In what many have described as the most pivotal vote since the Second World War, millions of Brits today cast their ballots in the country’s general election. Exit polls suggest a large majority for Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party, with an estimated 368 seats, up from 317 in 2017.The result is consistent with pre-election polls, which suggested a majority. For the party, which has spent the last two years limping along as a minority government, it will doubtless come as a cause for celebration. But it is a blow for advocates of tactical voting, who encouraged pro-Remain voters to set aside their party preference and pick the candidate best able to defeat the Tories across the 650 seats representing the entire UK.Support for the Conservative Party has risen steadily since Johnson was elected its leader in July, despite concerns about his character and trustworthiness. In recent months, he has fended off multiple accusations of racism and sexism. He was found to have broken the law by suspending Parliament to reduce its time for debate ahead of the previous Oct. 31 Brexit deadline. More recently, he courted controversy by skipping a televised debate on climate change, and for refusing to appear for an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Neil. Johnson will likely read the results as a decisive mandate for the harder Brexit he has negotiated with the EU. The deal, which resembles Theresa May’s earlier agreement, has been widely derided by the British media and failed to pass in a series of votes ahead of the election, barring one key vote. Now, with an expected Tory majority, Johnson should have an easier path than his predecessor to securing Parliament’s backing by the new Brexit deadline of Jan. 31. For the Labour Party, the result will likely spell the end of the left-wing Jeremy Corbyn’s time as party leader. Down an estimated 71 seats from 2017’s 262, MPs may see today’s disappointment as a call for a change of leadership and an opportunity for the party’s more centrist MPs to gain some ground.The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, failed to meaningfully boost their level of support. In an election where the centrist and pro-EU vote appeared to be theirs for the taking, leader Jo Swinson’s party is projected to capture 13 seats, just one more than in 2017.

Business groups have condemned the escalating violence in recent weeks."It has not only affected Hong Kong's reputation as an international financial center, but also the small and medium size enterprises, and most importantly undermined the safety and livelihood of ordinary Hong Kong people," Hong Kong's General Chamber of Commerce said in astatementearlier this week.The city is home to seven Fortune Global 500 companies, and operates as an Asian base for many multinational corporations and major banks who prize its semi-autonomous legal system and close ties to mainland China.Companies have reported "serious consequences from the disruption," including lost revenue, disrupted supply chains and shelved investments, the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong said last month.Tourists watch as protesters gather in the arrivals hall of Hong Kong international airport on July 26.Some countries havewarned their citizens about traveling to Hong Kong, where the city's international airport hasbecome a focal point for protests,hundreds of flights have been canceledand thousands of aviation workershave gone on strike.Preliminary government data shows that visitor numbers dropped in July, with a sharp decline in arrivals in the second half of the month, a spokesperson for the Hong Kong Tourism Board told CNN Business.Cathay Pacific (CPCAY), Hong Kong's flagship airline, said Wednesday that protests had affected its passenger numbers last month, and were continuing to "adversely impact" future flight bookings.In another headache for Cathay, China's aviation authority issued a directive Friday banning any staff who have supported the protests from working on flights to and from the mainland. From Sunday, the airline will have to submit details of all crew members to China for approval. "We are treating it seriously and are following up accordingly," Cathay Pacific said in a statement.Strikes in Hong Kong force Cathay Pacific to cancel more than 150 flightsConcerns for the broader tourism industry are growing, as travel companies suggest their outlook for August and September "has dropped significantly," according to the tourism board.Intercontinental Hotels (IHG)said this week that revenue per room — an industry metric used to assess hotel occupancy and daily room rates — fell in the first half of the year, in part due to the ongoing political dispute.Marriott (MAR)andDisney (DIS)both expect their businesses to be affected this year."In Hong Kong, we have seen an impact from the protests. Obviously, they are significant," Disney CEO Bob Igersaidin an analyst call Tuesday."While the impact is not reflected in the results that we just announced, you can expect that we will feel it in the quarter that we're currently in, and we'll see how long the protests go on."People walk past a Prada store in Hong Kong. The Italian fashion house says sales have been hurt by the protests.Swire Properties, a real estate developer that owns several major shopping malls, said Thursday that the city's protests have had "some effect" on retail sales. Its shares were down more than 3.5% Friday.July and August mark a "peak season" for summer retail sales, and if protests continue, shop owners expect "business to be greatly affected," said Annie Yau Tse, chairman of the Hong Kong Retail Management Association.Most of the group's member companies indicate that their sales have "dropped by single or double digits" since protests began in June, she said in arecent statement.Global luxury brands are among those being hurt.Prada (PRDSY)said in an earnings call last week that sales had been "negatively impacted by social unrest in Hong Kong," while Switzerland's Richemont, the owner of Cartier, noted that sales in Hong Kong had "retreated" in part due to the rallies.Swatch (SWGAF), another Swiss watchmaker, has pointed to "political turbulence" as the reason behind a decline in salesin Hong Kong.HSBC (HSBC), one of Hong Kong's biggest banks, has had to temporarily close some of its local branches because of the protests.In an earnings call this week, chief financial officer Ewen Stevenson warned that the company could be more affected if the crisis continues."Do we expect some impact in the second half? Yeah, inevitably there will be," he said. "If the current situation continues for a prolonged period of time, it will impact confidence."Barricades at HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong on July 28 as pro-democracy protesters readied for another big march.The protests are beginning to jeopardize the city's image as a global business hub and favored gateway to China, experts have warned.Currently, for example, Hong Kong enjoys a higher credit rating than mainland China, but this rests on the city's "governance standards, rule of law, policy framework, and business and regulatory environments" remaining "distinct from those of mainland China," Fitch Ratings analysts said recently.The possibility that Chinese authorities may look to take a firmer hand in Hong Kong affairs could threaten these unique differences.A military crackdown in Hong Kong would backfire on China's economyThe pain could spread through the local economy. Last week, the governmentreleased preliminary GDP datashowing what it called "subdued" economic performance in the second quarter."I don't think this will be a short-term crisis. It looks like it will be a medium-to-long [term crisis]," said Davide De Rosa, chairman of the European Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong.

Sens. Elizabeth WarrenElizabeth WarrenDimon: Wealth tax 'almost impossible to do' CNN's Don Lemon: 'Blow up the entire system' remark taken out of context Democrats shoot down talk of expanding Supreme Court MORE (D-Mass.) and Cory BookerCory Anthony BookerBipartisan praise pours in after Ginsburg's death DHS opens probe into allegations at Georgia ICE facility Democratic lawmakers call for an investigation into allegations of medical neglect at Georgia ICE facility MORE (D-N.J.) sparred early in Wednesday’s Democratic presidential debate over Warren’s signature wealth tax proposal.Warren has proposed a 2 percent tax on net worth above $50 million and a 6 percent tax on net worth above $1 billion.“Doing a wealth tax is not about punishing anyone,” she said. “It’s about saying, ‘You built something great in this country? Good for you. But you did it using workers all of us helped pay to educate. You did it getting your goods on roads and bridges all of us helped pay for. You did it protected by police and firefighters all of us help pay the salaries for.’”Warren said that regardless of party affiliation, people understand that the government is working better for the wealthy and worse for everyone else.“We come together when we acknowledge that and say we’re going to make real change,” she said.Booker said he doesn’t agree with the wealth tax Warren put forward but supports other measures to increase taxes on the rich, such as raising the estate tax and taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income — options that he called “real strategies that will increase revenue.”He also said Democrats shouldn't just talk about how to make the tax system more fair but "have to talk about how to grow wealth as well."Warren responded by talking about how she’d use the revenue that her wealth tax would raise for universal child care, universal pre-K and other education-related proposals.“Two cent wealth tax and we can invest in an entire generation,” she said.Booker said he agrees with the need for the education priorities Warren plans to use her wealth tax to fund. But he also said that a wealth tax is "cumbersome," that "it’s been tried by other nations; it’s hard to evaluate" and that the U.S. can raise the same amount of revenue through other means.Warren replied by saying that she’s “tired of free-loading billionaires.”

Japan is to cancel a ceremony to mark the anniversary next week of the March 2011 triple disaster on its north-east coast, as part of government-led efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus.The national ceremony was due to be held in Tokyo on 11 March, exactly nine years after a powerful earthquake and tsunami killed more than 18,000 people and triggered a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.The government had considered scaling down the ceremony or asking participants to take precautions against the virus, but is making plans to cancel it, according to public broadcaster NHK.Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, last week recommended the cancellation of large-scale sports and cultural events after the government drew criticism for its handling of the outbreak.Japan recorded its 1,000th Covid-19 infection on Wednesday, in the western prefecture of Yamaguchi. The total includes 706 passengers and crew from the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise liner. Twelve people have died from the virus in Japan, including six linked to the ship.This week the organisers of two of Tokyo’s biggest cherry blossom festivals said they were scaling back the events to discourage large numbers of people from viewing the flowers when they come into bloom in the capital later this month. Two blossom festivals in Tokyo have been cancelled. Photograph: Aflo/REX/ShutterstockWhile people will still be able to view the famous blossoms along the Meguro river during the day, organisers said the area would not be lit at night. Visitors will also be able to arrange private hanami gatherings in Ueno park, but there will be no mobile food trucks or rubbish bins provided.Many of the most popular attractions in Tokyo have announced closures until at least the middle of the month.The long list of leisure and cultural attractions to have temporarily closed their doors include Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea, the Ghibli Museum, Tokyo Skytree and the Kabukiza theatre.A travelling exhibition of 60 paintings – including Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers –from the National Gallery in London has been postponed until at least 17 March after its Japanese host, the National Museum of Western Art, said it would close. The exhibition is due to move to Osaka in early July.The Robot Restaurant in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district – a popular destination for overseas tourists – will not reopen until 9 March, while the Toyosu fish market, known for its dawn tuna auctions, will be off-limits to visitors until the middle of the month.The outbreak has also hit the capital’s culinary scene, with the conveyer-belt sushi chain Hamazushi saying that diners will now have to order dishes via a touch-screen panel rather than selecting plates as they pass in front of them, NHK said.

