Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google had roles as “gatekeepers” in common and controlled prices and the distribution of goods and services, the report said. That made third-party businesses — like app developers on Apple’s App Store and sellers on Amazon’s marketplace — beholden to the companies’ demands, the report said. The word monopoly appeared in the report nearly 120 times.“With no restrictions of tech companies to own and compete on their own platforms, which are the only options for so many small businesses, it takes away any real sense of competition,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat of Washington, who has been a vocal critic of Amazon.Even without full bipartisan support, the report sets important groundwork, said Gene Kimmelman, a former senior antitrust official at the Justice Department. He said the breakup of AT&T in the 1980s was supported by policies set forth by Congress. Tuesday’s report, he said, was “the foundation for legislation and regulation that enables antitrust cases against Google, Facebook and others to actually break markets open to more competition.”Google disputed the findings and said its free service had been a boon to consumers. “Google’s free products like Search, Maps and Gmail help millions of Americans,” the company said in a statement, “and we’ve invested billions of dollars in research and development to build and improve them. We compete fairly in a fast-moving and highly competitive industry.”Amazon said the committee’s recommendations could end up harming small businesses and consumers.“The flawed thinking would have the primary effect of forcing millions of independent retailers out of online stores, thereby depriving these small businesses of one of the fastest and most profitable ways available to reach customers,” Amazon said in a blog post. “Far from enhancing competition, these uninformed notions would instead reduce it.”Apple “vehemently disagrees with the conclusions in this staff report,” the company said in a statement. “The App Store has enabled new markets, new services and new products that were unimaginable a dozen years ago, and developers have been primary beneficiaries of this ecosystem,” the company said.Facebook disagreed that its mergers with Instagram and WhatsApp were anticompetitive. “We compete with a wide variety of services with millions, even billions, of people using them,” the company said in a statement. “Acquisitions are part of every industry, and just one way we innovate new technologies to deliver more value to people.”

“Where’s the Whistleblower?” President Donald Trump asked in a tweet this morning. The answer that Trump surely doesn’t want to hear, however, is this: It’s not just one whistle-blower anymore.The president now finds himself virtually surrounded by them, as one official after another treks to Capitol Hill to accuse Trump of putting his own political interests ahead of the nation’s. The clamor is powering the congressional impeachment investigation that Trump has failed to thwart, and that now threatens his presidency.William Taylor, Trump’s own envoy to Ukraine, yesterday became the latest senior official to cry foul over wrongdoing at the highest levels of the president’s administration. In closed-door testimony to three congressional committees, the veteran diplomat detailed how a pressure campaign directed by the president sought to tie U.S. aid to Ukraine to the public announcement of a Ukrainian investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son. It was the most damaging account yet of a quid pro quo that, despite denials from Trump and his lieutenants, fits the very definition of the term.In telling his story to Congress, Taylor joined a procession of current and former administration officials who have both backed up and expanded the initial allegations from an anonymous whistle-blower that set off the impeachment inquiry. Fiona Hill, the former director of European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council, told House investigators that the maneuvering in Ukraine by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, had prompted her boss, then–National Security Adviser John Bolton, to alert White House attorneys and liken Giuliani’s machinations to “a drug deal.” Kurt Volker, another top diplomat in Ukraine, reportedly testified that he personally told the country’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that he needed to publicly commit to a probe of corruption and the 2016 election to secure a face-to-face meeting with Trump. Taylor’s predecessor, Marie Yovanovitch, detailed how she was abruptly removed from her post as ambassador to Ukraine after a concerted effort by Giuliani to attack her as disloyal to the president.

It’s an article of faith since Watergate that it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up that fells a president. Members of Congress are organized to hold hearings to explore the cancer on the presidency. Reporters, like dobermans, are bred to sniff it out.What if there is no cover-up, no need to meet with Deep Throat in an underground garage to get to the bottom of a break-in of Democratic headquarters? What if shame has gone the way of the landline, an artifact of White Houses past? These aren’t hypothetical questions. It upends the moral universe to have a president who brags about a call to the point of releasing the transcript in which he shakes down the Ukrainian president in a weapons-for-dirt-on-Biden deal as if it were perfectly normal. True enough, it didn’t contain the words “quid pro quo,” as if the absence of a Latin phrase no one uses in conversation supports Trump’s assertion that he wasn’t withholding money to fight Vladimir Putin’s invading army until he got what he wanted. It bought Trump time. He was lauded on Fox News as “honest and transparent” for his revelations. Most significantly, The New York Times buried the story about what Trump had done under a headline screaming “Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies.” Mission Accomplished. Trump got a foreign country to reexamine (though not reopen) the investigation that had found Biden innocent, saw it run on the front page of the paper of record, and made it about Biden’s corruption with Trump as the corruption-killer, putting Biden on the defensive. By sticking to what’s in the transcript, Trump relieved his posse in the Senate of making a futile defense of him on the facts: after two years, they know Trump’s likely done whatever he’s been accused of. It also allows Trump to jump straight to “what are you going to do about it?” and back to his comfort zone as a victim of a supposed witch hunt. That escalated this week to a “lynching,” however sacrilegious it is to compare a lawful inquiry to that. It all slowed the train enough to keep the president’s allies in the Senate on board, which is all Trump cares about. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who in a temporary moment of sanity had criticized Trump for abandoning the Kurds, came back on board as his loyal lapdog, “impressed by his thinking outside the box” on Syria and over-agreeing with him that the Democrat’s inquiry was a lynching “in every sense.” Tuesday, career diplomat Bill Taylor delivered testimony as damning as any witness since John Dean declared there was a “cancer” on the Nixon presidency. Taylor, a Vietnam veteran who served under presidents from both parties, called the bargain Trump was trying to impose on Volodymyr Zelensky “crazy” and obviously a quid pro quo—the arms given for the favor—and has contemporaneous cables to back up his account. Yet because Trump bought himself breathing room by copping to the call immediately, not one other Republican senator was shocked enough to join Mitt Romney in breaking with Trump. Simultaneously admitting to a crime and escaping punishment for it is not something just anyone could do. It takes the instincts of an authoritarian who decides what the law is, the acting chops of a cheesy TV star who bends reality to his will, and the morals of a casino owner. Trump made a confession, dared anyone to make a big deal of it, and then did it again—China, if you’re listening, would you also like to investigate my political rival? And while everyone was busy on that, he abandoned our allies, the Kurds, “who we never promised protection” in the first place. Trump then sent his minions to negotiate a putative “ceasefire“ which the press covered as though he hadn’t started the fire.Anyone else who’d openly violated so many spoken and unspoken norms wouldn’t be subject to impeachment, they'd be driven out of town before it got that far, like Nixon raising his arms in a victory salute as he boarded Marine One for the last time. Trump is un-Nixonian. He can’t be shamed out of office, nor does he declare that he's not a crook. Instead he just asks: “so what?” and shifts the blame. The whistleblower is a spy, if he exists at all. House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff needs to be censored for his stupid, but harmless, parody of the transcript at a hearing. The speaker, not Trump, behaved badly at a meeting in the Roosevelt Room. Trump is so convinced that like the dictators he so admires he can get away with anything, he came right out and announced in an already chaotic week that he’d chosen his airport hotel in Miami as the site of this summer’s G7 meeting, after an exhaustive search, presumably for the one place sure to be a humid 90 degrees in June. Other than reversing himself amidst bipartisan outrage, it reminded me of Dick Cheney who, after an exhaustive search for Bush’s vice president, chose himself. What happened next shows that you can’t send a rookie to do a seasoned con man’s job. Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was only saying what Trump had been bending his ear with but he lacks the sleights of hand and asides that allows Trump to spill the beans and plead innocent in the same breath. He operates as if he’s still in the hospitality business, as Mulvaney allowed, while casually dispensing with Article II of the Constitution as a “phony Emoluments clause.” Mulvaney, abused more than most aides—once banished for coughing, an acting who is never going to be the real thing—blurted out that of course there was a quid pro quo, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Doesn’t everyone adjust foreign policy to fit their own politics? If you think otherwise, well, “Get Over It,” a legend immediately heat-stamped onto a campaign T-shirt for sale for $29.99.Only Trump can let it all hang out as a matter of strategy. He did it when he told Vladimir Putin’s top lieutenants visiting the Oval Office the day after he fired FBI Director James Comey that of course he got rid of him to end the investigation. If Trump does it, it has to be good. If he admits it, it has to be even better. There’s so much evidence that Trump’s dangerously unfit for office—delivered by the president himself in the White House driveway now that he’s killed the traditional press briefing, boasted about in his official twitter account, explained by Mulvaney—it’s not just hard to see how he’s not impeached and convicted but how he’s not shamed into leaving office. Yet he’s protected from summary judgement that would be rendered against any other defendant as if someone forgot to read him his Miranda rights. Trump isn’t intelligent but he is wily, confusing the third and fourth estates with his admissions against interest when he should hide that transcript until it was pried from his small clenched hands. Realize he has no shame. Trump doesn’t have enough of a moral compass to know what should be covered up.

