During Sanders’ tenure, the once daily ritual of the press briefing – must-watch television in the chaotic era of Sean Spicer – was essentially supplanted by the president holding court with reporters in the Oval Office, the cabinet room and, above all, on the White House South Lawn, competing with the roar of his Marine One helicopter. The more he talked, the more pointless Sanders’ briefings became, since she merely parroted his tweets, evaded serious policy questions and channeled her boss’s anti-media barbs. It was perhaps inevitable that the briefings would get shorter and finally wither away, symbolised by a recent photo that showed dust literally gathering on the lectern.

President Trump’s ambassador to Germany warned Sunday against other countries using “untrustworthy” 5G vendors amid the tensions involving Chinese company Huawei.Ambassador Richard Grenell tweeted that the president called him from Air Force One to tell him to “make clear that any nation who chooses to use an untrustworthy 5G vendor will jeopardize our ability to share Intelligence and information at the highest level.”. @realDonaldTrump just called me from AF1 and instructed me to make clear that any nation who chooses to use an untrustworthy 5G vendor will jeopardize our ability to share Intelligence and information at the highest level.— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) February 16, 2020Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and President Trump have both cautioned European countries against using the 5G company, saying China could access company's equipment for cyber espionage and other crimes. The administration has prioritized ensuring Huawei is not utilized by other nations by threatening the U.S. intelligence relationship. The warnings come after the United Kingdom announced Huawei would be used in “periphery” portions of its networks last month. U.S. lawmakers have since worried about the relationship between the U.S. and U.K. being at risk.Huawei has denied the company cooperates with China’s intelligence services, but U.S. officials say the company can access mobile phone networks through “backdoors” and would be inclined to help the Chinese government.The U.S. brought additional charges against the company last week of conspiring and using deception to steal trade secrets and U.S. technologies. The company has previously been charged with stealing intellectual property, wire fraud and obstruction of justice. Huawei declined to comment.

Prince was filmed with his bodyguard and Dr Michael Todd Schulenberg during a visit to the doctor on 20 April 2016. Schulenberg was accused of illegally prescribing an opioid for Prince and agreed to pay $30,000 (£21,000) over a civil violation. The settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing. An autopsy found the musician died the next day from an accidental overdose of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid Prince: no criminal charges to be filed over musician's overdose death

He added that in the last 24 hours, operations were resumed in the Middle Euphrates Valley and are currently underway. American officials believe the dispersed fighters may be in a wide swath of Syrian desert.For now, Votel was definitive that all US troops will leave Syria, but he wouldn't put a public timeline on when it will be completed."The President's orders are very clear to us. We understand exactly what he has directed," Votel said.However, he also notes the US military will also continue looking for ways to keep the pressure on ISIS and support the SDF without ground troops inside Syria. He declined to offer specifics how that might be accomplished.These comments came as Votel began atwo-week farewell tourbefore stepping down as head of US Central Command. His trip, which comes just as the U.S. begins plans to pull troops out of Syria, will include meetings with foreign leaders to thank them for their support.Votel is retiring after 39 years with the US Army.

In a blow to Amazon, the socialist candidate Kshama Sawant appeared on Saturday to have beaten the business-backed Egan Orion for a seat on Seattle city council, despite an unprecedented financial effort from the tech giant.Amazon is headquartered in the city. It ploughed $1.5m into the city council election through a political action committee sponsored by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.Civic Alliance For A Sound Economy dispensed about $440,000 in support of Orion and backed six other candidates considered business-friendly. In 2015, according to the New York Times, Amazon and its employees only contributed about $130,000 to city council candidates.Sawant, a member of the Socialist Alternative party and a former tech worker, was elected six years ago as the first socialist on the Seattle council in almost 100 years. On election night she trailed Orion by 8%. But as more ballots were counted she closed the gap, and by Friday evening, with the vast majority of ballots counted, she was up by almost 4%, or about 1,500 votes.“We were up against a Goliath, there is no question about that,” Sawant told the Guardian. “When the billionaires have all the money, the power, the political clout on their side, it’s quite an adversary to go up against.”King County Elections, which facilitates the ballot counting, said on Friday night there were about 2,500 votes left to count across all Seattle. Given that there are seven districts with council races, that meant there were probably fewer than 1,000 ballots left to count in Sawant and Orion’s race.Washington state runs a vote-by-mail system, which means it can take days to achieve a final count. In the past, more late voters have favoured the far left.Sawant thanked more than 1,000 volunteers who she said knocked on more than 200,000 doors. She also said she believed the funding and support her opponent received from Amazon and other corporations could have backfired.“All of this clarified to people that big business is not on our side,” she said. “This mythology that, ‘Oh if only we behaved nicely and we brought big business to the table, things would work out.’ Well that’s been blown to smithereens. They are not on our side and in fact they will use every dollar that they can to try and crush the movement.”Orion, an LGBTQ community leader and advocate for small businesses who considers himself a progressive liberal, has said he considered the funding from Amazon unnecessary and largely a distraction.Four other candidates endorsed by the Civic Alliance For A Sound Economy also seemed set to lose. Phil Tavel, Heidi Wills, Mark Solomon and Jim Pugel trailed their opponents by at least 6%, with Solomon down by about 20%. Two candidates endorsed by the Pac, Alex Pedersen and Debora Juarez, had substantial leads.A win for Sawant would give her a third term. She has been a fierce critic of the influence of big business on Seattle, and helped lead the push last year for the head tax, a per-employee tax on large corporations that was repealed a month after passing unanimously.On Saturday, Sawant said she planned to continue her battle for a tax on big business. Orion does not support the head tax.

