Enlarge this image A new home under construction in Paradise, Calif. Kirk Siegler/NPR hide caption toggle caption Kirk Siegler/NPR A new home under construction in Paradise, Calif. Kirk Siegler/NPR The sun is setting at a construction site on "the ridge," as locals call it. Towering pine trees with their bark still black from wildfire are lit up in orange. And Chip Gorley and some buddies are about to crack open cans of IPA to celebrate some rare good news.His foundation inspection passed, meaning they can start putting up the walls on Gorley's new home. It's on the exact site of where he lost everything in the Camp Fire a year ago."It's my home," Gorley says. "I'm coming back." National Water Uncertainty Frustrates Victims Of California's Worst Wildfire Like most who survived the historic wildfire, Gorley remembers it all that terrifying morning — the exploding propane tanks, the snapping of burnt tree limbs, that moment he thought he might die during a chaotic evacuation. But for him at least, talking about it and being open as the anniversary approached has helped. In Paradise, Calif., several memorials and commemorations were planned marking the anniversary through the weekend, including 85 seconds of silence at 11:08 a.m. on Nov. 8, for the 85 lives lost in the wildfire. Despite the trauma, Gorley says he never doubted that his hometown would recover. "It'll come back, it'll just be a slow grow," Gorley says. "As to when it will get back to where it's [even ] half the population, I don't know."Many of Gorley's friends have moved out of state. There was already a housing shortage — especially an affordable housing shortage — in rural Butte County before the fire. In search of cheaper housing, survivors have moved to states like Oregon, Idaho and Texas. Or they just don't ever want to live in Paradise again because of all the horror they experienced that day. Enlarge this image The Safeway shopping center was burnt last November and remained a pile of debris until recently. Kirk Siegler/NPR hide caption toggle caption Kirk Siegler/NPR The Safeway shopping center was burnt last November and remained a pile of debris until recently. Kirk Siegler/NPR Enlarge this image Much of the debris has now been trucked away, though some businesses like this McDonald's in rubble are still grim reminders of last year's fire. Kirk Siegler/NPR hide caption toggle caption Kirk Siegler/NPR Much of the debris has now been trucked away, though some businesses like this McDonald's in rubble are still grim reminders of last year's fire. Kirk Siegler/NPR At one point displacing close to 50,000 people, the Camp Fire was estimated to be the most expensive natural disaster in the world last year. Just removing the toxic debris cost almost $2 billion. The federal government is paying for about three quarters, including $200 million in direct aid to victims.The Camp Fire, named for Camp Creek Road where it is believed to have started east of Paradise, was the single most destructive wildfire in California history and the worst in the United States in a century. Close to 19,000 structures burned. In Paradise, more than 11,000 houses burned to the ground. A year later, only 11 have been rebuilt. Eleven. Paradise's Mayor Jody Jones plans to add to that tally though. Standing at her new home site, as her contractor and his crew hammer away in the background, Jones says those few who are rebuilding consider themselves pioneers."We never were victims, we're no longer survivors, we're pioneers," she says. "We're building a whole town from scratch, we're really proud of that." National Rethinking Disaster Recovery After A California Town Is Leveled By Wildfire Jones says the town has passed some new, tougher building codes. That includes no more wood decks or fences and expanded setbacks between homes and flammable material. They're also looking to reconfigure some streets for better escape routes. Some people died while trying to evacuate in the gridlock. But is all this enough? The Camp Fire continues to prompt some tough questions. Should towns like this built into dense overgrown dry forests where the homes themselves become ignition sources, be rebuilt in an era of climate change? Jones is a little tired of the question. In her view, no one in Southern California seems to raise the question about rebuilding in high risk zones after fires like the recent Getty Fire in Los Angeles that forced thousands to evacuate. "So what is the difference, is it because it's in L.A. and a metropolitan area and of course we should rebuild, but because we're a small town in the mountains we shouldn't," Jones asks. Paradise is a shell of what it was. The population went from about 26,000 to an estimated 3,000 today. National Paradise Bobcats Football Team Gives California Town Hope After Fires But there is progress here. Crews had to remove twice as much debris here as what was left from the twin towers after Sept. 11. Most of the toxic debris piles are now gone. So are the burnt cars that lined the roads giving it an apocalyptic feel. The demolished Safeway shopping center is finally cleared. Tammy Waller is one of the rare people up here whose home survived the fire. "The clean up has been way ahead of what I ever thought it would be," Waller says. One of the first things Waller did when she moved back into her neighborhood in Magalia above Paradise was pack a go-bag with camping gear. It now sits next to her front door as a permanent fixture alongside her dog crates should she need to evacuate again.Near her neighborhood one afternoon, she pointed up to power lines still mingling low among dense stands of trees and branches. Folks here recently had their power shut off for six days amid the bankrupt utility PG&E's new controversial safety plan. Enlarge this image Magalia resident Tammy Waller says it's unbelievable that even after the deadliest wildfire in California history was ignited by PG&E's faulty equipment, there are still power lines in her neighborhood perilously close to dense strands of trees and brush. Kirk Siegler/NPR hide caption toggle caption Kirk Siegler/NPR Magalia resident Tammy Waller says it's unbelievable that even after the deadliest wildfire in California history was ignited by PG&E's faulty equipment, there are still power lines in her neighborhood perilously close to dense strands of trees and brush. Kirk Siegler/NPR Everyone's cable, Internet and cell phones went dark for the most part. "If there were another fire, how would anybody know at say two o'clock in the morning," Waller says. Nearby those lines, there's a mobile home with a layer of pine needles and duff several inches thick on its roof. There is also overgrown brush everywhere. The area still feels vulnerable. Yet Waller's not sure anything can really be done to prevent another fire on the scale and intensity as last year's. "I know folks that had the cement siding, all of that, their house burnt to the ground," Waller says. "In that strong of a fire, there's nothing you're going to do about that." Like a lot of Paradise area residents, Waller was drawn here by the beauty and quiet and the slower pace than her longtime home in the Los Angeles area. But now she's on the fence about staying here for the longterm.

