As he does on most days, Kenzo, a twentysomething Dunkin’ Donuts manager, recently injected a $10 stamp bag of fentanyl, the opioid that can be 50 times stronger than heroin. Kenzo—the internet pseudonym of someone who spoke under the condition of anonymity for fear of professional consequences—prefers plain-old heroin, but can’t get it anymore in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia where he buys drugs. Dealers only offer fentanyl-based mixes, he told The Daily Beast.On this occasion, he instantly blacked out and fell into a “stress dream” in which his store was full of people and he didn’t have any doughnuts, he recalled. He woke up on the floor of his apartment to the sight of his girlfriend holding an empty canister of Narcan, the overdose reversal drug. His limbs were twisted, his lips a greyish blue.“I had to figure out that she had Narcanned me,” Kenzo explained in an interview. A 10-year opioid user, he had been revived by naloxone (the generic of the drug sold as Narcan) nasal spray before. This didn’t feel the same. “Narcan makes you instantly sick from withdrawal. The Narcan didn’t have any effect [this time],” he said. His senses were dulled and his mind hazy for the next few hours. “It was scary as hell,” he added.It was the man’s first encounter with “tranq dope,” in this case a fentanyl mixture heavily laced with xylazine that law enforcement officials, experts, and users say is increasingly prevalent on the street. Xylazine, a common tranquilizer for animals, puts users in hours-long sleepy stupors—and a surge in its proliferation is just the latest wrinkle in America’s deadly opioid crisis.Kenzo said he was aware dealers sold the stuff. In Kensington, a notorious open air drug market, they shout “tranq dope” from street corners, he recalled. He’s also read about it online on harm-reduction forums.In fact, he said, he was actively trying to avoid it. “I’m not looking to get knocked out,” he explained. “I want to go to get high and not get sick and go to work.” But in the post-heroin, fentanyl-soaked illicit drug market, one never knows what exactly they are buying.In some areas of the U.S., they are increasingly buying xylazine. National data is not available because medical examiners don’t always test for xylazine. But in Philadelphia, the drug’s prevalence in overdose deaths has increased over the past three years, according to a DEA spokesperson. Last year, two urban counties in Ohio issued public warnings about the distribution of xylazine-heavy drug batches. Public health officials near Dayton detected the daze-inducing mixture in one OD fatality toxicology report, and officials near Columbus linked xylazine to three fatalities.When tallying up state OD fatalities for 2019, Connecticut’s chief medical examiner, James Gill MD, found 71 cases where xylazine was present, of 1,200 deaths total. “It was surprising,” Gill told The Daily Beast. “I don’t think we saw it in any notable quantity before.”On the black market of late, xylazine is almost always sold in a mixture with fentanyl, the synthetic opioid of unpredictable potencies that has become the most common drug in overdose deaths in the U.S. Public health officials are especially concerned about xylazine because the drug makes the batch “Narcan-resistant.” Xylazine is a clonidine analogue, not an opioid, so it doesn’t respond to naloxone, while also depressing the muscular and nervous systems. In other words, it lessens the effectiveness of one of paramedics’ and users’ best tools for preventing an OD death.The odd thing is despite decades of mass abuse of legal pharmaceuticals, xylazine is not on any schedule of controlled substances in the U.S. It is widely used, and widely available, in veterinarian clinics and horse and cattle farms. Its intended purpose is easing the handling and surgery of animals; its primary effects are sedation, anesthesia, muscle relaxation, and analgesia.The drug is “fairly easy to get,” said Patrick J. Trainor, a supervisory special agent and public information officer for the DEA. “I have heard of packages of it being intercepted by commercial shipping carriers for several years now, so it’s been an issue.”It has long been used as a diluting agent, according to Trainer—an additive to make fentanyl and heroin mixtures less strong.The “tranq dope” trend has upped the xylazine content and made the drug a feature in its own right. Stamp bags of it go by names like “bad dream” and “flat line” (with a faltering electrocardiogram signal as a logo), according to Kenzo.“If you only have $5 and want to stay high, it’s the best bang for your buck,” he said.Xylazine gained traction as a heroin substitute in Puerto Rico in the early 2000s. After 9/11, drug trafficking became more difficult and dealers were more invested in getting their most profitable heroin to the mainland, according to Rafael A. Torruella, a research psychologist who studied the phenomenon for the National Development and Research Institutes, Inc.To fulfill local demand, dealers on the island sold heroin heavily diluted with xylazine, and some users started injecting “anestesia de caballo” straight, Torruella said. Puerto Rico’s equestrian industry made supplying the drug relatively easy.The result was gruesome.“It is a horse tranquilizer,” Torruella told The Daily Beast, “so literally the person looks high and also groggy and sleepy.” Zombie users roamed streets, unresponsive to other people. Open ulcers, the result of constant injection and general neglect of the body, became an identifier of a xylazine user.Eventually even the drug dealers couldn’t stomach the damage they were causing. “They said they weren’t going to sell that shit anymore,” said Torruella, “and they told the other dealers, ‘We’re going to kill you if you sell that shit.’”Torruella called Puerto Rico’s flirtation with xylazine an expression of “the failure of the war on drugs.”“You can’t get opium from what was Taliban-controlled Afghanistan or cocaine from South America, so you just sell whatever shit is around,” he said, adding, “That’s what we were left with, the worst shit.”Kenzo feels a similar sense of resignation about the drug market in Philadelphia.In his writings on forums, he’s made clear that getting hooked was an awful mistake. He bemoans “the unhealthy lifestyle that goes along with that, like having an awful diet, spending way too much” and “[b]eing tethered to my city due to physical dependence.”But at least heroin offered some predictability. Now he feels like he’s at the mercy of drug manufacturers and the increasing capriciousness of their product lines.“Over the last few years, it’s been mainly designer drugs, all these synthetic mixes,” he said. “If it were up to me, I would still be doing heroin, not fentanyl, not fentanyl and whatever random chemicals, not fentanyl with elephant tranquilizer or horse tranquilizer.”

Apple Inc. and Google both removed apps associated with Hong Kong’s antigovernment protests from their digital stores in recent days, thrusting the two Silicon Valley giants into a controversy engulfing other U.S. companies.Apple removed from its App Store a crowdsourced map service that allows Hong Kong protesters to track police activity, one day after the Chinese Communist Party-run People’s Daily newspaper lashed out at the iPhone maker, calling the app “toxic software.”Apple...

During the 2016 election, Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort pushed the idea that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the hack of Democratic National Committee servers, Manafort’s deputy told investigators during the special counsel’s Russia investigation.The unsubstantiated theory, advanced by Donald Trump even after he took office, would later help trigger the impeachment inquiry now consuming the White House.Notes from an FBI interview were released on Saturday after lawsuits by BuzzFeed News and CNN led to public access to hundreds of pages of documents from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The documents included summaries of interviews with other figures from the Mueller investigation, including Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.Information related to Ukraine took on renewed interest after calls for impeachment based on efforts by the president and his administration to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Democrat Joe Biden. Speaking with Ukraine’s new president in July, Trump asked about the DNC servers in the same phone call in which he pushed for an investigation into Biden.On Sunday, White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway was asked on CNN’s State of the Union if Trump accepted the intelligence community’s belief that Russia hacked the DNC, or if he thought Ukraine did.Conway prevaricated, saying: “He’s said it many times. It could be Russia. It could be Ukraine. It could be a guy in New Jersey.”Asked again, Conway said: “The president has great faith in the US intelligence community. The emails don’t matter.”Manafort speculated about Ukraine’s responsibility as the campaign sought to capitalize on the DNC email disclosures and as Trump associates discussed how they could get hold of the material themselves, deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates told investigators, according to a summary of one of his interviews.Gates said Manafort’s assertion that Ukraine might have done it echoed the position of Konstantin Kilimnik, a Manafort business associate who had also speculated that the hack could have been carried out by Russian operatives in Ukraine.US authorities have assessed that Kilimnik, who was also charged in Mueller’s investigation, has ties to Russian intelligence. Mueller’s team indicted 12 Russian agents in connection with the intrusion.Gates also said the campaign believed that Michael Flynn, who became Trump’s first national security adviser, would be in the best position to obtain Hillary Clinton’s missing emails because of his Russia connections.Flynn said he could use his intelligence sources to obtain the emails and was “adamant that Russians did not carry out the hack” because he believed the US intelligence community couldn’t have figured out the source, according to the agent’s notes. Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with the Russian ambassador.Mueller’s investigation concluded in March with a report that found insufficient evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign.The report also examined multiple episodes in which Trump sought to seize control of the Russia investigation but did not conclude one way or the other about whether the president obstructed justice. Attorney general William Barr, appointed by Trump, concluded that the president had not committed a crime.Gates worked with Manafort in a lucrative consulting business that included Ukraine and later testified against him. Gates pleaded guilty last year and has been one of the government’s key cooperators. He has yet to be sentenced as he continues working with investigators. Manafort was sentenced to more than seven years in prison, in part for financial crimes arising from his Ukraine work.During his interviews with investigators, Gates said Donald Trump Jr would ask where the hacked emails were during family meetings in summer 2016. Gates recalled that other key campaign aides, including future attorney general Jeff Sessions, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and Flynn, also “expressed interest in obtaining the emails as well”, according to an agent’s written summary of one interview.The identity of one person who expressed interest in the emails is blanked out.One time on the campaign aircraft, Gates told the FBI, Donald Trump said “get the emails”. Gates also said that another point, Trump told him more leaks were coming, though the heavily redacted documents do not indicate how Trump knew that.Gates also described conversations with the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, who entered the White House as chief of staff. Gates described the RNC as energized by the emails and said that though Trump and Kushner were initially skeptical about cooperating with the RNC, “the WikiLeaks issue was a turning point”, the FBI notes show. WikiLeaks was the website that published the stolen emails in the weeks before the election.The campaign was very pleased by the releases, though Trump was advised not to react but rather to let it all play out, according to the interview summaries.The RNC would put out press releases to amplify the emails’ release, Gates told the FBI.“The RNC also indicated they knew the timing of the upcoming releases,” though Gates didn’t specify who had that information. “Gates said the only non-public information the RNC had was related to the timing of the releases.”Manafort, meanwhile, was trying to advise the Trump campaign even after severing ties, causing alarm among some senior advisers.Manafort emailed Kushner on 5 November 2016, days before the election, saying he was feeling good about a Trump presidency, was “focusing on preserving the victory” and had sent a memo to Priebus and briefed Gates and Fox News host Sean Hannity, a close Trump ally.Kushner sent the email to Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who replied: “We need to avoid this guy like the plague.”“They are going to try and say the Russians worked with wiki leaks [sic] to give this victory to us,” Bannon wrote to Kushner and David Bossie, another Trump associate. “Paul is nice guy but can’t let word get out he is advising us.” Topics Trump-Russia investigation Trump impeachment inquiry Donald Trump Trump administration Russia US politics Donald Trump Jr news