E-commerce giant Amazon is going all out to get Indians to access the Internet—and its own website.The Seattle-headquartered company has launched ‘Internet’, a data-light mobile web browser for Android phones that promises to be “extra small,” allowing for ample storage space on phones. The app also promises data privacy at a time when concerns over companies collecting consumer usage data are on the rise.India now has the second-largest internet user base in the world, thanks to the availability of cheap smartphones and mobile data services. However, Amazon contends that a low-data consuming browser will allow users to get more internet access for the same cost.“The Amazon Internet app is designed for Android smartphone users in India. It offers a small application size so users have storage for their favorite videos, music, and other apps, and it requests few permissions to maintain the user’s privacy,” an Amazon India spokesperson told Quartz. “Specifically, it is a lightweight, webview-based mobile browser, offering increased bandwidth savings, a small application size and reduced page load times,” Amazon said.Amazon’s browser also provides “news, cricket, and entertainment from top sources right on the home page,” and will support ads, according to the app description on the Google Play Store.The launch of the new service comes just as Amazon is pushing hard to reach more Indians, and is trying to beat Flipkart, particularly in non-metro cities where the home-grown e-tailer has a stronghold. “It is for tier-2 markets where internet speeds are lower. My sense is that increasingly they are seeing a lot of the (customers in) tier-2 and tier-3 are getting into the online retail bandwagon, possibly they are targeting that market,” Yugal Joshi, vice-president of Texas-based consulting and research firm Everest Group, told Quartz.The two e-commerce companies have been jostling for pole position in India’s retail market for nearly five years now, with both pouring billions of dollars to innovate and win market share. In recent weeks, there have been reports that Amazon and Walmart, the biggest retailer in the world by sales, are fighting for a majority stake in Flipkart.However, industry experts are surprised over Amazon’s choice of launching a web browser in a market that already has multiple data-light browsers such as the UCBrowser, which is popular in India. A more obvious move would have been to launch a data-light version of their brand app, similar to what Facebook did with its Facebook Lite or Messenger Lite apps.“But will it be meaningful in metros and cities? I don’t know what the use is for that. I’m really surprised and confused that why would somebody launch a browser because browser is a way to consume any web application. It has to be some kind of Amazon-related app rather than a plain Jane browser,” Joshi said.

Insofar as everything has been totally politicized in Trumpistan, the "real story" is obvious. Even the Department of so-called Justice has been totally politicized. If Trump told Barr "Google is my friend", then you know Barr would know what not to do. However, Trump is stupid enough that he quite probably came out and ordered Barr "Get the google off my back before the election."I'd prefer to focus on possible solution approaches. Existing anti-trust law is clearly broken beyond belief. Corporate cancers are running amok. Too many industries are being dominated by leading companies. Among other targets of blame, the MBAs have long advocated against real competition. The usual guidance is something along the lines of "Don't even enter a market unless you can become #1 or #2." That's NOT how actual capitalism should work.My favored solution approach remains a progressive profits tax linked to market share. The path to higher retained earnings would lead to MORE competition, more choice, more progress, and I even believe it would result in more freedom. Smaller corporations would even help justify smaller government.But I cannot recall detecting any evidence of interest or even comprehension of that idea on Slashdot 2020. So what's your better solution approach?P.S. Is this story the "reason" the Dow dropped 800 points? Scare quoted due to the insanity of the stock markets these days. Reason need not apply.Quoted against the censorious troll moderation.One expansion here, though it's partly triggered by a later comment. Only two choices is linked to my complaint and my sig. The optimum locus of choice is probably around 5 for most people. Fewer than that means the choices are too limited, but when it gets too much higher, then the decision process becomes too difficult and it's too easy for gamesters to game the decision points. (There's also the paradox of increased dissatisfaction linked to too many options

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Without offering proof, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Friday said actor Leonardo DiCaprio had funded nonprofit groups that he claimed are partly responsible for fires in the Amazon this year.Bolsonaro’s remarks about the American actor were part of a wider government campaign against environmental nonprofit groups operating in Brazil.“DiCaprio is a cool guy, isn’t he? Giving money to set the Amazon on fire,” the president said to supporters in Brasilia.DiCaprio’s environmental organization Earth Alliance has pledged $5 million to help protect the Amazon after a surge in fires destroyed large parts of the rainforest in July and August. But the actor and committed environmentalist said in a statement sent to The Associated Press Friday his group had not funded any of the two nonprofits named by investigators so far.ADVERTISEMENT“While worthy of support, we did not fund the organizations targeted,” the statement read. “The future of these irreplaceable ecosystems is at stake and I am proud to stand with the groups protecting them.”Some members of Bolsonaro’s administration argue that civil society groups and environmental laws hinder economic development in the region.Bolsonaro and Environment Minister Ricardo Salles are promoting development in some protected natural areas, even as intentional fires and deforestation in the Amazon have reached levels not seen in a decade.The criticism of DiCaprio and environmental activists follows a police raid at the headquarters of two nonprofit groups in the Amazonian state of Para earlier this week. Local police also arrested four volunteer firefighters and say they are investigating them for allegedly igniting fires to obtain funding from sympathetic donors.The volunteer firefighters denied any wrongdoing and a judge ordered their release.Federal prosecutors say their investigations point to land-grabbers as primary suspects for fires in the area, not nonprofits or firefighters.Cattle ranchers, farmers and illegal loggers have long used fire to clear land in the Amazon.This is not the first time Brazil’s president has suggested, without evidence, that nonprofit groups are setting fires in the Amazon, or questioned warnings about climate change.In August, in the midst of an international outcry over the Amazon fires, Bolsonaro blamed the “information war going on in the world against Brazil” and fired the head of the governmental space research institute that monitors deforestation.Bolsonaro accused the institute’s president, Ricardo Galvão, of manipulating deforestation data to make his administration look bad.But when an annual deforestation report released in November, three months after the incident, confirmed a double-digit percent uptick in deforestation, the government acknowledged that deforestation had increased year-on-year.

At around the same time Facebook was working out its News Feed issues, an upstart messaging app called Snapchat — led by the brash Stanford graduate Evan Spiegel — built a feature called Stories, which let people share photos and videos with friends that disappeared in a day. Snapchat’s users loved how Stories gave them a carefree way to post (in contrast with Facebook, where your posts would go to everyone and stick around forever) and the app’s usage exploded. Spiegel, who once spurned a $3 billion acquisition offer from Zuckerberg, was now hitting him where it hurt. In the zero-sum game of social media, where time spent on one platform is time not spent on another, Spiegel had the energy, the sharing, and was driving his company toward a hot IPO.As Snapchat took off, an 18-year-old developer named Michael Sayman joined Facebook. Sayman had built a game that caught Zuckerberg’s eye, and the company hired him as a full-time engineer in 2015. Sitting through orientation, Sayman heard speeches about how Facebook’s leaders would listen to anyone’s ideas, and took the message to heart. “I believed it,” he told me. Before orientation was over, he spun up a presentation about how teens, already drifting to Snapchat, were using technology, and how Facebook might want to build for them.Still barely old enough to buy a lottery ticket, Sayman started presenting his ideas to Facebook’s executives and soon found himself in front of Zuckerberg. His presentation didn’t initially impress. But Chris Cox, then Facebook’s head of product, convinced Zuckerberg to give him a small team to experiment. “There was no blueprint,” Sayman told me. “I had a few ideas, people thought that they should let me be creative, they gave me the headcount to be creative, and there was no problem.”As time went on, Sayman watched his fellow teens sharing less on Facebook’s family of apps, and more on Snapchat. He turned his focus to Snapchat Stories, which he believed Facebook should build into its products. “I wanted the company to feel like Snapchat was an existential threat,” he said. “I wanted Facebook to panic.”Alex Kantrowitz [Photo: courtesy of David Fitzgerald/Web Summit via Sportsfile]Sayman brought his concerns to Zuckerberg, who had heard from others who came to similar conclusions. As a teenager, Sayman was invaluable. He could help Zuckerberg learn Snapchat’s culture. “He would point us to — Here’s the media that I follow, or here are the people I think are influential, who are cool,” Zuckerberg said. “I’d go follow those people, or talk to them, have them come in. That ends up being the iterative process of learning what matters.”Zuckerberg said he followed these tastemakers on Instagram, but confirmed he’s a Snapchat user too. “I try to use all the stuff,” he told me. “If you want to learn, there are so many lessons out there where people will tell you about things you’re not doing as well as you could. People tell you so much if you just care about understanding what they’re looking for.”This sort of experimentation has led Zuckerberg to some unexpected places. “When we were originally thinking about formally building a dating service for Facebook, I signed up for all the dating services.” he told me. “I was showing Priscilla (his wife) one of the apps. It was an app where you got matched with one person a day. I was like, ‘Here’s this app.’ And she said, ‘Hey, I’m having dinner with her tomorrow night!'” He matched with his wife’s friend. No word on how that dinner went.Sayman confirmed Zuckerberg was a willing Snapchat student. “He’d send snaps with me and I would critique him on his snaps,” Sayman said. “I’d be like ‘No, Mark. That’s not how this works!'”Eventually, the groundswell of support for Stories inside Facebook — generated by Sayman and others — got through to Zuckerberg. And in August 2016, Facebook’s executives called reporters into their offices to reveal a new product they called Instagram Stories. The product was a carbon copy of Snapchat Stories, lifting everything including the name.”They deserve all the credit,” then-Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told TechCrunch, nodding to Spiegel and his team.Always Day One by Alex KantrowitzCopying Stories was ruthless. It slowed Snapchat’s growth considerably, and likely destroyed billions of dollars of value in its parent company, Snap Inc., which is trading below its IPO price as of this writing. Snap, frustrated and weakened, is now speaking with FTC’s antitrust investigators about Facebook’s anti-competitive tactics, relying on a dossier it’s built up called “Project Voldemort,” a reference to the villain in Harry Potter.Evil villain or not, Facebook would’ve been in serious trouble without Stories, which has helped it recapture the friends and family sharing it was losing a few years ago, and restore the vibrancy to its app. Facebook is still losing teen users in the US by about 3% each year, according to eMarketer. But without Stories, and a renewed focus on messaging (another form of intimate sharing), it could’ve been in a much worse position. Copying was a move of self-preservation.Sayman credited Facebook’s ability to stay relevant with an internal awareness of its place in is the world. “Facebook is just an internet app. Especially in 2015 and 2016, it was just an internet app. Any other app could come about and beat it,” he said. “Mark was like, What do people want? Let’s just give it to them. He was a bit more cautious. He was more vigilant. He was definitely not thinking his product was eternal.”In China, where copying and iterating on products has long been the norm, Facebook is known as “the most Chinese company in Silicon Valley,” according to Chinese venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee, who wrote about this in his book, AI Superpowers. I sat down with Lee on one of his periodic visits to the Bay Area, and asked him to share his feelings about Zuckerberg. “Why do we stigmatize copying?” Lee said. “Don’t we learn everything from copying first? Don’t we learn music by copying Mozart and Beethoven? Don’t we learn art by copying whichever style that is taught? Through copying, you understand the essence of what you’re building, then you can innovate and build. It would seem copying is a reasonable way to get started.”From the moment Facebook copied Stories, it’s iterated on it and improved it. And now, its version is widely considered better than Snapchat’s. Some of Facebook’s improvements have been so good that Snapchat has even copied them back.The graveyard of dead social networks is littered with the corpses of companies that were once unstoppable but were ultimately done in by pride or an inability to invent. MySpace, Livejournal, Foursquare, Friendster, and Tumblr are among them. Facebook, meanwhile, has reinvented repeatedly and remains on top, in large part due to its feedback culture.“Obviously, we’d rather be genius and invent first,” Lee told me. “But if you can’t, then copy first and then iterate.”Excerpted from Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever. Copyright © 2019 by Alex Kantrowitz, courtesy of Portfolio/Penguin.