Trump has not lost his ability to offend or insult. He has lost his ability to surprise. Since 2017, commentators have reacted to Trump’s travesties by praising him for not doing worse. Trump is graded on a curve like no president in history. If he refrained from erupting in schoolyard epithets, or abusing nations as “shithole countries,” or inviting onlookers to punch a senator in the face? Then he was growing into the job. Trump indeed did not do any of those things last night, so he is collecting puppy-training accolades today. What a good boy!The German artist Max Liebermann remarked after a brownshirt parade under his window in 1933: “I could not possibly eat as much as I would like to throw up.” Through the gruesome evening, a look suggesting such a thought flashed again and again across Nancy Pelosi’s face. When it was all over, including the insults to her, she allowed herself a human moment of protest against the spectacle into which she had been involuntarily enrolled by more than a century of custom.It is now Pelosi, not Trump, who is the target of criticism. The world expects the speaker to know how to behave. If she deviated from expectations, she did so as a self-aware adult who can be held accountable for her actions—unlike the damaged child who occupies the White House.The criticism of Pelosi perpetuates a dangerous dilemma in American life. Trump will trash norms of decency and decorum, either because he chooses to or because he cannot help it. But he and his supporters invoke those same norms when they need help or protection. When Trump degrades State of the Union night into a WWE WrestleMania, it’s: USA, USA. When Pelosi crinkles her eyes in disapproval: Hey, that’s the successor to Washington and Lincoln! When Trump hurls abusive nicknames? Well, that’s just what he does. When Pelosi omits a customary compliment? How dare she.It’s not only Trump personally, but his whole administration. In the summer of 2018, then–Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was denied service at a Washington-area restaurant. There was much tut-tutting then: How have we allowed our political differences to escalate to such a point? Wasn’t there a time when a dinner out could be a refuge from politics, when opponents could be civil to one another? And the next day, she returned to her usual daily work of lying and defaming, hurt and offended that anybody would doubt that she remained a good person underneath it all.In only the past 10 days, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo could summon a reporter, scream and curse at her, spread a false story about her afterward, and then solemnly avow American leadership in the defense of the free press in a public interview. Trump and his retainers want to behave like banana republicans while inheriting the prestige of Reagan Republicans. It’s a deeply crooked deal.

Matthew Whitaker—remember him? Whitaker is a minor footnote in the sordid history of the Trump administration, an unqualified toady who served as acting attorney general for three months before a heavyweight hack—Bill Barr—took over. But on Tuesday, Whitaker went on Fox News with the essence of Trump’s lame new defense: “Abuse of power is not a crime.” Trump brown-nosers have already exhausted other, more plausible excuses for the president’s conduct. Ambassador William Taylor’s smoking howitzer testimony obliterated the “no quid pro quo” defense the president and his defenders have been peddling since the Ukraine scandal broke. Taylor’s careful timeline established beyond the shadow of a doubt that Trump abused his power as president. Instead of contesting that conclusion, the White House is now moving to a defense arguing that Trump’s behavior might have been “inappropriate” or even wrong, but what he did wasn't illegal and therefore does not rise to the level of impeachment.This will change the nature of the trial of Donald John Trump in the U.S. Senate, Chief Justice John Roberts presiding. Instead of arguing the facts, the president’s lawyers and Senate defenders will more likely take a page from the Democrats in William Jefferson Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial and argue that the president’s mistakes in judgment don’t merit removal from office. They will ignore the obvious distinction between Clinton lying about sex and Trump personifying corruption and will almost certainly create a constitutional crisis by adding an Article 2 claim that the inherent powers of the president allow him to, essentially, do whatever the hell he wants with the executive branch.The answer to the GOP’s furious and—because they’re pros at it—dangerous counterattack lies in federal law. It’s time that Democrats and Republicans and independents of conscience add a new word to the debate, the “E-word”—Extortion.In her cogent and persuasive fact sheet, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi streamlined the evidence so far (pre-Taylor) and sorted it into three handy categories that show Trump violated his oath of office: “The Shakedown,” “The Pressure Campaign,” and “The Cover-Up.” Pelosi wants to keep the House’s indictment on a high constitutional plane. So she doesn’t explain that shakedowns, pressure campaigns and cover-ups are all illegal under federal law. The first two constitute extortion and the third is obstruction of justice. Defining them as such isn’t necessary for either impeachment or removal. The House managers who will serve as prosecutors in the Senate trial are under no obligation to prove that a statute was violated. But the court of public opinion is a different venue, and it requires a different set of arguments for the wait-and-see voters who haven’t been paying close attention. When they hear “no president is above the law,” many want the law in question to be more like something out of a movie or TV police procedural than a constitutional law seminar. The law that says that maybe—depending on one’s constitutional interpretation— the White House has to cough up documents is less convincing than one that says you can’t act like Don Vito Corleone.I’m a native of Chicago, which has more than its share of public corruption cases. Federal charges often involve payoffs and kick-backs—bribing someone to do something. Extortion more often involves threats (shakedowns, pressure campaigns) related to the consequences of not doing something. Think “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” or “I’d like you to do us a favor, though.” The relevant law is the 1946 Hobbs Act, which was passed to curb labor union racketeering. Courts have since ruled that this federal statute applies strongly to public officials acting “under color of law”—meaning in their official capacities—and that it is not even necessary to prove intentionality in the quid pro quo, though with Trump there is plenty of that, or that the quid pro quo was completed. In other words, the fact that the military aid was finally sent to Ukraine is irrelevant to whether Trump is guilty of extortion.Trump’s shakedown had potential consequences much bigger than whether a studio boss wakes up with a horse’s head in his bed. As Taylor explained in his deposition, the $400 million in military aid that Trump used as his political weapon was essential to protecting Ukraine from Russians who had already killed 13,000 Ukrainians. Left undefended, Ukraine could easily slip into Russia’s orbit, a terrible fate for the Ukrainian people and a geopolitical nightmare that would essentially mean the resurrection of the old Soviet empire. Trump’s motive was not to get Johnny Fontaine a part in a movie but to corrupt an American presidential election by whacking Joe Biden. The case for Trump’s removal from office is so strong that some argue the solemnity of this constitutional crisis should not be reduced by impeaching the president in part for acting like a two-bit criminal. And including the Hobbs Act in articles of impeachment, they say, might risk letting Trump’s defense attorneys distract the proceedings with hair-splitting arguments about the intent of an obscure 1946 law when the House doesn’t need extortion to impeach and the Senate doesn’t need it to remove. On the other hand, introducing prima facie evidence of law-breaking might throw Republican lawyers and lackeys off their Article 2 game and rebut their argument that the president committed no crime.Either way, the Hobbs Act should be an important part of the public debate. By the Sunday shows, expect the Trump bootlickers —their tongues in perfect alignment—to all be chanting the same talking point: “Where’s the crime?”Anchors and anyone interested in saving the American republic should be prepared to reply: “It’s extortion, sir, and it’s a felony.”

Thornberry and Graham are both grappling in their own ways with a conundrum facing Republicans, in both the House and the Senate. Most of them know what their conclusion is—Trump is innocent and should not be impeached or removed—but they haven’t figured out why, and no one is helping them out.Typically, this is the sort of role that the White House would play, with a war room designing and pushing out a message. But Trump has declined to set up such an operation, relying on his Twitter account to push his message. “He is the war room,” Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham told Fox News earlier this month. If Twitter is the president’s army, it’s a fighting force that’s ready and willing to go over the top at a moment’s notice, but one that eschews any kind of long-term strategic planning.The White House has made clear that it will launch an all-out offensive against any Republican who dares to criticize the president at all. As for affirmative defenses, the White House’s line—which is to say the president’s—is that Trump did absolutely nothing wrong or inappropriate, as he reiterated Sunday: The call to the Ukrainian President was PERFECT. Read the Transcript! There was NOTHING said that was in any way wrong. Republicans, don’t be led into the fools trap of saying it was not perfect, but is not impeachable. No, it is much stronger than that. NOTHING WAS DONE WRONG! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 10, 2019Republicans aren’t getting much messaging help from the second-most powerful official in the party either. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told caucus members at a meeting in October that “their best bet was to calibrate their own message about the impeachment inquiry to fit their political situation,” according to the Associated Press. McConnell himself has studiously avoided taking a stance. In October, he pointedly denied telling Trump his July 25 conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “the most innocent phone call that I’ve read,” but did not offer an alternative assessment.A few Republicans have either labeled Trump’s call wrong or managed to avoid commenting. (Igor Bobic has a useful list on Senate Republican views.) But in the absence of guidance, the majority of Republican members who are trying to stick with Trump have been left to fend for themselves and come up with defenses. They’ve ended up in three main categories:The president did nothing wrong. The advantage of this position is that it puts you on the same side as the president, and means he won’t be taking shots at you publicly, the way he has at some other Republicans. The disadvantage is it puts you on the same side as the president—and against the judgment of most Americans. (Some of the people espousing it have constituencies that may be more Trump-friendly than the general populace.)