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was questioned by the Federal Trade Commission this week in an investigative hearing as part of the agency’s antitrust investigation, multiple outlets have reported.It’s unclear exactly what Zuckerberg was asked about in the closed-door probe. Sources told Politico, the outlet that first reported the testimony, that the hearing doesn’t necessarily signal that the agency will ultimately pursue an antitrust lawsuit.“We are committed to cooperating with the US Federal Trade Commission’s inquiry and answering the questions the Agency may have,” a Facebook spokesman said in a statement to The Hill. The FTC declined to comment for this story. The FTC hearing this week follows the House antitrust subcommittee hearing last month where Zuckerberg appeared alongside Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.At that hearing, lawmakers accused Zuckerberg of simply buying companies Facebook sees as competitors, pointing to their $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and the $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp in 2014.

LONDON—Boris Johnson’s “do or die” pledge to take Britain out of the European Union by Oct. 31 was quashed by Parliament on Tuesday night, handing the initiative to the EU to effectively trigger a British election.Johnson threatened to call for a general election if British lawmakers refused to allow him to rush through his deal and the EU proposed a new extension of three months or more. Under a law passed in Westminster last month, Johnson is not allowed to negotiate to shorten whatever extension the EU chooses. Rather than seek to compromise with opponents who want proper time to scrutinize the Brexit deal, Johnson responded to the 322 to 308 vote defeat on fast-tracking it by halting the passage of his deal altogether while Britain waits to see what extension the EU will grant. “We will pause this legislation,” he said, a phrase that sounded innocuous but could well kick-start an epic new election showdown between the forces of Remain and Leave. A snap vote could take place before Christmas. It remains to be seen if Johnson is as good as his word—and there have been plenty of reasons to cast doubt on it in the past—as there was no specific mention of the election he had threatened earlier in the day in the aftermath of his defeat. Under Britain’s fixed-term parliament act, a two-thirds majority is usually required to call an election so both the government and the opposition would have to agree. Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, did not need a second invitation, however. Soon after Johnson said he was pausing the agreement, Tusk tweeted that he was talking to leaders in Brussels about issuing a written extension, which is likely to delay the Brexit deadline until January 31.If that were confirmed, British politicians would be under heavy pressure to agree to hold an election and seek a fresh mandate from the voters before proceeding with any Brexit deal.Johnson had earlier won a vote on his deal—the first time his government has won a single significant vote in the Commons. That was a major step towards securing Brexit, as Parliament has always refused to back any formal arrangement that would result in leaving the EU.The next phase of the legislation’s progress is where things become more difficult, however, as lawmakers are able to amend the bill in order to clarify sections or—as No. 10 fears—introduce so-called wrecking amendments that would collapse the bill entirely.Just last week, Johnson had secured a compromise deal that many thought was impossible in Brussels, but that came at a serious cost. The EU had sworn they would not re-open the Withdrawal Agreement that had been negotiated with Theresa May, but then Johnson did what he said he would never do and he caved on one of his key red lines. He signed up to a version of the deal that May had rejected, which would effectively create a customs border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the mainland. That concession led to a breakthrough in Europe but it meant the Democratic Unionist Party, which had been propping up the Conservative government, fled from the deal. It was lawmakers who made the most aggressive speeches attacking the prime minister during a contentious debate in the House of Commons. Sammy Wilson of the DUP said he felt they had been betrayed by the Conservatives. “I nearly choked when the prime minister said it,” he said on Tuesday.Wilson and his nine DUP colleagues voted against Johnson’s expedited deal. Wilson was particularly aggravated that Johnson had been unfamiliar with the precise details of the deal he had agreed that would govern Northern Ireland’s relationship with the rest of Britain. There were doubts about exactly how familiar Johnson was with the customs rules that he was attempting to rush through Parliament.Jill Rutter, an independent former civil servant who worked at the Treasury and No. 10, said: “I don’t think Johnson understands what he has agreed for Northern Ireland…”With the Europeans jumping on his “pause” to bind Britain into another extension, Johnson may have also misunderstood that he was putting his job on the line.

By Updated Dec. 10, 2019 3:44 pm ET When Dina Srinivasan quit her job as a digital advertising executive two years ago, she wasn’t looking to retool antitrust law for the social-media age. She just wanted to spend some time reading in coffee shops. Then 36 years old, with a Yale law degree she had never put to use, Ms. Srinivasan spent a few months in cafes around her Connecticut home reading economic history, and mulling over her own misgivings about the evolution of the digital advertising market. One mystery nagged at her, she said: How could a company with... To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In Continue reading your article with a WSJ membership View Membership Options

Mass shootings get most of the attention in the headlines, but the majority of America’s 14,000 gun homicides every year come from smaller-scale, everyday urban gun violence.Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), a presidential candidate, is now pushing to do something about that urban violence.On Wednesday, Booker and Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV) introduced the Break the Cycle of Violence Act, which would dedicate $90 million a year over 10 years to US cities to tackle urban gun violence. The funds could go to hospital-based intervention programs that try to help gunshot victims before they retaliate against their shooters or are victimized again, street “interrupters” and other outreach workers who intervene in local conflicts to prevent violence from spreading, and strategies that target, with police and other social services, the small segments of the population responsible for most urban violence.These kinds of policy proposals don’t get as much attention as gun control in gun violence debates, but they can work — hand in hand with gun control, if policymakers embrace both — to significantly reduce urban violence.In 2012, after years of struggling with gun violence, Oakland, California, adopted what is now known as the Oakland Ceasefire — detailed in a recent rigorous analysis published by the Giffords Law Center, an advocacy group that aims to reduce gun violence.First, officials analyzed crime trends to see who was most at risk to commit gun violence. They found just 400 people — 0.1 percent of the city’s population — were at the highest risk at any given time and responsible for the majority of the city’s homicides.Officials and community leaders then coordinated interventions for these people, hosting call-ins in which they brought in the people at highest risk for gun violence for a meeting with police, social services, faith leaders, and other community activists. After the call-in, local officials followed up with individual interventions as needed.The idea was to convey a clear, direct message, something like: “We know who you are. We want the best for you, but we can’t and don’t approve of what you’re doing. We will crack down quickly and harshly if you continue down a path of violence. But if you agree to stop, we’ll give you an array of services — jobs, education, health care, and so on — to help you build a better, violence-free life.”The result: While homicides increased overall in Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, and other major cities, Oakland’s homicide rate plummeted by almost 50 percent from 2012 to 2017. The homicide solve rate went from 29 percent in 2011, the year before Oakland Ceasefire began, to more than 70 percent in 2017 — perhaps a sign of increased community trust in the police, according to Giffords.That’s just one of the several ideas that Booker and Horsford’s bill would fund, tackling the kind of gun violence that rarely grabs national headlines but disproportionately hurts poor and minority communities.“Often when we talk about gun violence, the discussion focuses on deadly mass shootings, but in my neighborhood in Newark and urban cities across the country people are experiencing this on a daily basis,” Booker said in a statement. “The epidemic of everyday gun violence that is ravaging our urban communities has been overlooked for too long, even as many neighborhoods have gun injury rates similar to war zones.”For Booker, the bill is part of a continuing focus on gun violence that has been a plank in his presidential campaign platform. He was among the first Democratic candidates to put out a comprehensive gun control plan. He followed that up with another plan to combat gun suicides in particular. And he’s called on Democrats to go bolder in addressing gun violence, telling me, “At a time with the levels of carnage in our country, we don’t need people who are defeatist in their thinking about what’s possible.” For more on the policy proposals to address urban gun violence, read Vox’s explainer.

