BERLIN -- Germany’s economy, Europe’s largest, avoided entering a widely-anticipated recession in the third quarter as strong domestic spending helped spark modest growth, the Federal Statistical Office reported Thursday.The Wiesbaden-based agency said the economy grew 0.1% in the July-September period over the previous quarter, largely driven by public and private consumption. Exports rose as well, while imports remained roughly at the second quarter level, the agency reported.It said, however, that the second quarter contraction was greater than preliminary figures had shown, with the economy shrinking in the April-June period by 0.2% compared to the 0.1% originally reported.Among other things, the dispute between U.S. President Donald Trump and the Chinese leadership over China's trade surplus with the U.S. has dampened trade and industrial output by raising uncertainty about whether and where more tariffs might be imposed. Another negative is uncertainty about the date and terms of Britain's departure from the European Union.Liechtenstein’s VP Bank cautioned that commercial disputes are delaying investments in industry, and key areas like the automotive sector are struggling with lower demand and massive challenges like the shift away from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles.“According to the official version Germany has avoided a recession but this does not change the overall difficult economic situation,” the bank said in a research note.ING economist Carsten Brzeski said the “German economy can still be divided into two worlds: the depressive world and the happy-go-lucky one.”On one hand, the manufacturing sector is struggling amid the international and structural challenges, while on the other, private consumption remains solid with low inflation, low interest rates and a strong labor market.“The main question, however, is how long the happy-go-lucky world can resist the negative impact from the depressive world,” he said. “The latest developments suggest that the protective shield has started to crumble.”A week ago, the German government’s independent panel of economic advisers reported that a 0.1% third-quarter contraction was likely.Though they said there were no signs of a “broad, deep recession,” the panel also said there was no sign of a “strong revival” in the fourth quarter. The five-member panel cut its economic forecast to growth of 0.5% this year and 0.9% in 2020, compared with its forecast in March of 0.8% this year and 1.7% next year.In their report, the government economists cautioned that a no-deal Brexit could yet chop 0.3 percentage points off next year's German growth, reducing it to 0.6%.And even though the recession has been averted, “the numbers are no cause for complacency,” said Friedrich Heinemann, head of Germany’s ZEW economic think tank.Among the issues the government needs to address are the country’s corporate tax rate and the impending “retirement wave’ of the baby boomer generation, he said.“For German’s well-being, it does not matter if quarterly growth is a touch below or above zero,” he said. “On the contrary, concern should be more focused on the sinking prospects for Germany’s long-term growth.”

The Trump administration has long sought to persuade the Supreme Court to rule on whether it had the authority to cancel the program. But the justices turned down an unusual petition seeking review in January 2018, before any appeals court had ruled. The administration asked again in November, not long before the Ninth Circuit ruled.For many months, the Supreme Court took no action on the request, which was at odds with the court’s usual practice.On Friday, before the justices left for their summer break, the court agreed to hear an appeal of the Ninth Circuit decision, Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, No. 18-587, along with two others in which appeals courts have not yet ruled: Trump v. NAACP, No. 18-588, and McAleenan v. Vidal, No. 18-589.The administration has argued that the program was an unconstitutional exercise of executive authority, relying on a ruling from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, that shut down a related program created by Mr. Obama, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA, saying he had exceeded his statutory authority.In his executive action establishing DAPA, which was blocked by courts before it went into effect, Mr. Obama would have allowed as many as five million unauthorized immigrants who were the parents of citizens or of lawful permanent residents to apply for a program sparing them from deportation and providing them work permits.After the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, the Supreme Court deadlocked, 4 to 4, in an appeal of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, leaving it in place and ending what Mr. Obama had hoped would become one of his central legacies.The Trump administration has argued that the DAPA ruling meant that DACA was also unlawful.In its decision in November, the Ninth Circuit said the two programs differed in important ways, rejecting the administration’s legal analysis. The appeals court affirmed a nationwide injunction ordering the administration to retain major elements of the program while the case moved forward.