A second man has died in the space of a week from injuries sustained in a protest-related clash in Hong Kong. The death came after China’s president, Xi Jinping, issued his harshest warning yet to the city, saying it urgently needed to “end violence and restore order”.A 70-year-old cleaner who is thought to have been hit by a brick during a clash between protesters and pro-Beijing residents died late on Thursday, hospital officials said.His death came less than a week after a student protester who had fallen from a building died from his injuries. Since then, the level of violence at the proteststhat began five months ago has reached new heights.On Monday police shot a 21-year-old student in the stomach at close range and a 57-year old man was set on fire while arguing with demonstrators. A 15-year-old boy is in a critical condition in hospital after he was hit on the head with a teargas canister on Wednesday.Xi, speaking at a summit in Brazil on Thursday, said “persistent radical and violent crimes” had “seriously trampled on the rule of law and social order” of Hong Kong, the state news agency Xinhua reported.The president pledged Beijing’s support for Hong Kong’s police, its judiciary in punishing “violent criminals”, and its chief executive, Carrie Lam. “Stopping the violence and restoring order is Hong Kong’s most urgent task at present,” he said.As he delivered his remarks, demonstrators in Hong Kong were burning a Chinese flag, blocking roads and throwing petrol bombs at riot police, who responded with teargas, on a fourth consecutive weekday of unrest.Student protesters barricaded themselves inside universities, in some cases building makeshift walls across roads and stockpiling bows and arrows, molotov cocktails, catapults and other homemade weapons.Students from Europe, mainland China and Taiwan were leaving the city as several universities cancelled classes for the rest of the semester. The education bureau has suspended all classes in primary and secondary schools from Friday to Sunday.Police described the Chinese University of Hong Kong as a “weapons factory and an arsenal”. Ch Supt Tse Chun-chung told a briefing that the campus protests were “another step closer to terrorism”.The protests began in June over an extradition bill that would have allowed suspects in Hong Kong to be sent to mainland China to be tried. The bill, which has now been withdrawn, became a lightning rod for dissatisfaction over Beijing’s growing influence over the city, and the protesters’ demands have since become much more broad.After five months of filling the streets week after week, their calls for genuine democratic suffrage and an independent inquiry into police brutality have become one of the most serious challenges to Xi’s authority since he took power in 2012. On Monday Lam described the protesters as “enemies of the public”. Hong Kong police have been heard referring to protesters as “cockroaches”, while Beijing and Chinese state media has blamed the demonstrators for wreaking “chaos”. That word that was also used by official press to denigrate the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, which were violently crushed with thousands of lives lost.“That combination of dehumanisation and claiming that protesters have done things that the authorities don’t just feel are incorrect but completely beyond the pale, that has disturbing echoes from the past,” said Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of modern China at the University of California, Irvine.“In the Hong Kong case now it sometimes seems as though the police are placing a whole generation – youths in their teens and early 20s – into the category of people who can be treated in brutal ways.” Ivy Huang contributed additional reporting• This article was amended on 15 November 2019 to specify that the two deaths have happened in the space of a week.

Welcome to Hillicon Valley, The Hill's newsletter detailing all you need to know about the tech and cyber news from Capitol Hill to Silicon Valley. If you don't already, be sure to sign up for our newsletter with this LINK.Welcome! Follow the cyber team, Maggie Miller (@magmill95), and the tech team, Harper Neidig (@hneidig) and Emily Birnbaum (@birnbaum_e). EYES ON ELECTION SECURITY: Funding to bolster election security efforts at the state level could become a sticking point during the ongoing government spending talks, with the House approving the funds while Republicans in the Senate remain staunchly opposed.The spotlight was on the Senate Tuesday, as the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government marked up its portion of the annual spending bill, with the full committee due to vote on the bill Thursday. While the subcommittee will wait until after the markup to release its version of the annual financial services and general government funding bill, which includes appropriations for the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), it's unlikely to include election security funds due to Republican opposition.Why it matters: This could become a factor in negotiations between the House and Senate over government funding bills and make it even more difficult for Congress to approve funding legislation prior to the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, which is needed to avert a shutdown.The House already passed its version of the financial services and general government bill in June, which included $600 million for the EAC to distribute to states in order to "improve the administration of elections for Federal office, including to enhance election technology and make election security improvements."Despite strong support for election security funding for states from both House and Senate Democrats, the House version of the appropriations bill passed without a single Republican vote, and Republicans who hold the majority in the Senate look unlikely to include the funding in their version.Where the Republicans are coming down: Sen. John KennedyJohn Neely KennedyMORE (R-La.), the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government, has been vocal in his opposition to including funding to bolster election security efforts in any funding bill from his panel. In a speech on the Senate floor last week, Kennedy argued that giving states funding for election security efforts could lead to a federal takeover of elections.And the Democrats: In addition to requests from state officials, Senate Democrats have kept up sustained pressure on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to allow votes on a number of Democratic-backed election security bills, many of which include funding for states to bolster election cybersecurity.McConnell has refused to allow votes on the majority of these bills due to concerns around federalizing elections, although the Senate has approved legislation to make hacking voting systems a federal crime and to bar individuals who interfere or attempt to interfere in U.S. elections from entering the country. A possible CR?: Both Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), the chairman of a House Appropriations Subcommittee, and Kennedy told The Hill that a continuing resolution (CR) will likely be passed in the Senate to avert a shutdown, which would continue current funding levels for a certain time period and give Congress more time to negotiate. Kennedy said that while a CR was not ideal, he would be "fine" to approve one if Democrats pushed back on election security funds. Quigley, on the other hand, said that he viewed a potential CR as "a failure" of Congress."I think even a CR is a failure, but beyond that going a whole year on a CR is a worse failure, and a catastrophe shutting down," Quigley said.Read more on the upcoming fight here. BIG TECH TURF WAR: The two federal agencies charged with investigating Big Tech are jockeying over how to divide up their responsibilities, setting up a messy showdown that could undermine the government's efforts to take on the Silicon Valley giants.At a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Joe Simons and the Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim offered blunt assessments of the recent turf war between the FTC and the Department of Justice (DOJ)'s Antitrust Division over how to investigate the tech sector."I cannot deny that there are instances where Chairman Simons and my time is wasted on ... squabbles," Delrahim said, responding to a line of questioning from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah).Flashback: The FTC and DOJ, which are both tasked with enforcing the country's antitrust laws, have recently announced they are investigating some of the tech industry's biggest companies. Reports emerged over the summer that the FTC had agreed to take on Facebook and Amazon while the DOJ would look into Google and Apple. But a DOJ announcement in July made it clear that the department is looking into all the top tech companies -- not only Google and Apple.The fight has spilled into the open: On Monday, just ahead of the Senate oversight hearing, The Wall Street Journal reported the FTC and DOJ have been scuffling over which agency will take the lead on Facebook.At the hearing: "Is it even feasible for the two agencies, for you to split between yourselves what is in effect a single investigation?" Lee asked, noting that it's difficult to conduct a "piecemeal" antitrust investigation into a single company."It's not the normal thing to do, that's for sure," Simons replied.Delrahim said it's possible the agencies "would look at different conduct, perhaps of the same companies."Why it matters: Former FTC and DOJ officials told The Hill it's not uncommon for the agencies to have disputes over the "clearance" process, during which they decide how to divide up what issues to cover. But they said it's clear the FTC and DOJ's relationship has frayed in recent years and that the latest turf issues could stall the investigations into Big Tech."The disagreements between FTC and DOJ are unprecedented," David Balto, a former official at both agencies, told The Hill, calling it a "sign of government dysfunction at its worst."More on the hearing and fight here. A SUPREME COURT FOR FACEBOOK: Facebook on Tuesday released the charter for an oversight board that it is creating to review its content moderating decisions amid blowback over how it handles issues like hate speech and political content.Company CEO Mark ZuckerbergMark Elliot ZuckerbergHillicon Valley: Trump refuses to condemn QAnon | Twitter revises its policy, lets users share disputed article | Google sees foreign cyber threats Chairman: Senate Judiciary to vote on subpoena for Mark Zuckerberg GOP senator writing book criticizing Big Tech for 'tyranny' MORE, who first announced the plans for the board last year, wrote in an open letter on Tuesday that the new body is meant to give users confidence that there is a process in place to protect their speech."If someone disagrees with a decision we've made, they can appeal to us first, and soon they will be able to further appeal to this independent board," Zuckerberg wrote. "The board's decision will be binding, even if I or anyone at Facebook disagrees with it. The board will use our values to inform its decisions and explain its reasoning openly and in a way that protects people's privacy."The oversight board will be set up like a supreme court for the social network and will be able to overrule the company on content decisions."A final decision will include a determination on the content, as well as a corresponding plain language explanation of the board's rationale," the charter for Facebook's oversight board reads. "At the board's discretion, the final decision may include a policy advisory statement, which will be taken into consideration by Facebook to guide its future policy development."The board will have a maximum of 40 seats, with Facebook selecting some of the first members, who will then help fill out the rest of the board.Read more on the oversight board here. APPLE PUSHES BACK ON TAX BILL: Apple is challenging the European Union's decision to bill the U.S. company $14 billion in back taxes, saying the payback "defies reality and common sense."Apple is requesting that the General Court, the second-highest court of the European Union, overturn the 2016 European Commission case in an appeal, Reuters reported.The company is accused of receiving illegal state aid from Ireland to help it decrease its taxes over two decades.Apple argues that the decision is flawed because the intellectual property rights were established in the United States, not in Ireland, and the Commission is attempting to alter the international tax system, Reuters reported."The Commission contends that essentially all of Apple's profits from all of its sales outside the Americas must be attributed to two branches in Ireland," Apple's lawyer Daniel Beard told the court, according to Reuters.The EU executive countered Apple's argument, saying it did not intend to regulate international tax laws. Instead, it said Ireland should have researched Apple's taxes, Reuters reported.Ireland is also fighting the 2016 decision because its economy benefited from the deal, according to Reuters.Read more here. BIBI LASHES OUT AT FACEBOOK: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin NetanyahuBenjamin (Bibi) NetanyahuMORE has reportedly accused Facebook of caving to "pressure of the Left" after the platform shut down his chatbot on Tuesday, saying it had broken election rules."The chat bot is our way to talk to our supporters," Netanyahu said in a social media video, according to The Jerusalem Post. "They took a five kilo hammer and used it to crush us in the Likud; we are in a difficult struggle.""I stand to so many pressures; Facebook doesn't stand up to the pressure of the Left," he added.Israeli news site Ynet News reported that the chatbot illegally shared polling information in violation of the country's election laws."We work with Elections Commissions around the world to help protect the integrity of elections," a Facebook spokesperson told the Jerusalem Post. "Our policies clearly state developers are required to comply with all applicable laws in the country where their app is available. We have restricted this bot for violating local law until the polling stations are closed tonight."Read more here. Lighter click: Happy Birthday Emily! An op-ed to chew on: Law enforcement's encryption dilemma NOTABLE LINKS FROM AROUND THE WEB: Chicago school professor fights 'Chicago school' beliefs that abet Big Tech. (The New York Times)Lawsuit: AT&T signed customers up for DirecTV Now without their knowledge. (Ars Technica)