Stan Chudnovsky doesn’t remember when CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other top Facebook executives began talking about treating the company’s portfolio of services more like, well, a portfolio. The current VP for Facebook’s Messenger service simply recalls that the company’s original tendency to keep Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp pretty much separate started to feel increasingly unwieldy as user numbers for each surged well past the billion mark. Instead of continuing to silo off each app, execs concluded that “we can serve people better if the experiences we are building are a little bit more interconnected,” Chudnovsky says. “That truth [had] been ringing in our ears for a long time. What was never obvious is how would we exactly go about it, and how would we prioritize it.”To kick-start the process, Zuckerberg did what he often does: He posted about it on Facebook. On March 6, 2019, he shared a 3,219-word manifesto titled “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking.” He drew a contrast between social networking’s “town squares”—the largely public meeting areas offered by Facebook and Instagram feeds—and its more intimate “living rooms,” as exemplified by private group chats and messages exchanged through Messenger or WhatsApp.“Today we already see that private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication,” Zuckerberg wrote. He detailed a wildly ambitious, years-long plan to move Facebook’s portfolio of services aggressively in that direction—and all together. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger would follow a unified strategy to get there.Stan Chudnovsky, VP, head of Messenger: “To do surgery of this magnitude on a service that billions of people use, that’s what introduces the large amount of complexity into the equation. And that’s why it’s taking so long.” [Photo: courtesy Facebook]That was almost 19 months ago. Facebook then went largely quiet about the effort, which had a scale and complexity that made even the simpler parts of the undertaking into enormous projects fraught with potential pitfalls. But the company is finally beginning to roll out key components of Zuckerberg’s new vision.On September 29, Facebook introduced Accounts Center, a one-stop hub—still in test mode—where users can view and change settings across Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram, including the ability to log into each service and automatically cross-post among them. Now it’s also beginning to push out a new version of Instagram’s messaging features that’s based on Messenger rather being its own self-contained entity. Users on both services will be able to chat with Messenger and Instagram friends from either app.With some of the most thorny aspects of the integration plan not yet realized—such as end-to-end encryption spanning all of Facebook’s messaging products—this week’s announcements are just a start. But they still represent a meaningful pivot. “The first decade of the company was really focused on the more public space—feed, stories, large groups,” says Chris Cox, the longtime Facebook product czar who left the company shortly after Zuckerberg published his post, then rejoined as chief product officer last June. With the features being revealed this week, “if we’re successful, we’re a few [percentage points] of the way there in the long run, because we have so much more building to do.”How the 2.47 billion people who use Facebook’s portfolio of services will react to these changes—and more to come—is unknown even to Facebook. While Zuckerberg, whom the company did not make available for this story, often makes proclamations about Facebook’s future, real life doesn’t always cooperate. In 2014, for example, he boldly predicted that user-generated video would dominate the site within five years. It’s now been six years, and our News Feeds are still laden with text. However, it’s easy to understand why he would be looking beyond the vast (and still vastly profitable) town squares he presides over. And it’s not just because the more private apps are gaining in popularity.Though private messaging has problems of its own—Whats­App and Messenger have both placed limits on message forwarding to slow the spread of misinformation—much of the controversy that dogs Facebook stems from its publicness. The fact that any disinformation, hoaxes, and hateful rhetoric shared on the site can be disseminated to millions of people in an instant has made the company a target for politicians and watchdogs. Even some Facebook employees—­historically, true believers in the company they work for—have pushed back, tweeting their discontent and staging a virtual walkout in June.New Instagram messaging features based on Messenger include suggestions of people to block based on those you’ve blocked on Facebook. [Photo: Facebook]The spotlight has only grown hotter for Zuckerberg since he published his post, as 2020’s grinding real-world turmoil—including the COVID-19 pandemic, protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, and threats to the U.S. presidential election’s integrity—flowed onto Facebook and then back into the real world. The company’s handling of the chaos drew its own opposition, especially its refusal to suppress a post in which President Donald Trump warned that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Nervous about their association with the social network, 1,200 brands paused their Facebook advertising—­­at least for the month of July—as part of a move called Stop Hate for Profit. The company’s revenues took a negligible hit.Concern about Facebook’s power isn’t new, but the push to do something about it has grown and intensified. Two months after Zuckerberg disclosed his new vision for the company, his Harvard classmate and Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes published an incendiary op-ed in The New York Times, titled “It’s Time to Break Up Facebook.” This past July, Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) grilled Zuckerberg at the U.S. House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee hearings, saying, “Your platform is so big, even with the right policies in place, you can’t contain deadly content. Frankly, I believe it strikes at the very heart of American democracy.”Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, says that “there is increasing mobilization within the society at the grassroots, the sense that [tech giants], which we once thought of as the solution, have now become the problem. In my view, it’s this shifting sense of public malaise, of public fear, that has finally mobilized lawmakers.”Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: Recent moves by legislators to rein in Facebook and other tech giants reflect “a growing sense that democracy has to reassert itself over this economic paradigm, the surveillance economy that is now truly out of control.” [Photo: Michael D. Wilson]There’s no way to square this kind of take with Facebook’s self-image. VP of product and social good Naomi Gleit, who wrote about Facebook in her Stanford thesis and then joined the company in 2005 when it was less than a year and half old, still laments “the gap between what people think that our intentions are and what our intentions are.” But the fact remains that Facebook is combining its apps into one even bigger, formidable network at the same time that many are questioning whether it should exist at all in its current form.Indeed, Facebook’s massive reengineering effort coincides with several external threats at once: to its size, its primary revenue source (targeted advertising), and its liability protections for what’s published on the platform. All of which makes this an unprecedented moment for the company, and—since this is Facebook we’re talking about—society itself.There was a time when Facebook’s strategy for its component parts was to treat them more like entities unto themselves. “I love when people come to the Instagram campus, because not everyone realizes how autonomous we actually are,” Instagram cofounder and then CEO Kevin Systrom told me in 2017. That was soon after his company had decamped from Facebook’s sprawling Menlo Park, California, digs, which felt like the world’s largest dorm room, to its own gleaming headquarters a mile and a half away—decorated, inevitably, with blown-up photos depicting Instagram users’ best lives.At the time, Systrom described his relationship with Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg as being like that between a CEO and trusted board members. “You get input and you get guidance,” he explained. “But you also get pure autonomy, and you get to push your vision forward—which also happens to push the larger company’s vision forward as well.”Letting Instagram be Instagram was good business. When Facebook bought the photo-sharing phenom for $1 billion, in 2012, it had racked up an impressive 30 million users in just 18 months. Years later, Instagram played a decisive role in Facebook’s strategy for staving off Snapchat, which had twice spurned Zuckerberg’s acquisition proposals. As Snapchat’s playful, ephemeral “Stories” feature took off, Systrom’s team adroitly co-opted it in 2016, creating a wildly popular clone that still felt like it belonged inside Instagram.Did Facebook ever pressure Instagram to make changes that felt un-Instagrammy? Absolutely. But Systrom was able to fend off such intrusions as cross-promotions with Facebook that would have bespoiled the app’s tasteful aesthetic. “I’d see things like that, and then they’d just disappear,” remembers one former staffer. “We won those fights.”[Illustration: Ramona Ring]If anything, WhatsApp remained even more of a principality unto itself. In 2014, after Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition bid had been announced but before it had cleared its final regulatory hurdles, CEO Jan Koum told me that his company had “no plans to change anything about how we execute” once the deal was done. It didn’t.In startup days, Koum and partner Brian Acton had been ardently opposed to collecting unnecessary data about users and larding their app with ads. “Remember, when advertising is involved, you the user are the product,” they warned in a 2012 blog post, not needing to mention Facebook by name to make their point. Post-acquisition, as WhatsApp grew to a billion users by early 2016, it continued to spurn ads and champion privacy. In April of that year, it switched on end-to-end encryption that prevented even Whats­App from deciphering messages as they traveled between users.After the founder exodus, veteran Facebook executives Adam Mosseri and Will Cathcart took over Instagram and WhatsApp, respectively. Both were trusted Zuckerberg lieutenants and had previously overseen Facebook’s News Feed—setting the stage for the unification plan to come.For years, surveys have shown that most peo­ple don’t know that Facebook owns Instagram and Whats­App. That often seemed to redound to the company’s favor. Folks who fled Facebook—­teenagers who deem it insufficiently cool or older users concerned about privacy—often ended up spending more time in something else owned by Facebook Inc.However, such ignorance became tougher to maintain in August 2019, when Instagram’s and WhatsApp’s startup screens began declaring that the apps were “From Facebook.” Tying beloved products to the embattled Facebook brand was a gutsy act of transparency, says Ivan Kayser, CEO of strategy and design consultancy Redscout, who calls Facebook’s willingness to do so “weirdly positive.”I tell people, ‘If you’re here because you miss the old days … maybe this isn’t the right place for you now.”Vishal Shah, Instagram VP of productConfusion about the relationship between Facebook and the other services under its umbrella was “long-term, not a good thing for us,” says Instagram VP of product Vishal Shah. He points out that the company’s apps have always benefited from certain logical integrations and consolidations. For example, Instagram users have been able to cross-post photos to Facebook with one click. Businesses also have unified tools, such as a single dashboard for wrangling communications with customers on both Facebook and Instagram.But in many cases, Facebook had been willing to double up on its efforts, if not triple or quadruple. After Instagram Stories had become a blockbuster, in 2017, Facebook, Messenger, and Whats­App rolled out their own takes on the idea—pretty darn similar, but not identical. That’s an inefficient way to build new functionality. “Right now, every time we innovate on something in Facebook Stories, Instagram takes three months to implement that same feature inside Instagram Stories, and vice versa,” sighs Fidji Simo, who, as VP of the Facebook app, is responsible for the company’s flagship product.Contrast that with last spring’s rollout of Rooms, a Zoom-esque videoconferencing service that the company pushed out months ahead of schedule when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Though officially part of Messenger, Rooms can also be launched from Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Other recent launches, such as Facebook Pay and Facebook Shops, follow a similar one-service-everywhere strategy. (In August, the company folded all of its payments-related initiatives into a new group called Facebook Financial, led by former Messenger chief David Marcus—who was once president of PayPal.)Fidji Simo, VP of the Facebook app: “I feel like the motivations of the company are often misunderstood. The way in which we make decisions is really grounded in what people want … and private communication is a great example of that.” [Photo: courtesy Facebook]New functionality, such as Accounts Center’s aggregation of Facebook and Instagram settings in one place, may sound mundane. But given an app like Instagram’s historic independence and cultural quirks, even seemingly straightforward tweaks face an array of challenges.On Facebook, for example, people are limited—at least in theory—to a single, real-identity account. On Instagram, having a pseudonym is fine, and some young people maintain a “fake Instagram,” or “finsta”: a second, secret account meant only for close friends. The last thing anyone would want is their finsta posts popping up on Facebook. “Users need to decide that [Facebook and Insta­gram accounts] can be interrelated, and that that control should be on their side, from our perspective,” says George Lee, a Facebook director of product and former Instagram head of growth.The braiding together of sites has required adjustment on everyone’s part. Shah joined Instagram in 2015, when it was a more self-contained operation. Today, he says, “I tell people, ‘If you’re here because you miss the old days of how we used to build and experiment in a vacuum, maybe this isn’t the right place for you now.’ ” (That didn’t stop Instagram from recently unveiling Reels, a TikTok doppelgänger that’s only available inside Insta­gram; Facebook says it has no current plans to spread it to other apps.)The trickiest part of Zuckerberg’s plan is the intensified emphasis on private messaging. Without setting a deadline, he said in his 2019 post that users of Messenger, Whats­App, and Instagram’s messaging feature—each historically a walled garden—would be able to communicate securely across all three services in a project referred to within the company as “interop.” The first tangible result is the new version of Messenger. It remains a standalone app—but the same features appear within Instagram to replace its existing messaging capabilities, which have been known as Instagram Direct since their 2013 debut. The update is going live in a few countries now, with a global rollout (including in the U.S.) planned for later in 2020.In part, turning Instagram’s messaging features into an in-app version of Messenger is about efficiency. Chief product officer Cox says that it will allow the company to “do the research, figure out the best product, build the best product, and then bring it.” Instagram users get to choose whether to switch or keep Instagram Direct in its existing form; there’s a lot to tempt them to make the move, including new selfie stickers, animated text effects, custom emoji reactions, Snapchat-like vanishing messages, and features for shared video watching—plus the ability to message friends on Messenger.Accounts Center, which Facebook is currently testing, is a single destination for settings that span Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram. [Photo: Facebook]Facebook says it has no plans to force every Instagram user to embrace the new experience. It seems unlikely, however, that the company will maintain two flavors of messaging in the app indefinitely. Those who cherish Instagram as a refuge from Facebook could see the Messenger-derived features as an encroachment rather than an upgrade. But Cox says that he’s been encouraged by tests: “It’s not interrupting any habit or pattern or something that people really love. We’re feeling pretty good about what we’ve seen in the folks who’ve used it so far.”The new Instagram messaging capabilities also include signs that Facebook thought about the privacy implications of knocking down walls between services. For instance, Instagram users can turn off the ability to receive messages from Messenger. Alternatively, they can automatically route particular types of incoming missives—say, ones from friends of Facebook friends—to Message Requests, where they’re quarantined rather than displayed. There’s even a feature that suggests accounts you might want to block based on who you’ve blocked on Facebook.“Everyone at Facebook now understands that if we don’t do [privacy and security] well, we won’t contribute to Facebook’s mission,” says product manager Mitu Singh, who now works on cross-app experiences. “It’s super ingrained in everyone’s heads. And I think in addition to that, they also realize that if we don’t do this well, they won’t get to ship the product experiences that they want to ship and that they’re excited about having people use.”For now, WhatsApp isn’t part of this mix, and given the app’s more stripped-down feel, any move to unify it with Messenger might leave users particularly skittish. The end-to-end encryption that Zuckerberg promised for Messenger and Instagram is also still to come. Messenger VP Chudnovsky won’t say when the interop project will be completed other than that it won’t be this year. “I assumed it was going to be very complicated,” he says. “I think it’s somewhat more complicated than we originally thought.”The challenges aren’t merely technical. Facebook’s history is pockmarked with examples of its playing fast and loose with its users’ data in service of its behemoth advertising business. The likelihood that Zuckerberg would face widespread cynicism about his vision of a more private future was so high that even he had to acknowledge it. “I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform—­because frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we’ve historically focused on tools for more open sharing,” he wrote.[Facebook] is not going to do too much that doesn’t let them spy on you, because their business model depends on it.”Bruce Schneier, technologist and authorAt least Zuckerberg could point to Whats­App as a model. Long after its disaffected founders quit, the service’s end-to-end encryption and general reputation for privacy remain intact. “They haven’t screwed it up, which is kind of neat,” says technologist and author Bruce Schneier, though he quickly adds that Facebook “is not going to do too much that doesn’t let them spy on you, because their business model depends on it.”If Facebook follows through with its promise to bring WhatsApp-level privacy to the rest of its services, a long-simmering tension over the tech industry’s relationship with the law is likely to boil over. Governments hate end-to-end encryption, because it makes messages impervious to standard monitoring techniques, even with the assistance of the tech company. Last October, U.S. Attorney General William Barr and officials from the U.K. and Australia signed an open letter to Zuckerberg opposing his plans to spread end-to-end encryption throughout Facebook’s services, calling it a calamitous hindrance to investigations of “child sexual exploitation and abuse, terrorism, and foreign adversaries’ attempts to undermine democratic values and institutions.”Law enforcement officials often propose adding a “back door” to encryption schemes that would allow them access to data in appropriate circumstances. But that idea is fiercely rejected by privacy advocates, who say that any sort of bypass would be an irresistibly juicy target for hackers and others who would abuse it. “The moment you provide a back door to an end-to-end encrypted product, it’s no longer an end-to-end encrypted product,” Jan Koum told me in 2017, when he was still CEO of WhatsApp. “Anybody can find that back door.”In a response to Barr’s letter, Chudnovsky and WhatsApp’s Cathcart wrote that Facebook wouldn’t implement a back door, calling it a “gift to criminals, hackers, and repressive regimes.” The debate is likely to continue regardless of the results of November’s election.Facebook watchers also wonder what pervasive encryption would mean for the company’s ad business, which still delivers 98% of company revenue. How can Facebook target ads toward users if it can’t scan the contents of those users’ messages?Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CEO of marketing platform Socialbakers, thinks that Facebook’s scale alone makes it essential to marketers. Encryption wouldn’t stop the company from acquiring other information about users that makes them valuable, such as who they communicate with and for how long.“Messaging can be a very good channel for monetization—it’s just that the experience is going to be different,” he says.Besides, Facebook may finally be on the cusp of succeeding at tapping into a source of revenue that doesn’t involve ads—and messaging is at the heart of it. Last April, Facebook invested $5.7 billion in India’s Jio Platforms, a wireless carrier launched by industrial giant Reliance Industries in 2016. Thanks to radically low pricing—as little as 7 cents a day for voice and data—Jio reached consumers who’d never had a cellphone and rapidly became the country’s largest wireless carrier.Facebook’s investment gives it the opportunity to participate in Jio’s ambitious plans to further unlock the Indian market through new services. For instance, the company intends to help millions of kirana—­neighborhood mom-and-pop stores—­finally shift from cash to digital payments. Already, many such shops accept grocery orders via Whats­App, making them prospects for something like Facebook Pay (not yet available in India) or even Novi (Facebook’s still-under-development cryptocurrency, formerly known as Calibra).Over time, in India and elsewhere, Whats­App could evolve into something resembling Tencent’s WeChat. In China, that app leveraged its preeminence in messaging to become an all-encompassing platform that lets hundreds of millions of people do everything from hail a ride to schedule a dentist appointment or buy insurance—often facilitated by Tencent’s WePay.A bonus for Facebook: India implemented a ban on Chinese apps in July, eliminating local competition from WeChat itself as well as ByteDance’s TikTok. And even better, the future of Facebook in India isn’t just about one market, enormous as it is. “If you can scale up something in India, then the chances are higher that you will end up scaling really fast in other parts of the world,” says Tarun Pathak, an analyst at Counterpart Research. (Facebook has been banned in mainland China—another market of potentially game-changing proportions—for more than a decade.)As Zuckerberg predicted in his 2019 post, skepticism about Facebook’s efforts to stitch together its properties is running high. Some critics see them as a preemptive gambit to make itself tougher to disentangle, should current spikes of antitrust fever on Capitol Hill turn into government action to break it up or impose new restrictions on its behavior.If you go from a completely public space to a completely private space … that’s not something that people understand well.”Fidji Simo, VP of Facebook app“The fact that they’re continuing to race to do that is really irresponsible,” says Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, which has called for the breakup of both Facebook and Google on the grounds that their dominance of major internet services harms society and democracy and makes them too big to regulate in their current form. “It’s also disrespectful to policy makers and to our democratic institutions that have raised clear and obvious concerns with their acquisition strategy over the years.”Then again, if policy makers feel that they and democratic institutions are being disrespected, Facebook’s melding of its properties could devolve into a self-own. “When Facebook initially bought these companies, it said that it would keep them separate,” says Michael Carrier, a professor at Rutgers Law School who specializes in antitrust issues. “Why are they integrating them? If the only reason is to hurt competitors or to forestall an antitrust remedy like breakup, then that could present concerns.” (In response to the theory that the company is tying its services together in order to make them hard to break up, a Facebook spokesperson pointed out that deep integration—such as Instagram and WhatsApp moving to Facebook data centers and Instagram leveraging the Facebook ad platform—started immediately after the acquisitions.)In some form, at some point, “regulation is coming, and if [Facebook] doesn’t figure out a better approach to policy questions more generally, then it’s going to get subverted by governments,” says Dipayan Ghosh, codirector of the Digital Platforms and Democracy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School and a former member of Facebook’s policy team. But any endgame is likely to take years to play out. (AT&T’s forced breakup, in 1984, followed more than seven decades of controversy, three antitrust suits, and eight years of litigation.)Dipayan Ghosh, codirector of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Digital Platforms and Democracy Project: “We don’t really have a way for regulators to think about the currency that’s being extracted from consumers … which is a complex and novel combination of data and attention.” [Photo: courtesy Dipayan Ghosh]Even if Facebook remains intact and recognizable, the era of it taking out rivals by gobbling them up is over. Acquisitions on the scale of Instagram or WhatsApp are unlikely to pass regulatory muster in today’s climate; when TikTok’s U.S. operations hit the market as a result of geopolitical drama, pundits didn’t even pause to take Facebook seriously as a potential buyer. Its $400 million acquisition of meme search engine Giphy, in May—not a seismic transaction by historical standards—is under scrutiny from both the Federal Trade Commission and U.K. antitrust regulators.All of this only intensifies pressure on the company to ensure that its new vision works—especially since Facebook has been famously bad at generating new hits in-house. “There’s just this whole slew of really crappy apps that Facebook tried to develop on its own,” snarks one former Instagram business-­side executive. “The acquisitions were much more successful.”Another possible hurdle: The tighter integration on which so much of the plan rests might simply not excite the masses. “I literally cannot imagine somebody who’s using WhatsApp thinking, ‘Hey, I really wish I could message this person on Facebook, too,’ ” says one Silicon Valley veteran, whose résumé includes time at Facebook. “I would love to hear a more compelling value proposition.” (For the record, Facebook’s Cox says the company’s research has indicated that users like the idea of being able to reach friends without juggling multiple messaging apps.)Facebook acknowledges that it doesn’t yet have all the answers. “I think the main thing is really figuring out all of the experiences along the spectrum,” says Facebook app chief Simo. “If you go from a completely public space to a completely private space like Messenger, that’s not something that people understand well.” It’s critical that new and upcoming changes be both comprehensible and enticing.Writing a manifesto, after all, is easy. Figuring out how to go through fundamental change—when your company is being challenged from every direction—is hard. As so much of Facebook’s history has shown, what happens next could be as unpredictable as it is profound.