When the impeachment of President Trump finally goes public on Wednesday, two men will be thrust into the national spotlight as each party’s lead inquisitor. One of them is a career congressional staffer who’s rarely been in the public eye but has been in the background for a decade of Capitol Hill investigations. The other is a trial lawyer turned cable-news pundit who spent a decade prosecuting mobsters in a high-profile Manhattan federal court. That the attorneys—Steve Castor with the Republicans and Daniel Goldman with the Democrats—find themselves at the heart of the impeachment inquiry is a function of the ground rules that Democrats passed to govern the proceedings. When witnesses take the stand in open hearings this week, they will get grilled not by the top lawmakers on the panel but primarily by the lawyers.It is expected that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) and the committee’s ranking member, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), will ask some questions but cede most of their time to Goldman and Castor. They will each get at least 45 minutes to examine and cross-examine the witnesses—far more than the five minutes that rank-and-file committee members typically get for such questioning. The two are no strangers to the work, having already conducted dozens of hours of questioning during the closed-door phase of the impeachment inquiry. But as the most consequential witnesses to an alleged Trumpworld scheme to pressure Ukraine testify publicly for the first time—with the TV cameras rolling and millions watching—Goldman and Castor are poised to become household names. Though they find themselves in the same position, the paths that got them there could hardly be more different. “His style is right out of the SDNY bootcamp, as am I. He will know everything there is to know about a witness and the circumstances around the witness. He’ll be fully, 100 percent prepared.””— Elie Honig, a former SDNY prosecutor who worked with Daniel GoldmanWhen Democrats took the majority in January, Schiff hired Goldman to lead the committee’s investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia. His pedigree fit the mission that Schiff laid out: Goldman had spent 10 years as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, where he prosecuted organized-crime syndicates—including some linked to Russians—for a variety of crimes.His work at SDNY was often headline-grabbing: He was the lead prosecutor of the famous gambler Billy Walters, who was convicted and sentenced to five years in jail for an insider-trading scheme in 2017. Goldman also helped lead the prosecution of the former boss of the La Cosa Nostra crime family on murder and extortion charges, putting him behind bars for life. But Goldman arrived on Capitol Hill from Manhattan as something of a Resistance celebrity: In 2017, he stepped down from SDNY and became a legal analyst for MSNBC (he also wrote occasionally for The Daily Beast). For a year, he was a fixture on the network, appearing regularly to discuss everything from the various twists and turns in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to the sexual-assault allegations made against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In the process, he accrued some 70,000 followers on Twitter with a stream of reliably Trump-critical commentary: He once called Trump’s desire to investigate Hillary Clinton and James Comey “pure fascism;” in another tweet, he wondered if congressional Republicans—naming specifically one “Devil Nunes”—had all “sold their soul” to Trump.Goldman’s charge now is to establish Democrats’ case against Trump by questioning the witnesses they believe are best positioned to tell that story, including Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, and Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S ambassador there who was ousted in a pressure campaign led by Rudy Giuliani. The former prosecutor has already impressed congressional Democrats this year. And those who know Goldman from his past job say he’s more than up to the task. A fellow SDNY alum turned TV legal analyst, Elie Honig, told The Daily Beast that he will be a calm, focused, and prepared lead inquisitor for the Democrats—one who won’t waste time getting to the most essential elements of the case his side is aiming to build.“His style is right out of the SDNY boot camp, as am I,” said Honig, who overlapped with Goldman in the office and prosecuted several organized-crime cases alongside him. “He will know everything there is to know about a witness and the circumstances around the witness. He’ll be fully, 100 percent prepared.”Honig said to pay closest attention to the first five minutes of Goldman’s time with witnesses because that’s where he’ll lay out the “biggest points” he wants to bring out during his questioning. “Dan is direct, he’s no-nonsense, he is confident and he won’t be at all cowed or intimidated by the magnitude of the moment,” Honig said. “He’s a very dedicated institutionalist. He’s one of those people you see on the Hill that you know he could have left a long time ago and made a lot of money in any number of places.”— Former Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), of Steve CastorCastor, meanwhile, has an extremely low public profile. “He’s a lawyer’s lawyer,” said a senior Republican congressional aide. “He didn’t come to Capitol Hill to get famous.”Quite the contrary. Most people saw Castor’s name for the first time when it was in all caps in one of these transcripts. But for Republicans on the Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, Castor has been a quiet but steady presence for over a decade as different investigations led by a cast of chairmen paraded through the often chaotic panel. “He has the longest-running institutional knowledge of most anybody on our side of the aisle,” said former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), who served as chairman of the Oversight panel from 2015 to 2017. “He’s been through several of these fights in the past.” “From Tom Davis to Darrell Issa to me to Jim Jordan to Trey Gowdy, he’s always had everybody’s confidence and we are an eclectic group of oversight chairs and ranking members,” he said. “And the fact that he’s had all of our confidence is saying something.” The issues that passed through the committee during Castor’s 14-year tenure there have also run the gamut. From the investigation into steroid abuse in professional sports to the lobbying activities of Jack Abramoff to the Obama-era “Fast and Furious” investigation into a gun-running operation gone bad to the investigation into alleged biased against conservatives inside the Internal Revenue Service to probes into the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice, Castor gained a no-drama reputation for direct questions, trustworthiness, and discretion. “If Castor gave his word to someone he was adamant, because the integrity of our ability and power to investigate is at stake,” said former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), who chaired the Oversight panel from summer 2017 until he retired from Congress last year. Gowdy predicted that Castor would ask methodical questions “rooted in relevance” and that he already knows the answer to. “Good lawyers don’t like surprises,” he said, noting that “other than the drama of a congressional hearing” it’s unlikely any new information would come out during the public examination of the witnesses this week. Those who know Castor painted the portrait of a family man and dog lover who passed up higher-profile or better-paid posts in the Executive Branch or private practice to stay on the committee.“He’s a very dedicated institutionalist,” said former Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the chairman who Castor served as counsel for nearly half his time on the committee. “He’s one of those people you see on the Hill that you know he could have left a long time ago and made a lot of money in any number of places.” Including, Issa added, one of the many firms now representing members of the Trump administration who are fighting subpoenas from Congress. Staffers like Goldman and Castor rarely become the story on Capitol Hill, but thanks to their dominant roles in the spectacle of impeachment, both may soon face the kind of partisan adoration and rancor usually reserved for prominent lawmakers who are used to the spotlight.Goldman, for example, has already been the subject of critical coverage in conservative outlets such as The Federalist, which wrote that a “former MSNBC contributor” had been dispatched by Schiff to ask questions of impeachment witnesses. That outlet wrote that Goldman was “flustered” during the deposition of former Ambassador Kurt Volker, allegedly forcing Schiff to shut the attorney down.The transcripts, at least as written, do not reveal anything of the sort. Instead, Goldman has been the Democrats’ point person for methodically obtaining key details out of the witnesses, asking the who, what, where, and why questions that have led to top-line discoveries from the depositions and helped to establish the Ukraine timeline and fact pattern Democrats see as foundational to the impeachment probe. In open hearings, Goldman’s charge will be similar—not to coax testimony out of hostile witnesses, Honig said, but to build a narrative with witnesses whose stories are critical to the Democrats’ case. “These three witnesses are not going to be hostile, so to speak,” he said. “I think by and large, the majority in House Intel will be embracing their testimony, so I don’t think he’ll be in a combative situation with any of these witnesses.”Castor, on the other hand, will play a different role. He has already shown a flair for lines of questioning likely to please the president and his supporters, and infuriate his detractors. In depositions, Castor has showed a willingness to ask the same question multiple times, a common tactic, but one that frequently irked the counsels representing various witnesses—and, sometimes, the witnesses themselves. He has reliably interrogated officials about their knowledge of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company where Hunter Biden served as a board member, as Republicans seek to back up claims the Bidens acted improperly. In one instance, Castor doggedly asked Laura Cooper—a Pentagon official—what she knew about Burisma, even after she insisted her work gave her no opportunities to learn about the company. “I have no level of personal knowledge or detail on these,” she said, after the fourth question from Castor about Burisma.The veteran GOP attorney has also led efforts in the depositions to get information about the anonymous whistleblower whose complaint about Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president launched the impeachment inquiry. At one point, Castor point-blank asked one witness, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, if the whistleblower was a particular person—leading Schiff to respond that Republicans were endangering the person’s safety and running afoul of whistleblower protection law. But Castor’s M.O. has at other points earned grudging praise from Democratic rivals. He has proven to be “a skilled lawyer who went to great lengths to defend the president,” said a Democratic source. “If there was a piece of evidence that could have been turned up to have saved the president, Castor would have found it.” But a lawyer who’s faced Castor from the other side of the dais table hardly cast him as a partisan hack. Bob Driscoll, a Washington defense attorney who has represented clients before the Oversight Committee for years, said his experience in both the majority and the minority has given him perspective.“When you’ve got the experience having done it both ways, you dispatch a little bit of the drama. People who’ve only been on one side tend to act like you’re about to light the Constitution on fire if you take a position they don’t agree with, whereas I think he’s mature enough that he recognizes that the other side isn’t trying to light the Constitution on fire by asserting their constitutional prerogatives,” said Driscoll. “There may still be disagreement, but it’s a tone thing,” he added. “You get very little ‘how dare you!’ coming out of him.”

Your neighbor’s teenage children are on it. So are Jimmy Fallon and the Washington Post, as well as Bollywood stars like Madhuri Dixit Nene.A platform for short selfie videos, TikTok is supremely skillful at dragging its largely young users down a rabbit hole of quirky, endless videos. Like legacy social media, TikTok allows you to connect with people you already know—but that’s an almost irrelevant part of the app. The reason TikTok has become a global phenomenon is the eternal loop of videos from people you don’t know under the “For You” tab. Here, TikTok’s powerful algorithms surface videos from millions of users, personalized for you.