On the rocky road towards Germany’s post-Merkel future, one thing used to seem certain: the shoes of the first female, Protestant East German scientist at the top of German politics would be filled by a male Catholic Rhinelander with a law degree.That description still fits all the three official candidates who at a party congress in early December will pitch to lead Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, the indispensable behemoth of postwar politics in Europe’s largest economy.But the pandemic has realigned the stars for some of its top politicians to the extent that CDU insiders worry the leadership race’s most likely outcome no longer looks ideal, and the ideal outcome for the greater good of the party looks unlikely.The impressive lead the conservatives have built up through their handling of the Covid-19 threat, they fear, could melt away as a squabbling party emerges from the shadow of the chancellor that has unified them for the last 15 years.Merkel, who will not be running for a fifth term at federal elections in 2021, has already had to tear up her succession plan once: her designated continuity candidate, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who took charge of the CDU in December 2018, announced her resignation a year later, her authority diminished by a series of internal power struggles.Before the onset of Covid-19, a new chair was due to be crowned at a party congress in late April. Armin Laschet, the moderate state premier of North-Rhine-Westphalia, looked like the top contender after winning over the ambitious young health minister, Jens Spahn, as his number two.Laschet, a loyal defender of Merkel’s refugee policy in 2015, also has the advantage that his home turf is Germany’s most populous state, providing almost 30% of the 1,001 delegates who get to cast their vote on the future leadership. But the 59-year-old with Wallonian roots has floundered during the pandemic, in which he emerged as one of the most prominent voices of relaxing social distancing restrictions – only to then have to coordinate Germany’s first “second lockdown” following a Covid-19 outbreak at an abattoir in Gütersloh. In the eyes of many voters, “pushy Laschet” looked more concerned with local business lobbyists than the welfare of the country as a whole.“It’s hard to imagine Laschet staring down Putin, Xi or Trump,” said one previously sympathetic CDU delegate.As Laschet’s popularity ratings nosedived, another conservative politician rose to unseen heights: polls showed the Bavarian premier Markus Söder, who had introduced a lockdown in Germany’s southernmost state before it came into place in the rest of the country, to be the most popular politician in the country.“In a world that is increasingly marked by insecurities – through migration movements, climate change or global pandemics – we are seeing a high preparedness to trade some basic rights in exchange for stability,” says Wolfgang Merkel (no relation), a political scientist at Berlin’s Humboldt University.A recent study authored by Merkel shows populist attitudes in Germany to be in steep decline after rising during the refugee crisis – a trend, he says, which was accelerated by strong statesmanship by established parties at the height of the pandemic.“For governments, there is a new premium on leaders who can demonstrate strength and act decisively, albeit without the populist rhetoric. For the CDU, that means polls will be crucial for choosing its chancellor candidate, and for now they point towards Söder rather than Laschet.”As the leader of the CDU’s sister party, the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), Söder won’t be in the running when delegates gather for a socially distanced one-day congress in Stuttgart this winter, most likely on 4 December.But he could become the two parties’ candidate for the chancellory – an option that has been tried before, with an unhappy ending for the conservatives. Both in 1980 and 2002 the CDU/CSU lost an election as a result, and many still believe that Bavarian politicians with their broad accents and overtly Catholic brand of conservatism simply cannot win enough votes north of the river Main.Söder’s growing band of vocal admirers point out that their man is in fact from Franconia, and a Protestant at that. “He’s the least Bavarian leader the CSU has ever had,” says one fan.For the 6ft 4in southerner to run, however, he would need the support of the head of the CDU in Berlin: something that Laschet would be as unlikely to offer as Friedrich Merz, the veteran hardliner and Merkel critic who is seen as the number two in the three-horse race for the leadership.Some Christian Democrat MPs envision a “dream ticket” of Söder and Spahn, whose star has also shone brightly during the pandemic. But for the openly gay 40-year-old to run for the leadership would require reneging on his deal with Laschet. “In politics everyone loves betrayal, but no one loves a traitor,” said an official at the CDU headquarters when asked about such an option.There’s an outside chance that the fiendishly complicated reshuffle at the top of Germany’s biggest party could benefit the outside candidate: Norbert Röttgen, the third Catholic lawyer from Rhineland-Westphalia on the ballot.After leading the CDU to a crushing defeat in his home state in 2012 and losing his job in Merkel’s second cabinet as a result, the former environment minister has slowly crept back into the limelight through his role as chair of the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee.As the Alexei Navalny/novichok affair has forced Germany to reconsider its approach to Russia, Röttgen’s outspoken views have impressed conservatives who are frustrated with Laschet and Söder’s soft-pedalling. But the suave, sometimes over-confident 55-year-old’s biggest asset could be his openness to ceding the chancellor candidacy to Söder. If Röttgen made it to the second round, he might end up with the votes of the embittered supporters of one of the two frontrunners almost by accident.Merkel’s line of succession, which has been planned, postponed and redrawn continuously over the last decade, could in the end be a matter of chance. Topics Germany The Observer Angela Merkel features

Of all the protest movements around the world this year, the one in Hong Kong is now the longest and, increasingly, the most violent. It may also be the most hate filled. Many of the police and demonstrators have turned a clash of values over Hong Kong’s governance into a calamity of profanities and rage toward each other.This is odd considering the protests began in June to protect rule of law in the Chinese territory from the kind of arbitrary and often personal justice of the mainland’s ruling Communist Party. Hong Kong police, once considered Asia’s finest, have become brutal and indiscriminate toward the largely peaceful protesters. They shot at least one unarmed demonstrator, for example, while also driving a motorbike into a crowd.Their tougher tactics have emboldened a radical wing of protesters to harass police and their families, and to toss petrol bombs during street confrontations. Name-calling has escalated. The territory’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, called the protesters “enemies of the people.”It would seem the most practical steps to end this spiral of hate and violence would be for Mrs. Lam to swiftly and credibly investigate police abuses and to grant amnesty to nonviolent protesters. With China’s rulers largely in charge of Hong Kong now, that is unlikely to happen. Fearful of its own people, the Communist Party cannot appear weak. Therefore, the protesters themselves must end their antipathy toward police to stop the dehumanization on both sides.They should listen to Edward Leung, the pro-democracy leader who has most inspired these latest demonstrations. His slogan, “Retake Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times,” has become the most widely chanted phrase during the protests. He is in prison serving a six-year sentence for his role in a 2016 street brawl with police. Not only did he apologize for the incident, he admitted he “could not suppress his anger.” He is admired for his willingness to be jailed as well as his honesty. Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. In July, Mr. Leung sent a message from prison that the protesters should not resort to personal loathing of the police and others. “I earnestly call on you not to be dominated by hatred – one should always stay vigilant and keep thinking when in peril,” he wrote.Like famous freedom fighters who have spent time in jail, such as Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Leung may know that hatred in the heart cannot win a battle over ideas in public thought. China is a formidable foe but even its leaders have shown some restraint in the face of the numbers of protesters in Hong Kong and their influence on global opinion. The demonstrators are standing up for what they love – such as universal suffrage and judicial independence. What’s hate got to do with it?

Beyond that, there is a hefty list of semi-unknown unknowns: places where we don’t know what we don’t know, but we know where it might come from. Some of the witnesses most able to shed light on the specifics of the Ukraine case have not spoken. The administration refused to allow them to testify, and House Democrats opted to shorten their investigation rather than force testimony through court battles, choosing instead to impeach Trump for obstructing them as well as abusing his power.This includes Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who told reporters in a briefing that of course Trump asked for a quid pro quo from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and instructed people to “get over it.” It also includes former Energy Secretary Rick Perry; Pompeo and one of his top aides; former National Security Adviser John Bolton and his deputy, Charles Kupperman; the acting head of the Office of Management and Budget, which held up aid allocated to Ukraine; and the lawyer who placed a transcript of Trump’s call with Zelensky on a special server.The public doesn’t know what other transcripts were kept on that server. It doesn’t know the nature of calls between Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican member on the Intelligence Committee, and the White House. And it hasn’t seen documents that several witnesses testified the State Department would not provide to them.There are also, as always, the truly unknown unknowns.The peculiar situation of an investigation complete but large pieces of essential information still hidden is reminiscent of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Though Mueller submitted his report on March 22, the public continues to learn new information, and still doesn’t have a full picture.As I reported in November, when Roger Stone was sentenced for obstruction of justice in connection with the Mueller probe, we still don’t have a full understanding of what happened between Trump and Russia, in part due to obstruction by Stone and others. Still, additional information continues to emerge, both through reporting and also in additional investigations. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s recent report added some new facts and context, and a probe by U.S. Attorney John Durham is expected to add more. During sentencing for the former Trump aide Rick Gates this week, Judge Amy Berman Jackson—who has access to nonpublic information from the Mueller probe—seemed to telegraph some sense of how serious the still-classified material is.Will there be a true public reckoning anytime soon? In theory, Trump’s pending trial in the Senate on the impeachment charges could add more information, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has signaled that he is not interested in a substantial factual phase to the trial, and wants to get it over with as quickly as possible. Some House Democrats have also floated the idea of impeaching Trump again if new information comes to light. As a matter of law, this is plausible; double jeopardy does not apply to impeachment.