LONDON (AP) — Boris Johnson’s many critics have often dismissed him as a political clown. He’s having the last laugh now.Results Friday confirmed that Johnson’s Conservative Party has won a thumping majority in Britain’s general election. He looks set to take more seats in Parliament than any Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.A majority government gives Johnson the power to fulfill his promise to take Britain out of the European Union next month.It’s a triumph for a 55-year-old politician who has been written off more than once.Johnson has built a career playing the rumpled, Latin-spouting clown who doesn’t take himself too seriously. He once said he had as much chance of becoming prime minister as of being “reincarnated as an olive.” ADVERTISEMENT“He doesn’t seem like an ordinary politician,” said Jonathan Hopkin, a political scientist at the London School of Economics. “He has managed to create this aura around himself of being a personality, an eccentric, somebody who is funny and can kind of appeal to people beyond the usual party divides.”That bumbling exterior masks a steel core of ambition.As a child, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s goal was to become “world king.” At the elite private school Eton he was clever, though not diligent; one teacher complained to Johnson’s parents about his ”disgracefully cavalier attitude.”At Oxford University, Johnson was president of the Oxford Union debating society, and a member of the Bullingdon Club, a posh, raucous drinking-and-dining society notorious for drunken vandalism.As a young journalist for The Daily Telegraph in Brussels, he delighted his editors with exaggerated stories of European Union waste and ridiculous red tape — tales that had an enduring political impact in Britain.Johnson spent the following decades juggling journalism and politics, downplaying his personal ambition while becoming steadily more famous. He was a magazine editor, a backbench lawmaker, a self-satirizing guest on TV comedy quiz shows. In 2008, he was elected mayor of London, serving until 2016.His path wasn’t smooth. Johnson was fired from The Times for fabricating a quote. He was recorded promising to give a friend the address of a journalist that the friend wanted beaten up. He was fired from a senior Conservative post for lying about an extramarital affair. He always bounced back.His words often landed him in trouble. Johnson has called Papua New Guineans cannibals, called the children of single mothers “ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate” and compared Muslim women who wear face-covering veils to “letter boxes.”ADVERTISEMENTConfronted with past language, Johnson has claimed he was joking, or accused journalists of distorting his words and raking up long-ago articles. Critics allege that his quips are not gaffes, but deliberate dog-whistles to bigots — a populist tactic straight out of the Donald Trump playbook.Enemies and allies alike have long wondered what Johnson really believes. Before Britain’s 2016 referendum he wrote two newspaper columns — one in favor of quitting the EU, one for remaining — before throwing himself behind the “leave” campaign. His energy and popular appeal helped the “leave” side win. Critics say the campaign was built on lies, such as the false claim, emblazoned on the side of a bus, that Britain sends 350 million pounds ($460 million) a week to the EU, money that could instead be spent on the U.K.’s health service.After the referendum, Johnson was made foreign secretary by Prime Minister Theresa May, one of the top jobs in government. Two years later he quit in opposition to her Brexit blueprint, then won a Conservative leadership contest in July 2019 when May resigned in defeat after Parliament stymied her plan.To get the top job, Johnson promised Conservatives that he’d rather be “dead in a ditch” than delay Brexit beyond Oct. 31.But his first three months in office were studded with defeats: He suspended Parliament to sideline troublesome lawmakers, but the U.K. Supreme Court ruled the move illegal. Parliament rejected his attempt to push through this Brexit bill and forced him to ask the EU for more time. The “do or die” date of Oct. 31 came and went, and Johnson gambled on an election in hopes of securing a majority and a mandate.It was risky, but it paid off. Despite his reputation as a shambolic politician, the Conservative campaign was disciplined and focused, hammering home the “Get Brexit done” message. Johnson was criticized for avoiding tough interviews as the party tried to steer clear of potential gaffes.The strategy worked. Johnson is now on course to take the U.K. out of the bloc by Jan. 31.Yet “Get Brexit Done” is a misleading slogan. Leaving the EU will only kick-start months of negotiations on future trade relations with the bloc, with the current deadline set for the end of 2020.“Brexit will happen on Jan. 31,” said Tony Travers, professor of government at the London School of Economics. “And then the question is: Can some kind of trade deal be done with the EU by Dec. 31, 2020?”___Follow AP’s full coverage of Brexit and British politics at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit

Over the past few months, Jewish people in New York have endured a spike in anti-Semitic violence.Just weeks after four people were murdered at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, a man with a machete attacked a group of Hasidic men celebrating Hanukkah in Monsey, 35 miles north of New York City. Attacks on Jewish people in New York, specifically Orthodox Jews, have taken place with disturbing frequency over the past two years. In the third quarter of 2019, hate crime incidents aimed at Jewish people made up nearly half of all hate crime complaints compiled by police in New York City. Since December 23, 2019, at least 13 anti-Semitic attacks have taken place in New York, including one on New Year’s Day in which a young Jewish man was attacked in Brooklyn by two women who allegedly yelled anti-Semitic slurs. In a statement, the NYPD’s Public Information office told me, “The NYPD has zero tolerance when it comes to hate crimes in New York City. We have deployed assets and resources in Jewish neighborhoods, specifically around houses of worship. This includes an increase of uniform patrols, auxiliary units, as well as plain clothes patrols. Additionally, officers from the Critical Response Command and Strategic Response Group are patrolling these areas.”As evidenced by the Monsey attack, many of the anti-Semitic attacks aren’t coming from the far right, but from non-white people immersed in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that are just as baseless, virulent, and dangerous as those spread by white nationalists. For example, in Jersey City, the attackers were part of an extremist wing of the Black Hebrew Israelites that believes Jewish people are imposters (as one acolyte put it in 2007, “Negroes are the real Jews”) and worthy of death. One attacker posted about how Jewish people controlled the government and referred to Jewish people as being part of the “synagogue of Satan,” a phrase derived from the Book of Revelation that has become an anti-Semitic calling card. And while violence aimed at Orthodox Jews and people who are visibly Jewish (those who wear kippahs, for example) has been increasing for months, media attention and, more importantly, attention from law enforcement agencies, has been sparse. Some media outlets have even appeared to blame the rise in violence on Orthodox Jewish people themselves, arguing that growing Orthodox communities were causing “predictable sparring.” But anti-Semitic attacks aren’t the fault of the community enduring them. While it’s almost impossible to pinpoint an exact origin for the recent spate of violence, many of the attacks are tied to long-simmering anti-Semitic attitudes based on conspiracy theories and myths that have largely gone unchecked — coupled with political inaction at best and outright anti-Semitism coming from politicians themselves at worst. I’ve argued before that anti-Semitism, unlike many other forms of hate, is heavily reliant on conspiracy theories to replicate itself. Jewish people are believed to be secretly in charge — of the government, of culture, of the world in its entirety — forcing people to do their bidding without their knowledge. As Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan put it in 2018, “The Jews have control over those agencies of government. When you want something in this world, the Jew holds the door.” But some anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have very specific origins, like conspiracy theories tying Jewish people to anti-black racism, slavery, and police brutality. One of the Jersey City shooters, for example, posted online that the police shooting of Alton Sterling in 2016 was part of a “well planned agenda layed [sic] out by the upper echelon of Rosenbergs people” — a reference to Jewish people. Many of these conspiracy theories heard today can be traced to a 1991 book published by the Nation of Islam, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. The book falsely argued that Jewish people were the real force behind the slave trade, and a third volume of the book even stated that Jewish people were secretly responsible for the 1920s rise of the Ku Klux Klan, a famously anti-Semitic hate group. None of that is true, but the messaging proved effective and infectious (perusing Twitter on Thursday, I saw a user making those exact points). As the historian Henry Louis Gates noted in a 1992 New York Times article, the book is “one of the most sophisticated instances of hate literature yet compiled,” aimed at fomenting “ethnic isolationism” to drive Jewish people and black Americans apart. Jewish Americans were at the forefront of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s (and targeted by white supremacists for that reason). But NOI leader Farrakhan targeted Jewish people for their civil rights activism, saying in 1998, “Any time the Jewish philanthropists financed the NAACP, they have a stake in what the NAACP does. So the leaders of that organization have to kowtow to those kinds of powers.”In 1995, the American History Association Council issued a statement that the book’s arguments were part of a historical legacy of anti-Semitism:During the past few years there have been a number of egregious assaults on the historical record in institutions of higher learning and at educational conferences. These assaults implicate Jews as a dominant group in the Atlantic slave trade and the enslavement of Africans in the New World. The claims so misrepresent the historical record, however, that we believe them only to be part of a long anti-Semitic tradition that presents Jews as negative central actors in human history. In such scenarios, Jews are the secret force behind every major social development from capitalism to democracy, every major cataclysm from the Medieval Pandemic of the plague through the French and Russian Revolutions to the collapse of Communism, and now, incredibly, appear for the first time, as the secret force behind slavery. More recently, he blamed Jews for the existence of transgender people, saying in February 2018 that “Jews were responsible for all of this filth and degenerate behavior that Hollywood is putting out: turning men into women, and women into men.” That speech was attended by Tamika Mallory, one of the organizers of the 2017 Women’s March who has also allegedly suggested that Jewish people were collectively responsible for anti-black racism. (She has denied doing so.) Farrakhan has also enjoyed close ties to Democratic politicians despite being an avowed anti-Semite who believes black women become lesbians because they don’t respect black men without jobs. As Steven Lubet wrote in the American Prospect in 2018, “Although he has spouted anti-Semitism, homophobia, and misogyny for decades, Farrakhan is still accepted in some quarters of the American left, welcome in polite company, and rebuked, if at all, only in the mildest terms.”The people facing the brunt of anti-Semitic attacks in New York have been members of the Orthodox community, which is perhaps part of why an ongoing string of anti-Semitic violence has gone largely unnoticed until now. Tablet Magazine’s Armin Rosen told me, “The reason that it took such a long time for this to really become an issue was the fact that all of these attacks were against people from the Haredi Orthodox communities, which are unfairly seen as being outside of the mainstream of city life, in a way outside of the social fabric.” Eli Steinberg, a writer at the Forward who is Orthodox, told me that permissive attitudes toward harassment aimed at the Orthodox community were contributing to violence. “If it’s okay to talk about people this way, and nobody seems to care, and it’s okay to discriminate against them, and nobody seems to care, and when you see people start attacking Jews and the world doesn’t get outraged about it, it creates a general sense that anyone can act with impunity toward us, with no consequences.” In New York State, anti-Orthodox sentiments have been a bipartisan affair as politicians blame Orthodox Jews for overdevelopment and gentrification, and commentators even argue that the increasing size of Hasidic communities will “foster prejudice” and anti-Semitism — in short, blaming anti-Semitism on Jews themselves. Republican leaders have accused Haredi Jews of “plotting a takeover” of counties north of New York City and posing a danger to “our homes, our families, our schools, our communities, our water, our way of life” according to a video posted on Facebook by the Rockland County Republican Party. Rockland is the county that encompasses Monsey. And across the Hudson River, Jersey City Board of Education Trustee Joan Terrell Page reacted to the attacks that claimed the lives of four people (one that authorities believe was ultimately targeting an Orthodox school attached to the market) by writing on Facebook, “Where was all this faith and hope when Black homeowners were threatened, intimidated, and harassed by I WANT TO BUY YOUR HOUSE brutes of the jewish community?” In response to calls for her resignation, John Flora, a Democratic candidate for Congress, argued in support of Page, saying, “To me her remarks were an invitation for the entire city to discuss honestly what led up to such a horrific event.” When I reached out to Flora for comment on what he meant, his campaign sent me the following: “The rise of intolerance in recent weeks has shown us that we can’t expect this type of hatred to go away on its own. It will take the intentional effort of the community at-large, and not only politicians, to identify its root causes. There will never be a convenient time to begin doing the sort of work that grows tolerance, but it needs to be done. The ultimate goal is that one day our differences will make us stronger as a city and nation.” The campaign, however, didn’t explain what events “honestly” provoked a shooting spree aimed at children. Even mainstream reporting about the attacks in Jersey City and Monsey has appeared to blame Orthodox Jewish people themselves for the violence they are enduring. For example, an Associated Press article on anti-Semitic violence in New York posted on Thursday argued that Orthodox communities had “taken advantage of open space and cheaper housing to establish modern-day versions of the European shtetls where their ancestors lived for centuries before the Holocaust,” leading to “flare-ups of rhetoric seen by some as anti-Semitic,” as if anti-Semitic violence with rocks and machetes logically stems from disputes over housing stock.During our conversation, Steinberg said he was fearful of people “dead set” on making the rise in anti-Semitic violence a “black versus Jew conflict,” noting examples of anti-Semitic rhetoric aimed at Orthodox people coming from a wide array of sources, including former New York City mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg. “There may be a stream of ‘black anti-Semitism’,” he said, “but I don’t think anyone really knows enough to say there’s some greater driving force behind that, and this is not a ‘black’ issue. It is an anti-Semitism issue, and that’s just one part of it.” Anti-Semitism is not an inevitable consequence of diverse communities. After all, as Elad Nehorai wrote in Haaretz last week, “These attacks are not occurring with any similar frequency in other areas of the United States: they are largely confined to the New York area. Even where other Jewish communities mix with black communities, such as in Chicago, these horrors have not occurred nearly as often.” The rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes in New York is taking place in a political context in which anti-Semitism is believed by many, particularly on the left, to solely be a problem of the far-right, of white nationalists and white nationalism. But anti-Semitism is a bipartisan cudgel, whether it comes from a Democratic Washington, DC, city council member who posted a video to Facebook arguing that a well-known Jewish family controlled the weather, or from Republican operatives calling Orthodox communities “the most egregious example of women’s oppression.” And conspiracy theories that purport Jewish Americans are somehow responsible for police brutality aimed at black Americans are just as baseless as conspiracy theories alleging George Soros, a Holocaust survivor, was a Nazi. There’s no clear movement or entity behind the rise of anti-Semitic attacks in New York and elsewhere, no single group that can be blamed for random assaults on Jewish children. Rather, there is a stew of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, coupled with political cowardice and outright victim blaming, that is putting visibly Jewish people at risk. Correction: An earlier version of this article mischaracterized John Flora’s relationship with a vigil held in support of Jersey City official Joan Terrell Page.

The Supreme Court is weighing a fast-track appeal from the Trump administration that seeks to close the door to nearly all migrants who seek asylum at the southern border. And once again, the justices are being asked to decide a far-reaching legal question on a rushed basis, without the usual oral arguments or months of deliberation.Since 1980, U.S. law has promised those who flee persecution and violence in their home country a right to at least apply for asylum here. But on July 16, the Trump administration announced a new rule that would declare “ineligible” those who traveled through Mexico and did not seek asylum there.The emergency appeal filed late last month on behalf of Atty. Gen. William Barr asks the justices to set aside lower court orders blocking the rule and allow it to be enforced immediately. A decision could come within a week.If the court’s conservatives agree and grant Barr’s appeal, it would be the latest example of how the Trump administration is making major changes in the execution of laws while bypassing Congress and avoiding months or even years of fighting in lower federal courts.Normally, the high court agrees to review and decide a legal question only after a case has been decided by a federal district judge and a federal appeals court.But increasingly in the Trump era, the justices are deciding major issues by acting on emergency appeals filed after one of the administration’s new rules is blocked in a lower court.In July, for example, Trump won the right to divert billions of dollars that Congress appropriated for the military to begin building the U.S. Mexico border wall he promised during his 2016 campaign. Congress had refused to pay for the wall, so Trump declared he had the emergency authority to transfer money from other departments and agencies.A federal judge in Oakland and the 9th Circuit Court blocked the transfer as illegal. But acting on an emergency appeal from Solicitor Gen. Noel Francisco, the high court voted 5-4 to lift the lower court decisions in a one-paragraph order in Trump vs. Sierra Club. The justices did not hear arguments in the case and did not issue a majority opinion or a dissent.University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck says Francisco has been “unusually aggressive in seeking emergency or extraordinary relief” from the justices, and he has been winning. “I think there’s no question there has been a shift in how at least a majority of the justices approach such applications,” he said.In the past, it was rare for the government’s top lawyers to ask the high court to intervene and rule in a pending case. Under the court’s rules, lawyers filing such appeals have to argue that their clients face a serious or irreparable harm if the high court fails to act. And the justices have often said they are reluctant to decide an important legal question on a rushed basis.Irv Gornstein, director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown’s law school, cited several reasons for the change.“We have a president who is pursuing many more controversial and divisive policies than his predecessors. We have lower courts that are skeptical of both the president and his policies. We have a solicitor general’s office that is optimistic that taking issues to the high court will bear fruit. And we have a Supreme Court that is ready to act at an early stage when it thinks the lower courts have gone off the rails,” he said.The asylum law is now at the center of Trump’s immigration battle. The law says, “Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States, whether or not at a designated port of arrival ... may apply for asylum.”Trump and his administration have chafed at this open-door policy. Officials say it permits tens of thousands of migrants to get a foothold in this country while their asylum claims work their way slowly through the immigration courts. They say only a small percentage will finally win their claims.The Justice Department told the court it had more than 436,000 asylum claims pending.But rather than persuade Congress to change the law, Trump has sought to weaken it through new regulations.On July 16, the administration announced what it called an “interim final rule” that would deem migrants “ineligible” for asylum if they had traveled across Mexico without seeking asylum there.A federal judge in San Francisco and the 9th Circuit blocked the new rule from taking effect, ruling that it conflicted with the promise of the asylum law.But Francisco filed an appeal on Aug. 26 that faulted the lower court judges for “second-guessing” the administration’s policy and urged the high court to allow the new rule to go into effect. It will “screen out asylum seekers who declined to request protection at the first opportunity” in Mexico, and it will “alleviate a crushing burden on the U.S. asylum system,” he said in Barr vs. East Bay Sanctuary Covenant.Francisco pointed to provisions in the asylum law that said immigrants could be sent to a “safe third country” for protection. He also noted the attorney general was authorized to set “other conditions or limitations” on asylum.Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union said the court “should not permit such a tectonic change to the U.S. asylum law.” If put into effect, the new rule “would eliminate virtually all asylum at the southern border,” they said in a response filed Wednesday. “The ban is a blatant end-run around the scheme Congress created” and rests on an “expansive view of executive authority to rewrite the statute.”The court has no deadline or timetable for acting on the appeal. But usually, the justices take some action within a week or two after receiving briefs from both sides.