NEW YORK (AP) — The first line of President Donald Trump’s obituary has been written.While Trump is all but certain to avoid removal from office, a portion of his legacy took shape Wednesday when he became just the third president in American history to be impeached by the U.S. House. The two articles of impeachment approved along largely partisan lines on Wednesday stand as a constitutional rebuke that will stay with Trump even as he tries to trivialize their meaning and use them to power his reelection bid.ADVERTISEMENT“It’ll be impossible to look back at this presidency and not discuss impeachment. It is permanently tied to his record,” said Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University. “Trump now always becomes part of the conversation about misusing presidential power. Ukraine will be his Watergate. Ukraine will be his Lewinsky.”History books will add Trump to the section that features Bill Clinton, impeached 21 years ago for lying under oath about sex with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and Andrew Johnson, impeached 151 years ago for defying Congress on Reconstruction. Richard Nixon, who avoided impeachment by resigning during the Watergate investigation, is there, too.Trump himself is keenly aware of the impact that impeachment may have on his legacy.Allies in recent months have described him as seething over the prospect, taking impeachment more as a personal attack and an attempt to delegitimize his presidency than a judgment on his conduct. Trump said Tuesday that he took “zero” responsibility for his expected impeachment. “Few people in high position could have endured or passed this test,” Trump wrote in a fiery six-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the eve of his impeachment. “You do not know, nor do you care, the great damage and hurt you have inflicted upon wonderful and loving members of my family.”The letter, rife with exclamation points, random capitalizations and scores of grievances, portrayed the president as the victim of an unfair and politically motivated attack.“One hundred years from now, when people look back at this affair, I want them to understand it, and learn from it, so that it can never happen to another President again,” he wrote. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham conceded Thursday that Trump was unhappy with the outcome. “The president has said many times that this isn’t something he necessarily wants on his resume,” she said in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America.”ADVERTISEMENTWith Republicans in control of the Senate, Trump’s acquittal in a January trial there seems assured. He has asserted that a public backlash to impeachment may help him politically by firing up loyal supporters and attracting more independents to his cause. He’s mused about taking a post-verdict victory lap, a veritable “Not Guilty Tour” akin to the “Thank You Tour” he conducted during the 2016 presidential transition.Presidential historian Jon Meacham said impeachment will make Trump “the first insurgent incumbent president in American history.” He compared the reflexive partisanship of this moment to the 19th-century tribalism that surrounded Johnson and Reconstruction, requiring a divided nation “to assess what’s being said instead of simply saluting the person saying it.”Uniquely able to command attention, Trump has held sway over his adopted Republican Party, reshaping it in his image even while defying its orthodoxy. He has thrilled his base of supporters with his confrontational style and tough rhetoric, using his combative Twitter account to fight political rivals and dispute from the outset accusations of foreign electoral interference during special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.While Trump escaped that episode with his grip on power unchanged, the Ukraine story stunned the White House with the speed that it overwhelmed Washington. Trump fell back on the same playbook -- deny, delay, denounce -- but could not avoid an impeachment inquiry at the hands of the Democratic-controlled House.Kellyanne Conway, senior counselor to the president, on Wednesday rejected the notion that Trump believes his legacy will be tarnished by impeachment.“No, he doesn’t,” Conway said. “He sees it as a stain on the legacy of people who have been so focused and hell-bent on removing him from office.” While Clinton apologized for his behavior and Nixon stepped aside, Trump has remained unbowed, sticking to his contention that he had a “perfect” phone call with Ukraine’s president. Trump and many of his Republican defenders have rejected the testimony of a parade of government witnesses who testified about Trump’s efforts to push Kyiv to investigate potential election rival Joe Biden.At a rally in Michigan that began mere minutes after the House began its historic vote, Trump tried to publicly downplay the stain on his record.“It’s impeachment lite. With Richard Nixon, I could see it as a very dark era,” Trump said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m having a good time. But I also know we have a great group of people behind us in the Republican Party.”The president’s approval rating has largely remained unchanged during the impeachment inquiry, his pugnacious personality and populism helping cement his hold with supporters.Extraordinary polarization around impeachment is not new, but the fierce partisanship this time has been heightened by a unique aspect of this moment: Trump is standing for reelection, while Clinton and Nixon were halfway through their second terms when they faced the threat of impeachment.The outcome of that election may alter how Trump’s impeachment is ultimately remembered.“Donald Trump is now going to be synonymous with impeachment. There is no way to market it like a badge of honor. It’s a medallion of shame,” said Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian at Rice University.“But if he wins, the impeachment looks somewhat smaller. It means he defied it and remade the modern Republican Party in his own image and kept them loyal.”___Jonathan Lemire has covered the White House and politics for The Associated Press since 2013.___Follow Lemire on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@JonLemire

Paying with my phone has always been just fine at Amazon Go stores. The palm print just does not seem to offer anything new or improved. So what is this even solving?What Iâ(TM)d prefer to see is Amazon rolling out the existing system in a more widespread fashion. I already choose Go over 7-11 wherever itâ(TM)s an option. It would be fantabulous to see it rolled out at Whole Foods as well.The Go problem that Amazon really needs to solve... and this will have to be done via lobbying or in the courts, not with technology... is the one of localities (Including, unfortunately, my own.) trying to torpedo stores like Amazon Go from the outset by banning cashless payments. Yes that is really happening. Because everyoneâ(TM)s opinions, habits, and theories have to be equally valid these days; our local politicos are catering to the âoeun-bankedâ. So because some loons think banks and credit cards and smartphones are the mark or the beast or part of the new world order or whatever other lunacy; the rest of us may have to give up the convenience and points from Go and keep waiting on in interminable lines everywhere.That legislation seems to be on hold during COVID. But the virus is yet another massive point in FAVOR of cashless payment. Iâ(TM)m not sure about COVID specifically. But cash is usually the most filthy thing the average person will touch in their average day. So Go, and other stores using the same system, would be a big win from a hygiene or health POV too.

The CIA’s top lawyer sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on the now-famous whistleblower’s complaint about President Donald Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine. And no, that lawyer isn’t some deep-state conspiracist out to thwart the president: She’s a Trump appointee.According to NBC News on Friday, CIA general counsel Courtney Simmons Elwood and another top official called the Justice Department on August 14 to make a criminal referral — weeks before the whistleblower complaint had become public. “On that call, Elwood and John Eisenberg, the top legal adviser to the White House National Security Council, told the top Justice Department national security lawyer, John Demers, that the allegations merited examination by the DOJ, officials said,” NBC News reports. The DOJ, however, reportedly didn’t consider that to be an official referral because it came in a call, not in writing. (This is important, as you’ll see in just a minute.) As such, the DOJ didn’t look any further into the allegations that Elwood was so concerned about. In other words, they dropped it.The Justice Department would eventually look into the allegations made in the whistleblower complaint a bit later after receiving a different criminal referral, this one from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (and apparently in writing, luckily). That referral was “based solely on the whistleblower’s official written complaint.” This is a really important point, because, as NBC News explains, “Justice Department officials have said they only investigated the president’s Ukraine call for violations of campaign finance law because it was the only statute mentioned in the whistleblower’s complaint.”So DOJ looked into this whistleblower complaint and determined in September that there is no need for a full-blown criminal probe into Trump’s actions because that specific law — campaign finance — wasn’t broken, thus effectively closing the inquiry.Now here’s the kicker: The CIA’s criminal referral wasn’t about campaign finance law, according to NBC News.This means DOJ essentially ignored the CIA criminal referral — which apparently included concerns that other laws besides campaign finance law may have been broken — all because it was made over the phone.The episode calls into serious question just how thorough the Justice Department was when determining whether to start a formal investigation into the president’s actions on Ukraine.Our podcast explains how Ukraine finds itself at the center of the American political drama, yet President Trump is the least of the country’s worries.Looking for a quick way to keep up with the never-ending news cycle? Host Sean Rameswaram will guide you through the most important stories at the end of each day.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