Last week, state attorneys general, led by Texas and New York, announced investigations into Google and Facebook for possible antitrust violations. This is a big deal. No society has ever centralized control of information as we have in big tech, and this is the first real American strike at the problem. As Scott Galloway frequently notes in his podcast with tech journalist Kara Swisher, the big tech breakup has finally begun.What have Google and Facebook done to merit such attention from authorities? To put it simply, they use their control of the flow of information to monopolize advertising revenue, killing newspapers across the country and around the world and eliminating potential competitors in a host of areas. Since 2007, a little less than half of all newspaper journalism jobs in the US have been eliminated. Out of America’s 3,000 counties, two-thirds now have no daily newspaper. Every sector of news gathering is in decline, and not because the appetite for news is down. People want news. But the traffic and ad revenue that used to flow from news now flows to the digital duo.Market structure failings in advertising markets are a strange problem, because no one actually wants advertising. But advertising is nonetheless critical to give the press a viable financial lifeline, and one shielded by the state. Advertising has financed our news gathering since the early 1800s, and it is unlikely we can have a democracy without the journalism advertising enables. Facebook’s global revenue will be over $60bn this year, and Google’s will be more than $110bn. Most of this money used to be directed to publishers. So how do Google and Facebook control ad revenue?Facebook and Google are basically advertising backends tied to large consumer-facing products. Google has eight products with more than a billion users, and Facebook has four products with more than a billion users. Their business models are quite complex, but the gist is that they seek to place ads in front of you while you are trying to communicate or when you are looking for something you want. So far, this doesn’t sound so bad. But Google and Facebook aren’t just getting a lot of online ad revenue growth, they are capturing practically all of it. And this is where data comes in.The most important input for an advertiser is knowing who is watching the ad. If you know who is seeing an ad slot, you can charge a lot of money to tailor it for that person’s specific interest. If you don’t know who is seeing an ad slot, you can’t charge very much at all. Google and Facebook know who is looking at ad slots everywhere and what they are interested in, so they can sell anything any marketer needs.These corporations enhance their power by getting data from nearly every publisher that exists. Google and Facebook need publishers to serve their large audiences, and publishers need Google and Facebook as distributors. But the power imbalance is stark. Google and Facebook need publishers, but they don’t need any one specific publisher. By contrast every publisher desperately needs both Google and Facebook to get their content in front of readers. For example, a few years ago Google decided to punish the Wall Street Journal for enacting a certain type of paywall by downgrading the newspaper’s search ranking, lowering the Wall Street Journal’s traffic by 44%. Google’s business was unaffected.With this imbalance, both Google and Facebook can and do entice or force, through a host of arrangements, millions of publishers to hand over data about their audiences and subject themselves to specific formatting choices. In other words, Google and Facebook both compete with publishers for ad revenue and force those publishers to hand over data about their readers and subscribers, data which is the main input that advertisers want.The net effect of this market structure is that news gatherers can produce news, but most of the advertising revenue earned from people consuming that news goes to Google and Facebook. Google and Facebook earn money from other people’s work, which is unfair and anti-competitive. And it’s why newspapers are dying.A strong set of antitrust suits, regulatory choices, and/or legislation splitting apart these companies and regulating the data used in ad markets can restore the flow of advertising to the people who do the work to earn it. Such actions will restore the strength of our democratic institutions.Normally, antitrust enforcement would come from the federal government, but Trump enforcers have proved irrelevant at best. Instead these investigations are being led by the states. The Republican attorney general of Texas and the Democratic attorney general of New York are informal leaders, meaning that the investigations are bipartisan. The state attorneys general complement an important investigation by the House antitrust subcommittee led by David Cicilline. Such leadership suggests the rule of law, absent from American business for several decades, may be on its way back. There are also important investigations, hearings or cases by enforcers in Germany, France, the European Union, Israel, India, Singapore, Russia, Mexico and Australia, among others.These corporations have become too powerful to be contained by democratic societies. We must work through our government to break them up and regulate our information commons, or they will end up becoming our government and choosing what we see and know about the world around us. It’s easy to be despondent about the state of the world. But at least in this case, there are public servants fighting for the people. Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Open Markets Institute and the author of Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy

One of President Donald Trump’s top trade advisers on China is refusing to say whether he brought up China possibly investigating Joe Biden and his son during trade negotiations with Beijing.Asked the question repeatedly by CNN’s Jim Sciutto on Thursday, Peter Navarro — one of the architects of Trump’s hardline trade policy toward China — said, “you don’t have the right to know what happens behind closed doors in the administration.”While in one sense he’s right, governments need secrecy to hold sensitive diplomatic talks, it should’ve been quite easy for Navarro to answer “no” — unless the answer really is “yes.”Navarro never directly addressed Sciutto’s straightforward question. Instead, he chose to attack the media. “The problem that I’ve seen over the last three years in Washington is that there are too many stories reported based on anonymous sources,” he said, adding that Sciutto’s inquiry “was not an appropriate question, in my judgment.” Here's video of @jimsciutto asking Peter Navarro if political investigations about the Bidens have come up during China trade talks, and Navarro declining to answer. pic.twitter.com/uaev1O960s— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) October 24, 2019 But it was an appropriate question, and a timely one. Recent testimony in the House Democrat-led impeachment inquiry shows that Trump may have led a policy toward Ukraine whereby the US withheld military aid in exchange for Kyiv’s commitment to investigate the Bidens. And on October 3, Trump, on camera, urged Beijing to look into Joe Biden over his false belief that the former vice president somehow took billions of dollars out of the country. “China should start an investigation into the Bidens, because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine,” Trump told reporters that day.The administration repeatedly denies that there was an improper quid pro quo with Ukraine or that the Bidens ever came up during years-long talks with China over trade. “The president’s view is there is no linkage between that and the trade talks,” Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic adviser, told reporters on October 7. “I guarantee there will be no linkage.”That’s no longer as clear. Navarro could’ve very easily said, “No, the Bidens never came up.” Instead, he chose to dodge the question and try to turn it back on the media. But his assertion that the real problem is journalists reporting information and quotes from anonymous sources (a common practice in journalism) was a weak dodge. Because the alternative to quoting anonymous government officials is to ask government officials to answer your questions on the record — which is exactly what Scuitto was doing. And still Navarro refused to answer. If Navarro had really wanted to set the record straight about whether the Bidens had come up during trade talks with China, he could’ve easily done so. He chose not to. That in itself is perhaps even more telling than a quote from an anonymous source would be.

Cory Booker’s early fundraising numbers are well behind those posted by other major candidates in the race to challenge Donald Trump.The New Jersey senator, who campaigned on Sunday in New Hampshire, said he raised more than $5m in the two months since he entered the 2020 primary, and has more than $6.1m cash on hand.Booker announced the figure in an email to supporters. The sum puts him near the back of the pack in fundraising with roughly 10 months to go before the start of primary voting. Of those candidates that have announced their figures, only the entrepreneur and rank outsider Andrew Yang announced raising less.Senator Kamala Harris of California raised $12m in the first three months of the year while Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who has seen a bump in opinion polls, announced this week he had raised $7m.Beto O’Rourke, a former congressman from Texas, raised $6.1m in his first 24 hours and $9.4m in his first 18 days, his campaign has said. Senator Bernie Sanders raised $5.9m in the day after announcing his candidacy, and later disclosed he had raised $10m in a week.Fundraising has become an early way to prove to donors and potential supporters that a candidate is viable. Donations to Booker averaged about $34, with 82% of the donors new supporters, spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said on Twitter.Candidates are required by law to report all campaign donations, and cannot accept more than $2,800 from a single donor during the primary race.The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren has said her campaign will not hold any formal fundraising events and will instead rely solely on “small-dollar” donations or contributions collected online.Booker insisted on Sunday he felt “incredible” about his fundraising haul.“Money is important but it is definitely not going to be the barometer with which people make their decisions over who’s going to be the next president of the United States,” he said. “And I’m happy that we have the resources we need to be in this race.”On the policy front, Booker promoted a program known as baby bonds which calls for newborns to get a savings account. The government would contribute up to $2,000 annually until the child is 18. The amount would depend on parents’ income.Booker’s campaign says it is expected that one in 10 kids in New Hampshire would receive the full $2,000 annually. He said the plan would let kids use the fund to get training, go to college, start a business or buy a home. Booker said the idea was to “create a fair playing field where everybody has a stake in this economy”.Elsewhere on Sunday, Buttigieg defended his experience, saying he was not someone who has “been marinating in Washington” for a long time. Asked on NBC’s Meet the Press about his qualifications, he said he would “stack up my experience against anybody”, though he acknowledged “it’s not as traditional”.The Democratic field is full of senators, members of the House and governors. Buttigieg said “being a mayor of a city of any size means that you have to deal with the kinds of issues that really hit Americans”.He would not confirm that he will formally announce his candidacy next Sunday in South Bend but said: “The kind of thing we’re going to announce is the kind of thing you only get to announce once.”Buttigieg was also campaigning in New Hampshire. The Colorado senator Michael Bennet was there too, days after he made public a prostate cancer diagnosis.Bennet said he was not dwelling on the diagnosis and spoke to voters about healthcare and partisan divides in Washington. He told CNN’s State of the Union he hopes to announce a run for president “as soon as I can”, depending on his health.“I have got to go through a procedure at the beginning of the upcoming recess,” Bennet said. “That starts later this week. And then it’s going to be a couple of weeks for recovery. But I would like to get on with this.” He added that he was “looking forward to running in 2020”.“This obviously was unexpected,” Bennet said. “But we caught it early. It’s something I think we’re going to be able to treat. And I don’t think it should keep me off the trail.”