Hillary Clinton rebuked U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson for suppressing a report on Russia’s influence in the Brexit vote, calling the move “inexplicable and shameful.” In a pair of BBC Radio interviews on Tuesday, the former secretary of state warned that the revelations of potential meddling are a further sign that the free world is in jeopardy. “I’m dumbfounded that this government won’t release the report about Russian influence because every person who votes in this country deserves to see that report before your election happens,” she said, deeming the lack of transparency “outrageous.” “We’ve got to stand up against any force, internal or external, who in any way threatens the foundations of our respective countries,” she said. Johnson has decided to delay the report’s release until after the Dec. 12 general election, but details have already begun to leak, including allegations that Russian oligarchs bankrolled Conservative Party politicians. Clinton, whose 2016 Democratic presidential run fell on the same year of the Brexit referendum, drew parallels between Russian interference in U.S. elections and trouble in the U.K. “There is no doubt ― we know it in our country, we have seen it in Europe, we have seen it here ― that Russia in particular is determined to try to shape the politics of western democracies,” she said. The report, vaguely titled “Russia,” was developed by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee and sent to Johnson in mid-October. The committee said it was up to Johnson to determine how to handle the information, but that it expected “to be in a position to publish the report imminently.” However, the report may not show the same level of widespread interference seen in the U.S., as confirmed by former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe that concluded in March. Earlier this month, BuzzFeed News cited two sources with direct knowledge of its findings who stated that British intelligence found no evidence that Russia shaped the result of the Brexit vote and the 2017 general election. So far, no evidence has been made public either. Download Calling all HuffPost superfans! Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter Join HuffPost Voting Made Easy Register to vote and apply for an absentee ballot today Register now

It’s the day after Adam Schiff made one last speech on the floor of the House of Representatives arguing that Donald Trump must be impeached. The California Democrat was back at work, headed to the secure room underneath the U.S. Capitol where, over the course of the last three months, his House Intelligence Committee conducted its impeachment investigation.The inquiry shaped charges that Trump abused his power by pressuring Ukraine to do him political favors and obstructed Congress’ investigation into the alleged abuse—leading to a vote last Wednesday that sealed Trump’s place in history as the third U.S. president to be impeached. But as Democrats were finalizing the case to have Trump removed from office, Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney and the man at the center of the Ukraine investigation, gave an interview to the New Yorker in which he admitted he wanted the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, “out of the way” because she was going to “make the investigations difficult for everybody.”The interview came a week after Giuliani returned from a trip to Ukraine, of which the president told reporters that Giuliani gathered “a lot of good information” and would present a report of his findings to Congress and the Department of Justice.These developments have weighed on Schiff and fellow House Democrats. As he descended the staircase to his committee’s room—accompanied in that moment not by the usual pack of reporters but only by an aide and a Capitol policeman—this Daily Beast reporter asked the chairman of the Intelligence Committee how his party might navigate this situation. “I am not sure that I have a complete answer for you,” answered Schiff. “Because, given the continuing nature of his violations of his oath, we have to expect that’s not going to stop. I would hope that the accountability of the impeachment might provide a guardrail, but it could also have the effect of emboldening him.”“We’ll continue to do our oversight work,” Schiff continued. “That’s all we can do. And if there’s additional wrongdoing, exposing it—that’s all we can do.”“I would hope that the accountability of the impeachment might provide a guardrail, but it could also have the effect of emboldening him.”— Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)With the Ukraine inquiry complete and the ink dry on their 300-page report on the matter, Democrats find themselves in a complicated position heading into next year. They will retain the oversight power that helped them uncover the scandal in the first place, but they’ll have already exhausted the most powerful available response to what they found—impeachment—and it will almost certainly not result in Trump’s removal. The Republican-controlled Senate is expected acquit Trump on both charges during a trial that will likely take place next year.Asked how they could meet this challenge, several of the dozen House Democrats who spoke to The Daily Beast for this story gave a similar answer to Schiff: Democrats could only continue investigating—and hope it works out.“If the president engages in serious misconduct, we have to make a decision about what is the best way to move forward,” said Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), a member of the Judiciary Committee and the first member of House Democratic leadership to back impeachment. “This is the position we’re in. There’s no good outcome other than to continue to call it out, continue to make sure the American people know about it.”Looking ahead, House Democrats see no shortage of avenues for investigation. They plan, for example, to keep tracking the sprawling and apparently ongoing Ukraine saga, no matter what happens next.“Rudy Giuliani is running around, trading and bartering, probably, national assets in favor of interference in our election,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), an Intelligence Committee member. “That story has to be told. We need to understand, even if it’s only sort of in the rearview mirror, so that it never happens again.”Some lawmakers said that the past year of revelations about the Trump administration was so overwhelming and damaging that Democrats should spend the next year simply surveying the wreckage and figuring out how to rebuild. Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY) said one of his priorities is “immediate oversight of the Justice Department and the State Department… to see how much damage has been done to those departments, how much credibility they've lost, how much our international diplomatic effort has been damaged, whether there’s still any morale in the FBI.”In particular, there’s a lot of appetite among Democrats for stepped-up scrutiny on Attorney General Bill Barr, who has declined to testify in front of House Democrats about Robert Mueller’s investigation, or about his considerable role in the Ukraine effort. Some Democrats believe a key part of any post-impeachment oversight should be to ratchet up the pressure on figures like Barr and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Yarmuth said his hope is this strategy “would alert the American people to the damage that’s being done and then hopefully there’s going to be pressure on them to correct it.”That the 2020 election looms less than a year away creates some challenges for Democrats’ investigations. For one, many of them believe that Trump is still actively trying to use his power to influence his re-election contest. “We’ve got to be very vigilant of continued abuses of office,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), “violations in, particularly, the integrity of the 2020 election.”Democratic lawmakers generally agreed that the goal of their investigations should be to surface relevant information to the public ahead of that election, with the hope that the American people might do what Congress could not: decide that Trump is unfit for office.“I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that sometime between tomorrow and November of 2020 there's going to be yet more outrageous behavior exposed,” said Himes. “This is the story of the Trump presidency. I mean, every week there are new stories of the president’s immoral qualities… In all likelihood, what matters between now and November of 2020 is the popular sentiment.”“I wouldn't rule out the possibility that sometime between tomorrow and November of 2020 there's going to be yet more outrageous behavior exposed. This is the story of the Trump presidency.”— Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT)Some Democrats noted that there is technically no double jeopardy for impeachment—in other words, that power could be used again to bring the same or different charges against Trump. But there is virtually no appetite to go there again, unless there are seismic revelations about the president that could shake the ironclad GOP support for him.“If the president were to do something that in a bipartisan fashion people believe is impeachable then the Constitution doesn’t say you’re limited,” said Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN), who said he hoped that his GOP colleagues would not simply support the president no matter what. “I’d like to think that, collectively, we still have a system that can prevent tragedies or miscalculations that have unspeakable consequences.”Other lawmakers noted they could get a bit of help on this front from the courts, which are weighing several cases that could ultimately produce possibly explosive new information about the president. Decisions from federal judges could come soon, for example, on whether Trump’s former lawyer Don McGahn must testify in front of lawmakers, and on whether lawmakers will get access to additional materials Mueller collected in his investigation. Later in the year, the Supreme Court is poised to issue a hugely significant ruling on whether or not the president’s accounting firm is obligated to release his personal tax and financial records to investigators on Capitol Hill and New York federal prosecutors.“We have an ongoing responsibility,” said Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA), “to continue to follow the investigations that he wholeheartedly, whole-cloth, has blocked. The courts are going to continue to see the obstruction, and the correctness of our cause, and our right to investigate.”But looking at how the Ukraine allegations developed—on a call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky that took place the day after Mueller testified—many Democrats can’t escape the idea another scandal could come from out of nowhere.Schiff, who on Thursday seemed uncertain whether impeachment would ultimately deter or embolden Trump, did venture one prediction. “I don't think he's gonna feel vindicated,” he said. “But I also don't think he's gonna change his ways.”Asked if that put Democrats in a tough position, Schiff—before disappearing into the committee’s compound—answered: “It puts the country in a tough position.”

First it was rejected. Then it was approved. And now the iOS app of HKMap.live, a real-time, volunteer-run, and crowdsourced map of the city’s protests, has been removed by Apple from its app store.In a statement, Apple said the app “has been used in ways that endanger law enforcement and residents in Hong Kong,” as well as to “target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement.”HKMap.live is a dynamic online map that shows the latest developments during protests in Hong Kong, which have been increasingly spontaneous and widespread in recent weeks. Various emoji show the locations and movements of police and protesters, as well as places where tear gas has been deployed or barricades erected. But the map is not just used by protesters: passersby and residents use the map to get a quick overview of the latest developments, so as to avoid tear gas and other trouble spots.Apple had earlier this month rejected the app, which was already available on Google Play, saying it “facilities, enables, and encourages” illegal activity by allowing users to “evade law enforcement.” After reviewing the app further, it then approved it late last week. The app became available for download on Saturday and quickly topped the travel category in the Hong Kong app store. Now, just several days later, it has decided to remove the app after all in the wake of the warning from Chinese state media.In a statement posted its Twitter page, the administrator of HKMap.Live, who is in his 20s and works in the finance industry, said that there is “0 evidence” showing that the app had been used to target and ambush police officers. It emphasized that the app aggregates from public sources like news outlets’ live streams, and also vets entries from users, adding: “The majority of user review in App Store that suggest HKmap IMPROVED public safety, not the opposite.”Critics of the decision pointed out that the app is no different than other community-generated mapping platforms such as Google’s traffic app Waze, which factors in real-time data from users such as warnings of high-crime areas.American companies have come under relentless pressure from the Chinese government in recent days for their support of the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, which China has painted as a dangerous separatist movement.After the NBA’s Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey expressed his support for the city’s protests in a now-deleted tweet last Friday (Oct. 4), Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, social media giant Tencent—the league’s largest overseas partner—and other Chinese partners said they would end cooperation with the Rockets, while the Chinese consulate in Houston warned the team to “immediately correct any mistakes.” Also this week, the US gaming company Blizzard Entertainment gave a one-year suspension to a professional player from Hong Kong for having violated competition rules by shouting “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times!‘ in a post-game interview on Sunday (Oct. 6).This story was updated with a statement from HKMap.Live.