During the Sunday talk shows, two prominent Republican lawmakers circled around an emerging talking point about President Donald Trump’s public request that China investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter: The president was just joking around.Last week, amid an impeachment inquiry into the Ukraine scandal in which the president allegedly held up military aid to pressure the country to investigate his political rivals, the president stood on the White House lawn and said: “China should start an investigation into the Bidens, because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine.”The remarks caused widespread outrage, with even some moderate Republicans such as Sens. Susan Collins and Mitt Romney saying it was a “big mistake” for Trump to publicly urge an authoritarian regime to open a probe into his political opponents. Trump, meanwhile, revealed during private remarks that he raised the Hunter Biden issue with an intermediary to China.Even though Trump has privately pushed China to look into a 2020 presidential hopeful and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and other allies have been using China to slime Biden for a while now, some GOP lawmakers have attempted to claim that Trump isn't serious about wanting China to look into the former vice president.Asked by a reporter on Friday—who also noted that he was one of the loudest critics of China and its human rights abuse—if he thought it was OK for the president to publicly ask China to probe the Bidens, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said he didn’t think it was a “real request.”“I think he did it to gig you guys. I think he did to provoke you to ask me and others, and get outraged by it,” the Florida senator added. “Like I said, he plays it like a violin and everybody falls right into it. It’s not a real request.”During an appearance on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, meanwhile, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH)—one of the president’s most vocal supporters in Congress—embraced Rubio’s defense of Trump’s China remarks.Repeatedly refusing to answer host George Stephanopoulos’ question as to whether he believes it’s appropriate for the president to publicly call for the Chinese to look into the Bidens, Jordan laughed and asked the host: “George, you really think he was serious about thinking that China’s going to investigate the Biden family?”Jordan also claimed that Rubio had it “exactly right” when the Florida lawmaker said Trump’s “getting the press all spun up about this.” After Stephanopoulos questioned him on whether we’re supposed to take Trump at his word, Jordan replied that the press still hasn't “figured out” how the president speaks.Over on CBS News’ Face the Nation, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) took the same tack, latching onto Rubio’s excuse. Asked by anchor Margaret Brennan if he was “comfortable” with the president calling for foreign governments to investigate his political opponents, Blunt brushed off the China request.“Well, I doubt if the China comment was serious, to tell you the truth,” Blunt replied.Brennan then wondered why the Missouri lawmaker wasn’t taking the president at his word on this, prompting Blunt to say Trump just “loves to bait the press” and does it every day to see what the media will “talk about.” “So you don’t believe the president,” the CBS host noted. “Is that appropriate to ask for a foreign government to interfere?”“I don’t imagine that’s what he’s doing,” Blunt responded.While these Republicans are running interference for the president and rallying around a defense that revolves around not taking the president seriously or literally, Trump has spent the past two days unleashing on Romney for condemning his actions and remarks on China, calling the 2012 Republican presidential nominee a “pompous ass.”

In this way, his candidacy violates a certain unwritten law of U.S. electoral politics. American voters have historically appreciated candidates who, from a socioeconomic perspective, identify “down”: Franklin D. Roosevelt was a traitor to the upper class; Trump is the real-estate billionaire who speaks for coal miners; Bernie Sanders is the septuagenarian senator who rallies the young left. But there’s not a deep history of successful candidates who appeared to identify “up,” like a young, nonmillionaire, small-town mayor who aligns himself with cosmopolitan capital. Identifying down can be a proxy for authenticity, but identifying up invites accusations of inauthenticity. By rejecting young progressive activism, Buttigieg betrays his generational-class identity.4. Overthink it more: Young people project an extreme hostility toward Buttigieg on the internet in part to exorcise their own anxieties about success and increase their in-group status. This week, I tweeted that the stark age gap of Buttigieg’s support suggests that he performs a specific archetype in this race: “your polite, hyper-achieving high school friend, who delighted the parents at that Christmas party with his piano rendition of Silent Night, which made your friends roll their eyes so hard their retinas detached.”Older and richer educated liberals look at Buttigieg and see a flattering reflection of their young selves or offspring. Young educated liberals look at Buttigieg and see a nauseating caricature, not of the person they are, or even the person they wanted to be, but of the person they’ve felt pressured to emulate but never quite became—an outcome they regard with tortured ambivalence. Buttigieg is the guy they hated in college, not only because he was obnoxiously successful, but also because his success sat uncomfortably, hauntingly close to the version of success they once felt prompted to achieve.This was the subtext—to me, anyway—of a highly celebrated New York Times magazine column in April by Jay Caspian Kang, which tagged Buttigieg as a kind of polymathic Frankenstein “who seems most intent on dazzling the country with his academic feats of strength.” The headline read: “Pete Buttigieg’s Meaningless Erudition Made Him the ‘Smart’ Candidate.” Fair enough. But for The New York Times to publish this critique is like Garden & Gun magazine running a long feature on the existential emptiness of cheesy grits. The column indicts readers for delighting in the very sensibility that they subscribe to the publication to enjoy. I have nothing against Kang, erudition, meaninglessness, or, above all, cheesy grits. But it is, shall we say, telling to discover a critique of conspicuous well-roundedness within a publication with approximately 10 pull-away subsections on arts, travel, business, and foreign affairs.