NEWARK, N.J. ― Presidential candidate Cory Booker likens himself to a civil rights icon when describing his previous work with Newark schools.“I was like Malcolm X,” Booker, a senator from New Jersey, told an Iowa crowd in February of his time as Newark’s mayor. He went on to cite a quote he has used for nearly two decades to justify his centrist brand of education reform. “By any means necessary, my kids were going to get an education.”But when Newark resident Lisa Douglas hears of the comparison, she cringes.“For him to even say he considers himself a Malcolm X and then to not consider those who he would hurt in the process of going with this whole [school] choice … I don’t think he’s Malcolm X at all,” said the mother of three. Newark Unified School District has undergone a massive overhaul in the nine years since Booker sat on a couch with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on the Oprah Winfrey Show and famously promised to turn Newark schools into a national model for school improvement. They went on to change the way teachers were evaluated, dramatically expand charter schools and revamp the city’s enrollment system. Booker and his allies describe the efforts as an unequivocal success, citing research that shows district gains in reading achievement and graduation rates and arguing criticism is misleading and shortsighted.But many residents and stakeholders remember the reform effort for the acrimony it created and are ambivalent about its accomplishments.HuffPost attended Newark school board and community meetings, spent time in neighborhood hangouts and interviewed 39 stakeholders, parents and community activists about Booker’s education legacy. Some Newark residents said they are mistrustful of the data that has come out about the district; they claim that potential gains have occurred in spite of the changes Booker spurred, not because of them. They remain angry and resentful of their former mayor, who they say handed their schools and children over to money-hungry consultants in the name of national recognition. Others are more positive or conflicted about the changes ― critical of what took place, while nonetheless embracing the shiny new charter schools that have come to their neighborhood. Many of the people HuffPost spoke to said they resented the way the education reform efforts were implemented, sometimes even more than the changes themselves. “It kind of polarized the city in terms of those who were pro- and anti-reform,” recalled Princess Fils-Aime, an assistant principal at a charter school, who spoke in a personal capacity. “It took us a while to get to a place where we could, as a city, agree upon the direction we wanted to take our schools.”All the while, the changes Booker championed, like the proliferation of charter schools, have increasingly fallen out of favor among Democrats nationwide, putting the candidate in a politically tricky position. Booker’s record of support for charter school-centered reform policies is too long to run away from, but he is under pressure to differentiate himself from conservative figures like Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos with whom he once served on the board of an education nonprofit.At a presidential candidate forum in August, Booker decried lax charter school laws in states like Michigan, emphasizing that the “the next president, and I plan on being that person, must focus on empowering public education.”By the time Booker became mayor of Newark in 2006, the city’s schools had been under state control for just over a decade following a takeover prompted by city fiscal mismanagement, corruption and poor achievement rates. The district was in dire need of improvement. So in 2010, Booker and Christie, with the help of Zuckerberg, vowed to fix it. Zuckerberg agreed to donate $100 million to a no-holds-barred education reform effort run by the state in conjunction with his foundation. Booker would leverage Zuckerberg’s pledge to raise an additional $100 million from other donors.The plan was to make “Newark into a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation,” Zuckerberg said during the gift’s announcement on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Some Newark parents were shocked to learn about the impending transformation of their children’s schools, hearing about the proposed reforms at the same time as the rest of the nation ― on television. But the lack of warning was by design, according to journalist Dale Russakoff, who has chronicled Zuckerberg’s gift and its aftermath in her book “The Prize.” An early proposal of Booker’s reforms called for a top-down process to be imposed on schools, without input from stakeholders that could slow down the process. The goal was to make real change, Booker promised, in part by making Newark the “charter school capital of the world.”The new charter schools ― public schools that are privately operated ― were supposed to upend the stagnation and complacency that Booker and other reformers thought plagued traditional public schools, by introducing competition and bypassing the messy bureaucracy endemic in large school systems. Indeed, in Newark, existing charter schools had already been vastly outperforming their traditional public school counterparts.But putting market-inspired education policies into practice in Newark’s gritty political environment involved messy and prosaic dealmaking. A serious chunk of Zuckerberg’s money ― $48 million ― ended up going toward a new teacher union contract that upped teacher pay in exchange for making it easier for principals to hire and fire them. An even larger sum went to expanding charter schools, prompting a continued shift in student enrollment away from traditional public schools and toward charters. Enrollment in Newark schools had been dropping for years, based on a variety of factors, but by 2011, it dipped to a low. In response, appointed superintendent Cami Anderson oversaw budget cuts that prompted the layoffs of over 200 counselors, clerical workers, janitors and other support staff.By 2013, Anderson announced plans to overhaul the district, in a project called One Newark. The plan was bold and complicated, designed to address enrollment declines, deteriorating facilities, budgetary constraints and demand for charters. It called for some schools to be shuttered, converted to charters, redesigned or given an influx of resources. It created a new, controversial district enrollment system in which students choose schools via a citywide lottery. Cory was courageous and brave and took his lumps in the realm of school reform. Chris Cerf, an architect of the district overhaul with Cory Booker But some were again frustrated with the top-down nature of the changes. Community meetings had devolved into yelling matches as union members, in particular, mobilized their supporters against the school overhaul. Anderson, a white woman who was not from Newark, a city which is overwhelmingly of color, became the face of the reform effort and in turn, the greatest object of distrust. The school closures put teachers and staff out of work, and they devastated residents who felt connected to their neighborhood public schools. Parents feared their kids would have to travel far distances to reach their schools, even crossing dangerous neighborhoods. They worried siblings accustomed to walking to school together would be sent to different schools, even as they relied on older kids to keep their children safe.What began as simmering discontent exploded into pandemonium. Anderson had a brick thrown through her window and found a bag of feces left on her porch.With the state’s backing, One Newark continued apace, but so did the protests. Booker served as a fundraiser and public champion for the school reform effort from the beginning, letting Anderson and others manage implementation. Some of Booker’s critics say his rosy comments about the effort helped conceal the overhaul’s stumbles. “Some people look at him as a cheerleader, but I look at him as an actor,” said a former district employee who liaised with Booker around reform efforts and asked to remain anonymous. “He will pretend things are great knowing damn well they’re not.” As the Newark education overhaul went from national media darling to public relations debacle, Booker set his sights on sunnier horizons. After New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg died in June 2013, Booker announced he would run for the seat. By the time that opposition to Anderson’s new One Newark plan exploded, Booker had effectively put the city’s education troubles in his rearview mirror.Booker’s detractors believe his decision as mayor to play an active role in education policies was self-interested. They argue that he was willing to share in the publicity for the splashy rollout of the plan with Winfrey, but happier to make himself scarce when the project was no longer politically beneficial.“Booker wanted to be able to have on his paperwork that he turned Newark into another New Orleans,” said Leah Owens, a former Newark school board member, referring to the wholesale transformation of New Orleans’ school system from traditional public schools to charter schools. Booker’s sudden absence complicated the rollout of One Newark. A plan that would have been controversial under any circumstances suddenly lost one of its key defenders, and the special election held for Booker’s seat became a referendum on the education overhaul. Former public school principal Ras Baraka ― who had campaigned against charter schools and Booker’s brand of reform ― defeated Shavar Jeffries, a Booker ally and former head of the Newark advisory school board, in a landslide. The election heightened community tension, Anderson said. Though she supported Booker and his decision to run for Senate, it made for unfortunate timing. “Had Booker remained the spiritual and moral leader, I think we would have had pushback, there’s no question… but I think the tone and tenor of pushback would have been different,” Anderson said. Education reformers continue to fight against the idea that these changes were as unpopular as they seemed ― arguing unions fanned a fire of negativity. They also say that their reforms worked. A Harvard study funded by the Zuckerberg foundation shows that after initial dips, reading achievement has improved in Newark schools. Student enrollment in all public schools has seen an uptick after years of decline. Newark’s charters are excelling, according to studies from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University. Chris Cerf, who helped design the district overhaul with Booker and went on to serve as Newark’s superintendent after Anderson resigned in 2015, remains unapologetic about the district’s tactics and the reaction it provoked, maintaining that changing such an entrenched system was always going to be bitter.“Change has casualties and change often occurs in an environment of high-decibel rhetoric,” said Cerf, who previously served as the New Jersey education commissioner. “There was a little bit of showboating … around Oprah for example, and in retrospect, I wish we hadn’t done that.” But overall, Cerf said, “Cory was courageous and brave and took his lumps in the realm of school reform.”Newark Teachers Union President John Abeigon, on the other hand, says he has yet to see “anything positive” come out of the changes, noting, “I wasn’t a Wall Street investor.” “Any improvement has been based on the dedication of the teaching staff and has nothing to do with the education reformers,” he said. During a recent sunny afternoon at Independence Park in the Ironbound district of Newark, parents pushed their children on swings and watched them as they tackled the jungle gym.It’s a working-class neighborhood populated primarily by Portuguese, Latin American and Spanish immigrants and their relatives, and is located in the East Ward, one of the city’s richer neighborhoods. It boasts a vibrant economy and has become a recent hotspot for real estate developers. The most cataclysmic aspects of the reforms spared this neighborhood. And on this day, three residents say they just wish more charter schools had opened. “I would send her to charter school, but there’s no space,” Pedro Gaeote said of his elementary-aged daughter. Lucianna Duarte, a recent high school graduate who attended one of the district’s citywide magnet programs, recalls the unrest that the reforms spurred. Her teachers encouraged her and other students to take to the streets in protest. But other than that, she wasn’t impacted by the upheaval, and she certainly didn’t see the fruits of Zuckerberg’s philanthropy improve her schools, she says. “I didn’t see it in action in the schools I was going to,” she said.Across town, emotions still run high. After a public safety meeting the West Ward neighborhood of Newark, residents expressed deep reservations about charter schools ― even if they chose to send their children to one and praised these schools’ educational superiority. The West Ward, which is mostly Black and Latino, was heavily impacted by school closures, consolidation and charters during Booker’s mayoral reign. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education concluded African American students were disproportionately impacted by school closures during that time, and therefore racially discriminated against. The reality is people were heard and not listened to. A former school district employee Marie, a former teacher in the district who asked to be referenced by her middle name for privacy reasons, lost her job when her school was converted to a charter.The 57-year-old feels like district leaders pushed their agenda at the expense of the most vulnerable students and the community members who had worked for years to make their neighborhoods better. Ultimately, the children with the most engaged parents moved to charter schools, while she and her hardworking peers served the hardest students with less. “Those in authority had a mission, and they stuck to it, and it wasn’t about listening to parents or teachers,” Marie said. “[Booker] had a charter school agenda, period.”Marie said she was bitter but has since moved on, noting that she now understands “there were reasons for the decisions that were made that will hopefully help the city long term.” She supposes that local discourse around charter schools has evolved a bit too, noting that, “now it’s your sister, your niece, your brother that’s going to a charter school, so you can’t keep speaking ill.”Chuckie Shepherd, a retired home renovator raising three children in Newark’s West Ward, exemplifies the ambivalence that many city residents have about the explosion of charter school growth. He switched his three children to charter schools after two of them were bullied in district schools. He found the charter schools a “little more secure.”But he laments the scale of charter school growth, which he hypothesizes were part of a scheme to pad the coffers of a select few, rather than to benefit all students. “Instead of having all these charter schools, [Booker] could have had one or two,” he said. “How many charter schools you got all over the place now?”Even community members who were sympathetic to efforts to restructure Newark’s schools admit that community engagement efforts fell short. “A lot of stuff could have been avoided if they had taken a little more time to do it right in terms of community engagement … They didn’t,” said Richard Cammarieri, a veteran anti-poverty advocate who works at a Newark nonprofit. “They were trying to do things quickly rather than do it as well as possible.”Anderson says there was a comprehensive community engagement effort, though a small but well-organized group of detractors made authentic engagement more difficult. On a day-to-day basis, she says she generally heard from a range of everyday community members, including from those who wanted her to move fast.The former district employee maintains that there was extensive community engagement. It’s just that residents’ concerns were ignored. This employee, who asked to remain anonymous, said Newark leaders treated kids as dollar signs, with callous indifference to their actual success or well-being. After leaving the job, this employee put their kids in private schools, out of fear that leaders in their children’s public schools had similar attitudes to the ones in Newark. “The reality is people were heard and not listened to,” the former employee said. “It was like, we hear what you want, but we know better, and you’re not going to get what you want.” When residents and leaders are asked who they blame for the education reform effort’s shortcomings, the reaction is mixed. Some blame Christie. Others point to Booker, or Cerf, the architect of the program. While Anderson was the subject of vicious protests as superintendent, the Newark teachers union president John Abeigon believes she “was the fall guy.” Now, as Booker runs for president, some residents are looking at him with suspicion. Many residents who spoke to HuffPost have a more favorable view of Baraka, Booker’s successor, even though he has maintained many of the changes Booker’s administration spearheaded because they see him as part of the community. Booker, meanwhile, has been plagued by claims that he’s an outsider since he first ran for city council in 1998. (Baraka declined to be interviewed for this piece.)On the campaign trail, Booker has both embraced and shied away from his education record. He boasts about improvements in Newark schools, but does not employ terms like “charter schools” and “school choice” frequently, preferring instead to hint at it through comments disavowing “one-size-fits-all education.” When pressed at an American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Forum in August to clarify whether he still supports charter schools, Booker did not answer directly. Instead he condemned Republican-backed schemes to allow unregulated charter schools to flourish.He’s also backed away from his onetime support of vouchers, a policy that allows parents to send their kids to private school using public funding, which many education activists see as an effort to privatize public education. Booker supported vouchers while serving on the Newark city council from 1998 to 2002. When asked about it in a live-streamed question-and-answer session with the Working Families Party last week, he spoke only about his record as mayor, which did not include vouchers. “We didn’t support vouchers. That is a lie ― and not one of the strategies we pursued,” he replied. “What we pursued was a system of public education that was inclusive, that had equity and for every kid to have an opportunity to go to a great school system.”HuffPost asked Booker’s campaign a number of questions about his education record in Newark and criticisms of his handling of the reforms.Sabrina Singh, a spokeswoman for the campaign, provided a broad statement that mirrored Booker’s public defenses of his record. She did not rebut specific criticisms or clarify Booker’s stance on private-school vouchers.“No matter what the critics and cynics say, the work Cory and others did to improve and support Newark’s public schools is a success story: student achievement is increasing, a higher percentage of kids are graduating, test scores are up, and more Newark children are going to college,” she said. RELATED COVERAGE Watch HuffPost’s Full Interview With Cory Booker Cory Booker Says He'll Prioritize Public Schools Despite Past Support For Charters Cory Booker Defends Donations From Controversial New Jersey Political Bosses