Two Brits and one curious American talk Brexit in a group chat.Simon Montlake (Brexit reporter, Brit): Hello from cloudy London where I’ve just had a long lunch. Peter Ford (senior global correspondent, Brit): Lovely day in Paris. Is the U.K. already suffering from Brexit?Rebecca Asoulin (engagement editor, American): Ah – well I am secretly obsessed with British food (and overdone meat apparently) – so I am envious of the lunch! Shall we pivot to the meat of the issue? Oct. 31 is inching closer and Britain is still set to leave the European Union on that date – deal or no deal. Half a year ago now (which is, what, like 10 in Brexit years?) we chatted and you two made some predictions about where we’d be by now. Did you get it right?Peter: I’ll fess up first. I said I thought there would be an election and there hasn’t been one, so I was wrong. But it is uncanny how similar the situation today is to the situation when we last talked seven months ago. Then we were 10 days away from a deadline that got pushed back. Same today. Then I set out the four possible futures: Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Fierce women’s advocate, and icon in her own right1) Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal passes 2) A second referendum in which the people vote on Brexit again3) A national election for Members of Parliament4) A no-deal BrexitSubstitute ‘Boris Johnson’s deal’ for ‘Ms. May’s deal’ and those are the same four options we are still looking at seven months on... Simon: There’s one more option: a Brexit reversal. Give it up as a bad idea. The Liberal Democrat party has adopted this as their platform for the next election. However, the Liberal Democrat party won’t have a majority. Plus it would be incredibly controversial to backtrack on the 2016 referendum result. Rebecca: So it’s not quite groundhog day for this chat – because of the main difference to the options Peter laid out. It’s not Ms. May’s deal anymore that’s an option, right?Simon: No, step forward Boris Johnson, prime minister!Rebecca: Tell me more about him and how he changed the Brexit equation. Is he really the U.K.’s Donald Trump? Simon: Let me go first... Boris Johnson has been auditioning for the job for many years. He’s finally made it, having helped defeat Theresa May’s attempt to deliver Brexit. The Trump comparison holds true for his political persona and his malleability, but there are big differences too. Boris plays up the goofball image when it suits him. But I have to give him credit for pivoting to a serious negotiation with the EU that has produced a compromise deal. Some believed he was just posturing and wanted the U.K. to crash out of the EU without a deal. Instead we are within striking distance of a Brexit deal, at least the first stage. Peter: Boris can carry all the Brexiters, including those who were skeptical about Ms. May’s deal, because he has been the Brexit standard bearer since the referendum campaign began. If he says it’s a good Brexit deal, hardly anybody on the Brexit side will dare argue with him.Rebecca: And that new deal he struck was supposed to be voted on Saturday. Simon – you were reporting for the Monitor in the House of Commons over the weekend. What happened?Simon: Super Saturday! Was more of a souffle Saturday, if we extend the culinary metaphors. It rose up and fell back to Earth.Peter: Sounds like my efforts in the kitchen...Simon: It was quite a day. There was a huge march to Parliament Square by supporters of a second referendum, essentially a pro-EU crowd. Inside Parliament, the MPs crowded in for a debate and a vote, which was highly unusual. The last time Parliament sat on a weekend was 1982 and Britain was on the verge of war with Argentina over the Falklands Islands. This time it was Boris seeking approval for his freshly minted U.K.-EU withdrawal agreement. And he didn’t quite get what he wanted. What happened was parliamentary chicanery of the highest order: an amendment to the motion. And it passed by a slim majority, which basically meant the postponement of MPs having to vote up/down on the withdrawal agreement.Rebecca: Wait, so they didn’t vote on the deal itself, they voted on an amendment to the motion on the deal?Simon: Yes, they amended the motion, all in the name of preventing any chance of a no-deal Brexit on Oct. 31, which is still the official deadline for the U.K. to leave. What the amended motion did was insist that Parliament passes all the necessary laws to effect an orderly Brexit. And that’s where we are this week. The big question is whether Parliament can legislate before Oct. 31, or if another hurdle will arise to prevent Johnson’s deal going ahead.Peter: There are a number of spanners [i.e. wrenches] that could be put in the works of Parliament this week. One option as the government tries to get approval for its deal is that somebody might amend the motion to tack on a condition: OK, we approve this deal, but only if it is also approved by a confirmatory referendum.Rebecca: In other words, only if people vote again to leave the EU with this deal. Peter: Right. Very controversial, as Simon said earlier. And although the country seems split down the middle on Brexit, with an apparent slight tilt towards ‘Remain,’ it is hard to see Parliament voting for that. But someone else could also introduce amendments that would make Brexit much ‘softer’ than the hard break with the EU that Mr. Johnson wants, and maintain close economic ties. That idea might attract majority support, but the prime minister would not stand for that. So that’s another possible route to a new election. (I will be right on this in the end...)Simon: The key to Brexit predictions: Eventually, you could be right. An election is coming!Rebecca: I think I’ll keep being right for a while. The only thing I kept predicting was Brexit would drag on with extension after extension!Simon: It’s time to talk extensions – and extension letters. Peter: Or non-letters. Since Parliament withheld its approval of Johnson’s deal on Saturday, the prime minister was obliged (by a law passed earlier designed to forestall no-deal) to ask the EU for another extension till Jan. 31, 2020. Johnson had said he would ‘rather be dead in a ditch’ than do that, but the law is the law. So he did ask for an extension, but only by sending Brussels a photocopy of the legislation spelling out what he had to ask for, and not signing it.Then he sent another letter – signed, sealed, and delivered – telling the EU to ignore what he had just sent them and not to give the U.K. any extra time. Diplomatic legerdemain (i.e. sleight of hand, Peter’s been in Paris too long!) or a silly schoolboy prank? Observers are divided....Simon: Of course, the EU must decide on the extension request. But I don’t see them rejecting it if the result is a no-deal Brexit that causes chaos and disruption on all sides, which means that we could be looking at a January 2020 Brexit deadline.Peter: You are absolutely right, Simon. The EU’s top priority is to avoid a disorderly Brexit. But at the same time EU leaders are fed up to the back teeth with what is going on in Britain, and increasingly worried about what another few months of uncertainty would do to business confidence across the continent. If they don’t give an extension, the thinking goes, the pressure on Parliament to approve the deal on the table will be intense because the alternative would be no deal. But these are high stakes to play for.Rebecca: What comes next if the deal does pass?Peter: Aha! You thought you could sit back and relax, didn’t you? No such luck. If the deal passes, we all move on to a year – or possibly three years – of negotiations between London and Brussels about the exact nature of the U.K.’s new relationship with the EU, on trade and all sorts of other things. These talks will keep you on the edge of your seat, guaranteed...Simon: I think Johnson will go for an election. He will campaign as the Man Who Delivered Brexit – but, the problem is that elections are unpredictable and the electorate has grown very fickle. It’s not a two-party system any longer, if it ever was, and we don’t know how much Brexit will be yesterday’s news, so what will be the pitch to voters?Rebecca: Do you think the British people will ever feel like Brexit is yesterday’s news? How do you think they will react to a deal passing? Simon: I think people are desperate to move on and talk about something else. If Johnson’s deal does pass I think it will be due to fatigue on all sides. Fatigue and momentum go together, in a curiously British way. One sign I saw at Saturday’s rally: “Down With This Sort Of Thing.”Peter: That’s right. Brexit has been such a terribly divisive question and has sucked all the oxygen out of British political life for so long, I think that a deal – any deal – would probably be greeted with a huge sigh of relief on all sides. But in fact economists are unusually unanimous in predicting that Brexit of any flavor will be bad for the British economy and make the country’s citizens poorer than they would have been inside the EU. That has got lost in the wash. Simon: We made it this far without mentioning Northern Ireland or the cast-off backstop. Back to the backstop? No forward to the front stop.Rebecca: What’s the short version of how Boris’ deal deals with Northern Ireland?Peter: Northern Ireland will be both in the EU and out of it. In law (de jure) it will be part of the U.K. In fact (de facto) it will be in the EU customs union and single market for most goods. And subject to the European Court of Justice. When the EU proposed such an idea two years ago Mr. Johnson called it a constitutional outrage. But it was his only way out so he took it.Simon: The idea is to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Which this deal does, by treating Northern Ireland differently. The irony is that Northern Ireland gets a special status that allows it access to EU markets for goods. Which the rest of the U.K. won’t have, not under Johnson’s vision of future trade. But the Unionists in Northern Ireland are set against any special status that pushes them closer to Ireland, and over time weakens their ties to the rest of the U.K., aka Great Britain. Alas, no way to keep everyone happy. That is Brexit.Ah and speaking of no one being happy, the House of Commons speaker just blocked Parliament from voting on Johnson’s deal today. (at 3:30 p.m. GMT Oct. 21) – as expected. Rebecca: I’m watching his statement right now as we chat. Do members of Parliament laugh and make so much noise all the time during sessions?Peter: Yes. It’s a bear pit.Simon: As a reporter who sits in the press gallery, looking down on the bear pit, I can assure you that it’s the best theater seat in town.Rebecca: So the short version of what just happened is Parliament won’t vote on the deal again today because they already voted on it Saturday. And there is a rule (dating back to the early 1600s, apparently!) that Parliament won’t debate the same issue twice in the same session. Simon: It often feels like Britain has been debating Brexit since 1600. Rebecca: It does feel like Brexit moves both too slow and too fast at once. Peter: And goes round in circles sometimes.Rebecca: Well we will see if Halloween proves to be the end of the beginning or just more of the beginning of this process. Simon: One more sign from Saturday’s rally that made me laugh: ‘Make Halloween Unbrexity Again.’ I predict the U.K. will not leave on Oct. 31. But I will stick my neck out and say that Brexit will happen before Christmas, followed by a spring election.Peter: I will leave Simon’s neck on the block. And my Halloween resolution is to make no more Brexit predictions. Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. Rebecca: Fair! Thank you both for chatting!This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Jacob Turcotte and Peter Ford/Staff; Photos: Associated Press