President Trump on Tuesday sought to shift the focus to his economic track record with a marquee speech in New York City one day before the first public hearings in the House impeachment inquiry.The president delivered remarks to a gathering of Wall Street executives and business leaders at the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan in what amounted to a victory lap for his administration’s stewardship of the economy.Trump mostly used the speech as a laundry list of his administration’s economic credentials as he spoke to a largely supportive audience. He rattled off statistics about low unemployment rates for certain minority groups, an increase in manufacturing jobs and his efforts to roll back government regulations.“Today I’m proud to stand before you as president of the United States to report that we have delivered on our promises and exceeded our expectations by a very wide margin,” Trump said, later concluding that “the best is yet to come.”Trump claimed credit for record lows in unemployment and a brief surge in economic activity that began shortly after he inherited a rebounding economy from former President Obama in 2017.While Trump boasted that efforts to cut taxes and regulations helped save the U.S. from “a future of American decline,” his remarks come as the economy slows toward the path expected before he took office.Tuesday’s speech came at a critical juncture politically for Trump. He is staring down an impeachment inquiry that goes public on Wednesday with the first televised testimony from witnesses who have raised concerns that he pressured a foreign government, Ukraine, to investigate a political rival.The president is also still in search of a landmark trade deal with China to bolster his case for reelection and faces signs that an economic slowdown may be on the horizon.The U.S. and China were initially expected to sign off on "phase one" of a trade agreement during a summit in Chile this weekend. But the gathering was scrapped amid unrest in Santiago, and Trump offered no specifics on when the deal might be finalized.Questions about the scope of the deal with Beijing are also lingering over negotiations. While Chinese officials have said the U.S. has agreed to lift some tariffs on the nation's goods, Trump said last week that he has not committed to repealing any import taxes.“We’re the ones that are deciding whether or not we want to make a deal,” he said. “We’re close. A significant phase one trade deal with China could happen. Could happen soon. But we will only accept a deal if it’s good for the United States and our great companies.”Trump is under growing pressure to strike a trade deal with China before the 2020 election. The president has already imposed tariffs on roughly $350 billion in Chinese imports, and is scheduled to levy import taxes on another $110 billion in goods.Economists expect costs to spike for essential consumer goods with Trump's next round of tariffs, which could strain budgets and dampen strong household spending. A slowdown in consumer spending could quickly lead to declines in employment, raising fears of a recession.The year-plus trade war between the world’s largest economies has also cratered U.S. business investment and manufacturing. U.S. farmers and ranchers have also suffered under crushing tariffs from Beijing on crops and livestock, which make up the majority of U.S. exports to China.Trump on Tuesday, however, was largely dismissive of fears that his trade war was hindering the U.S. economy.While the president nodded to his efforts to subsidize the losses of “patriot” U.S. farmers, he insisted that “the real cost would be if we did nothing” to counter China’s trade practices.His speech in New York and the subsequent question-and-answer session also veered into campaign territory at times. Trump at various points highlighted his pace of appointing federal judges, complained of “loopholes” in immigration law and boasted of the recent mission that killed the leader of ISIS.Trump and his allies are likely to try and harness the strength of the economy, barring a downturn, as a key selling point for his 2020 reelection campaign. While the president's overall approval ratings have remained mired around 40 percent, he tends to get higher marks on his handling of the economy.But Republicans lamented during the 2018 midterm election that Trump did not focus enough on the economy and instead pivoted to more divisive issues like immigration, and it’s unclear whether the president will be more disciplined in 2020.He faces a number of potential obstacles that could detract from his economic message, most pressingly the impeachment fight that has engulfed his presidency.Trump made only a passing reference to the impeachment inquiry during Tuesday’s speech, as he accused Democrats of slow-walking a vote on the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), an update to the North American Free Trade Agreement, to “pursue outrageous hoaxes and delusional witch hunts that are going absolutely nowhere.”House Democrats and Trump trade officials are negotiating over labor, environmental and pharmaceutical provisions in the USMCA. While Trump and his GOP allies have pressure the House to take up the trade deal immediately, Democratic negotiators and the White House urged patience as what they call productive negotiations continue.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: Amazon opened a brick-and-mortar convenience store in Seattle today, and it's a good guess you haven't seen one quite like this before. There are no cashiers, no checkout lines at the store called Amazon Go. We asked Simone Alicea of member station KNKX in Seattle to scope it out.SIMONE ALICEA, BYLINE: I head out about 9:30 in the morning. I download the Amazon Go app while I walk, entering the information for my Amazon account.I'm going cross the street safely. Opening it up. OK. It says Amazon Go. Welcome to Just Walk Out Shopping.I have to update my credit card information, and then I'm ready to go. I'm here looking for lunch, and it's almost like they read my mind. I find sandwiches from a local bakery directly in front of the entrance.And there's a little station for brown bags, although they were giving out reusable bags at the door. I didn't grab one.Then I head out.All right. Since I have my lunch, I'm going to scan out. And I don't even have to scan. I just walk, I think. Yeah.And that's it. My receipt comes on the app, and it tells me my trip was 2 minutes and 55 seconds. Many of my fellow shoppers are Amazon employees. They've been able to shop here for about a year while the company's been testing the store. You can tell someone has just been in if they have a telltale orange bag, like Annie Ng. She's from LA and is visiting Seattle on vacation. When she saw the news about Amazon Go, she thought it might be worth checking out before she left.ANNIE NG: It was good. I mean, we expected a line of people to kind of go in there and check the place out. And luckily, we came in and there's no one. I guess it's what we expected.ALICEA: She spent about five minutes in the store to buy a chocolate bar. For her, it was convenient, especially as a tourist who was already downtown anyway.NG: I would definitely make it a stop, but I wouldn't make it a destination.ALICEA: No word yet on Amazon Go popping up in other cities. For NPR News, I'm Simone Alicea in Seattle.(SOUNDBITE OF HIM'S "ELEMENTALS")Copyright © 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Amazon accounts for nearly 40 percent of e-commerce sales in the US today, and it takes a cut of even more online shopping by selling payments services and other technologies to external shopping sites. Now, the online retail giant is making a play to grab a piece of brick-and-mortar shopping, too — and it wants customers to literally lend a hand to do it.Amazon on Tuesday is unveiling a new biometric technology called Amazon One that allows shoppers to pay at stores by placing their palm over a scanning device when they walk in the door or when they check out. The first time they register to use this tech, a customer will scan their palm and insert their payment card at a terminal; after that, they can simply pay with their hand. The hand-scanning tech isn’t just for Amazon’s own stores — the company hopes to sell it to other retailers, including competitors, too.The technology will be available at the entrance of two of the company’s Amazon Go cashierless convenience stores in Seattle, Washington, starting Tuesday, and will roll out to the rest of the chain’s 20-plus stores in the future, Amazon Vice President Dilip Kumar told Recode in an interview Monday. Recode reported in December that Amazon had filed a patent application for such a hand-payment technology.The technology could also show up in Whole Foods stores, with Amazon hinting in a press release that it will introduce palm payments in the coming months at its other stores beyond its Amazon Go locations. Kumar wouldn’t comment on a potential Whole Foods implementation, though the New York Post reported a year ago that such a plan was in the works.But the Amazon executive did make it clear that the company expects to sell the technology to other retailers, like it began doing earlier this year with its “Just Walk Out” technology — the cocktail of cameras, sensors, and computer vision software that powers Amazon Go stores. Kumar said the Amazon One pitch to other retailers is straightforward: reduce friction for your customers at checkout, thereby shortening lines and increasing how many shoppers are served along the way. Amazon’s plan to license these two homegrown technologies to other retailers, whether competitor or not, is the real story: Amazon isn’t satisfied with e-commerce dominance; it wants to earn a cut of more transactions in the physical retail world, where 80-something percent of commerce still takes place in the US. So it’s building out a futuristic suite of services to court other retailers, while showcasing the technology in its own stores as case studies. One obvious question is whether retailers, many of which consider Amazon a competitor of one sort or another, will want to do business with the tech giant. Kumar pointed to Amazon Web Services, the company’s $40 billion division that leases computing power, data storage, and myriad software capabilities to internet companies big and small, as an example of an Amazon offering that attracts competitors. Amazon will collect data on where Amazon One customers shop when they use the payment option, but it will not know what shoppers purchase or how much they spend inside third-party retail stores. An Amazon spokesperson said the company has “no plans to use transaction information from third-party locations for Amazon advertising or other purposes,” and shoppers can sign up for the service without linking it to an Amazon customer account if they choose.Another question is whether enough people will be willing to hand over scans of their hands to Amazon in order to save a bit of time at checkout. It’s true that a no-touch payment method might be more attractive today, during the Covid-19 pandemic, than even a year ago. But new payment methods often face steep adoption challenges, and that’s even when biometrics aren’t involved. Biometric tracking poses a host of privacy concerns, including the potential of targeted hacking or a mass data breach.Kumar, the Amazon executive, said the more locations where Amazon can introduce the technology, the more valuable customers will find it and be willing to give it a try. That’s why the company plans to pitch other use cases beyond payments. Kumar also said Amazon is discussing with potential partners the idea of linking palm scans with building IDs to replace office ID cards, or with event tickets for stadiums or arenas — two settings that don’t sound especially appealing during a global health crisis, but may be in the future when gathering in a crowd won’t pose serious health risks.The executive added that Amazon chose palm scans over other biometric options for a few reasons. One, he said, is that it’s not easy for a bad actor to identify a person by simply viewing an image of their hand, if that material ever leaked. Another is the uniqueness of each person’s hand. “Even identical twins have many differences in their palm structure,” he said. A spokesperson added that the images are encrypted when scanned, and then “sent to a highly secure area we custom-built in the cloud for analysis and storage.”To some, the upside still won’t be worth it. “How lazy are people that they will hand over their handprints so they don’t have to take out their wallet?” my wife asked when I mentioned the new technology to her in an embargoed dinner-table discussion. But Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint-scanning tech and its Face ID face-scanning tech also seemed a little crazy at first — until they weren’t. And if enough customers trust Amazon with the trade-off, physical retailers will face an interesting dilemma: chase the future by aligning with the most powerful tech company in retail, or stick to the present and hope their customers don't stray as a result.Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.