Andrew Yang is urging the Democratic National Committee to take an unorthodox step in its debate oversight process: commission more polling over the next several days. In a letter sent to DNC Chairman Tom Perez on Dec. 21, obtained by The Daily Beast, the Democratic contender calls for the DNC to commission four early-state polls before Jan. 10 as part of an effort to encourage more diversity on the debate stage in Iowa. “With the upcoming holidays and meager number of polls currently out in the field, a diverse set of candidates might be absent from the stage in Des Moines for reasons out of anyone’s control,” Yang wrote. “This is a troubling prospect for our party. Regardless of the DNC’s best intentions, voters would cry foul and could even make unfounded claims of bias and prejudice.”Yang, who qualified for the first six debates but has yet to reach the polling threshold for the seventh, was the only candidate of color on stage at the recent Los Angeles event. So far, the five candidates who have qualified for the CNN-hosted Jan. 14 event at Drake University—former Vice President Joe Biden, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg—are all white.Yang has met the individual donor requirement and one qualifying poll, but has three left before he can clear the criteria, and believes commissioning more qualifying polls would be a “simple solution.” Yang, an entrepreneur who’s had flashes of momentum throughout the Democatic primary in some early states, contends the biggest barrier to allowing “a diverse set of candidates” to debate at the next event is the lack of recent qualifying polls that meet the committee’s specifications.It’s been over a month since a poll in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, or South Carolina has been taken, the letter contends, which would not take into account any potential polling bumps from candidates’ recent performances at the sixth debate earlier this month. “As you know, big shifts can happen within short periods in this race, as we’ve already witnessed multiple times,” Yang wrote.More polls, “would provide an accurate snapshot of the current state of the race and where voters’ hearts and minds are, thus getting ahead of an imminent problem,” he wrote. A DNC official pointed to 26 total qualifying polls for the December debate. For the January event, the qualifying window was one week longer, in part to account for holidays, the official said. “The DNC has been more than inclusive throughout this entire process with an expansive list of qualifying polls, including 26 polls for the December debate, more than half of which were state polls,” the official told The Daily Beast. “The DNC will not sponsor its own debate-qualifying polls of presidential candidates during a primary. This would break with the long standing practice of both parties using independent polling for debate qualification, and it would be an inappropriate use of DNC resources that should be directed at beating Donald Trump.”The correspondence is the first time Yang has written Perez. A senior campaign official said the team has not heard back from the chairman directly, but did receive an acknowledgement that it was received from DNC staff. “Andrew Yang has managed to create a broad coalition for the future of our country and we, as a party, need to keep bringing more people into the fold instead of trying to keep people out of the political process,” a senior Yang campaign official said, noting that the team now has nearly 400,000 donors and 1 million contributions, figures first shared with The Daily Beast. Yang’s campaign expects to raise at least $12.5 million in the fourth quarter, 25 percent more money than in the previous one, his campaign said.

“I don’t know how much more hands-on you could get a mayor at that point,” he said. “This was a very big priority for me in my early days. I was just pushing like you wouldn’t believe. So I was on the streets.”Even so, he acknowledged that he should have more quickly reined in police abuses. He attributed that failure, in large part, to a reliance on “imperfect data, imperfect measures,” that erroneously showed complaints going down.“Even as I had strived my entire life to be a force for equity, fairness, justice and opportunity, it was obvious that some of our police practices, on my watch, were undermining not only my own values but my life’s mission,” he wrote in his 2016 book, “United.”Ultimately, the Justice Department intervened at the A.C.L.U.’s request and Mr. Booker came around, calling the investigation a “win-win” for the city. That inquiry would document a pattern of unconstitutional behavior by the Newark police: Three-quarters of pedestrian stops failed to meet the legal criteria, and blacks were at least 2.5 times more likely than whites to be stopped or arrested. The police department remains under a Justice Department consent decree.Today, in the era of Black Lives Matter, these tactics and their outsize impact on minority communities have helped drive a broad reassessment of criminal justice policies. That has left many politicians with tough-on-crime histories, especially on the Democratic side of the aisle, in a potentially awkward place. For Mr. Booker, there is an extra layer.In the interview, he recalled how, as a young black man, he had been a police target himself. He described the episode in a column written at Stanford in 1992, after Los Angeles had erupted in fire and rage over the acquittal of three police officers in the beating of Rodney King.Mr. Booker’s trial by police stop had come near the George Washington Bridge.“Five police cars, six officers, surround my car, guns ready,” he wrote. “I sat shaking.” The officers told him he had fit the description of a car thief.

The intervention by the Justice Department led to a mass resignation from the case in protest by prosecutors. First Aaron Zelinsky, a former Mueller aide, resigned from the case. (Zelinsky remains an assistant U.S. attorney, a career position, in Maryland.) Two others, Adam Jed and Mike Marando, also dropped off the case. A fourth, Jonathan Kravis, resigned from DOJ altogether in protest.The president has always been obsessed with loyalty, and in particular loyalty to himself, not to rule of law. He infamously asked then–FBI Director James Comey for loyalty in January 2017, and after concluding that he was not receiving it, fired Comey in May of that year. But for the most part, Trump has been somewhat restrained about flexing his muscles to enforce loyalty. He fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, though Sessions had gotten that job only through political fealty. He tried to fire Mueller, but then–White House Counsel Don McGahn refused, and Trump relented.Trump has been surprisingly spare with his pardon power. He hasn’t hesitated to hand out dubious pardons—to Dinesh D’Souza, for example, and former Sheriff Joe Arpaio—but he has so far not pardoned people like Paul Manafort, the former campaign chair who refused to testify against Trump and was sent to prison. Despite widespread predictions, Manafort remains in the clink.The president had reason to hesitate. Though the pardon power is not reviewable, abusing it raised the risk of backlash, as did intervening in prosecutions. Voters might have gotten angry; Congress might have decided to investigate or even impeach him. But Trump has now survived impeachment, and has a good sense of how consistently Senate Republicans have his back. Some have even argued that Trump has learned his lesson from the impeachment.The administration’s rush to aid Stone, especially set against the retributive firings, shows Trump newly willing to flex his muscles, and demonstrates how Pollyannaish the predictions of a chastened Trump were. The apology for firing Vindman goes this way: Vindman remains an officer, and Trump has a right to aides on the National Security Council whom he trusts. But Trump also said Tuesday that the military should consider disciplining Vindman, whose only offense seems to have been complying with a lawful subpoena from Congress.The intervention on behalf of Stone is particularly disturbing because he was convicted of lying to protect Trump. Thanks to Stone’s stonewalling, we still don’t really know what happened between Trump and Russia in 2016. Stone had Trump’s back, and now Trump has his. So much for the law-and-order president.During the Senate impeachment trial, House managers and the president’s lawyers tangled over whether a president could be impeached for actions that didn’t break specific laws. Trump’s support of Stone, even if it ends here, shows the stakes of that debate. The president isn’t breaking any laws by intervening in this case, but he is making clear that he places personal loyalty ahead of enforcing the rule of law. David A. Grahamis a staff writer atThe Atlantic.Connect Facebook Twitter