A headline-grabbing former mayor — with a love of social media — who says he’s the only vegan in Senate history. “Thank you for a vegan mecca.” Senator Cory Booker is throwing his hat in the ring for president of the United States. “I’m in this race to try to build our nation up.” So, who is he? “Tight end Cory Booker. Nice move.” Booker is a former college football player and Yale Law School graduate. “Mayor Booker, for those who don’t know what’s —” He became a national figure as mayor of Newark, by bringing in money and attention to the city. “A $100 million challenge grant.” And in 2013, he was elected to the Senate. “Thank you, New Jersey!” Booker is known for coming to his constituents’ rescue — literally. “The building next door was on fire.” “Yes, yes.” “And your first instinct was to go in?” “Yeah.” “He ran into the burning building and up the stairs.” Also his upbeat attitude. “Lead with love.” And his public speaking. “This is about the closest I’ll probably ever have in my life to an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment.” Some of Booker’s priorities? So far criminal justice reform, and he’s also likely to focus on racial and gender equality — and marijuana legalization. He’s been in the Senate for a while, but he doesn’t have many signature legislative accomplishments. Booker also has ties to Wall Street, something that might be an issue for the party’s more progressive wing. So how has he taken on President Trump? Booker has been one of Trump’s most aggressive critics in the Senate. “And it is a failure.” For Booker, the Trump presidency poses a “moral moment in our nation.” But this approach may fall flat with Democrats, who are energized by their anger toward Trump. For his part, President Trump has said this: “I mean, take a look at Cory Booker. He ran Newark, New Jersey into the ground. He was a horrible mayor.” So what are his chances? So far he’s polling in the middle of the assumed pack. But it’s pretty early. Booker has been building a national profile for a while. He’s already traveled to many states that could be key to winning the White House.

The transcripts of interviews with former U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and former Pompeo aide Michael McKinley were the first of what is expected to be more than a dozen transcripts released in the coming days ahead of public impeachment hearings as early as next week.At issue is whether Trump used his power as a sitting president for personal gain by trying to convince a foreign government to investigate a U.S. citizen -- in this case former vice president and potential 2020 presidential rival Joe Biden.READ THE DOCUMENTS BELOW:McKinley said the idea of a president using the America's diplomatic staff to dig up dirt on a political opponent was a first for him and in part why he decided to resign."If I can underscore, in 37 years in the Foreign Service and different parts of the globe and working on many controversial issues, working 10 years back in Washington, I had never seen that," McKinley told lawmakers, according to the transcript.According to Yovanovitch, she said a Ukrainian politician had already told her to "watch my back."Then in April, Yovanovitch received a call from the director general of the Foreign Service, Carol Perez, and told to board the next plane home."I was like, 'What? What happened?' And she said, 'I don't know, but this is about your security. You need to come home immediately. You need to come home on the next plane,'" Yovanovitch told lawmakers about her conversation with Perez.In his July 25 phone call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump called Yovanovitch "bad news" and urged the leader to work with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani instead."Well, she's going to go through some things," Trump told Zelenskiy on the phone call, according to a memo of the call released by the White House.Yovanovitch testified that she was "shocked" upon hearing details of the president's transcript of the call and didn't know what Trump meant."Did you feel threatened?" an investigator asked Yovanovitch about Trump's remark that she was going to "go through things.""Yes," she replied.Yovanovitch also testified that she was told by her superiors at the State Department that Trump had wanted her out in summer of 2018 and that Pompeo "had tried to protect me but was no longer able to do that."In one conversation with Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan, Yovanovitch recalled asking what she had done wrong. According to her account, Sullivan said to her "you've done nothing wrong.""The reason they pulled me back is that they were worried that if I wasn't, you know, physically out of Ukraine that there would be, you know, some sort of public … tweet or something else from the White House," she said. "And so this was to make sure that I would be treated with as much respect as possible."In his testimony, McKinley told lawmakers that he had three separate conversations with Pompeo about the need to defend Yovanovitch, but did not receive a response.In an Oct. 20 interview with ABC's "This Week," Pompeo denied hearing McKinley express any concerns. Pompeo said, "I never heard him say a single thing about his concerns with respect to the decision that was made."McKinley said he resigned in part because he was concerned about "the lack of public support for department employees."He also said he was disturbed by a push to use U.S. diplomatic missions "to procure negative political information for domestic purposes," as well as a "failure" at the State Department to support the American diplomatic corps."I think the combination was a pretty good reason to decide (that) I had no longer a useful role to play," McKinley said.

All major indexes were higher, led by the small-cap Russell 2000 Index for a second day.The S&P 500 Index gained, as transportation companies, telephone stocks and technology hardware makers pushed the benchmark higher.Financials were only major industry group to decline. Boeing Co. helped lift large-caps with a strong fourth-quarter delivery report. PG&E Corp. was the biggest decliner, dropping 10 % amid reports that the California utility giant is considering bankruptcy.

How about two world wars under capitalism. TWO WORLD WARS in fact a whole century of war under capitalism and oh look this century, WAR again, driven by capitalism, another century of war. In fact the USA is has a whole war industrial complex driven by capitalism. Climate change the big driver capitalism. Oh yeah capitalism has a fantastic track record, 100 million killed last century what will they do for this century a billion. Claiming capitalism has a great track is to ignore WARs for profits completely and utterly.Wars have been fought for all of recorded history, and since before. Animals other than humans also fight wars. Are you going to blame ant colony conflicts on capitalism as well ?The only ism more homicidally murderous than capitalism was monarchism. Not as high numbers but certainly more tortuously vicious, although the USA tried to catch up providing torture under capitalism, for profit, employing many people including psychopathic medical practitioners to provide the torture and to try to ensure victims survived so they could torture them hundreds of times.Capitalism is democracy. You vote for products and services with your dollars. If you don't want a product or service to exist, stop voting for it with your dollars. If enough other people feel like you, then the company will go out of business. As long as people keep voting for products and services with their dollars, then those products and services remain available on the market. You couldn't design a better system than that if you tried.Capitalism is democracy. Democracy is capitalism.Democide ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ), or death by government, is the #1 cause of death for all of history, and if you think you prefer socialism, or communism over freedom and capitalism, then you are advocating for more government, which will bring with it more death.Oh yeah, capitalism has a fantastic track record, don't forget organised crime and lobbyists buying elections, truly creatures of capitalism.Organized crime creates revenue streams from freedoms which the government has limited. Organized crime steps in to supply the demand for products and services that the government has made illegal. This is not unique to capitalism, as organized crime exists in communist economies as well, and likely to an even larger degree, as crime and corruption are the primary means a person escapes poverty under communist systems.As for lobbyists being able to gain access and favors from government officials, thats the result of corrupt or inept government officials, not capitalism. Government has a monopoly on certain goods and services, and it is because of that centrally planned and controlled monopoly that lobbyists are able to take advantage of a single point of failure and buy influence. If those same services were available on the free market, capitalism would insure competition and value and no single point of failure.I think you just hate yourself and freedom, so you blame capitalism.

