. ... It’s a very stuffy conversation.”As for the content of the jokes, well, Chieng described Yang’s brand of humor as “an Asian dad making Asian dad jokes.”“He’s not getting a Netflix special anytime soon,” he said.

CHENNAI, India—The U.S. government is trying to thwart Huawei Technologies Co.’s ascent in wireless technology, but the Chinese company is determined to prevail.Far from Washington, where the government has called Huawei a national security threat, the world’s largest maker of cellular-tower equipment is trying to guide the development and design of the next generation of mobile networks, dubbed 5G.Huawei is sending large teams to industry-sponsored meetings—including one held recently in this south India port city. Just as the home-movie industry agreed years ago on specifications for DVD players, wireless-technology companies are now meeting to establish 5G standards.Huawei representatives are swamping such conferences with recommendations for how the new system should work, leveraging the company’s large research-and-development budget and its growing workforce of skilled engineers, according to meeting attendees and outside analysts.The U.S. and Europe, drawing on the expertise of Western firms, were the quickest to roll out today’s 3G and 4G mobile networks. Now, industry leaders say China, with Huawei’s leadership, is ahead in the race for the next stage.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will be available to testify in a House antitrust investigation into major tech companies, according to a letter from a lawyer representing the company obtained by The Hill on Monday.The e-commerce giant had previously resisted making its CEO available for a House Judiciary Committee hearing, prompting threats of legal action by the lawmakers.The letter, sent by Robert Kelner of the Covington & Burling law firm and provided to The Hill by a source familiar with the negotiations over the appearance, says that Amazon would make Bezos available to testify at a hearing "with the other CEOs this summer."Kelner said that the executive would only appear after some issues on timing, format and questions about the committee's request for internal documents are resolved.An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the offer in the letter for Bezos to testify along with other CEOs this summer.The House Judiciary Committee formally called on Bezos to testify in May related to reports suggesting that his deputies may have misled Congress in testimony about their use of data from third-party sellers. Concerns about Amazon potentially abusing its position as both the operator of the e-commerce platform and a seller of its own line of products have been raised in antitrust cases abroad and could be part of the committee's broader digital marketplace investigation.House lawmakers have recently dialed up the pressure on the country's biggest tech companies — Amazon, Facebook, Facebook and Google's parent company Alphabet — to offer their CEOs to testify as part of the probe, Axios reported Sunday. Rep.David CicillineDavid Nicola CicillinePocan won't seek another term as Progressive Caucus co-chair Jewish lawmakers targeted by anti-Semitic tweets ahead of election: ADL Pelosi suggests Trump setting 'dangerous' example with quick return to White House MORE(D-R.I.), the chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust who has been leading the investigation, said in a statement to The Hill that having the CEOs testify will be "essential to complete this bipartisan investigation into the state of competition in the digital." "The Antitrust Subcommittee will continue to use the tools at our disposal to ensure we gather whatever information is necessary for our work," he added. --This report was updated at 1:52 p.m.