There is a flash of light in the dark town as an airstrike hits an Islamic State weapons depot. A few seconds later, a ball of flame engulfs the entire neighbourhood. The sonic boom sends shockwaves through Baghuz, shaking the ground miles away, and for a second everything and everyone is stunned into silence. Then the artillery fire starts up again.Five years after Isis swept across Syria and Iraq, all that remains of the “caliphate” that at its peak stretched across two countries and controlled 10 million people is a handful of streets in a bend of the Euphrates river running through this desert town, which will be retaken in the next few days.Trapped from the east and the west by advancing Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and by the Syrian regime and Russia on the other side of the river, the caliphate is a hellscape of smoke and fire. There is nowhere left for the fighters to go.The US-led coalition is making up for lost time in the fight to drive Isis out of its last stronghold. After a 10-day truce to evacuate women and children from the town, the offensive restarted this weekend at a tempo not seen even in the major battles for the cities of Mosul and Raqqa.Isis snipers, suicide bombs and heat-seeking rockets are preventing the SDF from making gains on the ground during daylight. But when darkness falls, Isis is hampered without night vision goggles, and for the past two nights US jets and helicopters have attacked. At least 160 machine guns are stationed at 50-metre intervals along the frontline, the gunfire echoing across the area.After sunset on a rooftop position near the front on Saturday, bright red tracers and sparks from mortar and artillery fire illuminated palm tree groves and rubble. Thick clouds of smoke blocked out the sky.“The day is their time. But the night is for us,” said Memo Wan, an SDF commander, as his men whooped and cheered at every explosion. One of the unit was killed by an improvised explosive device (IED) planted by Isis a few weeks ago.In the past two days, the SDF have managed to close the remaining gap of 1km between Isis and their own positions, and Wan said the militants were now almost totally besieged, with all but one supply line cut.“We have picked up walkie talkies dropped by retreating fighters and listened to them panicking and talking about how to escape,” he said. “From the accents, many were Iraqi and other foreigners.”Between 1,000 and 1,500 men are believed to be still inside the riverside pocket, along with an unknown number of women and children. The SDF believes senior fighters may be trying to bribe the regime for passage into Abu Kamal on the other side of the Euphrates.“We were only expecting 2,000 people to leave during the evacuations, but it was more than 9,000 women and children in the end, so it could be there are more fighters left than we think,” said commander Adnan Afrin. “This battle has been extremely difficult because so many will fight to the death.”Current intelligence suggests that high-profile hostages are still being held in Baghuz as bargaining chips. Also trapped in the town are two American children, Yusuf and Zahra Shikder, whose mother died in an airstrike in January and who are now believed to be in the custody of a British family that has chosen to die in the battle.Those who were able and willing to leave Baghuz did so over the past two weeks, walking for hours or reaching SDF checkpoints where they were put in vehicles normally used for transporting sheep and taken to prisons or displacement camps.On Friday the last hundred or so people to flee the pending fighting were screened in the middle of the desert by SDF troops. Among them were three teenage boys who had been made to fight: weak with hunger, they fell upon bread provided by their captors.Small children kept close to their mothers, their noses, hands and in some cases bare feet turning blue in the biting desert wind. Their faces wore no expressions. Most did not cry.A handful of men tried to pass as civilians. A tall Bosnian fighter ignored questions, closing his eyes and smiling serenely before wincing and falling over. Medics said he had not eaten for days and an old wound on his torso had reopened.Even though some of its last fighters are children or injured, Isis is refusing to go quietly from its last redoubt. In the first 24 hours of the renewed campaign, snipers and IEDs killed three SDF soldiers and injured another seven. Soldiers said they had seen through binoculars that women with guns were now among those fighting, and that two female suicide bombers had attacked in the last month.The jihadists have turned to their repertoire of cars, motorbikes and even bicycles for suicide attacks, also lacing the tunnels they are using to hide in with IEDs. According to commanders of the operation, the group is continuing to use civilians as human shields against airstrikes.At the rooftop position commanded by Wan, walkie talkies crackled as news filtered through of an incoming new casualty from the front 400 metres away.While the SDF closed in on the jihadists in the east of the country, across in the north-west near Idlib 21 Syrian soldiers and allied militiamen were killed by a separate group linked to al-Qaida, in one of the deadliest breaches of a six-month-old truce deal. Sunday’s attack by Ansar al-Tawhid fighters was carried out in the village of Massasneh, in the north of Hama province, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The attack was confirmed by the Syrian foreign ministry.In Baghuz on Sunday morning, both in the town’s outskirts and at a hilltop position above the town, the extensive damage from airstrikes and shelling could be clearly seen. A car bomb had ploughed into the gate of a mosque, bringing down the building’s dome.Yellow spring flowers and new blossom on trees were covered in white rubble dust, and at one house charred pomegranates, never picked, were left to rot on the branch.Artillery thuds and machine gunfire drowned out the springtime birdsong. The fire from the previous night’s airstrike on the weapons depot was still burning, sending columns of black smoke into the blue desert sky. Topics Syria Islamic State Middle East and North Africa features

That a president would defy the results of an election has long been unthinkable; it is now, if not an actual possibility, at the very least something Trump’s supporters joke about. As the former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee tweeted, President Trump “will be eligible for a 3rd term due to the illegal attempts by Comey, Dems, and media , et al attempting to oust him as @POTUS so that’s why I was named to head up the 2024 re-election.” A good troll though it may have been, Huckabee is not the first person to suggest that Trump might not leave when his presidency ends.In May, the faith leader Jerry Falwell Jr. tweeted an apparent reference to the completed investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Russian election interference. “I now support reparations,” he wrote. “Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup.” Trump retweeted Falwell’s post.One of Trump’s former confidants, Michael Cohen, has suggested that Trump won’t leave. In his congressional testimony before heading to prison, Trump’s former attorney said, “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”Trump himself has joked about staying in office beyond his term, and even for life. In December, Trump told a crowd at a Pennsylvania rally that he will leave office in “five years, nine years, 13 years, 17 years, 21 years, 25 years, 29 years …” He added that he was joking to drive the media “totally crazy.” Just a few days earlier, Trump had alluded to his critics in a speech, “A lot of them say, ‘You know he’s not leaving’ … So now we have to start thinking about that because it’s not a bad idea.” This is how propaganda works. Say something outrageous often enough and soon it no longer sounds shocking.Refusal to leave office is rare, but not unheard of. In the past decade, presidents in democracies such as Moldova, Sri Lanka, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Gambia have refused to leave office, sometimes leading to bloodshed. In 2016, Joseph Kabila decided not to step down after three five-year terms as the president of Congo, announcing that he would delay the election for two years so that a census could be conducted. His decision was met with mass protests in which 50 people were killed by government security forces. Still, he followed through and an election took place in 2018. He left office thereafter.Elected officials in the U.S. have also refused to step down, albeit from lower offices than the presidency. In 1874, a Texas governor locked himself in the basement of the state capitol building after losing his reelection bid. The saga began when Republican Governor Edmund J. Davis lost the 1873 election by a resounding 2-to-1 ratio to his Democratic challenger, Richard Coke, and claimed that the election had been tainted with fraud and intimidation. A court case made its way to the state’s supreme court. All three justices, each of whom had been appointed by the incumbent Davis, ruled that the election was unconstitutional and invalid. Democrats called upon the public to disregard the court’s decision, and proceeded with plans for Coke’s inauguration. On January 15, 1874, Coke arrived at the state capitol with a sheriff’s posse, and was sworn in to office while Davis barricaded himself downstairs with state troopers. The next day, Davis requested federal troops from President Ulysses S. Grant. Grant refused, and Davis finally stepped down three days later.