Thousands of Virginia residents have shown up at meetings across the state to try to block Democrats from enacting new gun laws, with some gun rights supporters openly discussing violent resistance and civil war.The backlash to gun control in Virginia is being fueled by conspiracy theories and misinformation, and some observers worry that the escalating rhetoric may spark violence.When Democrats won control of Virginia’s state government for the first time in 26 years in November 2019, they pledged to pass a series of standard gun control laws, including universal background checks and bans on military-style “assault weapons” and high-capacity ammunition magazines. The agenda was no surprise: state Democrats had run for office on a platform of gun violence prevention, backed by funding from national gun control groups.But the pledge sparked a grassroots pro-gun movement whose size and intensity has surprised even longtime activists. In dozens of towns and counties, pro-gun Virginians have flooded local government meetings to oppose the new bills and to demand that their lawmakers pass “second amendment sanctuary” resolutions, which promise that local governments will not enforce state gun laws they see as unconstitutional.Some of these activists have warned of violence if Democrats push forward with gun control. Multiple Democratic lawmakers have reportedly received threats, including death threats. At heated public meetings across the state and in long social media comment threads, some gun rights supporters are openly discussing the possibility of civil war. Many have warned of the need to fight back against “tyranny” or have compared Democratic lawmakers to the British forces during the revolutionary war. “I really do think we may be on the brink of another war,” one speaker told a crowd of at least 800 people in Pulaski county, the Roanoke Times reported.The swift expansion of local pro-gun organizing in Virginia has also attracted the attention of national anti-government militias and white supremacist groups, who have “glommed on to” the grassroots movement, hoping to use it as a potential flashpoint that could lead to civil war and social breakdown, according to an analyst at the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors extremist groups.Some observers worry these tensions may come to a head on 20 January, when a lobby day against gun control at Virginia’s state capitol is expected to attract thousands of people, including members of anti-government groups from other states. Local residents are concerned the day could turn violent, like the 2017 Unite the Right rally in nearby Charlottesville, Virginia.So far, Ralph Northam, the state’s Democratic governor, has said that plans to pass new gun violence prevention laws will move forward despite the public backlash.“Everyone needs to work to turn the rhetoric down – at the end of the day, this is about keeping people safe,” Alena Yarmosky, a spokeswoman for the governor, said.The forcefulness of Virginia’s second-amendment movement has taken even longtime organizers by surprise. Government meetings across the state that typically attract a few dozen people have seen overflowing crowds of hundreds or even thousands showing up to protest against new gun laws.The main driver of the sanctuary movement has been the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a local pro-gun group that’s politically to the right of the National Rifle Association (NRA). But the group’s longtime president, Philip Van Cleave, said that sanctuary resolutions have been spreading across the state even faster than his group’s attempts to organize them.Van Cleave sounded almost breathless in a mid-December interview as he described being overwhelmed with emails, phone calls and membership requests. He said he expected VCDL’s membership to double over the course of that month, from 8,000 to 16,000 members.“I’m telling you, people that have never committed a crime, that are law-abiding, and pay their taxes, do everything right, don’t even have a speeding ticket, are saying, ‘I’m not giving up my guns,’” Van Cleave said.The NRA and other national gun groups are not driving the sanctuary movement in Virginia, Van Cleave said. Though the NRA put out a statement supporting sanctuary resolutions, it has also made some effort to separate itself from the Virginia movement, organizing a separate lobbying day for NRA members on 13 January.Not one of the Virginia Democrats’ proposed gun laws has been found to be unconstitutional by the US supreme court, and most of them have been repeatedly upheld by federal courts as consistent with the second amendment, according to Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California Los Angeles who specializes in gun policy.Still, at least 125 counties, cities and towns across Virginia have passed some version of a second amendment sanctuary resolution since November, according to the Virginia Citizens Defense League. Just this week, the city council in Virginia Beach, the site of a major mass shooting last May, became one of the latest local governments to pass a resolution pledging to support citizens’ gun rights.“I’ve never seen anything like this in the second amendment movement,” echoed Cam Edwards, a Virginia resident and former NRA TV host, and the editor of Bearing Arms, a pro-gun website. The closest political analogy would be the Tea Party, he said, “but this movement is centered around a single issue”.In themselves, sanctuary resolutions are largely symbolic. Virginia’s top prosecutor clarified in December that they “have no legal effect” and that local governments and local law enforcement officials “cannot nullify state laws”. But the resolutions have prompted pledges from some in law enforcement that they will refuse to enforce state gun laws they see as unconstitutional.One sheriff in Culpepper county said that if Democrats passed restrictive new gun laws, he was willing to swear in thousands of local residents as sheriffs’ deputies in order to protect their gun rights. Local lawmakers in Tazewell county passed a resolution about the county’s right to train and form a citizen militia.In Roanoke, when city council members refused to approve a sanctuary resolution, some in the audience shouted that the council was “treasonous”, WDBJ7 news reported.Some Democrats’ responses to the attempt to nullify gun control laws have only made tensions worse.In early December, a Democratic congressman from Virginia, Donald McEachin, publicly speculated that the governor might have to call in the national guard to enforce the new laws if local law enforcement officials would not. A spokeswoman for the governor said there was, in fact, no plan to call in the national guard. But the lawmaker’s suggestion, widely reported in media outlets, gave additional fuel to conspiracy theories about gun confiscation and prompted a defensive public statement from the national guard.Meanwhile, outright lies and misinformation are helping to fuel gun owners’ concerns, including conspiracy theories that the state’s Democratic governor is going to shut off electricity to facilitate a gun grab, or that the United Nations is coming to take Virginians’ guns.In response to both real policy proposals and conspiracy theories, some supporters of the sanctuary movement in Virginia are talking about the “boogaloo” – an ironic term for civil war that has spread through different online conversations, usually referring to the civil war that will break out if a government tries to take away citizens’ guns. The “boogaloo” meme originated as a joke about ridiculous movie sequels.Gun rights commentators on YouTube are asking “Does the Boogaloo begin in Virginia?” and warning: “Folks, this is now or never” and “Tyranny is not something in the past”.Such violent anti-government rhetoric is a traditional part of the gun debate in the United States. American gun owners have long vowed to respond with force to any government efforts to confiscate their firearms, arguing civilian gun ownership is protected in the Bill of Rights as a defense against government tyranny. They’ve embraced slogans like “come and take it” and “from my cold dead hands”.But the conversation in Virginia has observers worrying that some people may be moving closer to actual violence.“The rhetoric seems more revolutionary than ever,” Winkler, the UCLA law professor, said. Also new, he said: the possibility of “a lot of people coming in from out of state” to join protests against local Virginia gun laws.Talk of civil war is not only circulating online, or among anti-government groups coming into Virginia from elsewhere. Van Cleave said he had heard concerns about civil war in phone calls, emails, and in-person conversations at events across the state.“This is not people who are saying, ‘Yeah, I’m going to go fight.’ These are people who are concerned that this is where we’re headed. They’re seeing something, and they know if the government pushes the wrong buttons, it’s going to happen,’” Van Cleave said. “They’re very much aware that this is a powder keg.”Democrats in Virginia are “kneeling in water and they’re about to grab the third rail on a train track, and I just don’t know if they realize it”, Van Cleave said. “This is different. I’ve never seen this much intensity with so many people. If they pass gun control, I don’t know where it’s going, but I’m just praying they don’t do it. Leave it alone. Walk away.”Virginia’s gun rights battle is already being covered widely in conservative media outlets. Donald Trump and the rightwing Arizona congressman Paul Gosar shared articles about it on Twitter. The Fox News host Tucker Carlson talked to a guest on his show about fears that local law enforcement in Virginia would be sent in to confiscate citizens’ guns. Carlson blamed the left for “trying to pick a fight, like a real fight, with rural Virginia”.When gun rights supporters packed a local government meeting in Albemarle county, where Charlottesville is located, Matthew Christensen, a local activist, said he was shocked at the size of the turnout. The gun rights supporters were overwhelmingly white, he said, and the atmosphere was tense.Christensen, an anti-racist activist who supports gun control, said he saw the sanctuary movement as rooted in white resentment.“As white people, taking away privilege can feel like an attack, when it’s just a leveling of the playing field. And I think that’s where a lot of people are right now: they’re feeling attacked, and this is a way they can lash out,” Christensen said. “It almost seems like people are looking for a reason to pull a Bundy and attack the government.”White supremacist and anti-government groups are gravitating towards the standoff over gun rights in Virginia because they see it as a opportunity for radicalization and recruitment, said Daryl Johnson, a former lead analyst for domestic terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security.The Oath Keepers, an organization of current and former law enforcement and military officials described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as one of the country’s largest anti-government groups, announced that some of its members were already on their way to the state, with the intention of “helping Sheriffs raise and train an official armed posse in each county, under command of the Sheriff”. The Oath Keepers also called for members nationwide to head to Virginia to provide “boots on the ground” for the 20 January lobby day.White supremacist “accelerationists” have seized on the standoff as the potential beginning of a civil war that will destroy the United States and allow them to build a white nation in its ruins, according to Alex Friedfeld, a researcher at the Anti-Defamation League.“The story they’re telling is that the Jews and immigrants are responsible for turning Virginia blue, and they’re coming to take your guns,” Friedfeld said. (Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire philanthropist and presidential candidate, is Jewish, and the gun violence prevention advocacy group he founded touted an investment of $2.5m in Virginia’s 2019 elections to back local lawmakers who support gun control.)To white supremacists, Virginia looks like a perfect example of their ideology: “You’ve got white replacement. You’ve got what they’re calling Jewish gun grabbers, and the people rising up, saying the government is illegitimate.”Since mid-December, Friedfeld said, he has been monitoring the spread of conversations about Virginia and “boogaloo” among extremist groups online. He said he saw a clear distinction between extremist groups and Virginia’s “legitimate, law-abiding citizens who are are exercising their right to protest for what they believe in”.But the “boogaloo” rhetoric has been growing, and not only on militia pages. “Some of it does appear to be spilling over on to other second amendment pages, predominantly in the comment sections,” he said.Friedfeld cautioned that terms like “boogaloo” were designed to be catchy, and that they could take on different meanings in different conversations.The convergence of armed gun rights supporters and out of state anti-government groups on Virginia’s capitol on 20 January, Martin Luther King Day, has some activists raising concerns about whether the lobby day could become another Charlottesville, where a day of volatile street-fighting ended with a white supremacist plowing a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.Van Cleave said his group was relying on law enforcement to monitor extremist activity and to keep lobby day nonviolent. He said his group had no control over whether violent people of any ideology showed up to protest.“It’s a free country,” he said. “We can’t order them not to come.”Friedfeld, the ADL researcher, said he was reassured by what he saw as sincere efforts by the Virginia Citizens Defense League to keep lobby day peaceful, including requests that supporters not openly carry military-style rifles or other long guns.A spokesman for the Virginia capitol police declined to answer specific questions about preparations for lobby day, sending only a generic statement about the agency’s “long history of working successfully with our law enforcement and public safety partners” to “provide a safe environment at Capitol Square for people to express their views”.Many gun rights activists have been working to de-escalate the rhetoric in Virginia, even as they continue to fight against the passage of new gun laws. For weeks, in online conversations on pro-gun social media pages and forums, some gun rights supporters have been pushing back against “boogaloo” talk or comments about attacking law enforcement officers sent to confiscate guns. Other second amendment activists have publicly confronted conspiracy theories and misinformation. In December, Edwards, the former NRA TV host, devoted a post on his pro-gun site, Bearing Arms, to debunking false claims about Virginia.Other choices are less likely to de-escalate tensions. In early January, the NRA paid for multiple billboards around Richmond that warned: “The Northam/Bloomberg Gun Confiscation Plan Starts Jan. 8”.Winkler, the gun law expert, said he believed responsibility would ultimately come back to the NRA if the tensions in Virginia did spark any violence.For decades, the NRA has been pushing “overheated rhetoric about the second amendment protecting your right to rise up against the government”, he said. “This is the natural result.” Topics Virginia US gun control features