According to his own deadline, the New Jersey senator Cory Booker has less than two days to save his presidential campaign.On Sunday he said an “avalanche of support” had brought him close to a self-imposed fundraising goal, but admitted he could be out of the race by Tuesday.Some minor candidates have dropped out but the field is still unwieldy. On Friday the Democratic National Committee said its next debate, in Ohio on 15 October, would take place on one night. Twelve candidates, Booker among them, had qualified to appear.Booker announced last week that if he did not raise an additional $1.7m by the end of September, he would quit the race. Since then he has raised about $1.5m. Asked on CNN’s State of the Union if the end was nigh, he said: “It could be.”“But we’ve seen over the last week an avalanche of support. We have nearly 35,000 donors helping us make this goal, we’ve raised $1.5m plus, we’ve actually already crossed the threshold for the November debates of 165,000 unique donors.“So the surge and the momentum’s great but, yeah, I still need help in this final 36 hours.”Booker said he had set the fundraising goal in order to “stay in this race to win the nomination” as his candidacy was “not a vanity play or [about] ego”.“I’m not going to be in this primary unless I have a viable path to win it,” he said.The realclearpolitics.com national polling average shows how narrow that path has become.Former vice-president Joe Biden leads from Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who has gained significant momentum. The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is not far behind.California senator Kamala Harris and South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg round out the top five, some distance back. Booker is ninth, behind the former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke, former housing secretary Julían Castro and tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang.The size of the field and the persistence of its stragglers is becoming a national talking point.Returning this weekend for its 45th season, Saturday Night Live introduced a “CNN Impeachment Town Hall” in which “a muddled 10-person debate” was said to be the party’s choice for how to handle proceedings against Donald Trump.Booker, played by Chris Redd, was not included among “the actual candidates”.“We’re limiting the time you can speak by how well you’re doing in the polls,” the host said, “so Cory, you get five words.”Redd offered: “Impeach Trump now because trouble.”Asked if he would “like to leave now to beat traffic”, he said: “I would.” Topics US elections 2020 Cory Booker Democrats New Jersey US politics news