Amazon is clearly having fun with its Alexa digital assistant. The Seattle company has now put it in a microwave, a wall clock, potentially millions of cars, and in a bunch of new speakers.Starting with Alexa itself, Amazon says it’s made the assistant more opinionated (has favorites, not political opinions), more sensitive (you can tell it to be quiet, as when a baby is sleeping), more conversational (it can carry on extended conversations without repeated wake words), more approachable (as with Alexa captions for the hearing impaired), and more natural (it goes into the right skills triggered by context, without a rigid instructions).Here’s a rundown of everything Amazon announced at its pre-holiday event in Seattle today:New stuff for the connected homeThe new Echo Dot. [Photo: courtesy of Amazon]A new Echo Dot. Amazon says it has sold more Dots than any other Echo device. The devices, which look like oversized hockey pucks, are little wireless vehicles for Alexa that can also connect via Bluetooth or cable to bigger sound systems. Now there’s a new Echo Dot with a larger 1.6-inch speaker (the old one had a 1-inch speaker). Amazon says it’s 70% louder. The new Dot has a better, softer design, too. It’ll sell for $49.99 starting next month.Echo Input. Since the Dot has such a small speaker, many people connect them with a larger audio system via Bluetooth or cable. The new Echo Input is essentially a Dot without a speaker, and it’s much smaller—the same shape as a coaster and not much bigger. It’s basically a connecter between Alexa and your stereo system. It will sell for $34.99 starting later this year.Echo Sub. Amazon says lots of Echo owners like to put two of them together in a stereo pair. The Echo Sub allows people to add a large base speaker to the mix. Actually, it can be used to add base to just one Echo, too, in a 1.1 configuration. The new speaker will sell for $129.99 and will start shipping later this monthly.The Echo Link Amp and the Echo Link. [Photo: Mark Sullivan]Echo Link Amp and Echo Link. Instead of just stereo-connected components already in the home, Amazon is also starting to sell some of its own stereo components. The $200 Echo Link is a small black box with a volume knob that acts as an intermediary between Alexa and your home stereo system. The $300 Echo Link Amp goes a step further by adding amplification (60 watts per channel X 2) to the mix, and a good selection of audio connection options on the back of the device. Both devices are available later this year.A third Echo, the Echo Plus. Amazon announced a new Echo Plus, the third iteration on the Echo device, which pioneered the smart speaker space. The new model has more powerful bass and clearer sound. There’s also a smart home hub built in, so it can be used to add and control automated home devices like plugs and lights. It also adds a temperature sensor to test its particular place in the home. A new feature called Local Voice Control takes the most basic parts of Alexa’s brain and makes them available offline in case the broadband service to the home goes out. The new Echo will cost $149.99 and will go on sale next month.Making it easier to connectAmazon believes that many people have avoided putting smart devices in their homes because it’s too complicated and labor-intensive to set up. Now the company is pushing on a new initiative called “Simple Setup.” The Echo Smart Plug [Photo: courtesy of Amazon]For example, a new product called the Amazon Smart Plug uses a new connected home plug and a new set-up protocol in which you can talk through the set-up process with the Alexa assistant. And instead of having to enter all your credentials in an app, the device can access your credentials from a secure place in the cloud–that is, if you’ve already set up a device of the same brand in the past. When the Smart Plug is plugged in, it automatically starts looking around for a Simple Setup Wi-Fi network to connect with. Once recognized, the user’s credentials can be sent to the new device, and the thing is connected and controllable through Alexa. The plug will go for $24.99 when it starts shipping next month.Stuff for the kitchenAmazon Basics Microwave. Yes, Amazon has now put Alexa into a microwave. And, come to think of it, it’s a good idea. The era of punching numbers into the archaic pad on the front of microwaves may be coming to an end. With the Alexa microwave, you can just say “one potato” and the microwave will know what to do. The device becomes available later this year for $59.99.Amazon’s Alexa Wall Clock. [Photo: Mark Sullivan]Alexa Wall Clock. The new Alexa-powered wall clock can accept commands to set alarms. During the demo here in Seattle, the clock kept track of four different alarms of varying lengths. The timers, and their progress, are represented by LED lights around the outside edge of the clock. The clock will become available later this year for $29.99.In the carThe Echo Auto [Photo: Mark Sullivan]The Echo Auto. Amazon has worked with certain automakers to put the Alexa assistant in cars. But there are still millions of cars on the road with no such integration. The Echo Auto is a small dash-top device containing Alexa and also an eight-microphone array, allowing it to hear the driver’s voice over road noise, entertainment, the air conditioner, etc. The device connects to the user’s phone via a Bluetooth to get internet access. It can also connect through the car’s audio auxiliary jack, Amazon says. So the driver can do things like get audio directions to a coffee shop or gas station nearby without having to pick up a device. Amazon is doing a sort of beta program where a user pay $24.99 for the device to help the company learn from real use. When the device goes to general availability (not sure when), it’ll cost $49.99.New video gadgetsThe new Echo Show has both Amazon Silk and Mozilla Firefox browsers.A new Echo Show. Amazon’s Echo Show, the company says, has been completely redesigned with a larger 10-inch display, a larger speaker inside, and a larger space in back of the device where the speaker radiates for deeper bass. Amazon says it now has “room-filling” sound. The Show also has a smart home hub built in, so it can be used to set up and control other connected home devices. Importantly, through a new integration with Microsoft, people who use Skype can now do their calling and video chat through the Show. The new device will go on sale next month for $229.99.Fire TV Recast DVR. Amazon has a new DVR that can record four shows at a time and stream video to multiple devices. It offers a programming guide that helps organize video using a graphic display of what’s on cable now, shows already recorded to the DVR, and shows available on subscription services like Amazon Prime Video or Netflix. The DVR will be available before the holidays starting at $229.99.Setting up the Fire TV Recast DVR. [Photo: courtesy of Amazon]Compared to last year’s pre-Christmas Alexa product unveiling event, this one was very good. The products Amazon announced this year represented the branching out of Alexa into new places where it can be truly useful, as in the car. Not too long ago, personal assistants like Alexa were pretty much confined to smart speakers. Amazon proved today that that’s changing fast.