A girl-piglet and a boy-piglet, a mummy and daddy pig, no LGBTQ characters or focus on race or religion; Peppa Pig isn’t an obvious target for controversy or counterculture worship. At first glance, it could be a pretty solid adult choice for boredom or sleep. Yet the Douyin video platform in China deems its influence to be a potentially harmful one, due to its growing popularity among the country’s shehuiren. That’s anti-establishment “gangster” internet users to some, or people who like memes and get tattoos of asinine cartoon characters because it’s a bit funny to others.Like people who spend a lot of time on Tumblr, Reddit, or 4chan, ironic Peppa Pig fans probably aren’t a danger to the continuation of humanity as we know it. They might need tattoo-removal services at some point, but removal from a video platform of the cartoons they like, as well as their associated hashtags, is a bit much. For many here in the UK, the apparent crackdown in China has been taken as bizarre and hilarious. Peppa as a figurehead for “unruly slackers”, a cult-like hero calling society’s disaffected to rebel? The cartoon? It’s always been a pedestrian watch, probably even for the generation of children it was designed for. To kids watching who come from single-parent families, have two mums, or are living in foster homes, Peppa Pig’s cosily conservative family set-up may be as otherworldly as talking pigs and rabbits. But despite Peppa being so safe – almost antiquated, even – all the sniggering about its removal from the Chinese media platform is what’s truly bizarre. Because it shouldn’t be surprising at all. A group of adults using the creation or censorship of children’s entertainment to further their own political and moral values isn’t unheard of; it’s almost de rigueur, everywhere. There have been understandable examples of censure, such as the episode of the 90s cartoon Gargoyles on gun crime, which was subsequently cut to remove the blood. Even though blood usually happens after a gunshot. And gunshots tend to happen in television episodes that have been commissioned to focus on guns. An episode of TaleSpin was also taken off air, in this case because of its terrorism theme. Yes; the adults who created it animated Baloo to fight against terrorism. In a children’s TV show. Going further back, there’s 1818-47’s The History of the Fairchild Family’s subsequent fall out of regular circulation … because it included a gibbet-side lesson where a child is shown the hanged corpse of a criminal. Adults of the time wanted children to know that criminals deserved to be hanged. If the adults in charge aren’t stealthily dripping their own politics into children’s entertainment, they’re banning it afterwards when it includes politics they don’t agree with. This is what media for children is, because it’s created, and censored, by adults for the adults they want to see in the future. It’s gentle (sometimes not so gentle) social conditioning, and always has been. Politics but, ya know, for kids. The reporting of the censoring of Peppa, with its undertone of “isn’t China weird and funny compared to us – how ridiculous” ignores all this; how politics are used during the creation of entertainment for children, and afterwards by politicians themselves. This isn’t even Peppa’s first foray into the world of politics; she was part of the promotion of the Labour government’s Sure Start programme back in 2010. One episode of the show was banned by the Australian Broadcasting Company for fear it would encourage children to interact with dangerous spiders. The columnist Piers Akerman even accused the programme of pushing “a weird feminist line”. SoDouyin’s action is not unprecedented, nor ridiculous. Not even when it involves innocent little Peppa and her brother George. The innocuous fictional world of Peppa Pig might seem too far removed from our own to become a symbol of unrest, or moral decay in society, but like much media before it, we create it, we consume it, we use it, and we ban it. What is children’s entertainment but a means to prepare our children for the world? And what is the world but a messed-up mire of warring politics created by angry grown-ups? Children need to be ready for this wherever they live – welcome to adulthood, kids.• Phoebe-Jane Boyd is a freelance journalist who writes on politics and pop culture•This article was amended on 5 June 2018 to remove references to China banning Peppa Pig cartoons and make clear that the entity that removed the cartoons was Douyin video platform. Topics Peppa Pig Opinion China Children's TV Children Asia Pacific Censorship comment

Republicans push the bar ever lower. This president still cannot clear it. Even a month ago, Democrats were at pains to stress that a request for foreign interference in domestic politics was impeachable in and of itself, whether or not Donald Trump had offered a quid pro quo to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. There was a principled reason for this. Mr Trump and his supporters should not be allowed to present the manipulation of US diplomacy for private interests as normal practice. A country like Ukraine is hardly in a position to antagonise the American president; no explicit threat or inducement need be added to the scales. But in any case, the bargaining simply makes a terrible act much worse.Of course, the Democrats had a pragmatic reason for drawing the line: the knowledge that it might be hard to prove the attempted trading of interests. This is why Tuesday’s testimony to impeachment inquiry hearings by Bill Taylor, the acting ambassador to Kyiv, drew gasps. It is not a surprise to anyone that the president should pursue such a course. But Mr Taylor, a veteran diplomat, laid out clearly, precisely and damningly how Mr Trump sought to make a summit meeting and military aid to Ukraine conditional on its government launching two investigations: one into his political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and another into the conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine (not Russia) that interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Hillary Clinton (rather than Mr Trump).The ambassador’s evidence, building on testimony from the former top Russia adviser Fiona Hill, and his ousted predecessor Marie Yovanovitch, laid out the way this administration created a foreign policy back channel for this purpose, undermining its conventional diplomacy. It was run by the president through his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and figures including the ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, a donor to Trump’s inauguration with no former diplomatic experience.Mr Taylor says Mr Sondland told him there was no quid pro quo – before spelling out an arrangement that is the very definition of a quid pro quo. Last week the acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney agreed that there was, but that it only related to 2016 – so “get over it”. (He subsequently walked back his remarks.) The White House continues to insist that there was no quid pro quo. To claim that no quid pro quo existed is like the rest of us claiming that Mr Trump is not the president. Life would be better if it were true, but wishful thinking does not make inconvenient facts disappear.The past cannot be undone, and things can be improved only if there is the will to do so. The Democrats’ will was galvanised when they launched impeachment proceedings. Republicans are still floundering. Most managed to criticise Mr Trump’s claim that he was facing a “lynching”, a deliberately offensive and ridiculous attempt to distract from Mr Taylor’s evidence and to rally his base with racialised imagery. But they continue to balk at taking him on for fear that they will be politically punished. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, refused to back Mr Trump’s claims that he had described the president’s call with Mr Zelenskiy as “innocent”.That is as far as he has gone. Like his colleagues, he seeks to avoid the taint of Mr Trump without actually cutting him loose. They have no will to protect the standards of office – just the hope that all this will go away if they keep lowering very basic expectations for the highest office in the land. Topics Donald Trump Opinion Ukraine Trump impeachment inquiry US foreign policy Volodymyr Zelenskiy Europe editorials