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News:House lawmakers leading an antitrust investigation into Amazon demanded Friday that CEO Jeff Bezos testify about the company's alleged practice of gleaning financial information from third-party sellers to bolster its own private label business. The House Judiciary Committee threatened to subpoena Bezos if he does not voluntarily agree to testify. The letter comes after a Wall Street Journal investigation found that Amazon employees in the company's private label business had routinely used data from third-party sellers to inform its own product strategy -- a practice that the company has consistently denied to Congress. Amazon's associate general counsel, Nate Sutton, said in a July hearing on the company's practices that "we do not use any seller data to compete with them." He also told Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., chair of the House antitrust subcommittee, in the same hearing that "we do not use their individual data when we're making decisions to launch private brands." Amazon has also submitted numerous written responses to the same effect to the committee. "If the reporting in The Wall Street Journal article is accurate, then statements Amazon made to the Committee about the company's business practices appear to be misleading, and possibly criminally false or perjurious," said the House Judiciary Committee in its letter.

The Department of Justice is investigating the U.S.'s largest tech firms for allegedly monopolistic behavior. Roughly 20 years ago, a similar case threatened to destabilize Microsoft. WSJ explains. By Updated Sept. 6, 2019 5:20 pm ET WASHINGTON—Top state law-enforcement officials from across the country are formally launching antitrust probes into Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google starting next week, further pressuring tech giants already under federal scrutiny over whether their online dominance stifles competition. The moves, involving two large bipartisan coalitions of state attorneys general, add considerable heft to the investigative efforts under way in Washington. As in the government’s antitrust action against Microsoft Corp. two decades... To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In Continue reading your article with a WSJ membership View Membership Options

It’s 2020, the year that Amazon will celebrate its 25th birthday as an online retailer. Amazon is more complex and diverse than ever before, and part of my job is to make sense of what’s going on so I can advise our clients on how to navigate the future. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I have some educated guesses on what we might see from Amazon in 2020 (besides, you know, that there will be another season of Fleabag).Amazon will own the internet (or at least part of it)It’s looking like Elon Musk’s SpaceX is going to have first-mover advantage in the race to offer broadband internet from a fleet of satellites, but Jeff Bezos is not far behind. The Amazon founder already has his own rocket company, and now Amazon is leasing over 200,000 square feet in Redmond, Washington, for a team dedicated to Project Kuiper, described as a constellation of 3,236 satellites deployed in low Earth orbit for low-latency, high-speed broadband.It will be years before Project Kuiper gets off the ground, but one can’t contemplate Amazon’s future without thinking about “what’s next” in terms of the internet. Amazon and its services are inexorably intertwined with the web. Alexa, Fire TV, Amazon Web Services, eero Wi-Fi routers (acquired by Amazon last year), etc. The company announced Amazon Sidewalk last year, a “new long-term effort to greatly extend the working range of low-bandwidth, low-power, smart lights, sensors, and other low-cost devices customers install at the edge of their home network.”How do we predict Amazon’s next move here? What do 5G networks mean for Amazon? Will they try another phone? Honestly, I have no idea (that’s a lousy prediction, I know). However, it’s not hard to imagine Amazon as an internet service provider, and the satellite project seems to foreshadow precisely that.Amazon had shipped products with UPS for years and now is delivering most of its own packages. Amazon relied on Oracle for years and then built the largest cloud computing company. The company tends to take over the infrastructure it needs for its business to operate. Whether or how this happens with internet service or some variation on that theme remains to be seen, but I predict that by the end of 2020 we get some additional clues as to whether or not Prime will come with a data plan.Amazon advertising grows up, faces headwindsAmazon’s advertising division is already the third-largest digital advertising platform in the U.S. (behind Google and Facebook). Advertising, currently bringing in over $10 billion in revenue, is a high priority for Amazon and in many ways is still quite nascent.While Amazon’s growth in this area may initially seem unlimited, a lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. Consider the customer’s limited tolerance for ads in the search process, for example. Amazon displays only so many products on any given page, and as sponsored listings start occupying more of this real estate, friction mounts in the user experience.Another challenge that Amazon faces with search advertising is that Amazon customers spend precious little time on the site. Amazon is ruthlessly efficient and intentionally so. I attribute this to the fact the site was designed by men who hate to shop. They patented 1-click ordering. In, out, boom, done.The implication of this, of course, is that limited time-on-site translates directly to limited opportunities for Amazon to surface multiple advertisements to the visitor. Contrast this with Facebook, where people spend hours browsing the site every week and might be exposed to hundreds of ad impressions.The third headwind for site search advertising is the reality of ad economics for brands. Costs per click have been steadily increasing since Amazon launched sponsored ads, but these costs are now hitting a plateau. This is simply a function of brands not having unlimited margin dollars to spend. No one is going to spend $13 to advertise a $19 curling iron that costs $5 to ship.When Amazon Advertising saturates its site real estate, is unable to convince customers to stick around to see more ads, and brands max out their bids, the search ad business will mature. This is why Amazon’s strategy is evolving to become more competitive in display advertising (i.e. “higher up the funnel”).The prediction here is that Amazon Advertising introduces tools and programs to become a stronger competitor of Google’s GDN, including better attribution data, clean room options, and exclusive targeting/re-targeting options. Amazon Advertising will also lean into developing its partner agency programs, formally embracing the traditional brand/agency relationship while empowering agencies with tools to help sway client budgets toward Amazon.Bonus prediction: Amazon tests Alexa ads in 2020. “Do you want to hear about our Deal of the Day?”Doubling down on video, GIFs, and other visualsI predict that we will see pictures on Amazon start moving more. Relative to other mobile apps that are in Amazon’s class for popularity, Amazon’s content is surprisingly static. Amazon will double down on video in ads, GIFs, live streams, brand store videos, 360-degree images, VR, etc. Video, animations, and interactive displays will become standard content building blocks.As a result, vendors and sellers will need to do their storytelling and communicate product value props visually. Investments in 10-second media will become increasingly valuable.Alexa, send refills for my prescriptionsIn 2018 there were rumors actively circulating that Amazon would buy a drugstore business such as Walgreen or CVS. Amazon bought PillPack instead, which lacked the physical footprint of the chains but was better aligned with Amazon’s online business and still offered important inroads to the industry. Everyone knows pharmacy is a tough and insular business, limited to the few who have navigated the regulatory labyrinths of the insurance and healthcare industries. These pills are too big to swallow (sorry) for most newcomers to the category, but Jeff Bezos is not afraid of complexity. He also sat on the board of Drugstore.com in the 1990s, so he’s not naïve.The prize here is huge. Prescription drug spending is $500 billion in the US alone. The business model is horribly antiquated and ripe for disruption. Who needs nine thousand Walgreen’s locations when you can just ask Alexa to refill your prescriptions and have them delivered the next day?Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts integrated PillPack into their plans last year and did so primarily because of the popularity of PillPack with enrollees. According to the insurer, PillPack has an NPS score of 74, vs 26 for traditional pharmacies (!) In other words, customers dread the trip to the pharmacy and would much rather have their meds delivered.It’s going to take more than one insurance company to move the needle on the adoption of Amazon’s services, but it’s not difficult to imagine other insurers also viewing the option a feature benefit for customers and pursuing it on those merits alone. Industry analysts say that Amazon will ultimately need a pharmacy benefit manager under its ownership to tip the scales, which is something to look for in the coming year.I predict that 2020 will be a strong growth year for PillPack in terms of popularity, setting the stage for a tipping point in insurer adoption in 2021. If Amazon pulls this off, there will be an Uber-like revolution for prescription medicine distribution that permanently disrupts the existing retail model.Tested by hackersThis is my boldest and least favorite prediction. Likely as not, Amazon successfully fends off cyberattacks with the kind of regularity that would alarm most people and we’re blissfully ignorant that any such nastiness occurs. However, Amazon is potentially vulnerable in many ways that most websites or businesses are not. For one, there are millions of third-party merchants across the globe that can publish directly to Amazon’s website. I’m not going to elaborate upon any specific tactics or perceived potential weaknesses for obvious reasons, but in general terms, I think there’s (rightfully) a focus by Amazon on protecting critical infrastructure that leaves open the possibility of more low-tech incursions that could still be disruptive or harmful.Amazon’s website experienced outages the past two Prime Days, with the 2018 episode being particularly costly. As it was explained to the public, these issues were not nefarious but resulted from a failure of the infrastructure to deal with the surge in traffic (having published new UIs specifically for the event complicated the execution as well). I mention this more as a reminder of Amazon’s critical dependence upon the site operating in order for the business to function.This idea may seem laughable to some of the tech security people at Amazon, but I’ve seen detail pages of Amazon private label products hacked, fake reviews are published with regularity and someone is always finding Nazi memorabilia somewhere on the site. Furthermore, what’s to say that the dog food you buy on Amazon (from China) isn’t contaminated? Meanwhile, Amazon doesn’t share the real name of its sellers with the public, so presumably, this activity can be transacted anonymously.I’m not predicting that anyone will take Amazon down, but I give it even odds that Amazon is tested in ways it didn’t expect and faces a PR backlash as a result.Expanding use of APIs fuels a third-party developer boomWith or without the platform unification, we will see Amazon expand access to APIs, or electronic data exchanges. Amazon currently offers EDI connections for the purposes of order confirmation and shipping functions, and Seller Center has an API for reporting and a host of other functions. Recently, Amazon has limited the use of the Seller Central API (called MWS) to developers who are registered with Amazon.In 2020 I predict that we will begin to see RESTful APIs introduced as an alternative to the legacy EDI technology currently employed for vendor POs, as well as new APIs to cover additional functions such as payments, catalog details, sales data, and other analytics.In the future, users may not even need to log into Vendor Central except to change user settings. In other words, all vendor interactions with Amazon’s platform might instead take place through third-party tools developed with the APIs.The implications of this shift will be profound for the developer and investment community. An entire marketplace of tools for third-party sellers has already emerged over the years from developers using the Seller Central MWS. Amazon’s road map suggests that this marketplace will expand to include tools designed for Amazon vendors by independent developers using the wider set of APIs. When Amazon released the API for its advertising platform just a couple of years ago, it propelled a rush of development from new and existing companies, prompting hundreds of millions of dollars in investments and acquisitions.Larry Pluimer is the founder and CEO of Indigitous, a Seattle-based Amazon services agency that helps brands and investors achieve their objectives with Amazon. Previously, he worked with Amazon to launch the Outdoor Recreation category for Amazon Retail.A version of this article appears on AmazonPOV and has been reprinted with permission.