The U.S. Department of Justice could announce an antitrust case against Google as early as this week, The New York Times‘s Katie Benner and Cecilia Kang report. Attorney General Willam Barr has reportedly been pushing DOJ attorneys to wrap up its investigation of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which has been going on since last summer.But the Times reports that the majority of the 40 or so lawyers conducting the investigation have pushed back, saying they need more time to bring a strong case. Some expressed fears that Barr, an openly political animal, is rushing the case along so that that the Trump administration appears to be taking action against Big Tech before voters decide whether to reelect him November 3.There aren’t many other plausible explanations for Barr’s actions. The Google business practices under investigation have been going on for years; there’s no impending harm that needs immediate redress. Moreover, while it would be understandable if an attorney general felt an obligation to get a case filed under the current administration, Barr seems fixated on getting a case filed by the election, not by January 20, 2021. That suggests a political motive.Barr may win some political points for Trump by hurrying the DOJ’s case, but he might also hamstring the government’s biggest chance in years to rein in monopolistic behavior by tech giants such as Google.“If I’m the case manager, and if you convinced me that taking another couple of months is going to make the case better, I’ll say take the time,” says George Washington Law School professor and antitrust expert William Kovacic.The stakes are high for everybody involved.“It’s going to have a huge economic impact,” Kovacic says. “It will potentially have a big impact on the reputation and stature of the Department of Justice, and with that in mind, there is no magic to bringing the case October 1, November 1, December 1, or January 1.”Narrow scopeThe tight time frame imposed by Barr may have already greatly narrowed the scope of the DOJ’s case. The Times quoted unnamed DOJ antitrust lawyers saying they had confined their case to Google’s dominance in internet search. They had collected large amounts of evidence on Google’s dominance in internet advertising, but believe part of the antitrust charges focused on search may represent their best chance in court given the tight time frame.Even with a limited focus, the DOJ attorneys may still need more time. Because of the way U.S. antitrust laws are written, and because of the way U.S. courts interpret them, big-time antitrust cases in the U.S. are very hard to win.“The real question in this case is whether consumers are better off or worse off,” Kovacic says. “That’s what U.S. antitrust law is concerned with—not the impact on individual firms, but the impact on consumers.”It will not be enough to make general arguments about how Google’s sheer size stifles competition.Given that, it’s logical that Google’s lawyers will present evidence that the company’s success has allowed it to provide a range of useful free services for consumers, and that its scale benefits small businesses by giving them affordable targeted advertising that reaches lots of people. They’ll also argue that the company participates in a highly competitive market. Even though Google participates in a duopoly (with Facebook) on online display ads, for example, its lawyers might argue that in the real world it must compete for ad dollars with TV and radio as well.To overcome these arguments, the DOJ will have to provide both witness testimony and data showing concrete examples of ways Google has shut out competitors and harmed consumers.It will not be enough to make general arguments about how Google’s sheer size stifles competition. While there are those in the legal community who believe that antitrust law should address the tacit or potential harms caused by the “bigness” of companies like Google, the courts have so far not seen it that way.But the courts are concerned about applying existing law to cases. Antitrust claims that have found relief in the law are more traditional ones, such as situations where a company releases a new product and bundles it with an already-successful one as a way of cutting off competition. The DOJ will have to show ways in which Google is dominating its markets by means other than just having good products or being a big company.The DOJ lawyers, Kovacic says, may have asked for more time because they felt they could not yet reach that bar. They may need more time to talk to more consumers who have been harmed by Google, or to interview Google competitors that have been harmed.And because of the coverage of the DOJ’s case during September, this may be the time when the best witnesses would come forward. Kovacic says that as it becomes more apparent that the agency will indeed bring a case, witnesses tend to become more willing to stick their necks out and talk against giants like Google. They become more willing to risk retribution from Google if they believe their testimony will actually help bring about fairer market conditions.A large group of state attorneys general are also working together on an investigation into Google’s alleged anticompetitive practices. This could factor into the time needed by the DOJ to bring its case. Kovacic believes the state AGs may want to bring a broader case, covering more of Google’s businesses and business practices, than the DOJ’s case. He adds that it’s also possible that the states will eventually combine their case with the DOJ’s rather than bring a separate action.But once the DOJ files with the court, its lawyers will have to work with their case as written. Any weak spots in the way it defines Google’s practices or its role in the market may be seized upon and exploited. A loss of that magnitude may seriously spoil the DOJ’s appetite for another go at Big Tech for years to come.If hurrying to file the DOJ’s case gives Trump the look of a strong leader standing up to Big Tech and helps him get reelected, Barr may be happy. But if it weakens the case against Google, many others—including the company’s competitors, consumers, and the DOJ lawyers who are serious about helping create fair markets—may lose.