HONG KONG — Storefronts closed for weekend demonstrations are now shuttered, for weeks or even permanently. Protesters are occupying major roads, rail tracks, bridges and tunnels, cutting off critical thoroughfares for commuters and commerce on a daily basis. Universities are telling students not to come back for the rest of the semester. Nearly six months into the antigovernment protests, life in Hong Kong has dramatically changed, pushing the economy into recession, fraying faith in the authorities and pitting neighbors against one another. The turmoil has upended a city long known for its world-class transport, gleaming towers of global finance and cosmopolitan aura, with the potential to alter Hong Kong’s character.Some of the wounds may be lasting.Violent confrontations with the police and mass arrests of protesters have eroded faith in the government and the legal system. Those have been hallmarks of the city’s distinct status under the “one country, two systems” policy, Beijing’s pledge when it reclaimed the city from Britain in 1997.Decisions by the city’s leadership, like an extradition bill that set off the protests and a face mask ban, have cemented fears that Beijing’s authoritarian reach stretches to Hong Kong. They are stark reminders that Hong Kong could become just another Chinese city when the pledge expires in 2047.Other scars are likely to fade over time. Students and teachers will sit together in classrooms again. Vandalized malls, smashed subway stations and destroyed sidewalks will be repaired. Shoppers from mainland China will eventually return to buy Tiffany rings and Chanel bags, lured by low taxes.ImagePassengers were forced off a train in the Sha Tin area after service was suspended because of disruptions carried out by protesters.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesThe economy will slowly recover, too. While multinational companies have drawn up exit strategies, few have plans to move. As the bridge to China, Hong Kong is hard to leave and even harder to replace. The healing process, though, cannot begin until the protests end. And with each escalation, both sides seem further apart and a peaceful outcome less likely. “Nobody wants blood on his or her hands,” said Regina Ip, a member of Hong Kong’s cabinet. “But because no decisive action is taken, Hong Kong is being destroyed.”As the distrust deepens, the demonstrations, once largely peaceful and confined to the weekends, are now spilling over into weekdays. Activists speak of the police as a brutal tool of the Hong Kong government rather than blaming the Chinese Communist Party. ImageProtesters on a debris-strewn road at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. When the police fired tear gas into the grounds of a university this week, they breached the perceived inviolability of educational institutions.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesThe narrative of an out-of-control police force is reinforced by footage and photographs in chat groups of officers beating protesters, and using pepper spray and tear gas on bystanders. A cellphone video of a policeman shooting an unarmed young protester on Monday spread wildly on social media. In recent days, bankers and lawyers in suits and ties have gathered with black-clad protesters outside their high-rise offices at lunchtime to heckle and yell at the police. One skirmish this week between a man and a group of riot police officers happened just feet from Hong Kong’s stock exchange. In another, a banker from Citigroup was arrested. “People are just expressing their opinions, and people in the government and the police force are using excessive force to suppress the opinions,” Marcus Lee, 26, a lawyer, said at a lunchtime rally after officers had just fired tear gas. “The police are especially aggressive toward students and teenagers.” China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday made his toughest public comments so far about protests, pointedly giving his backing to the city’s police.“The continued radical violent criminal actions in Hong Kong have gravely trampled on rule of law and social order, seriously damaging the prosperity and stability of Hong Kong,” Mr. Xi said in Brasília at a summit meeting of developing countries, according to an online report from People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. China, Mr. Xi said, “staunchly supports the Hong Kong police in sternly enforcing the law, and the Hong Kong judicial authorities in punishing violent criminals.”When the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets into the grounds of Hong Kong universities this week, they breached the perceived inviolability of educational institutions, setting off some of the most violent confrontations. Administrators and professors now say they are bracing for a long-term hit. Universities could struggle to recruit foreign and mainland Chinese students. Many mainland students fled across the border to Shenzhen this week as the police and students activists fought at the borders of some campuses, and foreign universities have been canceling exchange programs. In the coming years, foreign students could be dissuaded by the perception that the government might try to stifle academic and speech freedoms.ImageCustomers at a restaurant in the Lan Kwai Fong nightlife district shielding their faces from tear gas this month. Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesThis week, hundreds of university scholars worldwide joined local peers in signing a petition calling on the police to halt campus attacks and warning they might reconsider academic partnerships in Hong Kong “if student’s safety is at risk and such blatant violation of academic and intellectual freedom continues.”William Hayward, dean of social sciences at the University of Hong Kong, said the school’s president, Xiang Zhang, had reassured the faculty and students that “we remain a global university where we engage in a kind of academic discourse wherever it leads, where our colleagues think it should go.”“So any of my colleagues can feel free to teach what they want, teach a class to pursue questions of scholarship that they want to pursue,” he said. “And nothing about the current environment has changed that in any way.”The protests have created major gridlock in a city that runs on efficient logistics. On the campus of Chinese University of Hong Kong, students in recent days fanned out to block the city’s oldest train line and one of its largest highways. The barricades have created a choke point, making it difficult for one million Hong Kong residents to reach the rest of the city. Trucks traverse the road, ferrying goods made in southeastern China like air-conditioners, cellphones, costume jewelry and shirts.ImageA protest in August. The continuing unrest has pushed Hong Kong’s economy into a recession.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesEfforts to turn Hong Kong into an Asian cultural capital have been dented by the protests. Events and shows have been canceled, including an appearance by the “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah and the Hong Kong Tennis Open. People are asking whether the annual Art Basel event will be held in March.The performing arts venues that make up the ambitious West Kowloon Cultural District are still running. But they have had to cancel, postpone and adjust performances in recent weeks. “We had nearly 15,000 people come to our inaugural Jazz Fest this past weekend,” said Alison Friedman, the district’s artistic director of performing arts. “While ticket sales are down, attendance is staying strong. We need the arts more than ever.”It all threatens to make a bad economy even worse. The turmoil has pushed Hong Kong’s economy into a recession — the weakest since the depths of the global financial crisis. Daily headlines about violence have scared off tourists and business travelers. On a recent Sunday afternoon, protesters and riot police officers faced off outside the Peninsula, one of Hong Kong’s oldest hotels. Employees quickly shut the front door, closed the blinds and rolled down the shutters, but they weren’t fast enough to prevent tear gas from floating into high tea, and while a lone violin played, guests wheezed. Although the protests have hurt growth, the city’s economic core is also one of its greatest strengths for enduring the tumult. Multinational companies use Hong Kong as a gateway to China, and Beijing uses the city as a gateway to the world. There are few alternatives that also offer the free flow of capital and information.ImageSome travelers’ plans were interrupted after a protest in September at Hong Kong’s international airport, one of Asia’s key travel hubs. Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times“As long as Hong Kong maintains these two distinct characteristics, it will have an advantage,” said Weijian Shan, chief executive of the private equity firm PAG. Hong Kong has its currency pegged to the United States dollar, making it reliable and stable. China, which has a tight hold on its currency, also uses Hong Kong as the first financial stop to transact and trade with the rest of the world. China can’t afford to risk Hong Kong’s role. Chinese financial institutions have hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of assets in the city, while state-owned companies own as much as 30 percent of assets in Hong Kong, according to an analysis by Global Source Partners, a research firm. Chinese companies, top Chinese Communist officials and rich businesspeople have parked their wealth in the city, which would be under threat if Beijing changed its policy. In a vote of confidence for the city, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is expected to raise $13 billion this month by selling shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.Hong Kong is also still an important entry point for multinational companies into China. The city’s laws are based on British legal tradition. In China, the rule of law is weaker.“I have not heard from one person that they are pulling out of Hong Kong,” said Rick Helfenbein, president of the American Apparel and Footwear Association, which has 335 corporate members with brands like Jimmy Choo, Versace and Gap.“They may be pulling their hair,” he added. “Safety is a topic of conversation. Leaving is not.” Christopher Buckley contributed reporting from Beijing.