Editor’s note: This article was updated at 5:45 p.m. on Oct. 22 to include testimony from senior U.S. diplomat William Taylor Jr.A key part of the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump involves three Latin words: quid pro quo, literally “this for that.” Did President Trump withhold aid from Ukraine to pressure it to launch an investigation that might benefit him politically?Democrats charge that the president abused his office by improperly leveraging U.S. foreign policy to try to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden and to pursue a debunked theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the hacking of Democratic Party emails in 2016.President Trump’s defenders insist that while the president may have asked the Ukrainian leader for help with certain matters, it was entirely appropriate and there was no quid pro quo. Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney recently complicated that argument by seeming to say there was a quid pro quo, but that’s a common feature of foreign policy – an assertion he later tried to walk back.On Tuesday, explosive testimony from William Taylor Jr., the senior U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, added a new dimension and new urgency to the quid pro quo question. Mr. Taylor told House impeachment investigators that President Trump did withhold Ukraine aid and a promised White House meeting for Ukraine’s leader until Ukrainian officials publicly promised to investigate the Bidens, father and son. Will Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis change anything? Or everything?If true Mr. Taylor’s assertions would directly contradict the president’s “no quid pro quo” stance, while calling into question the accuracy of several impeachment witnesses who have stated they were unaware of such pressure.Mr. Taylor was acting ambassador for the U.S. in Ukraine. His Tuesday testimony occurred behind closed doors, but news organizations obtained copies of his 15-page opening statement, which was apparently based on copious notes and memos for the record from Mr. Taylor’s files.In short, he said that the quid pro quo was real, and drew a line directly from President Trump to the mysterious withholding of American military aid intended to help Ukraine defend against Russian incursion on its territory.“I said on September 9 in a message to [Ambassador to the European Union] Gordon Sondland that withholding security assistance in exchange for help with a domestic political campaign in the United States would be ‘crazy’. I believed that then, and I still believe that,” Mr. Taylor said in his opening statement.Mr. Taylor said that Mr. Sondland, a wealthy hotelier and political appointee who donated to the Trump campaign, informed him of the reasons for the unusual hold in a phone call. Everything was dependent on a public statement by Ukraine of an investigation into Biden-related matters, Mr. Sondland said, according to Mr. Taylor.The president wanted Ukraine in a “public box,” Mr. Taylor was told. Presumably this would help ensure the investigations really occurred. It might also have been a means, by itself, of throwing doubt on the honesty of former Vice President Biden and his son.“Ambassador Sondland tried to explain to me that President Trump is a businessman,” Mr. Taylor said in his statement. “When a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, he said, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check.”A diplomat with five decades of experience, Mr. Taylor described a situation in which there were two channels for Ukraine policy, “one regular, and one highly irregular.” The latter consisted of Mr. Sondland, special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.Democrats who heard Mr. Taylor’s testimony described it as a possible inflection point in their impeachment inquiry. Republicans were tight-lipped about what the diplomat had said.There is sure to be a fight over Mr. Taylor’s credibility, and over the question of whether his statements really describe a direct line from the Oval Office to Ukraine, or simply his mistaken impression of what the circumstances were in this case.One possible line of defense: GOP lawmakers are likely to describe Mr. Taylor as a bureaucrat disgruntled by the fact that the Trump administration was sapping the bureaucracy’s power and implementing new policies on its own, of which the career State Department hierarchy simply disapproved.Democratic House investigators are almost certain to try and speak again with Mr. Sondland. In his previous appearance, compelled by a House subpoena, Mr. Sondland had said that President Trump had told him there was no quid pro quo in this instance, but he was not certain of the truth of that assertion. He also said that he did not recall having discussions with any State Department or White House official about former Vice President Biden or his son.It may all come down to Mr. Trump’s intent.In many circumstances it is perfectly proper for a high U.S. official, even a president, to ask foreign countries for assistance with an ongoing law enforcement investigation, according to George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley.“Such calls can shortcut bureaucratic red tape, particularly if the evidence is held, as with this case, by national security or justice officials,” Mr. Turley wrote in an October 2 column in The Hill.It may also be appropriate in some circumstances for a president to ask a foreign country to investigate a political rival, as President Trump appears to have done by urging the Ukrainian president to investigate the activities of former Vice President Biden and his son Hunter Biden. As Ohio State constitutional law professor Edward Foley points out in Politico, it all depends on what the rival may have been doing, and whether the president has the nation’s broader interests at heart.In 1804, former Vice President Aaron Burr contacted the British government, looking for foreign support to cut the western portion of the U.S. away to form a separate country. President Thomas Jefferson, who detested Mr. Burr, eventually had the former vice president tried for treason. Probing this alleged deal was clearly in the country’s interest.“Jefferson as president would have been acting responsibly if he had requested Britain’s assistance in the investigation of Burr,” Mr. Foley writes. In his dealings with Ukraine, including his call to investigate Mr. Biden and his son, was Mr. Trump acting for the good of the nation, or the benefit of himself? The impeachment inquiry will be tasked with answering that question. Evidence may include public statements and private discussions among staff members about possible quid pro quos. Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. To determine intent, lawmakers will have to judge what they believe was in Mr. Trump’s heart, as well as his actions.“That is a tricky – but not impossible – bar for Congress to clear,” writes Mr. Foley.

New Jersey Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Cory Booker says he is unequivocal in his support on whether the impeachment inquiry of President Trump should proceed, regardless of polls showing that a majority of Americans want the president's fate decided by next year's election. "I swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution," Booker told NPR on Saturday. "I didn't swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution unless there's an election coming up," he said in the interview, recorded for the NPR series with Democratic presidential candidates Off Script. Booker spoke from Vonda's Kitchen in Newark, N.J., the same city where he served as mayor from 2006 to 2013. He said that Trump was potentially "violating the Constitution" and "doing things that are unacceptable" with respect to the presidency. Enlarge this image Senator and 2020 presidential candidate Cory Booker is seen outside of Vonda's Kitchen in Newark, N.J. on Oct. 12, 2019, ahead of an NPR-moderated discussion with voters. A.J. Chavar for NPR hide caption toggle caption A.J. Chavar for NPR Senator and 2020 presidential candidate Cory Booker is seen outside of Vonda's Kitchen in Newark, N.J. on Oct. 12, 2019, ahead of an NPR-moderated discussion with voters. A.J. Chavar for NPR "The long arc of history will look back and say, 'What did the United States Senate, what did the Congress do when a president of the United States was acting more like a dictator or totalitarian authoritarian leader than someone who is subject to the checks and balances as designed by our founders?'" Booker's comments came as polls show public support building for the impeachment inquiry announced against President Trump last month by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. In all, 52% of Americans say they approve of the inquiry, while 43% disapprove, according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released this week. But by a 58-37% margin, Americans think the president's future should be decided at the ballot box rather than through impeachment, according to the poll. Enlarge this image Senator and 2020 presidential hopeful Cory Booker greets supporters outside Vonda's Kitchen in Newark, N.J. A.J. Chavar for NPR hide caption toggle caption A.J. Chavar for NPR Senator and 2020 presidential hopeful Cory Booker greets supporters outside Vonda's Kitchen in Newark, N.J. A.J. Chavar for NPR With the launch of the inquiry, three House committees are now investigating President Trump's July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. On the call, Trump asked Zelenskiy to "look into" the family of his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, according to a rough transcript of the conversation released by the White House. In the interview with NPR's Ari Shapiro, Booker was asked why Congress should get involved in impeachment proceedings, rather than leave it up to voters who go to the polls in a little more than a year. Booker said he has no idea what the state of things will be 13 months from now, but "in this moment in history" the move should not be to sit back and wait for November 2020. "So politics be damned," Booker said. "I have a job to do which is to hold the executive accountable and we should be doing that." 2020 Candidate Conversations: Off Script Beto O'Rourke On Impeachment: 'This Has To Be About What Is Good For This Country' Off Script: 2020 Candidate Conversations Julián Castro On Impeachment: 'How Much More Evidence Do People Need?' Booker and 11 other candidates are debating for the fourth time on Tuesday. The CNN/New York Times Democratic Presidential Debate airs at 8 p.m. ET on CNN. You can also listen to it on your local NPR station.

The victim's brother confirmed her death to BBC Hindi, saying that no arrests had been made in the first 10 days after the incident took place. "She was left for dead. She fought for her life for 14 days," he said.

Those words arguably met the faculty letter’s demand to publicly acknowledge anti-Black racism at Princeton. But the same language was then cited by the Trump administration as justification for a Department of Education probe into whether the university has violated federal law.The Civil Rights Act of 1964 declares that at institutions that receive federal funds, no person shall be subject to discrimination or denied the benefits of any activity on the basis of race.Princeton administrators have long affirmed that their institution is complying with those requirements. Given Eisgruber’s claims that racism persists at Princeton, that racist assumptions are embedded in its structures, and that systemic racism there damages the lives of Black people, the Department of Education says it wants to know if the university has been lying.The government’s letter concludes with intrusive demands to interview Princeton employees under oath and generate sensitive documents, including a list of each Princetonian who has been discriminated against on the basis of race since 2015, as well as records related to Eisgruber’s claims about “systemic” or “embedded” racism.The investigation is absurd. Princeton is highly sought after by Black applicants. In admissions it uses the race of minority applicants, who are admitted at higher rates, as a “plus” to achieve greater diversity in a way that very likely benefits Black applicants. It spends lavishly on “inclusion” efforts, holds events to celebrate (and name a building after) Black alumni, and dedicates resources to recruiting and hiring Black faculty and staff. No reasonable person deciding where federal officials should look for anti-Black civil-rights violations would probe the Ivy League University. But trolls waging a culture war against critical race theory might.As far as I can tell, the strategy is to force Princeton to either admit to serious anti-Black discrimination, risking devastating financial penalties, or else mount an affirmative case that the institution is not guilty of “systemic” anti-Black discrimination, exposing the racism claims of many administrators, faculty, and students as hyperbole. In its absurdity, then, the probe exposes the performative nature of some anti-racist rhetoric at Princeton and other elite universities.Defenders of the investigation see it that way too. In City Journal, Seth Barron characterized it as a maneuver that could neutralize the systemic-racism narrative. “If racism is institutionally embedded somewhere, the United States has a juggernaut of laws, courts, investigators, and prosecutors that can tear the offending institution into shreds and pulverize its racism,” he wrote. “So bring out your systemic racism, Princeton—let’s see it. Because if it isn’t documented or identifiable somewhere, or if it lurks below the level of consciousness as implicit bias, then it’s like phlogiston or aether, and just a form of juju or magical thinking.”

Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) on Friday introduced a billbanning the use of facial recognition technology in public housing, mirroring legislationproposedin the House in July. The Hill reports:

Appearing Friday morning on CNN, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) invoked a long-debunked conspiracy theory at the center of the Ukraine scandal and the House’s impeachment inquiry, defending the president’s now-infamous July call to the Ukrainian president as simply trying to get to the bottom of the “CrowdStrike server.”With polls showing a majority of Americans support impeachment following allegations that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, CNN host Jim Sciutto asked Waltz whether a U.S. president should seek election assistance from a foreign country. “Look, I am not comfortable if there is a clear-cut quid pro quo, then, yeah that makes me very uncomfortable and we should take a hard look at that,” Waltz replied before claiming the call transcript does not show that.Waltz went on to call for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to immediately hold an “up or down” vote on impeachment, saying if Trump’s actions are impeachable then they shouldn’t mind voting on it now. This then prompted him to address Trump publicly urging China to also look into Biden before taking a conspiratorial detour.“I don’t like asking China, who is an adversary, let me be clear there,” Waltz declared. “But I do think you can interpret that, and I do, as looking into corruption and looking backwards at 2016 at the CrowdStrike server.”Sciutto, meanwhile, did not push back on or address Waltz’s claims.The Florida lawmaker was referencing the insane conspiracy that claims the Russian government wasn’t responsible for hacking the DNC server and John Podesta’s emails during the 2016 election. Instead, the theory goes, CrowdStrike—which investigated the breach in 2016—framed Russia because its co-founder is Ukrainian. (He’s not, by the way.) Proponents of the theory also allege that the DNC server is actually somewhere in Ukraine, with Trumpworld believing this is where Hillary Clinton’s missing emails can also be found.Besides bringing up Biden during his call with the Ukrainian president, Trump, according to the memo of the call, also said, “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike. I guess you have one of your wealthy people. The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

WASHINGTON—China is making fresh efforts to influence Chinese communities around the world to advance Beijing’s interests, requiring heightened vigilance from democratic countries, a new study says.A unit in China’s ruling Communist Party known as the United Front Work Department engages thousands of organizations to collect intelligence, encourage technology transfer, counter dissident movements and generate support for other Beijing objectives, said the report by the nonpartisan Australian Strategic Policy Institute....