The 2020 Primetime Emmys are going to be a proving ground, if nothing else. The 72nd annual ceremony — which will air on ABC at 8 pm ET on Sunday, September 20, and stream on ABC’s website (with a cable login), Hulu’s Live TV service, and something called FuboTV — won’t be held in a giant theater full of celebrities because (and I don’t know if you’ve heard this) the global Covid-19 pandemic makes hosting events where lots of people crowd together into one room not advisable. Instead, the awards are primed to become an ode to barely structured chaos. There will be 130 cameras stationed around the world — from New York to Los Angeles, from London to Tel Aviv — all designed to capture the moment when a nominee wins or loses. And for safety’s sake, those cameras are either going to be operated remotely or by the nominees themselves. The Television Academy has shipped out tiny “production” units, which contain a camera, a laptop, a ring light, and a boom microphone, as per a recent press conference with the awards show’s producers. (You can read a list of nominees right here.)It’s honestly pretty nifty, but it also contains the potential for so, so much chaos. Think of your standard videoconferencing operation. Now multiply that by 130 individual live feeds, one for each nominee, not to mention everything going on at the Staples Center in LA, which will be the awards’ hub. Yeah, it’s going to be a lot. Here are five things to expect from this year’s incredibly unusual Emmy Awards.At a Wednesday press conference, the Emmys’ executive producers, Reggie Hudlin and Ian Stewart, said that Kimmel would be hanging out at the Staples Center to deliver his monologue and keep things rolling along. At first, that might sound like he’ll be standing in a giant, empty arena, delivering jokes into an echoing nothingness. But, no, the producers assured the press: Other people will drop by to say hey (though they wouldn’t say who, exactly; our money is on Matt Damon, so Kimmel can keep running that particular joke into the ground). Still, a mostly empty, cavernous space, combined with a comedian who almost certainly gains energy from hearing people laugh at his jokes ... what could go wrong?It sure sounds like once the Emmy Awards begin, all of those cameras are going to turn on, and then the celebrities will be forced to just hang out in their desk chairs and watch the show. Surely, some of those feeds will be turned off as the evening wears on (particularly for those nominees who don’t win in their categories), but at least for the opening monologue, the producers will likely want to be able to cut to, say, Baby Yoda when Kimmel makes a crack about The Mandalorian. (Don’t you come for Baby Yoda, Jimmy Kimmel!) This makes for an incredibly elaborate production headache. Any one of those feeds could go on the fritz at any moment, and all of them have to be filtered through command HQ at the Staples Center. What could possibly go wrong?Surely some of them will be glammed up, but the event has no dress code. If Ted Danson wants to show up in footie pajamas, Ted Danson is gonna show up in footie pajamas.It’s too soon to make reliable predictions — the week-long slog that is the Creative Arts Emmys only got to the portion where it started handing out awards for scripted programming on Wednesday, after two full days of awards to nonscripted programming — but given the categories where the three shows above are nominated, particularly for acting, writing, and directing, and the general buzz for them within the TV industry, it seems safe to predict they’ll each be taking home a number of trophies on Sunday. (Further bolstering Schitt’s Creek’s case: It won Outstanding Casting for a Comedy Series, and the last five winners of that award went on to win Outstanding Comedy Series.)Then again, The Mandalorian scooped up five Creative Arts Emmys, helping Disney+ set a new bar for how quickly a streaming service can attain Emmy success (it’s the first time a streaming service has ever won this many awards in its first year of eligibility), so look out for Baby Yoda. Unless Jimmy Kimmel gets him first.The 2020 Emmys are going to take chances on how they present awards, simply by necessity. We don’t know enough to really speculate. But we do know that awards shows like the Grammys and Oscars, scheduled for the first half of 2021, are going to be watching closely as they figure out how to offer up an awards show in the Covid-19 era.Indiewire quoted Hudlin as saying the following:Let’s use this opportunity as a way to experiment with different ways of presenting awards, so from category to category, it’s going to change throughout the entire three-hour broadcast. Some of them may not work. But we said, let’s just experiment. And let’s have the audience a little more on the edge of their seat just to see how many tricks we can pull out of our sleeve.What could this mean? We have no idea. But we hope it means that after he’s done laying into Baby Yoda, Kimmel uses powerful sorcery (or just holograms) to conjure the spirits of many of the nominees to share the stage with him and do his bidding. Or, more likely than not, we’re going to see a bunch of semi-funny comedic bits staged all over the world, requiring precise timing over a videoconferencing platform (a medium known for precise comedic timing).The Emmys, like last month’s Democratic National Convention, have a chance to break open the template of a TV staple that has become so commonplace as to be deeply boring. Will this year’s ceremony actually do that and save awards shows forever? Probably not, but hey, we can still hope.The 72nd Annual Primetime Emmy Awards will air Sunday, September 20, at 8 pm ET on ABC. It will be live nationwide. You can also watch on ABC’s website (with a cable login), Hulu’s Live TV service, and FuboTV. Help keep Vox free for allMillions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.

“We can never be defeated,” he said, his voice soaring and reverberating through the convention hall. “Even when we’re knocked down, we have to understand that we are never knocked out.”It is a ritual of politicking for presidential hopefuls to swing through this early-voting state, whose reputation as a political bellwether draws an array of potential candidates — or anyone who hopes to be seen as one — long before any election is to take place. Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, spent two days here in April, talking to union carpenters, activists and firefighters. Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels and an anti-Trump crusader, stormed into the state in August to declare he might run for president in 2020.Even lesser-known politicians have descended on the state. Representative John Delaney of Maryland has campaigned in all of Iowa’s 99 counties.As the midterm elections approach, other possible 2020 candidates, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., are also fanning out across the country — to campaign for midterm candidates but also to get themselves in front of voters. Senator Kamala Harris of California is in Ohio this weekend, where she is keynoting the Ohio Democratic Party’s state dinner.Then there is Mr. Avenatti, who was in Ohio on Friday and in New Hampshire last weekend, lest anyone forget he might be running, too.The flood of appearances is a sign of just how crowded the field of Democratic candidates could be heading into 2020, and how aggressively they will make the case that they are better than President Trump. Energized anew by a bitter Supreme Court confirmation process, many Democrats are looking for a leader who can offer a different vision for the country, and fight back against an administration they see as reckless, toxic and hostile.Last weekend, Ms. Warren gave the strongest signal yet that she would be a candidate, saying she was taking “a hard look” at a 2020 run because the “broken government” needed to be fixed.Mr. Booker’s trip to Iowa, his first since he campaigned in the state for Hillary Clinton in 2016, followed recent campaign stops in Texas, Georgia and Florida, all of which have tight races whose outcomes could shift the momentum for the Democrats. Mr. Booker, who has family in Iowa, will also be in the state on Monday for a get-out-the-vote rally. (His family is throwing him something of a family reunion on Sunday, according to an aide.)

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who was heavyset when he ran for president in 2004, said he has noticed both Ms. Gillibrand and Mr. Booker’s thinning profiles.Election 2020 ›Latest UpdatesUpdated Sept. 30, 2020, 9:14 p.m. ETTwitter shuts down accounts from Iran that sought to disrupt debate dialogue.Facebook will forbid ads that undermine the legitimacy of the coming election.Brad Parscale steps away from the Trump campaign entirely after episode involving law enforcement.Recently, Mr. Sharpton, the civil rights leader who lost about 175 pounds, met privately with Ms. Gillibrand before a joint news conference. She marveled at his ability to keep the weight off. He returned the compliment, telling her she was “looking even sharper” of late, Mr. Sharpton recalled.“And she says, ‘Well, reverend, you’ve got to always watch what you do.’ So I was saying, ‘Yes, especially if you have other plans.’ She said, ‘We’ll talk about that another time,’” Mr. Sharpton said of their exchange. “I was trying to bait her into telling me if she was going to run. But she did not give that away.”All jokes aside, he said that a candidate’s weight can shape voter perception.“Optics are important in politics,” Mr. Sharpton said. “And I think it does not hurt to look fit, because people want people that they feel take themselves seriously if they’re going to put the affairs of the state in their hands.”In the past, Ms. Gillibrand has been open about her weight. In 2012 she detailed her hour-by-hour daily diet for Self magazine (“Snack: 10 almonds”), after losing 40 pounds after the birth of her second child.She devoted a chapter about her body and gender expectations in her book, including sexist commentary congressional colleagues said to her (“You know, Kirsten, you’re even pretty when you’re fat” and “Don’t lose too much weight now. I like my girls chubby”).“I don’t like being judged on my looks and, frankly, I’d like to spend less time thinking about my appearance, but there it is,” she wrote. But she came to see the benefit of opening up about her weight battles. “I’d always wanted voters to know that I’m a tenacious person, and what finally convinced them was that I’d possessed the determination to lose 50 pounds.”