Boris Johnson has predicted Vladimir Putin will revel in the World Cup in Russia this summer in the same way that Adolf Hitler did in the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, and suggested the UK may advise English football fans to avoid travelling to the tournament for their own safety.The foreign secretary said about a quarter of the number of fans who travelled to watch England in Brazil in 2014 were currently expected to go to Russia. He said 24,000 people had purchased tickets, as opposed to 94,000 at the same point in the run-up to the tournament in Brazil.Johnson revealed that the British diplomat responsible for liaising with UK fans had been thrown out as part of the diplomatic expulsions in the wake of the poisoning of a Russian former spy, Sergei Skripal.Russia has also said it is closing the British consulate in St Petersburg, restricting the ability of the UK embassy to help visitors in the event of violence.Johnson said he would be seeking urgent assurances from Russia that it would fulfil its obligations under the World Cup contract to ensure the safety of fans. “I think it is up to the Russians to give us an undertaking that they will be safe,” he said.Both Russia and England have a history of violent football fans, and the risk of fierce fighting between the two sets of fans appears to be higher given the political tensions. The Russian foreign ministry responded to Johnson’s remarks by saying he was “poisoned with venom of hate, unprofessionalism and boorishness”. It said: “It’s scary to remember that this person represents the political leadership of a nuclear power.” Johnson was speaking to the all-party foreign affairs select committee and responding to remarks from the Labour MP Ian Austin, who called for England to pull out of the World Cup altogether. “Putin is going to use it in the way Hitler used the 1936 Olympics,” Austin said. Johnson replied: “I think that your characterisation of what is going to happen in Moscow, the World Cup, in all the venues – yes, I think the comparison with 1936 is certainly right. It is an emetic prospect of Putin glorying in this sporting event”. However, he said he did not think it would be fair to ban the England team from competing.Austin described Putin as a KGB “thug” who had enriched himself. Johnson said he did not believe Putin had been re-elected in a free and fair election, saying there had been no true competitive choice.Johnson again rejected Moscow’s assertion that it had nothing to do with the attack on Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, on 4 March. He said: “No matter how exactly it came to be done, the pathway, the chain of responsibility seems to me to go back to the Russian state and those at the top.”A Russian official said on Wednesday that Moscow would not accept the results of an inquiry into the source of the poison being undertaken by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. At a televised briefing to Moscow-based diplomats, Vladimir Yermakov, a deputy head of the foreign affairs ministry’s department for non-proliferation, said: “It is not possible to evaluate what happened in Salisbury within the framework of the [chemical weapons] convention and within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Deeper expert evaluations will be needed, and in any case we need to conduct our own investigations for Russia to be able to draw any conclusions.”He suggested the UK was “hiding facts” about the case that may later “disappear”.A sometimes flustered Yermakov was confronted at the briefing by diplomats from the UK, France, the US, Slovakia and Sweden all separately challenging the Russian handling of the case. The British diplomat, Emma Nottingham, accused the Russians of having “a record of state-sponsored assassinations”. Yermakov responded: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Pull yourselves away a little bit from your Russophobia and your island mentality.”EU heads of state will meet on Thursday and express solidarity with the UK over the Skripal attack but will not directly ascribe responsibility to Russia. The EU council president, Donald Tusk, said the EU would agree “to increase our resilience to hybrid threats such as undermining trust in our democracies through fake news or election meddling”. He said he was in “no mood to celebrate Putin’s election” – remarks designed to contrast strongly with a gushing letter of praise to the Russian leader from the EU commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker. Differences across the EU mean no new Russian sanctions will be proposed at least until clearer liability emerges from either the British police or OPCW investigations. Johnson said he had been struck by “the mountain of disgust globally” directed at Russia and claimed the UK had been picked on for standing up to Russia on human rights, Syria and Ukraine. Russia for its part suffered “a revanchiste bitter feeling about the way the cold war ended”, leading Putin “to want to cause trouble wherever he can”, he said. He said the UK would crack down on Russian oligarchs living in “big schlosses in fashionable districts of London”, so long as there was evidence that their funds had been gained illicitly or corruptly. Johnson said he was prepared to investigate whether wealthy Russians were sending money back to Moscow through Russian debt bond auctions. Russia raised $2bn in a debt auction in London last week. Topics Boris Johnson Foreign policy Russia Sergei Skripal Europe World Cup 2018 news

Nigel Farage has never won a seat in the UK parliament, nor has he sat at a cabinet table. Yet he has been one of the most effective British politicians of recent history. On Monday he made an announcement that showed why he cannot be discounted from exerting influence just because he cannot get elected. Mr Farage’s decision to pull his Brexit party candidates out of the 317 seats won by the Conservatives at the 2017 general election will help the hardliners in Boris Johnson’s party.Whether this is a formal pact or just a loose arrangement, it signals to liberal Conservatives, who blanch at Mr Farage’s demagoguery, that they are a vanishing species in the Tory party. Any form of Brexit that is acceptable to Mr Farage will be deeply damaging for the UK. In backing Mr Johnson’s deal, Mr Farage reveals it for what it really is: a nationalist project that sacrifices economic, constitutional and social stability on the altar of cut-throat competition and deregulation.Both Mr Johnson and Mr Farage are committed to supporting a damaging Brexit to get Britain out of the EU. It’s no surprise that Donald Trump has been urging both leaders to come together. To form a Johnson-led government will require the support of voters who will suffer the most from a hard Brexit. That is why Mr Farage peddles the idea that he is speaking up for the working-class leavers Labour has forgotten. Yet Conservatives will not give Mr Farage’s party a free run at northern seats where there’s a big leave vote, but an even bigger resistance to backing the Tories.Mr Farage, who owns 60% of the Brexit party, has described it as a “company” rather than a political party. It “won” the European elections this year but its candidates did not stand on any manifesto. There appears little intra-party democracy and Mr Farage is not troubled by local associations or a national executive committee. He is laying the ground for the emergence of a form of populism in the UK in which demagogues use digital tools and corporate structures to direct mass movements. That is what makes him so dangerous and why he should not be let near government.Viewed through the lens of Brexit, Britain is split into two tribes – one that sees the referendum vote of 2016 as inviolable and one that does not. Mr Farage and Mr Johnson have reached an accommodation because they think the outcome of the election will be decided by which Brexit tribe can best marshal its supporters. That begs the question of why the parties that want a second referendum on Brexit, like Labour and the Greens, or those who want to cancel it altogether, such as the Liberal Democrats, cannot do the same. Again, it might not be a formal alliance, because party loyalties and pride militates against it. On the ground there may be informal anti-Conservative alliances that materialise which are not sanctioned by party leaderships. Parties can also work together against a common enemy by encouraging tactical voting by their supporters.The pollster Peter Kellner calculated that if tactical voting could be used in the same way as it was in 1997, anti-hard Brexit parties would have a substantial majority. First-past-the-post rewards the two biggest parties, making Labour and Conservatives more likely to squash competitors because they fear being upended by them. If Britain’s electoral system was fairer and did not confer winner-takes-all powers to those with only minority support among voters, then electoral pacts would not be necessary.What the current political crisis is exposing, among other things, is the inadequacy of our voting system. If progressive parties take power after 12 December they ought to make fixing it a priority.