The opening phase of the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump has required investigators to methodically depose witnesses behind the closed doors of a secure facility in the Capitol basement.The game changes entirely on Wednesday, when the inquiry will move into a more familiar arena for Trump: television.The change of venue offers opportunities to make the case against Trump hit home for American voters. But Democratic strategists are concerned about the hazards of public televised hearings, which are expected to last about two weeks until the Thanksgiving break.The top concern is that Trump’s Republican defenders will succeed in creating a spectacle that makes voters write off impeachment as just another Washington soap opera.Democrats want people to tune in. Republicans want people to turn off.Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, said Democrats face structural challenges in making their case in televised hearings.“The same platform they will use to present and investigate information, Republicans will use to confuse, attack, smear and to attack the Democrats,” Zelizer said in an email.“Hearings are limited in time, so there is a zero-sum nature to how this unfolds. Equally difficult, after different parts of the hearings are over, the information will be refracted through the partisan media lens, which will impact how Americans make sense of what happened.”Certain factors could work to Democrats’ advantage. The witnesses themselves, who so far include three career civil servants and potentially an active-duty army officer expected to appear in uniform, could at a glance communicate a seriousness of purpose.The format of the hearings could also provide for a substantive exploration of the allegations against Trump, in contrast with the usual partisan ping-pong in which the two sides alternate five-minute blocks of time and members strain to generate clips for YouTube.Under special rules, the impeachment hearings will begin with up to 45 minutes of uninterrupted questioning by each side, with allowances for questioning by lawyers on committee staff in addition to members. In transcripts of closed-door hearings, one such staff member, Daniel Goldman, director of investigations for Democrats on the intelligence committee, comes across as particularly effective.Analyzing the Democratic strategy on the Pod Save America podcast, the former Barack Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer said that to avoid derailment, committee members needed to go in with a clear plan.“It needs to be scripted like a television show,” Pfeiffer said. “Not just in the various episodes, as in what order the witnesses are called – but how do we script the episodes themselves? What is each member taking on? What order are they taking it on? Who is assigned with pushing back on the Republican arguments? It has to be very incredibly scripted.”Republicans are working from a different script. Their strategy will be not to try to challenge the mountain of evidence but to defend Trump’s state of mind in a July phone call he had with the Ukrainian president and argue that Trump’s actions are not impeachable, according to a strategy memo obtained by Axios.On Saturday the top GOP member of the intelligence committee, Devin Nunes, released a list of witnesses the minority wishes to call. The list included Hunter Biden, the son of the former vice-president; the anonymous whistleblower whose complaint launched the impeachment inquiry; and a former contractor for a company that during the 2016 campaign paid for research focusing on Trump’s activities in Russia.“Your failure to fulfil Minority witness requests shall constitute evidence of your denial of fundamental fairness and due process,” Nunes wrote to the committee chairman, Adam Schiff.Schiff replied that the identity of the whistleblower would be protected and that the committee would consider the other witness requests.With cable networks including Fox News planning to carry the impeachment hearings live, Trump himself seems likely to tune in. He may well tweet, but his participation is otherwise expected to be limited.Lawyers for the president are not permitted at the intelligence committee hearings but would be able to appear if the process moves to the next stage, the drafting of articles of impeachment before a full House vote. Richard Nixon leaves the White House on 9 August 1974, after resigning as president. Photograph: Chick Harrity/APPublic support for the impeachment inquiry has slackened a bit to 48% in the three weeks since it crested at 50%, according to FiveThirtyEight’s tracker. But support for the impeachment of Richard Nixon climbed quickly, Pew Research has noted, after the process landed on television and many Americans encountered the case against the president for the first time.Corey Brettschneider, author of The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents and a professor of constitutional law at Brown University, said public support for Trump’s impeachment has materialized much more quickly than it did for Nixon.“Here, I think public opinion is moving even more swiftly to suggest that the inquiry is warranted,” Brettschneider said. “The more public opinion moves here, as was the case with Nixon, that’s when I think we’re going to start to see these Republican defections that everybody’s waiting for.”In conversation with Pfeiffer on Pod Save America, former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau said polling indicating most people have made up their minds about Trump means Democrats shouldn’t get their hopes too high.“The ability to persuade, I think, is fairly limited,” he said, “and that should both give the Democrats hope that there’s not going to be some backlash, but also temper our hopes that there’s going to be some huge swing towards us because of impeachment. This very well could be a wash in the end.”

These young immigrants are stranded at the junction of several forces: the Trump administration’s determination to discourage immigrants from trying to cross the border; the continuing flow of children journeying by themselves from Central America; the lingering effects of last summer’s family-separation crisis at the border; and a new government policy that has made it much more difficult for relatives to claim children from federal custody.At the moment, the government’s rolls include hundreds of children in shelters and temporary foster care programs who were taken from an adult at the border, whether a parent, grandparent or some other companion. About 13,000 children who came to the United States on their own were being held in federally contracted shelters this month, more than five times the number in May 2017.All of which means there are more children showing up more often to federal immigration courtrooms like Judge Zagzoug’s, at hearings that could determine whether they will be deported, reunited with their parents, or granted the asylum that their parents desperately want for them. They often sit at counsel tables alone, unaccompanied by any family and sometimes without even a lawyer.Under the circumstances, the children in Courtroom 14, many of whom were from a shelter operated by the Cayuga Centers, were fortunate. Many were allowed to go home at night to a foster family, though they returned to the shelter by day. And they could count on lawyers from Catholic Charities, which receives funding from a nonprofit group to represent immigrant children in New York City shelters.“We used to just deal with teenagers,” one lawyer, Jodi Ziesemer, said as she ushered children to the 14th floor before the hearings began. “Now they’re …” Her gaze swept the small group. Fernanda was gripping a green apple with both hands, occasionally taking a bite. As they moved down the hallway, her caseworker picked her up and carried her toward court.In a spotlessly bright waiting room, Ms. Ziesemer’s colleague, Miguel Medrano, spent a few minutes trying to prepare Fernanda for court. He bent low to talk to her, asking her name, her age, whether she spoke English or Spanish. “Sí?” he prompted her. No response. He shook his head. “Well, if she can’t, she can’t.” He turned back to her and tried again in English. “So we’re going to see the judge,” he said gently. No response.