An effort to call witnesses at the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump appeared on the verge of failure Thursday night after at least one of four Republican senators that Democrats needed to open the way said he opposed the idea.The setback for Democrats on the witnesses question meant that Trump could be acquitted by the Senate as early as Friday. He would thereafter be the third president in US history to have been impeached but to have avoided removal at trial.Republican Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who is retiring, announced on Thursday night at the end of a two-day question-and-answer period that although what Trump had done was “inappropriate”, the misconduct did “not meet the US constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense”.“The question then is not whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did,” Alexander said in a statement.One wavering Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, announced on Thursday night that she would support witnesses, while a second, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, said she would sleep on it. A third, Mitt Romney of Utah, indicated he would also support witnesses, saying: “I would like to hear from Mr Bolton”.But it appeared that the best Democrats could hope for was a tie vote on the question.John Roberts, who is presiding at the trial in his capacity as chief justice of the United States, might break such a tie vote – or he might allow the vote to stand and declare the motion to be unsuccessful, meaning that the push for witnesses would fail.The lead prosecutor in the case, the House manager Adam Schiff, warned that the Republicans’ unified determination to protect Trump instead of collecting evidence was paving the way toward a presidency unbound by congressional oversight or any other checks and balances.“What we have seen in the past few days is a descent into constitutional madness, because that way madness lies,” Schiff said, comparing the Republican position to Richard Nixon’s infamous defense of his conduct in the Watergate scandal: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”“Watergate is now 40, 50 years behind us,” said Schiff. “Have we learned nothing in the last half-century? Have we learned nothing at all? We are right back to where we were a half-century ago, and we may even be in a worse place because this time that argument may succeed.“That is the normalization of lawlessness.”In a late-stage gambit for witnesses, Schiff offered to restrict witness depositions to a time window of one week, after the model of the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, when three witnesses were deposed on video outside the Senate chamber.“Let’s use the Clinton model,” Schiff said. “Let’s take a week. Let’s take a week to have a fair trial.”Democrats are pushing for the president’s former national security adviser John Bolton to testify, with what could be a damaging account of Trump’s “quid pro quo” strategy with Ukraine that has resulted in his impeachment, while Republicans are signaling they have the numbers necessary to shut down the attempt.Bolton himself said after a speech in Austin, Texas, on Thursday night that witnesses who appeared during the House impeachment proceedings had done so admirably. At the time – last month – Bolton threatened to respond with a lawsuit to any subpoena to appear.“All of them acted in the best interest of the country as they saw it and consistent to what they thought our policies were,” said Bolton of the witnesses.If Republicans successfully block witnesses, that could effectively trigger the beginning of the end of the impeachment trial, with a final vote on whether to remove Trump from office or acquit him coming as early as Friday.Such a trial would be about half as long as the previous shortest presidential impeachment trial in US history, that of Clinton, which lasted just more than one month.This week, Trump’s lawyers have shifted their arguments away from the president doing nothing wrong to a position equating to: even if he did withhold aid to Ukraine in exchange for investigating his potential Democratic election rival Joe Biden, that doesn’t meet the standard needed for impeachment.With the question of whether to bring in potentially explosive new witness testimony hanging over the Senate, the trial has been a tense affair.Ahead of the resumption of impeachment proceedings on Thursday, McConnell was asked by reporters if he had confidence that he had the votes necessary to block a motion on witnesses.“I always do,” McConnell said. But the top Senate Republican was more unsure on other aspects of the trial. When asked if he had the votes for acquittal by Friday night, McConnell said: “We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”Privately, Republican Senate staffers expressed confidence that they could block a motion for witnesses.That prospect alarmed legal scholars and other observers.“I don’t think people fully grasp the constitutional danger of this moment,” tweeted Susan Hennessey, executive editor of the Lawfare web site. “If the Senate were to refuse to call relevant witnesses with direct testimony of grave presidential wrongdoing then we can no longer understand impeachment to be a genuine check on executive overreach.”Tom Nichols, a professor at the US Naval War College, tweeted: “The constitution wasn’t designed to deal with people who don’t give a shit.”The rush for witnesses followed a report from a leaked version of Bolton’s upcoming book where he said Trump told Bolton to hold back on congressionally approved national security aid to Ukraine until officials there agreed to help investigate Biden, his family and other matters involving US Democrats.Bolton’s book has been a persistent topic of discussion throughout the week in Washington. On Monday, the former Trump chief of staff John Kelly was asked about Bolton’s allegation in the book.“If John Bolton says that in the book, I believe John Bolton,” Kelly said. “John’s an honest guy. He’s a man of integrity and great character, so we’ll see what happens.”On Thursday, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, refused to fully respond to Kelly’s comments.“I respect Gen Kelly enormously and like him personally,” Conway said. “I don’t know what he’s referring to so I can’t answer. I’ve not seen the manuscript.”Thursday’s questioning portion of the hearings follows an eventful day in the impeachment trial. On Wednesday, Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz offered one of the most expansive and stunning arguments in Trump’s defense when he said the president could not be removed from national office over requesting political favors if he believed those favors were in the public interest of the country.“If the president does something which he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” Dershowitz said. Topics Trump impeachment US Senate John Bolton Republicans Democrats Donald Trump news

It was a rare sight on Thursday morning when a Trump administration official stood behind a podium and took questions from reporters. In the seven months since she succeeded Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham hasn’t done it once.But there was Kellyanne Conway delivering a briefing that was intended to be primarily focused on the CDC’s recent report on a life expectancy increase in the U.S. and the administration’s preparations to combat the coronavirus and the opioid crisis.After dubiously giving the president and First Lady Melania Trump credit for extending the average lifespan of Americans, Conway started to get testy when PBS NewsHour host Yamiche Alcindor asked her to comment on former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly saying he “believes” claims by former National Security Adviser John Bolton that President Donald Trump personally directed his quid pro quo with Ukraine. “Well, I respect General Kelly enormously and like him personally,” Conway replied. “I don’t know what he was referring to so I can’t answer.” She explained that because she has not personally seen a copy of Bolton’s unpublished manuscript she could not verify that he made those allegations against Trump in his new book. The two women continued to spar for several more minutes, with Conway asking, “Are you talking about a leak of an unpublished manuscript reported by The New York Times? Because I don’t know that to be true and neither do you.” “You want me to answer a hypothetical wrapped up in a conundrum,” Conway added, saying she “doesn’t make anything of” Kelly’s belief in Bolton. She then proceeded to attack Alcindor’s other employer NBC News for prematurely reporting Kelly’s departure from the White House. “I am not going to comment, particularly from the podium in the press briefing room on a leaked, unpublished manuscript that I haven’t seen,” Conway said. “I hope it doesn’t include classified information.”“And I know there’s always this rush to imbue credibility on whomever you think is against the president at that moment,” she continued before seeming to equate Bolton with figures like Michael Cohen, Michael Avenatti, and Lev Parnas—all three charged with federal crimes. When another reporter followed up by asking why the White House is dragging its feet on reviewing the chapter in Bolton’s book on Ukraine, Conway said “it has nothing to do with me” before deflecting the question by listing off unrelated accomplishment by the administration and boasting about Trump’s approval ratings. “The idea that we should stop what we’re doing to review somebody’s book strikes me as not a big priority, in my view, for the president,” Conway said. When that reporter noted that the contents of the book could become quite important “if witnesses are called” in Trump’s impeachment trial, Conway shot back, “You would hope so, wouldn’t you?” “I’m always happen to answer all of your questions, as you full well know,” Conway added. “But I gotta stick to reality, not hypotheticals. And frankly, wishful thinking.”