Some Amazon employees are furious after they discovered the company’s HR department appears to be quietly monitoring a subset of listservs dedicated to employees who are minorities and those who are involved in activism. Earlier this week, a group of Amazon employees discovered that an email alias affiliated with Amazon’s HR team had subscribed to 78 listservs at Amazon, the majority of which are related to underrepresented employees and employee activism issues, such as climate change, Black employee networking, and Muslim employees. Amazon has thousands of internal emailing lists where employees discuss common interests and projects, so the dozens of listservs that the alias was subscribed to are a small subset of the total groups that exist. Amazon denies that its HR teams were tracking emails to monitor organizing, and told Recode that it subscribed to the groups to monitor employee feedback on company culture. Some of the listservs that Amazon HR appears to be monitoring have been used for employee organizing around controversial issues at the company in recent months, such as Amazon warehouse worker rights, corporate carbon emissions, and military technology. Others are less political, such as groups for women in engineering and employees who are parents. Recode spoke with six Amazon employees who said they’re alarmed by the email monitoring when they consider how Amazon has been increasingly cracking down on worker organizing. These employees spoke on the condition of anonymity because of Amazon’s policies against speaking to the press without management’s approval. They told Recode that dozens of other colleagues have also posted messages on Amazon’s internal forums expressing concern about the monitoring, and many more are likely also upset but too scared to speak out publicly. “Most people would just read and go quiet,” said one employee. “It doesn’t seem smart to engage when we’re being told that we are being tracked.”“If this is what it looks like ... then this is a specific targeting of nonwhite male groups as potential threats to be observed,” said one employee. “It means that the people responsible for that at Amazon believe that women and people of color are suspicious and threats to the company.”After discovering the alias, an Amazon employee sent a message to all 78 listservs informing them that the company seemed to be watching their activities. Vice first reported on an Amazon employee warning their colleagues about the monitoring.“Good day! If you are a moderator or a user of this list, please note that it is being explicitly watched,” started the email. It goes on to state, “Without editorialising, it is difficult to read this project and its initial posting date without also considering the context of the recent job posting for which Amazon has come under fire.” (That’s a reference to the “labor organizing threats” analyst position.) The email noted that while the Muslim employee listserv was on the list of groups that HR was watching, the Christian one was not.Amazon spokesperson Jaci Anderson said the practice was intended to gather employee feedback to help improve company practices, and that Amazon does not link feedback from the emails to individual employees. She added that the company chooses which listservs to monitor based on the size and level of activity of the employee group, and for no other reason. “We continually work to improve the Amazon employee experience, and with hundreds of thousands of employees located around the world, we use several methods to gather feedback at scale,” Amazon spokesperson Jaci Anderson said in a statement. “The anonymized feedback that is sometimes shared from these open email forums has helped us improve our employee benefits, further strengthen our COVID-19 procedures, and improve the overall Amazon employee experience.”One of the Amazon employees who appears to be linked to the email alias is a data analyst in the employee relations division of HR. And because some employee relations roles at Amazon involve mitigating the risk of unionization in its massive warehouse network, this detail has fueled corporate employees’ concerns about the listserv monitoring. According to documents reviewed by Recode, the email account subscribed to these groups also appears to be linked to a larger data visualization project run by Amazon’s employee relations team called “SPOC” (geoSPatial Operating Console), which involves monitoring threats to Amazon’s operations — including unionization. Anderson, the Amazon spokesperson, said the program monitors all types of external activity that impacts the safety and well-being of its employees, from weather events to power outages, and is not intended to favor or target one type of external threat over another. Shortly after an Amazon employee emailed documents about the broader SPOC monitoring project to dozens of employee listservs, those documents were deleted from Amazon’s internal network that’s broadly available to employees.In April, Business Insider reported that Amazon was tracking Whole Foods workers’ unionization efforts in a geographic heat map. And Recode has previously reported how as far back as the early 2000s, Amazon has previously tracked worker organizing at its warehouses before using excel to make heat maps. “It’s disappointing but not surprising,” said one Amazon engineering manager about HR tracking listserv emails and broader anti-unionization monitoring efforts. “We are working in corporate America at one of the largest and most technically advanced companies in the world. Always assume big brother is watching.”This employee said they wish the company were as employee-obsessed as it is customer-obsessed, but also acknowledged that the company “overall takes care of their [corporate] employees very well.”Amazon has faced growing tensions within both its corporate and blue-collar workforces in recent years. Tensions peaked during the Covid-19 pandemic as many of its warehouse workers complained about working conditions and pay — and some started nascent talks about unionization. The company came under serious scrutiny when it fired Christian Smalls, a Staten Island warehouse worker who was organizing his colleagues for safer working conditions at the beginning of the pandemic, and after a report emerged that a top Amazon lawyer called Smalls, who is Black, “not smart, or articulate” in an executive meeting. Amazon said it fired Smalls for violating social distancing rules.The Smalls case, among other factors, prompted many of the companies’ tech employees to advocate for greater workplace protections for Amazon warehouse and delivery workers. The company responded by providing some incremental benefits, such as temporarily raising pay for fulfillment center employees and offering more time off. At the same time, Amazon also fired several corporate employees leading internal activism efforts, who had organized their tech colleagues in solidarity with Smalls and other warehouse workers.“After firing a number of employees organizing for better Covid-19 protections, and getting caught calling a Black organizer ‘not articulate,’ it seems like Bezos decided it was time to form an internal anti-worker police force to frighten employees into shutting up,” one Amazon software engineer told Recode. “That open feeling I had as a tech worker able to freely discuss ideas with coworkers has vanished so fast it’s made my head spin. There’s a real culture shift happening, and it sucks.” In the months since Smalls’s firing, Amazon employee activism has quieted down, at least publicly. But workers’ fears about the company targeting and monitoring minority and activist employees show that tensions still run deep at the company, and, if anything, its workers’ trust in their employer continues to erode.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.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Friday that the House of Representatives will send the articles of impeachment against President Trump to the Senate next week, ending a weeks-long standoff and paving the way for the impeachment trial to begin soon afterward.“I have asked Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler to be prepared to bring to the Floor next week a resolution to appoint managers and transmit articles of impeachment to the Senate,” Pelosi wrote in a letter to Democratic House members.Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff, Drew Hammill, confirmed on Twitter that the “articles will go over next week.”The transmission of the impeachment articles was expected to be a formality, as it was for Bill Clinton’s impeachment — it’s just a procedural step where they’re officially sent over from the House to the Senate. But shortly after the House voted to impeach Trump on December 18 over his attempt to force Ukraine to investigate one of his political opponents, Pelosi made the surprising announcement that she wasn’t prepared to pass things over to the Senate just yet. The problem, she said, was that because of comments Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had made about being in lockstep with the White House, she doubted he would hold a “fair trial.” So, she said, she wanted to wait and see what the Senate’s plans were regarding witnesses — or, at the very least, for more information on how the Senate trial would work. Democrats offered several possible justifications for the move — that it could buy time to obtain more evidence, or that it would put a public spotlight on Republicans’ attempts to restrict the trial. But most interpreted the move as an attempt to force concessions out of McConnell. The idea was that, since Trump badly wanted to be acquitted, delaying the trial would infuriate him. That indeed happened: Trump was furious. The problem was that McConnell and his Senate majority didn’t budge.In December, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had proposed that the Senate subpoena four current or former administration officials for testimony, including former National Security Adviser John Bolton, as well as acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, White House aide Robert Blair, and Office of Management and Budget official Mark Duffey. (All of them have knowledge of Trump’s hold on Ukraine aid.)McConnell, meanwhile, reportedly wants no witness testimony at all at the trial. But his public position, aimed at winning over swing Republican senators, was more nuanced. He said that the Senate simply won’t decide on witnesses, one way or the other, until after the trial begins — as senators did during Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999. (That trial started with opening arguments and questions from senators, before the chamber voted on a proposal to call witnesses.)McConnell won over enough of the 53 Senate Republicans with this plan — key swing votes such as Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Mitt Romney (R-UT) backed it. And McConnell announced Tuesday that he had enough Republican votes (at least 51) to move forward with the trial without Democratic support. This happened despite Monday’s surprising development in which Bolton said he would, in fact, comply with a Senate subpoena for his testimony in Trump’s trial. (Bolton didn’t agree to be interviewed by the House and said he planned to fight any House subpoena in court.)So by Wednesday, several Democrats in both the House and the Senate made clear in public statements that they thought it was time to move forward (though several of them walked back those statements afterward). Senators from both parties, including several Democratic presidential candidates, wanted more certainty in their schedules. And there was confusion about what Pelosi could reasonably hope to achieve by holding out further.Finally, then, Pelosi announced it was time to move on, rather than continue to hold out hope of concessions that didn’t appear to be forthcoming. So in the coming days, she’ll choose the impeachment managers — essentially, the “prosecutors” who will make the House’s case against Trump during the trial. And the articles themselves will likely be sent over in the middle of next week, after a vote by the full House, teeing up the third presidential impeachment trial in American history.

The former FBI director James Comey denounces Donald Trump as “untethered to truth” and likens the president to a mafia boss in an explosive new book expected to bring fresh turmoil to the White House.Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty, out next Tuesday, is published 11 months after he was fired by Trump, who allegedly tried to lean on him to shut down an investigation into his former national security adviser Michael Flynn.Comey’s dismissal triggered the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the investigation into Russian election meddling and alleged collusion between Moscow and Trump aides. Trump has denied collusion and called the investigation a “witch-hunt”.In Comey’s book, obtained by the Guardian from a bookseller in New York, the former FBI chief describes his first trip to Trump Tower in January 2017, to brief the president-elect about the dossier on his links to Russia compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele.Comey writes that Trump “appeared shorter than he seemed on a debate stage with Hillary Clinton”. He adds: “His face appeared slightly orange, with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assume he placed small tanning goggles, and impressively coiffed, bright blond hair, which on close inspection looked to be all his. I remember wondering how long it must take him in the morning to get that done.”Comey then describes discussions by Trump’s team of the political implications of the dossier and possible strategies when it made the news media, all while intelligence community leaders remained in the room.“Holy crap,” Comey writes, “they are trying to make each of us an ‘amica nostra’ – a friend of ours. To draw us in. As crazy as it sounds, I suddenly had the feeling that, in the blink of an eye, the president-elect was trying to make us all part of the same family.”Comey, who likens Trump’s presidency to a “forest fire”, repeatedly in the 304-page book paints Trump as a mafia-style boss.For example, in a discussion of a White House meeting with Trump and then chief of staff Reince Priebus in February 2017, Comey says that “because he never stops talking”, Trump “pulls all those present into a silent circle of assent”.“The encounter left me shaken,” he writes. “I had never seen anything like it in the Oval Office. As I found myself thrust into the Trump orbit, I once again was having flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the mob. The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and the truth.”Of Trump’s now famous demand over dinner at the White House in January 2017, “I need loyalty”, Comey writes: “To my mind, the demand was like Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony – with Trump in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a ‘made man’.”Comey also considers his experiences as acting attorney general under George W Bush, his appointment as FBI director by Barack Obama and his investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of private email while secretary of state. He recounts a one-on-one interview with Obama, after the 2016 election, in which he is moved “almost to the verge of tears” and tells the 44th president: “I dread the next four years.”Comey writes that he told Trump during that first meeting at Trump Tower he was not under investigation personally, despite the FBI general counsel, Jim Baker, having “argued powerfully” such an assurance could be “misleadingly narrow”, given the scope of the investigation into whether the Trump campaign had coordinated with Russia. Trump has repeatedly referred to that assurance.Describing a visit to the FBI’s Manhattan office after the Trump Tower session, Comey writes: “After the uncomfortable conversation I’d just had, it was like taking a shower.”Comey also writes that Trump fixated upon an allegation that he invited prostitutes to his hotel room in Moscow during the Miss Universe event in 2013. In a later call, Comey writes, Trump denied the most lurid allegation, insisting: “I’m a germaphobe. There’s no way I would let people pee on each other around me.”“I actually let out an audible laugh,” Comey writes, adding: “I imagined the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow was large enough for a germaphobe to be at a safe distance from the activity.”Comey did not, he writes, communicate this thought to Trump.Of his firing, in May 2017, Comey says he first thought news of it – which those in the room as he gave a speech in Los Angeles saw first on a TV screen behind him – was a practical joke.“I now saw the same words,” he writes. “COMEY FIRED. I wasn’t laughing any longer.”Eventually, he writes, John Kelly, then the secretary of homeland security, called to say “he was sick about my firing and that he intended to quit in protest. He said he didn’t want to work for dishonorable people who would treat someone like me in such a manner. I urged Kelly not to do that, arguing that the country needed principled people around this president. Especially this president.”Kelly is now White House chief of staff, subject to reports he has fallen out of favor.In an epilogue, Comey passes judgment on Trump’s character. Writing that “our country is paying a high price” for the 2016 election, he says: “This president is unethical, and untethered to the truth and institutional values. His leadership is transactional, ego driven, and about personal loyalty.”The book, an instant bestseller, will be supported by a media blitz. In response, the Republican party has organized a Trumpian scheme to attack “Lyin’ Comey” – and has set up a rebuttal website. Topics James Comey Donald Trump Trump administration Trump-Russia investigation US politics Republicans news