Taro Kono, Japan's foreign minister, and Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi met in Hanoi last month. Photo: YE AUNG THU/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES By Oct. 4, 2018 12:36 pm ET A breakdown in relations with the West over the Rohingya crisis is prompting Myanmar to seek closer ties with regional powers such as Japan and India that are eager to counterbalance China’s influence. Both Tokyo and New Delhi have refrained from the kind of strong criticism that several Western powers have directed at the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi over the military’s campaign against ethnic minority Rohingya Muslims. The campaign has killed an estimated 10,000 people and sent over 700,000 fleeing to refugee... To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In Continue reading your article with a WSJ membership View Membership Options

Thursday brought new bombshells in the Ukraine case, as Trump’s former envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, who was forced to resign last week, gave a deposition to House investigators. Republicans who were present insisted that Volker had not said there was a quid pro quo for dirt on Biden, but you don’t have to take their word for it, because the Democratic chairs of three committees released text messages that Volker turned over.The messages make clear that both American and Ukrainian officials understood that there was a quid pro quo: If Zelensky wanted to get a White House visit and military aid, he had to manufacture an investigation into the Bidens. In one message, Volker wrote that “assuming President Z convinces Trump he will investigate/‘get to the bottom of what happened’ in 2016, we will nail down date for visit to Washington.” Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland wrote, “i think potus really wants the deliverable.”In another exchange, Bill Taylor—a career Foreign Service officer and the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine after the ambassador was fired, reportedly at Giuliani’s behest—wrote, “Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” Sondland, evidently worried about creating a paper trail, instructed Taylor to call him.A few days later, Taylor said, “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.” After taking five hours to reply, Sondland again tried to clean up matters and prevent any written record. “Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind,” he wrote, adding, “I suggest we stop the back and forth by text.” Sondland also recommended that Taylor contact the secretary of state if he had other questions, making Mike Pompeo’s involvement in the scheme clear.But the stain of scandal is spreading, as a steady drip of evidence shows that Trump has sought to gather dirt on Biden from friends and adversaries alike, across the globe.Thursday morning on the White House’s South Lawn, Trump told reporters that China should mount a probe: “They should investigate the Bidens, because how does a company that’s newly formed—and all these companies—and by the way, likewise, China should start an investigation into the Bidens because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine.” There is no evidence to back up his charges. The moment was breathtaking, because Trump, under threat of impeachment for asking a foreign country to interfere in the 2020 election, opted to ask a foreign country to interfere in the 2020 election, with cameras rolling.Once again, there’s a quid pro quo on the table. China and the U.S. are fighting a trade war and are engaged in tense negotiations about trade policy, giving Beijing every reason to mount a probe to curry favor with Trump. As it turns out, this wasn’t Trump’s first request to China to investigate the Bidens. CNN revealed Friday night that in a June call with President Xi Jinping, Trump had brought up Biden. Trump also promised Xi not to bring up pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong during trade negotiations, which explains Trump’s bizarre silence on the demonstrations but spotlights his conciliatory negotiating approach and his lack of commitment to democratic principles.

The allegations made by Evelyn Yang, the wife of Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, and multiple other women against New York City doctor Robert Hadden raise troubling questions about how white-collar sexual assault defendants like him, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein have appeared to receive favorable treatment at the expense of their victims from Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance.Vance's office had an overwhelming case against the ob/gyn doctor, after 18 of his patients came forward with remarkably similar stories of being sexually assaulted by Hadden under the pretense of his doing medical examinations. Yang testified in a grand jury and was assured by a prosecutor that the case was a strong one. Why then was the end result a plea bargain to a single felony count and no jail time?As a former sex crimes prosecutor, I often encountered an inherent bias among law enforcement and prosecutors that favored more lenient treatment of “white-collar” defendants charged with sex crimes. Sometimes, that was due to wealthier clients getting more attention because their high-priced lawyers demanded it from the prosecutors. Vance’s office already faced criticism for its initial reluctance to prosecute Harvey Weinstein—even conducting its own “oppo research” on one of his accusers—and its attempt to seek a lower sex-offender registration status for Epstein (which Vance later said was a mistake by an unauthorized assistant district attorney). Notably, in Weinstein’s case his defense team included not only David Boies —who had a history of donating to Vance’s campaigns—but also Linda Fairstein, the former head of the Sex Crimes section in Vance’s office. Similarly, Hadden’s defense lawyer, Isabelle Kirshner, made donations to Vance’s campaign, including one donation made on the same day that she filed a motion in Hadden’s case.Often, as in Hadden’s case, defense lawyers make the argument that such alternatives as professional discipline should be considered punishment enough for defendants like medical doctors. That seems to be exactly what Vance’s office did here as Hadden was required to surrender his medical license as part of his plea bargain. But this amounts to a kind of alternative-dispute resolution that prosecutors need to stay away from because it arises from the attitude that professionally skilled defendants have more to lose than non-professionals. That’s the wrong focus.The focus needs to be on survivors, not defendants. To a survivor of sexual assault, it doesn’t matter whether their attacker has a medical degree or not. The right focus should be on justice for the survivor and making sure the predator doesn’t repeat his modus operandi with other victims.The actions of the prosecutors in the Hadden case painfully illustrate the poor treatment of victims of crime. Despite some legislative efforts to ensure that crime victims get a voice in prosecution decisions, communication is often poor with them. Yang’s recounting of her communication with the DA’s office reflects how it failed to take into account her views even after she had the courage to come forward and testify in the grand jury. The excuses given by Vance’s office include claiming the punishment would have been the same no matter which counts Hadden was convicted of, and also apparently excluding victims from being heard at sentencing unless they were the victims of one of the counts to which Hadden had pled guilty. These are unconscionably wrong rationalizations.The idea that the punishment remains the same no matter how many convictions occur is absurd. Prosecutors are free to ask for consecutive sentences from a judge and, although judges often favor concurrent sentences, a case such as Hadden or Bill Cosby frequently results in consecutive sentences.Similarly, excluding victims from speaking at sentencing, whether through a written victim impact statement or directly addressing the court, simply because they were not the victims in the charged crime is also wrong. At sentencing, unlike at trial, judges have broad latitude over what evidence they consider. When I successfully prosecuted and secured the first life-without-parole sentence for a serial rapist in Washington, D.C., my trial partner and I introduced numerous statements from other victims which were critical to giving the judge the full picture of the danger the defendant posed to society if he were ever allowed to go free again.The failings of Vance’s office in the prosecution of the doctor don’t impact just his victims. They hurt the overall effectiveness of our criminal justice system and put unknown numbers of future potential victims of other predators at risk. After Yang’s brave public criticisms, Vance’s office issued a statement that claimed they stood by their ‘legal analysis.” But legal analysis wasn’t the problem. The legal analysis would have dictated that Hadden spend years in prison. The problem was the favoritism enjoyed by wealthy professionals accused of sex crimes.

Trump conveyed his disdain for the bureau’s leadership—officials he appointed—when Stephanopoulos reminded him that FBI Director Christopher Wray had recently testified to Congress that campaigns should report instances of foreign interference in U.S. elections. “The FBI director is wrong, because frankly it doesn’t happen like that in life,” Trump said. What’s wrong is not only saying, as Trump once did, that you’d accept help from foreign countries in an election, but strong-arming them into tarring a political opponent. After he said he’d like China to probe the Bidens, the Federal Election Commission chairwoman, Ellen Weintraub, retweeted a message she’d sent over the summer that it’s illegal to solicit something of value from a foreign national as part of a U.S. election.“Is this thing on?” Weintraub wrote, cheekily, using a microphone emoji.Between the entreaties made to China and Ukraine, it’s clear the blowback from 2016 has not made the president any more cautious, and he continues to blur the lines between his own interests and his duties as head of state. Take the batch of text messages released by House Democrats late Thursday night. Right before a July phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Kurt Volker, a former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine, sent a message to a Zelensky aide. The note suggests that a summit meeting between the two leaders was conditioned on Ukraine’s willingness to investigate a discredited theory that Russia might not have been the ones that pilfered Democratic emails in the 2016 race.Writing that he had “heard from the White House,” Volker told the aide that if Zelensky would agree in the call to “get to the bottom of what happened in 2016,” the administration would “nail down” a meeting between the presidents.The texts show Ukraine was reluctant to go along with the scheme, which smacks of a quid pro quo. In one note in July, William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat there, wrote that Zelensky was “sensitive about Ukraine being taken seriously, not merely as an instrument in Washington domestic, reelection politics.” Yet Ukraine may have decided that defying Trump is too risky. New reports show that Ukraine’s prosecutor general is reviewing how the country handled an investigation into the energy company Burisma Group, on whose board Hunter Biden sat. That inquiry could ostensibly lead to the sort of renewed investigation into the Bidens that Trump wants done.There’s no obvious parallel to a president so brazenly enlisting foreign countries in schemes to discredit political rivals. As a Republican candidate in the 1968 presidential race, Richard Nixon took steps to sabotage then-President Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to reach a Vietnamese peace deal. Using private surrogates, Nixon delivered a message to South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu that if he delayed, he might get better terms in a Nixon presidency. Nixon’s aim was to deprive the Democrats of a breakthrough in the war that might tip the election in Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s favor. Johnson would later complain that the ploy amounted to “treason,” as the author John Farrell described in his biography of Nixon.But Nixon was only a candidate at the time, a private citizen. Trump is a sitting president.“If you want democracy, hold onto your sovereignty,” he said in his U.N. speech. In the months leading up to that address, we now know, he was compromising U.S. sovereignty and weakening its democracy, all to extinguish the chances of a campaign opponent. In the week after the speech, nothing’s changed. Peter Nicholasis a staff writer atThe Atlantic, where he covers the White House.