“I don’t know how much more hands-on you could get a mayor at that point,” he said. “This was a very big priority for me in my early days. I was just pushing like you wouldn’t believe. So I was on the streets.”Even so, he acknowledged that he should have more quickly reined in police abuses. He attributed that failure, in large part, to a reliance on “imperfect data, imperfect measures,” that erroneously showed complaints going down.“Even as I had strived my entire life to be a force for equity, fairness, justice and opportunity, it was obvious that some of our police practices, on my watch, were undermining not only my own values but my life’s mission,” he wrote in his 2016 book, “United.”Ultimately, the Justice Department intervened at the A.C.L.U.’s request and Mr. Booker came around, calling the investigation a “win-win” for the city. That inquiry would document a pattern of unconstitutional behavior by the Newark police: Three-quarters of pedestrian stops failed to meet the legal criteria, and blacks were at least 2.5 times more likely than whites to be stopped or arrested. The police department remains under a Justice Department consent decree.Today, in the era of Black Lives Matter, these tactics and their outsize impact on minority communities have helped drive a broad reassessment of criminal justice policies. That has left many politicians with tough-on-crime histories, especially on the Democratic side of the aisle, in a potentially awkward place. For Mr. Booker, there is an extra layer.In the interview, he recalled how, as a young black man, he had been a police target himself. He described the episode in a column written at Stanford in 1992, after Los Angeles had erupted in fire and rage over the acquittal of three police officers in the beating of Rodney King.Mr. Booker’s trial by police stop had come near the George Washington Bridge.“Five police cars, six officers, surround my car, guns ready,” he wrote. “I sat shaking.” The officers told him he had fit the description of a car thief.

Navigating their party’s new gender dynamics has not been seamless for some of the male candidates.Mr. O’Rourke, who entered the race on Thursday, has already faced backlash for joking that his wife has been raising their three young kids “sometimes with my help.” On a podcast this weekend, he promised not to repeat the comment and said he acknowledged “the truth of the criticism that I have enjoyed white privilege.”All the women in the 2020 race have touted their gender as a competitive advantage in a crowded field, marking a break from the party’s only other competitive female nominee, Hillary Clinton, who often struggled to publicly embrace her historic role.“I wasn’t born to run for office, just because growing up in the ’70s, in the middle of the country, I don’t think many people thought a girl could be president,” said Ms. Klobuchar, in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.Her comments were a reference to Mr. O’Rourke’s remark in a Vanity Fair interview that he was “born to be in” the race.But Ms. Gillibrand, who released a video on Sunday officially announcing her presidential bid, has leaned most deeply into a woman-centric message, making running as a woman, for women, a central theme of her candidacy.Representatives for Ms. Harris and Ms. Warren declined to comment on Mr. Booker’s and Mr. O’Rourke’s remarks.

While on pretrial release awaiting trial, onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort attempted to tamper with two witnesses, prosecutors said in a court filing Monday.Given the weight of the accusations, special counsel Robert Mueller asked a D.C. federal judge to consider revising the terms of his release—he is currently under house arrest on a $10 million unsecured bail—or even send him to jail to await trial.Manafort and an associate allegedly reached out to a pair of public relations people who were linked to an alleged conspiracy by Manafort and others to illegally lobby on behalf of Ukraine in the United States. Those potential witnesses, said to have been principals of a PR firm, are identified only as D1 and D2 in the court filings.Manafort and his associate, who is also unidentified by name, allegedly hinted the two should indicate that the lobbying, involving a group of pro-Ukraine European politicians nicknamed the “Hapsburg group,” took place in Europe, not the United States.“Person D2 explained that he and Person D1 had been responsible for interfacing with the Hapsburg group, and acted as ‘intermediaries’ between Manafort and Ukraine government officials and the Hapsburg group,” prosecutors wrote.“Person D2 further stated his opinion that Manafort and Person A’s outreach to him and Person D1 was an effort to get them to relay a message to the Hapsburg group: If the members of the Hapsburg group were contacted by anyone, they should say that their lobbying and public relations work was exclusively in Europe—a representation that would be contrary to Person D’s knowledge that the Hapsburg group worked in both Europe and the United States.”Manafort called Person D1 and sent him encrypted WhatsApp messages, while his associate reached out to Person D1 and Person D2 through a mix of encrypted WhatsApp and Telegram messages, according to court documents. Evidence included documents and testimony from the two PR people, as well as phone records and “documents recovered pursuant to a court-authorized search of Manafort’s iCloud account,” according to a declaration from an FBI agent involved in the case.Some of the evidence cited in Monday’s indictment“My friend P is trying to reach [D1] to brief him on what’s going on,” Manafort’s associate allegedly wrote in one Telegram message to Person D2. A minute later, he allegedly followed up by writing, “Basically P wants to give him a quick summary that he says to everybody (which is true) that our friends never lobbied in the U.S., and the purpose of the program was EU.”After another minute, prosecutors say he sent yet another message: “If you have a chance to mention this to [Person D1]. – it would be great. It would be good to get them connected to discuss in person. P is his friend.”Prosecutors were able to obtain the encrypted chats because, as Motherboard notes, Manafort was backing up information from his WhatsApp to Apple’s iCloud, where data is not encrypted and is thus available to police armed with a valid search warrant.Manafort and onetime colleague Richard W. Gates III were the first to be indicted in special counsel Mueller’s probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. They were accused of laundering millions of dollars in income from pro-Russia political parties in Ukraine. Gates has since pleaded guilty to making false statements and conspiring against the United States, with other charges dropped in a plea bargain.In December, Mueller also said Manafort had tried to improperly influence the trial by secretly ghostwriting an op-ed piece by a Ukrainian politician describing Manafort’s work.Manafort, who has pleaded not guilty, is also accused of defrauding a bank in purchasing a luxurious Manhattan condo. According to prosecutors, Manafort claimed it would be a second home for his daughter and son-in-law when it was allegedly instead used “as an income-generating rental property, charging thousands of dollars a week on Airbnb, among other places.”