Back in the foreign affairs committee, Labour’s Ian Austin says Washington seems keen to rip up the Iran nuclear deal. Will the UK fight to keep it?Johnson says the UK is committed to the deal.Q: Is some sort of compromise possible?Johnson says he thinks it is, “it really is.”He says he now wants to persuade America to keep it. He is not sure he will be able to persuade President Trump, but he thinks they are all better off keeping the deal, and Iran not having nuclear weapons.He says it could be possible to keep the joint comprehensive plan of action (JCPOA) without America participating, but that this would be hard.Austin ends by asking why, whenever Johnson gives evidence to the committee, Downing Street sends the prime minister’s parliamentary private secretary, Seema Kennedy, along to the hearing to keep an eye on him.Johnson says that that is a tribute to how seamlessly the Foreign Office and Number 10 work together.And that’s it. The hearing is over.

“Britain is open for business,” Alok Sharma, the new business secretary, declared in an article last week extolling the virtues of the government’s new immigration proposals. Yet just the previous week the government had tried to press ahead with deporting 50 men it described as guilty of “very serious offences” to Jamaica, despite the fact that many had grown up in Britain, had been convicted of drugs-related offences for which they had already served a prison sentence and have families in the UK.These are the Janus faces of the government’s immigration policy. Even as it continues to make Britain an inhumane place to live for low-skill immigrants, to demonstrate its tough credentials to voters at home, it talks up how liberal its immigration policy is to the international business community. Judged by the low bar of Theresa May’s immigration proposals, which proposed a minimum £30,000 salary threshold for longer-term visas in a post-Brexit immigration system, Johnson’s proposed system is marginally more open. Like May, he plans a system that scraps free movement and treats EU and non-EU immigrants alike. But the salary threshold will be dropped to £26,500 and for designated shortage occupations, it will be lower at £20,480.But there are major problems with the proposed system. One is purely administrative: the lack of capacity in the Home Office, a notoriously chaotic department, to introduce such a big change. The last such change took four years to implement. The government is planning for this new system to be operational in just seven months’ time.That is just the start. Many critical sectors of the economy, such as social care, have become reliant on low-paid workers from the EU. There is huge uncertainty about how this system will work for them; most care workers, for example, do not come close to the minimum salary threshold. The government’s argument is that making it harder for low-paid sectors to rely on immigration will force up wages. This is crank economics. Social care is highly skilled work, and of course should be better paid. But it is underpaid not because of immigration, but because it relies on skills that are fundamentally undervalued by society. The government is indirectly the biggest employer of care workers and it is its lack of funding for social care that holds down wages.In making the case for overall levels of immigration to come down, Priti Patel, the home secretary, has argued that the 8.5 million “economically inactive” people aged 16-64 could do the jobs currently undertaken by immigrants. But the vast majority of these are retired, studying, full-time carers or sick. To take social care as an example again. Our ageing population means we will probably need an additional 800,000 more care workers in just 15 years. As the ratio of working-age adults to older people continues to decline, it would be very challenging to fill those vacancies without to some extent relying on immigrants. Those who argue that immigration acts to depress wages right across the economy buy into the fallacy that there are a fixed number of jobs. In fact, through spending their earnings, immigrants also create jobs. And working-age immigrants are net contributors to the exchequer: without immigration, taxes would have to go up to maintain current levels of healthcare and pension provision in an ageing society.The economics are indisputable, but there is a real danger in making the case for immigration solely in these terms. It risks real people being cast as commodities; as assets to move here, contribute and leave. That belies the reality of how human lives play out. People who come to Britain to earn a livelihood contribute far more than pounds and pence: they enrich our collective cultural life. They put down roots: they make friends, fall in love, have children. None of that fits neatly into the 2.5-year segment of a working visa.Yet this government treats immigrants less and less like human beings. Its hostile environment policy has resulted in the wrongful deportation of members of the Windrush generation who have lived and paid taxes here for decades. Men who came to this country as young children, some of whom became ensnared by county lines gangs, have been deported to countries they do not know, where their lives are at risk from gangs, despite having British children and to all intents and purposes being British. The extortionate visa, citizenship and health charges levied by a profiteering Home Office mean young people who have grown up in Britain face thousands of pounds in fees and several years of navigating Kafkaesque bureaucracy in order to secure their status. The government’s right to rent policy – whereby landlords are forced to run checks on tenants’ immigration status if they suspect they do not have the right to be in the UK – has been ruled racially discriminatory by the high court.The irony is that the British public appears far more pragmatic about immigration than the government: attitudes towards immigration have become noticeably warmer, with 90% of voters believing immigration is essential so long as its levels are determined by economic need. There are far fewer people now whose hostility to immigration is driven by prejudice than a decade ago. But there is a strong public preference for immigrants to “put down roots and integrate”, something the hostile environment makes immeasurably harder.For all the government’s sales pitch about its liberal and open approach to immigration, the message once immigrants actually get here is clear. If you live and work in Britain, but are not British, do not try to become so. Do not put down roots, settle down, or integrate. You are not welcome here. Britain is not open, not while we have a government that fails to treat those immigrants who live among us and enrich us with the dignity and humanity that they deserve.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump fabricated a tale about foreshadowing Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 attack and warning against a war in Iraq before it happened in a weekend of exaggerated boasts and faulty assertions about the U.S. fight against extremists.In a national address Sunday to announce the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State group, Trump inflated his importance in assessing the threat while persisting in his deception that he’s bringing troops home from Syria.The remarks helped cap a week in which Trump and his GOP allies also repeatedly dismissed impeachment proceedings as an illegitimate scam. A federal judge ruled Friday it is not.ADVERTISEMENTA look at the president’s claims, which also cover the economy, the environment and other topics:WAR IN IRAQTRUMP: “In Iraq — so they spent — President Bush went in. I strongly disagreed with it, even though it wasn’t my expertise at the time, but I had a very good instinct about things. They went in and I said, ‘That’s a tremendous mistake.’ And there were no weapons of mass destruction. It turned out I was right.” — news conference Sunday.THE FACTS: There is no evidence Trump expressed public opposition to the Iraq war before the U.S. invaded, despite his repeated insistence that he did. Rather, he offered lukewarm support. He only began to voice doubts about the conflict well after it began in March 2003.His first known public comment on the topic came on Sept. 11, 2002, when he was asked whether he supported a potential Iraq invasion in an interview with radio host Howard Stern. “Yeah, I guess so,” Trump responded. On March 21, 2003, just days after the invasion, Trump said it “looks like a tremendous success from a military standpoint.”Later that year, he began expressing reservations.___BIN LADENTRUMP: “I’m writing a book ... About a year before the World Trade Center came down, the book came out. I was talking about Osama bin Laden. I said, ‘You have to kill him. You have to take him out.’ Nobody listened to me.” Trump added that people said to him, ”‘You predicted that Osama Bin Laden had to be killed, before he knocked down the World Trade Center.’ It’s true.” — news conference.THE FACTS: It’s not true.His 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” makes a passing mention of bin Laden but did no more than point to the al-Qaida leader as one of many threats to U.S. security. Nor does he say in the book that bin Laden should have been killed.ADVERTISEMENTAs part of his criticism of what he considered Bill Clinton’s haphazard approach to U.S. security as president, Trump wrote: “One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin Laden is public enemy Number One, and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan. He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.”The book did not call for further U.S. action against bin Laden or al-Qaida to follow up on attacks Clinton ordered in 1998 in Afghanistan and Sudan after al-Qaida bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The U.S. attacks were meant to disrupt bin Laden’s network and destroy some of al-Qaida’s infrastructure, such as a factory in Sudan associated with the production of a nerve gas ingredient. They “missed” in the sense that bin Laden was not killed in them, and al-Qaida was able to pull off 9/11 three years later.In passages on terrorism, Trump’s book does correctly predict that the U.S. was at risk of an attack that would make the 1993 World Trade Center bombing pale by comparison. That was a widespread concern at the time, as Trump suggested in stating “no sensible analyst rejects this possibility.”Still, Trump did not explicitly tie that threat to al-Qaida and thought an attack might come through a miniaturized weapon of mass destruction, like a nuclear device in a suitcase or anthrax.