Until very recently indeed, the idea that the president of the United States might stand outside the White House and call on Communist China to investigate one of his presidential challengers would not merely have seemed far-fetched. It would also have seemed unpatriotic (presidents don’t involve foreign powers in domestic politics), unprincipled (this is the same China with which he is fighting a trade war and which may soon crack down on Hong Kong democracy protests), illegal (US law bans attempts to solicit foreign assistance to fight American elections), and a breach of his oath of office (in which he promises to protect and defend the constitution). It short, such a thing was unthinkable.It is a mark of Donald Trump’s ability to trash the rules of domestic and international politics, and make up an entire new set of his own, that the unthinkable happened this week without causing much more than a weary collective shake of the American head. Speaking on live television outside the White House on Thursday, Mr Trump openly solicited America’s greatest international rival to help him get re-elected. Next year, Mr Trump may face a presidential contest against Joe Biden, the former vice-president, whose son Hunter – like Donald Trump Jr, as it happens – is a businessman and lobbyist with overseas interests. This week Mr Trump said: “China should start an investigation into the Bidens.”By all formerly prevailing standards this was an extraordinary act. But it did not come out of the blue. The call to China was simply a much more public, more brazen and more reckless iteration of the very same thing that Mr Trump stands accused of doing in Ukraine, on the basis of which he is now being investigated for possible impeachment by the House of Representatives. In July, Mr Trump used a telephone call to the newly elected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to press for investigations to be launched into the Bidens. If this did not happen, Mr Trump warned, the US would withhold military aid, a threat that was withdrawn after it became public. This week, however, evidence was produced on Capitol Hill that Mr Trump said he would only permit a White House meeting with Mr Zelenskiy if he publicly began a probe into the Bidens. Soberingly, Ukraine has now done just that.The shredding of norms does not get more brazen than this. But the Ukraine and China cases are not freak exceptions from an otherwise ethical record. Only this week it was claimed that Mr Trump had used his first phone call to Britain’s new prime minister, Boris Johnson, on 26 July to ask the UK to provide evidence that might help undermine Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian influence in Mr Trump’s 2016 election campaign. Similar White House demands have also been made to members of the Australian and the Italian governments.All these efforts are egregious. For a US president to press foreign governments to investigate his rivals is not just unusual, unfair or illegal. It is also lethally dangerous to national standing and international law. If there is evidence of unethical or corrupt activity in a foreign country, it should be properly investigated by the legitimate authorities and resolved within established and accountable bilateral processes. It should not be pursued as Mr Trump did with Ukraine, demanding “a favour” in return for aid or access. It should not be multiplied, as Mr Trump has now done with China, by smearing an opponent without evidence. Such acts send a wholly lawless signal to the world, that White House favours can be won by providing dirt on its enemies and that the president is in the market for dodgy dealings with despots.Mr Trump’s actions in Ukraine were a self-serving abuse of power. His Chinese claims are a reckless attempt to normalise his deviancy. Britain, for one, must have no part in it. Mr Trump’s actions are fuelled by refusal to accept responsibility and by fear of defeat. But he must be accountable. He must answer for his misuse of office. The political problem is that he may get away with it. The more he is criticised and implicated, the more his supporters back him. This cannot be ignored. But nor can the evidence. Mr Trump is in the dock. So are America’s political system and its standing in the world.

Enlarge this image Ambassador William Taylor is the first witness to appear in the first public impeachment hearing on Wednesday. He's a career diplomat who outlined the effort to get Ukraine's president to commit to political investigations in return for military assistance. Andrew Harnik/AP hide caption toggle caption Andrew Harnik/AP Ambassador William Taylor is the first witness to appear in the first public impeachment hearing on Wednesday. He's a career diplomat who outlined the effort to get Ukraine's president to commit to political investigations in return for military assistance. Andrew Harnik/AP Updated on Nov. 13 at 8:49 a.m. ET Public impeachment hearings begin Wednesday, and the first round of witnesses includes three career public servants who have testified behind closed doors that President Trump did link military aid and a White House meeting for Ukraine with a promise to investigate one of the president's domestic political opponents. "We intend to conduct these hearings with the seriousness and professionalism the public deserves. The process will be fair to the President, the Committee Members, and the witnesses. Above all, these hearings are intended to bring the facts to light for the American people," Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said in a letter to House members circulated on Tuesday. Trump Impeachment Inquiry Watch Live: House Holds 1st Open Hearing In Trump Impeachment Inquiry Congressional Republicans continue to back the president and denounce the impeachment inquiry as an effort to undo the results of the 2016 election. They have largely focused their complaints on the process, but some have also sought to discredit key witnesses, and others have argued that the allegations against Trump do not merit impeachment. The president continues to insist that the July call with Ukraine that set off the inquiry was "perfect."Here is what to expect from the hearings this week and what will follow:When are the hearings and how do I follow along? The first hearing is on Wednesday beginning at 10 a.m. ET. The second hearing is scheduled for 9 a.m. ET on Friday. You can watch live on NPR.org and listen to special coverage on many local public radio stations. Who is testifying? Schiff is using this week's hearings to focus on the testimony from officials who handled U.S. policy in Ukraine. All three have already appeared in closed-door interviews and backed up the complaint filed by an anonymous whistleblower that set off the impeachment inquiry. Transcripts of those interviews have already been released. Politics The Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Begins A New Phase This Week: What You Need To Know The three witnesses who will appear: William Taylor, the top diplomat in Ukraine, told investigators that he learned shortly after he was tapped for his post that there was a parallel foreign policy channel set up that he believed undermined U.S. national security interests.George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, described how Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, went against the traditional bipartisan approach regarding U.S. support for Ukraine in an effort to push for political investigations.Marie Yovanovitch was ousted from her post as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in May after a campaign led by Giuliani to criticize her performance and alleged lack of support for the president's policies. She recounted in her closed-door testimony that she was told by Ukrainians to "watch my back" because Giuliani's associates were pushing their business interests and viewed her as an obstacle.How will questioning work during the hearing?A resolution approved by the House lays out the impeachment inquiry process, including the format for public hearings. Usually, lawmakers get five minutes of questions each. In these hearings, though, Chairman Schiff and ranking member Devin Nunes, R-Calif., will have opportunities for expanded questioning of equal time, up to 45 minutes each. They can also yield that time to a designated committee staff lawyer. After the longer period of questioning, the committee will go back to the shorter rounds with other members.Will Republicans get any of their own witnesses? Yes. Nunes sent a list of people whom Republicans wanted to be added to open hearings, including Hunter Biden and the whistleblower whose complaint triggered the inquiry. But the House resolution dictates that the Democrats need to sign off on any additions. Schiff did not include Biden or the whistleblower in upcoming hearings, but he did agree on Tuesday evening to three of those on the list who he said were "within the scope of the impeachment inquiry."As the House investigates whether Trump inappropriately pressured Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, the president and his allies claim it was the Bidens who should have been scrutinized. But evidence contradicts those allegations of corruption on the part of the Bidens. Politics Can Trump Legally Out The Whistleblower? Experts Say It Would Not Violate Any Laws Trump's supporters have also tried to cast the whistleblower as partisan and dismiss the inquiry overall as a "sham." Hours of testimony have largely corroborated the whistleblower's account, though. Nunes said the anonymous whistleblower should testify "because President Trump should be afforded an opportunity to confront his accusers."The GOP staff of the three committees conducting the closed-door interviews sent out a memo to Republican lawmakers complaining that there is no guarantee they will get any of the witnesses they requested. The memo also argues that "the body of evidence to date does not support the Democrat allegation that President Trump pressured Ukraine to conduct investigations into the President's political rivals for his political benefit in the 2020 election." Are there more public hearings? And what happens after the Intelligence Committee hearings wrap up?The Intelligence Committee has scheduled three more public hearings next week with eight more witnesses, and top Democratic leaders have expressed interest in wrapping up the House impeachment process by the end of this year.Schiff announced that Jennifer Williams, an aide to Vice President Pence, and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, an aide on the National Security Council, will appear before the committee next Tuesday morning. In the afternoon, Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine, and Tim Morrison, a former NSC official, will testify.Next Wednesday, the panel will hear from Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union; Laura Cooper, a Defense Department official; and David Hale, the under secretary of state for political affairs.And on Thursday, the committee will have a public hearing with Fiona Hill, a former NSC official who was the top Russia policy specialist.Republicans requested that Volker, Morrison and Hale testify in the open sessions.The House resolution directs the Intelligence Committee to prepare a report and recommendations and send it to the House Judiciary Committee, the panel tasked with drafting any possible articles of impeachment. That report will also be released publicly.Will the Judiciary Committee also hold hearings?Yes. The House Judiciary Committee released its own procedures for the impeachment inquiry, which provide for the president and his counsel to attend any hearings, respond to any evidence presented and to question any potential witnesses. The Judiciary Committee will review the report from the Intelligence Committee as well as input from other panels that have conducted investigations into the Trump administration. It will determine what evidence lawmakers have to back up any articles of impeachment. Trump Impeachment Inquiry Trump Impeachment Inquiry: A Guide To Key People, Facts And Documents Schiff and Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., have already publicly argued that the White House's decision to ignore subpoenas for testimony and documents is building a case for one article of impeachment for obstruction of Congress. Once the panel agrees on any language for possible articles, it would vote on them and present them to the full House. A full House vote would likely happen quickly after any judiciary action — there are very few legislative days left on the calendar this year. Nadler and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., however, have been careful not to put any hard deadline on a House vote on articles of impeachment.If the House impeaches the president, what happens in the Senate? If the House approves articles of impeachment, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the Senate will move to a trial. McConnell points to the 1999 impeachment trial of then-President Bill Clinton as the model for how a trial would work. He would need to negotiate the procedures with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., but any trial is expected to last several weeks. Politics Trump, Ukraine And The Path To The Impeachment Inquiry: A Timeline Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts would preside over the trial and make any rulings on issues that would arise during the debate. All other Senate business would be put on hold, and all senators — including those running for president in 2020 — would be required to be present and listen to the evidence. Impeachment managers designated by House leaders would lay out the case on the articles of impeachment, and White House counsel Pat Cipollone is preparing to present the defense.Will the president be removed from office?Republicans control the Senate and remain strongly opposed to impeachment and have the votes to acquit him. In order to remove the president, the Senate would need a two-thirds majority to convict and remove him from office — that would require 20 GOP senators to join with Democrats.