In a June 2012 memorandum labeled “Eyes Only,” prosecutors said, Mr. Manafort described a plan to “assemble a small group of high-level European highly influential champions and politically credible friends” who did not have any obvious connection to the government of Ukraine.Prosecutors say Mr. Manafort laundered more than $18 million, and spent the money on fine suits, real estate and expensive rugs. The charges are not directly related to Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and Mr. Manafort’s allies have said the case is intended to pressure him to give prosecutors damaging information about the president. Jailing Mr. Manafort while he awaits trial would increase that pressure, but Mr. Trump’s lawyers say Mr. Manafort has nothing incriminating to provide.Mr. Manafort was indicted in October alongside his longtime business associate Rick Gates, in what was the first salvo of the special counsel’s investigation. Mr. Gates has since cut a plea deal and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.In February, prosecutors added new charges, accusing Mr. Manafort of lying to banks to secure millions of dollars in loans. He is awaiting trial in both cases. He also has launched — unsuccessfully so far — a broadside attack to Mr. Mueller’s authority.Mr. Trump has tried to distance himself from Mr. Manafort and repeatedly noted that the charges are not related to Mr. Manafort’s time as campaign chairman. And they do not address the central question of Mr. Mueller’s investigation: whether anyone with the campaign conspired with Russia to try to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Nevertheless, Mr. Trump’s lawyer has floated the idea of a pardon for Mr. Manafort.Mr. Mueller’s team has previously complained about Mr. Manafort’s actions while he awaits trial. Prosecutors said last year that Mr. Manafort and a longtime associate with ties to Russian intelligence helped draft an op-ed article about his lobbying work.

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As a clip from the interview with Scott Pelley was released, Mr. Pelley said on “CBS This Morning” that Mr. McCabe had confirmed a New York Times report that the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, had suggested wearing a wire in meetings with Mr. Trump and that Justice Department officials had discussed recruiting cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office.“There were meetings at the Justice Department in which it was discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the cabinet could be brought together to remove the president of the United States under the 25th Amendment,” Mr. Pelley said. “These were the eight days from Comey’s firing to the point that Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel. And the highest levels of American law enforcement were trying to figure out what to do with the president.”Former law enforcement officials said the comments were made during a pair of meetings on May 16, 2017. Mr. McCabe and his former colleagues kept contemporaneous memos on their interactions with Mr. Trump and Justice Department officials.According to one of those memos written by Mr. McCabe, an excerpt from which was provided to The Times, “We discussed the president’s capacity and the possibility he could be removed from office under the 25th Amendment,” and the deputy attorney general indicated that he looked into the issue and determined he would need a “majority or eight of the 15 cabinet officials.” Mr. McCabe added that Mr. Rosenstein suggested that he might have supporters in the attorney general and the secretary of homeland security.Mr. Rosenstein had disputed the account about the wire and the 25th Amendment. Former officials said that the days after Mr. Comey was fired were chaotic and that Mr. Rosenstein found himself under enormous pressure.A former Justice Department official who was present when Mr. Rosenstein proposed wearing a wire said the deputy attorney general had made the remark sarcastically. The department provided an anonymous comment from the official. But Mr. McCabe said the idea came up repeatedly and was taken seriously, Mr. Pelley said.

In another email, Mr. Gates said he was involved in discussions about nominating Mr. Calk to an economic advisory council. And in a third email just before Christmas 2016, Mr. Manafort included the names of Mr. Calk and his son on a list of people he would like to invite to the inauguration.The case pits two of Mr. Trump’s former senior campaign aides, men who worked together for decades, against each other in a high-stakes battle that could land either or both of them in prison for years.The outcome of the trial, the first to be mounted by prosecutors working for Mr. Mueller, may well hinge on whether or not the jury finds Mr. Gates to be credible. The trial is separate from the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s election interference, though Mr. Mueller’s mandate allows him to pursue any crimes uncovered as part of his inquiry.Mr. Gates and Mr. Manafort worked together for roughly two decades, including on the Trump campaign. Mr. Manafort served as campaign chairman for three months before he was forced out in August 2016. Mr. Gates served as his deputy, then worked as the campaign’s liaison to the Republican National Committee after Mr. Manafort’s departure.Mr. Gates, 46, admitted Monday that he was guilty of a long list of crimes, including stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from Mr. Manafort’s accounts by inflating his business expenses. He said that while he was helping Mr. Manafort hide income to evade taxes, and later to inflate his income to obtain bank loans, he was doing essentially the same on his own behalf.He said he concealed some of his own income in overseas accounts, evading taxes, and lied on applications for a mortgage and for a credit card. In exchange for his cooperation, the government in February agreed to dismiss 22 criminal charges stemming from his involvement in the scheme for which Mr. Manafort is now on trial.Mr. Gates pleaded guilty to lying to federal authorities and conspiracy to commit fraud but has yet to be sentenced. Although sentencing guidelines recommend a prison term of up to six years, he testified that prosecutors have agreed not to object if his defense attorney argues that he should receive probation.

It was a grisly end to a story that has been a stain on India for almost eight years. The hanging on Friday morning of the four men who carried out the 2012 gang-rape and murder of Jyoti Singh – who was christened Nirbhaya by Indian media, meaning “fearless” – marked the end of a drawn out and painful saga that exposed the country’s appalling record on sexual violence against women.Nirbhaya’s parents openly celebrated that “justice” had finally been served, yet the crowds baying for blood outside the Delhi jail where the execution took place, bearing signs calling for “death to rapists” and cheering as news of the hanging was announced, made for uncomfortable watching.There is little evidence that capital punishment is a deterrent for sexual violence and since India introduced capital punishment for rape cases after Singh’s murder, the problem has only continued to escalate. The calls to “hang the rapist” have been an easy way for politicians to be seen to respond to cases of sexual violence, while ignoring the endemic underlying issues that make India the most dangerous country in the world to be a woman, where a woman is raped every 20 minutes.While the case shocked the world and prompted the government into so-called action, in reality little has changed. The degradation of women remains systemic and women in India, in both rural and urban communities, have to spend large proportions of their days planning ahead, just to make sure they can get to their next destination safely. The mechanisms for women to report sexual violence remain woefully inadequate, more than 100,000 rape cases remain in the courts, and state governments are reluctant to even invest in basic safety measures such as street lighting. The fact that the 10bn-rupee (£112m) fund set up by the government after the murder – to give states money to invest in women’s safety initiatives – remains 91% unspent demonstrates that even when there is funding, there is no motivation to tackle the problem.While the Indian newspapers are filled on a daily basis with gruesome stories of rapes and murders of women of all ages, it was the gang-rape of a 27-year-old vet in Hyderabad in November that again captured global headlines and showed how little had changed. The threat of capital punishment did not stop the four men from allegedly sabotaging the woman’s scooter, lying in wait until she approached asking for help, then gang-raping her, suffocating her and burning her body.After the event, yet again, the resounding response was for the men to be immediately hanged. When the culprits were later shot in suspicious circumstances by the police, who claimed they had been attempting to escape, there was nationwide jubilation. Until there is an acceptance across society and government that violence begets violence and that executing several culprits is not the cure for the endemic and enduring plague of sexual violence nationwide, both safety and justice will remain out of reach for the women of India.