On Tuesday evening, a large (449-page) pdf landed in my inbox. It’s the majority report of the US House of Representatives judiciary committee’s subcommittee on antitrust, commercial and administrative law and it makes ideal bedside reading material for only two classes of person: competition lawyers and newspaper columnists. But even if it’s unlikely to be a bestseller, its publication is still a landmark event because it marks the first concerted (and properly resourced) critical interrogation of a new group of unaccountable powers that is roaming loose in our democracies: tech companies. Its guiding spirit was something said by the great Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis many moons ago: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”Only four tech companies were targeted – Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. How Microsoft escaped scrutiny is a mystery (to me anyway); perhaps it’s because that company had its day in court long ago and survived to become the handmaiden of governments and organisations everywhere and is therefore part of the ruling establishment.The inquiry that led to the report started in 2019 as an investigation into the state of competition online. It had three aims: “1) to document competition problems in digital markets; 2) examine whether dominant firms are engaging in anticompetitive conduct; and 3) assess whether existing antitrust laws, competition policies and current enforcement levels are adequate to address these issues.” Crudely summarised, its conclusions are: there are indeed serious competitions problems in digital markets; dominant firms are behaving in grossly anticompetitive ways; existing laws do need updating; and enforcement has, to date, been patchy and in many cases woefully inadequate.The cynical response to these findings is that we knew all that, so what’s new? Two answers: first, that we didn’t have evidence on such a massive and detailed scale and to make reforms possible in a law-abiding democracy you need evidence-based policy; and second, this is the first time that legislators in the jurisdiction that still matters most in the tech arena – the United States – have started to take these things seriously.Another significant thing about the report is that it signals the beginning of the end for a judicial mindset that has for decades enfeebled antitrust action in the US. This intellectual passivity can be traced to the late 1970s and particularly to the publication of a landmark book, The Antitrust Paradox by Robert Bork, a prominent judge and legal scholar. The thrust of his argument was that antitrust law in the US had, over many decades, focused too much on ensuring competition in markets rather than protecting consumers. Since consumers often benefited from corporate mergers that led to giant companies, antitrust law should therefore focus on consumer welfare rather than on ensuring competition. And, of course, for “consumer welfare” read “lower prices”.This philosophy was enthusiastically taken on by influential Chicago law school scholars and their colleagues in the economics department, including Milton Friedman, the high priest of neoliberal economics. And then along comes the internet, followed by the web and the headlong growth of firms such as Google, offering “free” services, and Amazon, offering cut-price online retailing. Bork’s arguments were music to the ears of tech entrepreneurs riding the power of network effects in winner-take-all markets and yet, by Bork’s criterion, doing nothing but good for consumers while becoming monopolies in the process. Applying old antitrust doctrines to such giant firms was, according to the new mindset, tantamount to punishing excellence.Bork’s legacy – legislative and judicial tolerance of the growth of digital monopolies – goes a long way to explaining why tech companies have enjoyed such a free ride over several decades. The House subcommittee’s investigation was the most tangible sign to date that those good times may be coming to an end. The intellectual and legislative climate has changed.But even if that’s true, there’s a long and rocky road ahead. The report, remember, is a “majority” one: it represents only the views of the Democratic majority on the subcommittee. Although the investigation originally began as a bipartisan one, as things came to the crunch the pathologically polarised politics of the US eventually surfaced in the committee room. In fact, this was obvious during the televised grilling of the CEOs of the four tech giants at the end of July. While Democrats on the subcommittee probed the witnesses about their abuses of monopoly power, Republicans, one of them a flake of Cadbury proportions, obsessed about only one thing: social media “censoring” of “conservative” (AKA rightwing) opinions. Not surprisingly, when it came to signing the report, all of the Republicans balked.What happens next depends, like everything else, on what happens on 3 November. If Biden wins and the Democrats gain control of the Senate as well as the House, then the tech giants will have big problems on their hands, because they will be dealing with legislators and regulators who know what they’re doing. If Trump wins, well, they’ll just be facing a screwball with a short attention span. For all I know, they might think that’s the better option – for them. Stay tuned: only 23 days to go.Selling sharesOn the Social Media Collective’s website, a very insightful critique by Niall Docherty of the film The Social Dilemma.Truckload of troubleWhat happens if there’s no Brexit trade deal? You can guess the answer, but Politico has done a really useful deep dive into the matter.Growing pains Thirty Glorious Years is a lovely, long-sweep essay by Jonathan Hopkin on the Aeon site about how our democracy got to its current state. Topics Technology sector Opinion Amazon Apple Facebook Google comment

With that, Trump’s defenses have failed on every side. Though the president was reportedly adamant that the exchange not be called a quid pro quo, it doesn’t matter what it was labeled, since it apparently was, in fact, a quid pro quo. Nor does the excuse that Trump was simply trying to use American leverage to fight corruption stand up. The president was seeking to aid his own personal reelection prospects using American statecraft as leverage—a clear abuse of power. (It’s also still possible that the administration broke the law by trying to hold up the funds.) Nor can the president claim ignorance of the scheme, since multiple witnesses have attested to his personal involvement.“The president used the machinery of government to advance his private interests instead of his own administration’s public policy,” Daniel Fried, a former State Department official in Republican and Democratic administrations, wrote in an email. “Taylor’s statement outlines in devastating detail that there was indeed a presidential-mandated ‘quid pro quo,’ that the substance of the U.S.-Ukrainian relationship was to be made conditional on the Ukrainians acting on behalf of the president’s partisan interests.”With this information in hand, Democrats have little choice but to vote to impeach. They just have to decide, as my colleague Elaine Godfrey reports, when and on what specific issues.Any impeachment of a president is an epochal event. Yet this realization is especially surprising because of how quickly it has come. As the drip of evidence has turned into a steady stream over the past two weeks, it’s easy to lose sight of how much the ground has shifted.Less than one month ago, on September 24, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House was launching an “official impeachment inquiry.” At the time, that seemed like a potentially risky move. What led Pelosi to act was that a group of moderate Democratic representatives who had been reluctant to impeach announced that they supported an impeachment inquiry—not necessarily articles of impeachment, or a vote to impeach, but a simple inquiry.A probe made sense, since the public, and Congress, knew very little about the matter in question. There was a whistle-blower complaint about the president’s behavior, and the White House had been refusing to release it, but the substance of the complaint was still mostly unknown. The White House had not yet released the transcript of a call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, had been relatively open about his muckraking in Ukraine, but the extent of his hijacking of U.S. foreign policy was unknown. More than half the country opposed impeachment (51.2 percent on average, per FiveThirtyEight), and less than 39 percent of the country backed it.