The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny says he believes Vladimir Putin ordered intelligence agencies to poison him, possibly to avoid a “Belarusian scenario” of civil unrest.Navalny, who is recovering in Germany after falling ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow in August, told the news magazine Der Spiegel that the use of the rare nerve agent novichok meant the assault on his life would have been ordered from the top.“I assert that Putin was behind the crime, and I have no other explanation for what happened”, Navalny said in his first interview since the poisoning. “Only three people can give orders to put into action ‘active measures’ and use novichok. Those who know Russian states of affairs also know: FSB director Alexander Bortnikov, foreign intelligence service head Sergey Naryshkin and the director of GRU cannot make such a decision without Putin’s orders.”The Kremlin has repeatedly denied any involvement, and in response to Navalny’s claim, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the accusations were “insulting and unacceptable”. Peskov also said he had information that Navalny was working with the CIA. “Specialists from the CIA are working with him during these days, and it’s not the first time that they have given him various instructions,” said Peskov.Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian Duma, called Navalny a “shameless scoundrel”. Russian officials have variously suggested that Navalny was not poisoned at all, that he poisoned himself, or that western spy agencies poisoned him.“Putin saved his life. If what happened to him was a specially directed operation by western security services then this accusation fits with the logic. He was saved by everyone, from the pilots and doctors to the president,” Volodin said.First they try to kill Navalny, he spends three weeks in a coma, and when he comes round Russian authorities start crying out that he’s a shameless scoundrel… Even I find it difficult to believe that this is really happening,” Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh wrote on Twitter.Navalny, when asked why Putin would have resorted to methods of chemical warfare – which in the past had been reserved for acts of retribution against former intelligence officials – pointed to the protests against President Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, as well to anti-Kremlin protests in the Siberian city of Khabarovsk.“The Kremlin notices that it needs to take extreme measures to avoid a ‘Belarusian scenario’,” he told Der Spiegel. “The system is fighting for survival, and we have just started to feel the consequences.”The plane on which Navalny fell ill on 20 August made an emergency landing in Omsk, where he spent two days in a coma before being flown by a medical jet to Berlin.Asked why Putin would have allowed him to leave the country if he were behind the attack, Navalny said he had been saved by his situation becoming a “reality show” that was watched around the world.“I believe they were determined not to let me leave the country, and that is why they publicly declared I was not in a fit state to be transported,” Navalny said. “They were waiting for me to die. But because of support for me and the efforts of my wife, the whole thing turned into a kind of reality show, with the title ‘Navalny dies in Omsk’ .“For Putin’s people it is important that they don’t lend their enemies a victim status. If I had died in Omsk or left with permanent damage there, then the responsibility would have clearly been with them.”Navalny said he believed he was poisoned via a contaminated surface in his room at the hotel Xander in Tomsk, possibly because intelligence agencies had learned lessons from the failed 2018 poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury.“I believe that they drew conclusion from the … [Salisbury] case, when 48 people were contaminated and an uninvolved woman died. That is why the poison was probably not applied to an object that I may not even use, like the sink or the shower. Or my mobile phone, which I might have handed to [his spokesperson] Kira [Yarmysh]. I am only speculating. It appears that we are dealing with a sophisticated substance, and it was applied to an object only I would touch.”Describing the moment in the aeroplane when the poison started to take effect, Navalny said: “You feel no pain, but you know you’re dying. And I mean right now. Even though nothing hurts you … you just think: this is the end.”While Der Spiegel reported that Navalny had lost 12kg (26lb) in weight, the Russian activist said his health was improving steadily and doctors had told him he might recover “90, maybe even 100%”.“Basically, I’m a bit of a guinea pig,” he said. “There aren’t many people you can observe who are still alive after being poisoned with a nerve agent.”Navalny remains at the Charité hospital in Berlin as an outpatient, where he confirmed that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, had visited him. “I was impressed by how well she knows Russia and my case. Some details she knows better than me.”Merkel has condemned the poisoning more strongly than many people expected, but governments across the EU have struggled to find an effective way of extracting answers from the Kremlin over the case.Navalny declined to endorse stopping the Nord Stream 2 Russian gas pipeline project as a retaliation: “That’s Germany’s business”, he said. “Decide for yourself.” He said sanctions against Russia were ineffective. “What we need are fine against specific culprits, and I tell you: 95% of Russian citizens would welcome this.”Despite the attempt on his life, he wants to return to Russia. “My job now is to remain the guy who isn’t afraid. And I’m not afraid. When my hands shake, it’s not from fear, it’s from this stuff. I would not give Putin the gift of not returning to Russia.”However, given the frequent arrest of people accused of working for foreign spy agencies in Russia, Peskov’s accusation that Navalny is receiving instructions from the CIA come across as a warning against returning. Last week, authorities seized Navalny’s apartment, as part of a claim for damages by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close Putin associate who sued Navalny for libel. While Navalny was in a coma, Prigozhin promised to “ruin” him if he survived. Topics Alexei Navalny Vladimir Putin Russia Germany Europe Angela Merkel news

Former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates testified in court Tuesday that Donald Trump did in fact discuss WikiLeaks with his longtime political adviser, Roger Stone, during the 2016 campaign.That’s a big deal because in sworn written answers to special counsel Robert Mueller, Trump claimed he couldn’t recall doing any such thing. “I do not recall discussing WikiLeaks with him,” Trump wrote. “Nor do I recall being aware of Mr. Stone having discussed WikiLeaks with individuals associated with my campaign.”Yet Gates, a longtime associate of Paul Manafort who struck a plea deal with Mueller’s team last year, told a very different story in court Tuesday.Going back as far as April 2016, Gates said, Stone told him that information would be released by WikiLeaks that could be helpful to Trump’s campaign. He reiterated this the following month. All this was before WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange stated publicly on June 12, 2016, that he had pending releases related to Hillary Clinton.Gates said that he and then-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort were initially skeptical about the quality of Stone’s information — particularly when months passed without any new releases showing up. But then, on July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks posted thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee — emails that had been hacked by Russian intelligence officers.After that, Gates testified, the top levels of the Trump campaign were very interested in what Stone knew about WikiLeaks. For instance, Gates said Manafort asked him to follow up with Stone to try to learn more about WikiLeaks’s plans. And Gates said that Manafort indicated he would update others on the campaign, “including the candidate” — that is, Donald Trump.Gates also testified that he witnessed a phone call between Trump and Stone in late July, shortly after the DNC email releases began, while Gates was in a car with Trump driving to LaGuardia Airport. Gates said that he could not hear exactly what was said on the call but that after the call ended, Trump told him that “more information would be coming.”Under questioning by Stone’s defense attorneys, Gates said that Stone had never predicted what was specifically coming from WikiLeaks (that is, that Assange had emails from the DNC and John Podesta). But, Gates said, he interpreted Stone’s statements to mean that Stone had inside information.We should keep what was revealed at this trial in perspective: Mueller — who would have already known the information Gates just testified to publicly when he wrote his final report — did not find any criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and WikiLeaks. Still, President Trump said in a sworn statement to Mueller that he couldn’t recall Roger Stone telling him anything about WikiLeaks — and Gates now says in his own sworn testimony that that’s not true. Here were Trump’s answers, submitted to Mueller’s team and published in the Mueller report:Now, both Gates and former Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon have testified at this trial that, over months, Stone suggested repeatedly that he had inside information on WikiLeaks’s plans. Gates went further by saying Stone talked about this with Trump himself, and, separately, that Manafort planned to update Trump on what Stone was saying.Trump is unlikely to face any legal jeopardy over this, though, for several reasons: There’s no record of what Stone told Trump on their phone call, and Gates himself admits he couldn’t hear it. In Trump’s answer, he used the phrase that he does not “recall” these discussions about WikiLeaks — he didn’t outright claim they didn’t happen. Gates is the only known witness here, so it’s his word against everyone else. And, again, Mueller knew all this at the time of writing the report and evidently took no further action. Stone’s trial, which will likely be sent to the jury for a verdict on Wednesday, is focused on whether he lied to and tried to obstruct the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian interference by misleading them about his communications and documents regarding WikiLeaks.That is: He’s been charged over the attempted cover-up, not for anything he actually did during the 2016 campaign.But that leaves open one important question: What did Stone know (and do) during the 2016 campaign regarding WikiLeaks, exactly?Stone’s defenders have said that, in fact, Stone had no intermediary — that he knew nothing at all about WikiLeaks beyond what the group had said publicly. That is: that Stone was just bluffing and making insinuations to try and hype up his own importance.The prosecution, meanwhile, has chosen to avoid answering this question, likely because what actually happened is difficult to prove. But prosecutors are pointing to emails Stone sent to conservative author Jerome Corsi in July 2016, telling Corsi to “get to Assange,” and that an associate of theirs, Ted Malloch, “should see Assange” — and to this response from Corsi in early August.“Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging... Time to let more than Podesta to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC. That appears to be the game hackers are now about. Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke — neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus, setting stage for Foundation debacle.”There, Corsi is certainly claiming to have gotten word on Assange’s plans. And there is an interesting mention of “Podesta” — the focus of the October 2016 email dumps — there, though Corsi does not go so far as to say that the dumps would be Podesta’s emails. Still, the government has not established whether Corsi did in fact get inside information or established who he might have gotten that information from.It is true, though, that within days of Corsi’s email, Stone began publicly proclaiming that he had inside information about Assange’s plans — first saying he’d communicated with Assange and then claiming their contacts had been through an intermediary.Meanwhile, prosecutors have presented a plethora of evidence that, when the House Intelligence Committee started asking questions about all this in 2017, Stone went to great lengths to mislead them — by trying to hide Corsi’s role and claim all his information on WikiLeaks came from radio host Randy Credico. (This seems to be false, as Credico’s contacts with Assange began weeks after Stone began speaking of an intermediary.)That is, appropriately, what prosecutors have focused on: the lies to Congress. But they haven’t done much to clear up whether anything of significance actually happened between Stone and WikiLeaks in 2016.