The world’s top chemical weapons watchdog group concluded that the substance ingested in August by Alexei Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most outspoken critic, was a nerve agent with “similar structural characteristics” to Novichok — providing more evidence the Kremlin was behind a chemical attack on a political opponent.The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’s (POCW) finding on Tuesday backs what a toxicology report in Germany found last month. Novichok is one of the world’s most lethal nerve agents. It was developed by the Soviet Union and was used on a Russian double agent in the UK two years ago.That’s why the OPCW seemed especially concerned about what they concluded. “These results constitute a matter of grave concern,” it said in a statement. “The use of chemical weapons by anyone under any circumstances [are] reprehensible and wholly contrary to the legal norms established by the international community.”Luckily, Navalny was released from a German hospital on September 23 and is expected to make a full recovery. Such an outcome wasn’t guaranteed after he was placed in a medically induced after being poisoned before boarding a flight in Russia in August.The confirmed use of a deadly nerve agent increases the likelihood that the Russian government was behind Navalny’s poisoning, as many have suspected, and has already led to condemnations from world leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Sanctions from European countries may follow, though it’s unclear if the United States will take any direct action.Which means the fallout from the suspected murder attempt might further split ties between a Europe united in its disdain for Russia’s actions and an America unwilling to chastise Moscow for the heinous act.On August 20, Navalny drank tea at a Siberian airport before boarding a flight to Moscow. He became ill on the aircraft, with a video purportedly showing the politician moaning and needing immediate medical attention. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, near Kazakhstan, where an ambulance waited to take him to a local hospital. But Navalny’s condition worsened, and he fell into a coma before he arrived at the facility. Russia’s Omsk Emergency Hospital No. 1, where Navalny was first treated, became the site of a frustrating standoff between Navalny’s family and supporters and the doctors overseeing his care. Navalny’s wife and team alleged the doctors were controlled by the Kremlin and tried to cover up the poisoning attack instead of properly treating their patient. The physicians at the time said Navalny wasn’t poisoned but instead suffered from a “metabolic disorder” that led to low blood sugar. “Poisons or traces of their presence in the body have not been identified,” Anatoly Kalinichenko, the deputy chief doctor at the Omsk emergency hospital, told reporters on Friday. “The diagnosis of ‘poisoning’ remains somewhere in the back of our minds, but we do not believe that the patient suffered poisoning.” But Navalny’s team — including his wife Yulia Navalnaya, who was barred from seeing her husband in the Russian hospital, according to a spokesperson — suspected foul play. They had good reason to believe that: The Kremlin has a long, sordid history of poisoning political dissidents, defectors, and other enemies of the state. “The medics are being totally commanded by the FSB and hardly release anything,” Vladimir Milov, a close Navalny associate, told me last week, using the acronym for Russia’s Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB responsible for internal security, among other things. “We of course cannot trust this hospital and we demand for Alexei to be given to us, so that we could have him treated in an independent hospital whose doctors we trust,” Navalnaya said in another press conference on August 21.A medical plane sent by the Berlin-based humanitarian group Cinema for Peace Foundation arrived in Omsk on Friday to take the opposition leader to Germany for treatment. The Russian doctors initially blocked the transfer, saying Navalny wasn’t stable enough to travel, before finally allowing the German physicians to take a look at the patient’s condition.Navalnaya wrote a letter to Putin, pleading for him to allow the transfer, and EU leader Charles Michel raised the issue and expressed concern about the situation in a Friday call with Putin. Late that Friday, the Russian physicians granted the transfer request, and Navalny arrived in Berlin over the weekend. Hanging over all the drama is one pressing question: Did Putin have anything to do it? As of right now, we don’t have a definitive answer to that question — and we may never get it. Turns out, that may be exactly the point. Ask people familiar with how the Russian government handles dissidents, and they unanimously note that what likely happened to Navalny is part of a long-standing Russian government playbook — one that Putin follows.“Killing or intimidating ‘enemies of the people’ has been a staple of Kremlin policy for over 100 years,” said John Sipher, who ran CIA operations in Russia during his 28-year intelligence career before retiring six years ago. “Putin has continued this tactic of killing his enemies at home and abroad, and has created a system where those who wish to earn the Kremlin’s support need to do [his] bidding,” Sipher said. “Whether or not Putin personally ordered the poisoning, he is behind any and all efforts to maintain control through intimidation and murder.”Poisoning people is kind of the Kremlin’s thing. In 2004, Viktor Yushchenko campaigned against a Putin ally for the presidency of Ukraine. But then he fell ill, with his face mysteriously and suddenly blotchy and the left side paralyzed. He also suffered immense abdominal and back pain. He said he had been poisoned — with dioxin, a toxic chemical, no less — but Russian officials have long denied having anything to do with what happened to him. (Oh, and Yushchenko ended up winning the presidency.)In 2006, two Russian agents put polonium-210 — a highly radioactive chemical — in former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko’s tea at a London hotel bar (he had defected to the UK). It took weeks for Litvinenko to die, and he blamed Putin for orchestrating the attack.“You may succeed in silencing one man,” Litvinenko said from his hospital bed, “but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.” Russia continues to deny any involvement in Litvinenko’s death.In 2018, the UK determined that Russian operatives poisoned a former Russian double agent and his daughter in Britain with Novichok, one of the world’s most lethal nerve agents (that just so happens to have been developed by the Soviet Union), putting both victims in the hospital in serious condition. They both recovered from the attack and are now in an unknown location — hiding out of fear of another potential attack.And while poison is one of the most commonly used assassination tools, the Kremlin isn’t above using more prosaic methods. Boris Nemtsov, for instance, was shot near the Kremlin in February 2015. Nemtsov had been digging up dirt on the government’s misdeeds, which may have prompted Putin allies to want him dead. A man was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the murder, but many critics believe the whole trial was a sham and a cover-up by the president’s team.The common thread among all of these episodes, as Sipher alluded to, is that it’s unclear just how directly Putin may or may not have been involved. Plausible deniability is baked into the cake of his authoritarian system. Everyone who works in the government knows what Putin wants without him having to explicitly ask. That means Kremlin operatives have the green light to pursue some of those goals — like knocking off a political rival — while officially keeping Putin out the loop.That, in a sense, is how he gets what he wants without having his fingerprints on the government’s dirtiest actions.So Putin could have ordered Navalny dead himself, but it’s equally possible that someone who wanted to make Putin happy did it on their own initiative. “Navalny has lots of enemies,” said Judy Twigg, a Russia expert at Virginia Commonwealth University. Navalny has been repeatedly jailed for instigating protests against Putin and was twice attacked with an antiseptic green dye in 2017. “It looks funny but it hurts like hell,” Navalny tweeted about the attacks. And last summer, while Navalny was serving a 30-day prison sentence for leading anti-government protests, he was taken to the hospital with symptoms of facial swelling, itching, and a rash. As the Guardian reported at the time, doctors at the hospital said Navalny was experiencing an allergic reaction to something but didn’t say what that something was. One of Navalny’s personal doctors also examined him, though, and she said he was suffering from “the result of harmful effects of undefined chemical substances ... induced by a ‘third person.’” In other words, poison. There’s still no official proof of foul play (of course).But beyond this very suggestive history, there are two other potential context clues that point the finger in Putin’s direction in this latest incident.First, if the FSB did indeed put pressure on the Omsk hospital, as the Navalny associate Milov alleged, that would imply that Putin or someone close to him cares deeply about how Navalny’s situation is handled. Twigg told me it’s certainly possible the FSB was involved. “The FSB would surely be highly engaged in a situation where there’s contact with foreigners,” said Twigg, especially since employees of the state — which includes most Russian medical staff — must report their contacts with international visitors, such as the German doctors.Of course, any state security officials that were involved may have just been following protocol by inserting themselves into a situation that would clearly garner global attention. But their suspected role in keeping the German doctors from initially seeing Navalny, if true, could mean they were trying to hide something — like, say, any evidence of poison coursing through the opposition figure’s veins.Second, things aren’t looking too great for Putin right now. He’s overseeing one of the world’s worst coronavirus outbreaks, facing protests that question his leadership, and watching as his ally in Belarus faces nationwide calls to step down. With all that instability, Putin may have wanted to target his main political rival to send a strong message.“This is an escalation and a sign that the regime is anxious and eager to clamp down once and for all,” Alina Polyakova, the president of the Center for European Policy Analysis, told me. If that was the plan, it’s unclear whether it will actually work. If Navalny fully recovers, he may have even more credibility to form a larger opposition movement against Putin as a result of the suspected attack, experts say. Instead of getting rid of his biggest political rival, Putin (or whoever might be responsible) may have just made him more powerful. Whether or not Navalny bounces back and is able to wield that power is what many inside and outside Russia — and certainly many inside the Kremlin — will be waiting to see.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 — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work, and helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world. Contribute today from as little as $3.

There is slightly more doubt on the Democratic side. Two House Democrats—Representatives Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey—voted in October against launching the inquiry and are likely to oppose the articles of impeachment. A few more Democrats from districts that backed Trump could join them in voting against one or both articles, although not enough that would threaten to sink the vote.None of those Democrats is on the Judiciary Committee, however, and over 14 hours yesterday, the party’s members on the panel delivered harsh indictments of the president’s conduct as a singular affront to the Constitution. Some, such as Representatives Eric Swalwell of California and Hakeem Jeffries of New York, seemed to be auditioning for the starring roles of impeachment “managers” during the Senate trial next year. Others were simply intent on rebutting the many Republicans who used the debate not only to defend the president but to attack Biden and his son Hunter. When Representative Matt Gaetz, the Trump acolyte from Florida, brought up Hunter Biden’s past drug use as he was offering an amendment, Democratic Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia came back with a thinly veiled warning to the young congressman, who was arrested in 2008 for driving under the influence. “I would say that the pot calling the kettle black is not something that we should do,” Johnson said. “I don’t know what members, if any, have had problems with substance abuse, been busted in a DUI. I don’t know, but if I did, I wouldn’t raise it against anyone on this committee. I don’t think it’s proper.”Gaetz did not respond.There is no filibuster in the House, but the light rules of a committee markup—in which lawmakers debate and revise legislation—gave Republicans their best opportunity to hold up the Democrats’ impeachment drive, if only for a day. Members were allowed to offer virtually unlimited amendments to the text of the articles, and once offered, every member of the committee was allowed up to five minutes to weigh in on each proposed change. The result was something of a free-for-all. When Nadler submitted the first change—merely substituting the president’s full middle name, John, for his middle initial in the text of the articles—the ensuing “debate” lasted three hours before the committee adopted the amendment without opposition. All substantive proposals from the Republicans, including attempts to remove the articles of impeachment entirely, were rejected on party-line votes.If the GOP’s goal in dragging out the meeting was to create some bad optics for the Democrats—by forcing a “midnight vote” on such a weighty matter as impeachment—Nadler sussed it out. He announced just before 11 p.m. eastern time that members would have a chance to “search their consciences” and that the committee would break for the night and return in the morning for the actual vote. Republicans claimed, with dubious sincerity, an ambush. “This is the kangaroo court,” complained Representative Doug Collins of Georgia, the top Republican on the committee. “Stalinesque,” chimed in Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas. Their complaints were futile, their limited power to stop impeachment in the House having already been exhausted. Their colleagues next week won’t even have such a chance.There seemed to be little soul-searching that took place over the next 11 hours. When the committee gaveled back in this morning, each member voted the same way they had been planning to for weeks, and the impeachment process advanced one more significant step toward an outcome that seems ever less in doubt. Russell Bermanis a staff writer atThe Atlantic, where he covers politics.Connect Twitter

The US government’s investigations into big tech widened on Friday as lawmakers announced they were seeking internal documents from Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple.Letters went out to the four companies on Friday from the leaders of the House judiciary committee and its subcommittee on antitrust, which has been conducting a sweeping antitrust investigation of the companies and their effect on competition and consumers.Among the dozens of executives named in the requests are Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt.Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat, said: “The open internet has delivered enormous benefits to Americans, including a surge of economic opportunity, massive investment, and new pathways for education online.“But there is growing evidence that a handful of corporations have come to capture an outsized share of online commerce and communications.”The investigation represents a rare example of bipartisan cooperation.Doug Collins, the senior Republican on the House committee, said: “This information is key in helping determine whether anticompetitive behavior is occurring, whether our antitrust enforcement agencies should investigate specific issues and whether or not our antitrust laws need improvement to better promote competition in the digital markets.”The investigation is likely to lead to the release of potentially embarrassing internal documents and high-profile public hearings involving some of the biggest names in tech.The letters seek information about the ways in which the tech giants have built their businesses, how they shape the search results that consumers see and how other businesses interact with their services.The companies have said they will cooperate fully with the congressional investigation.The lawmakers set a 14 October deadline for the companies to provide the documents.Nadler said the documents will help the committee understand “whether they are using their market power in ways that have harmed consumers and competition”.The justice department and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are also conducting investigations of the companies. The latest moves come after dozens of US states launched privacy and antitrust investigations into Facebook and Google.Associated Press contributed to this report Topics Technology Google Facebook Apple US politics Alphabet Computing news