Some big guest stars come out for a cold open set at a LGBTQ Presidential Town Hall. Moderator Anderson Cooper (Alex Moffat) and guest host Billy Porter (the Broadway and TV actor playing himself) welcome Cory Booker (Chris Redd), “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg (Colin Jost in a rare appearance away from the Weekend Update desk), and the night’s clear winner, Elizabeth Warren (Kate McKinnon).Warren’s snappy retort to a question concerning supporters of “traditional marriage” earns her the adulation of gays worldwide, among them Porter, who declares “Oh snap, the library’s open and Miss Thing is about to get read!”Next, Julían Castro (Lin-Manuel Miranda) takes the stage, apologizing for not being gay and promising to do better. He attempts to brand himself #LatinoObama and reminds everyone to “Vote for me for Vice-President – President! Dammit!”Finally, close-talker Joe Biden (Woody Harrelson, reprising a role from two weeks ago) puts everyone on edge by making a jumbled pitch for equality (“Whether you’re gay, lesby, transgential or queef, you’re OK with Joe!”), detailing a “false memory” about discovering what homosexuality was, and kissing Cooper on the lips.It’s an average dose of celebrity-skewering without any giant laughs, but it’s a welcome break from the unfunny Trump or Fox News sketches that so often kick things off.David Harbour, of Stranger Things fame, hosts for the first time. He refuses to partake in a Stranger Things monologue, insisting instead on doing “one of those walk around the studio ones”. Much to his chagrin, as soon as he gets backstage he discovers a portal to the Upside Down. There, he encounters Aidy Bryant, who he mistakes for Barb, a returning Pete Davidson and Lorne Michaels, now a page working under boss Kennan Thompson. It’s rather one-note, but it gets props for trying something different.Little Miss Teacher’s Friend is a middle-school pageant made up of awkward pre-teen tattletales and brown-nosers, all vying for the affection of their teacher, who finds the whole thing deeply uncomfortable. The funniest bits are two bookends in which Harbour, playing the principle and pageant host, loses his temper at an excited student for no reason.Grouch is a note-perfect parody of Joker, the latest “gritty anti-hero origin story”. The trailer promises a disturbing, Taxi-Driver-esque reimagining of Sesame Street in which Big Bird is a stripper, the Count is a junkie, Cookie Monster is a schizophrenic and Oscar the Grouch is an angry garbageman turned crazed vigilante. It’s the best movie parody the show has done in a long time.Soul Cycle is yet another competition sketch. This one sees four contestants – a sassy optimist, a coked-up struggling actor, a self-pitying supermodel and a lazy Scientology reject – vying to be a spin instructor at a trendy gym. It’s a funny showcase for all involved (especially Harbour, who has a penchant for playing high-strung buffoons), but the set-up feels tired.Musical guest Camilla Cabello, decked out in 18th-century French finery and surrounded by almost a dozen similarly-costumed dancers, performs Cry for Me.Weekend Update opens on the Trump impeachment. Jost and Michael Che unload on recently arrested Giuliani associates and “thumb breakers” Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who “were somehow not killed by John Wick”. Jokes about Trump’s probable allegiance to Nazis during the second world war, Abraham Lincoln’s sexual orientation and a ban on child sex dolls land hard, making this a stronger-than-usual effort.The first guest is teen movie critic Bailey Gismert (Heidi Gardner), who covers It: Chapter 2, Judy and Joker. She admits to having a crush on Joker (or Arthur, as she insists he be called), which leads to the inevitable mini-breakdown over her teenage woes. She signs off with a shout out to Todd Phillips: “The Joker director was right! Comedy is too woke!”Davidson joins to discuss the recent spike in sexually transmitted diseases: “I get tested all the time because, you know, I look like I have all of them.” He takes the glass-half-full view, suggesting an upsurge in curable STDs is a fair trade for the desegregating effects of modern dating, although he does lament the return of forgotten diseases, asking: “Does everything in my generation have to be a reboot? Like, the clap and Rambo came back in the same year, and neither of them were wanted.”Folk of the Past is a 60s TV performance from trio Peter, Paula and Murray. Their song Five Long Years recounts the time and money spent on various failures and humiliations: “Three years thinking Maine was a town in Vermont”, “Four years holding in farts in public”, “One, two, three years trying to impress my therapist”, “Three-thou on a fine for exposing my junk at a little league game”, “12 hours standing over a bridge saying, ‘Do it, you coward!’” It’s legitimately impressive – catchy, twisted and filled with surprising pathos. It’s the best sketch of the season.Later, Harbour and McKinnon play horny Italian grandparents (Harbour the grandmother, McKinnon the grandfather) whose open, shameless sensuality deeply disturbs their grandkids. The sketch is simple and juvenile and very funny. Harbour is particularly charming in his willingness to go broad.Cabello returns and performs Easy. Dog Court is a reality TV show centering around canine cases. In a dog park, Judge Connie Schaumberg (Cecily Strong) presides over a dispute between two dirtbag dog owners (Harbour and McKinnon, continuing to show off their chemistry). The pups are real, which causes things to go adorably off the rails as a squirrelly pug wriggles all over Strong’s face.It’s the perfect cap to a surprisingly strong episode. Harbour’s charisma makes him an ace at live comedy and thankfully, the writing was there to meet him. Topics Saturday Night Live Saturday Night Live recap US television Television TV comedy Comedy Lin-Manuel Miranda reviews