___TRUMP: “Nobody ever heard of Osama bin Laden until really the World Trade Center.” — news conference.THE FACTS: That’s incorrect. Bin Laden was well known by the CIA, other national security operations, experts and the public long before 9/11, with the CIA having a unit entirely dedicated to bin Laden going back to the mid-1990s. The debate at the time was over whether Clinton and successor President George W. Bush could have done more against al-Qaida to prevent the 2001 attacks.___SYRIATRUMP: “I want our soldiers home or fighting something that’s meaningful. I’ll tell you who loves us being there: Russia and China. Because while they build their military, we’re depleting our military there.” — news conference Sunday.THE FACTS: His assertion that a pullout of U.S. troops from Syria strategically hurts Russia is highly dubious.Both Russia and Iran stand to gain, and Russia has taken steps to move in and expand its influence in Syria after Trump announced a pullout. Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reached a deal on divvying up control of an area along the Turkey-Syria border, allowing Syrian troops to move back into a large part of the territory and ensure Kurdish fighters stay out.The Kurds once hoped an alliance with Washington in battling IS would strengthen their ambitions for autonomy, but now they are left hoping they can extract concessions from Russia and Syria to keep at least some aspects of their self-rule.“The U.S. has essentially ceded its influence and power in Syria to the Russians, the Turks and the Iranians,” said Seth Jones, a counterterrorism expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.Iran and Russia are both key allies of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government, with troops on the ground in Syria. While they may publicly oppose a Turkish incursion into Syria, they probably don’t mind an operation that diminishes the U.S.-allied Kurdish forces.Some of Turkey’s incursions into Syria appeared to have been coordinated with Russia and Iran.___TRUMP: “When these pundit fools who have called the Middle East wrong for 20 years ask what we are getting out of the deal, I simply say, THE OIL, AND WE ARE BRINGING OUR SOLDIERS BACK HOME, ISIS SECURED!” — tweet Friday.THE FACTS: The troops aren’t coming back despite the tweet shouting.Most of the roughly 1,000 troops leaving Syria are going to Iraq or other locations in the Middle East such as Jordan. And some will stay in Syria.Trump has acknowledged as much at times, though he reserves the all-caps tweeting to emphasize troop repatriation.In a prior tweet, he declared: “Our soldiers have left and are leaving Syria for other places” before “COMING HOME” at a time he doesn’t specify.He said last week some forces may remain in Syria to keep oilfields secure and make sure they don’t fall into the hands of a resurgent Islamic State group.The Pentagon says it is still working on plans for how to continue the anti-IS campaign in Syria and Iraq. In addition, the U.S. is sending more troops to Saudi Arabia.___TRUMP: “American forces defeated 100% of the ISIS caliphate during the last two years.” — remarks Wednesday on Syria.THE FACTS: His claim of a 100% defeat is misleading because IS still poses a threat. Nor does the death of al-Baghdadi in a U.S. military raid mean the threat is gone.No one disputes that IS has lost its caliphate — the large swath of territory it once controlled in parts of Syria and Iraq. But the group remains a threat to reemerge if the conditions that allowed its rise, like civil war in Syria and a lack of effective governance in Iraq, are not corrected.U.N. experts warned in August that IS leaders are aiming to consolidate and create conditions for an “eventual resurgence in its Iraqi and Syrian heartlands.”One counterterrorism expert said al-Baghdadi’s death is not the end of IS.“Counterterrorism must be part of the strategy, but reducing the strategy to just special operations raids and drone targeting, as this administration seems to want to, guarantees a forever war,” said Katherine Zimmerman of the American Enterprise Institute. She said extremists’ strength and staying power lies in the support they have locally among the disenfranchised and economically deprived populations.Another concern is that the chaos triggered by the Oct. 9 Turkish incursion, which followed Trump’s decision to have about two dozen American troops step away from the attack zone, could allow larger numbers of Islamic State fighters to escape from prisons that have been operated by the Kurds now under attack.___IMPEACHMENTTRUMP: “The Ukraine investigation is just as Corrupt and Fake as all of the other garbage that went on before it.” — tweet Saturday.TRUMP: “Entire Impeachment Scam.” — tweet Friday.ARIZONA REP. ANDY BIGGS, Republican member of House Judiciary Committee: “Adam Schiff is the ideal person Democrats want to lead their baseless attempted coup to overthrow the elected leader of our government.” — tweet Saturday.THE FACTS: According to a federal judge, the impeachment proceedings are no scam.In a ruling Friday, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell affirmed that House Democrats were legally engaged in an impeachment inquiry — not an illegitimate “scam” or “coup” as Trump and his GOP allies frequently assert.Howell made that declaration in ordering the Justice Department to give the House secret grand jury testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.Howell ruled that Republicans were wrong in arguing the impeachment proceedings were illegitimate because there was never a formal vote. The judge made clear the House should have leeway to investigate allegations of presidential misconduct since it is the only federal body empowered to do so under the Constitution.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., last month announced impeachment proceedings against Trump. She accused him of abusing presidential powers by seeking help from a foreign government to undermine Democratic rival Joe Biden and help his own reelection. The move followed a complaint by a whistleblower, a CIA officer, who made the charges.The impeachment process is laid out in the Constitution, giving Congress the authority to impeach and try a president as part of its responsibilities as a coequal branch of government to provide a check on a president when he or she commits treason, bribery, or “other high crimes and misdemeanors.”___TRUMP, regarding the phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that is at the center of the impeachment investigation: “They never thought that I’d do this — I released a transcription, done by stenographers, of the exact conversation I had.” — Cabinet meeting on Oct. 21.THE FACTS: Not true. The memorandum of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelenskiy itself makes clear that it does not capture the exact words between the leaders.The document says it is “not a verbatim transcript” and instead “records the notes and recollections of Situation Room Duty Officers and NSC policy staff assigned to listen and memorialize the conversation in written form as the conversation takes place. A number of factors can affect the accuracy of the record.” It cited potential factors such as the quality of the phone connection, variations in accent “and/or interpretation.”NSC refers to the National Security Council.___TRUMP, on Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into his phone call with Ukraine’s president: “Now they have what should be extremely easy to beat, because I have a perfect phone call. I made a perfect call — not a good call; a perfect call. In fact, a friend of mine, who’s a great lawyer, said, ‘Did you know this would be the subject of all of this scrutiny? Because the way you expressed yourself, this is like a perfect call.’” — Cabinet meeting.THE FACTS: Although Trump is entitled to see perfection in his words and deeds, he appears to use the term to suggest that his conduct in the phone call was by the book and validated as such by an anonymous lawyer-friend. That’s a hard argument to sustain.In his phone call, Trump told Zelenskiy “I would like for you to do us a favor” and investigate Joe Biden, his businessman son and Democrats going back to the 2016 U.S. election. Diplomat William Taylor testified this past week that Trump directly linked his request for that favor to military aid that he had abruptly suspended to Ukraine.As for the call being “perfect,” it was actually worrisome enough so that White House lawyers moved a rough transcript of it to a highly secure system where fewer officials would have access to it than is normally the case for conversations between Trump and world leaders.Trump often points to other people describing his phone call as perfect even if they didn’t. This month, Trump claimed that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had told him the call was “the most innocent” he’s read, but McConnell said he never discussed the Ukraine phone call with Trump.___PRESIDENTIAL SALARYTRUMP: “I give away my salary. It’s, I guess, close to $450,000. ...They say that no other president has done it. I’m surprised, to be honest with you. They actually say that George Washington may have been the only other President that did.” — Cabinet meeting.THE FACTS: His presidential history is wrong.He’s not the only president since Washington to give away his salary: Herbert Hoover and John F. Kennedy gave theirs to charity.And Washington didn’t give his away. He initially tried to decline his pay but agreed to take it after Congress insisted.The presidential salary is $400,000, plus $50,000 to cover expenses.___NORTH KOREATRUMP, on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un: “You could end up in a war. President Obama told me that. He said, ‘The biggest problem — I don’t know how to solve it.’ He told me doesn’t know how to solve it. I said, ‘Did you ever call him?’ ‘No.’ Actually, he tried 11 times. But the man on the other side — the gentleman on the side did not take his call. OK? Lack of respect. But he takes my call.” — Cabinet meeting.THE FACTS: This story of Kim ghosting Obama appears to be pure fiction.Ben Rhodes, who was on Obama’s national security team for both terms, said Obama never tried to call or meet Kim.“I honestly don’t even remember being in a single meeting my entire time in the White House where anyone even suggested the idea of a Kim call or meeting,” Rhodes told The Associated Press.Obama came into his presidency saying he’d be willing to meet Kim and other U.S. adversaries “without preconditions,” but never publicly pursued such contact with the North Korean leader.He met Cuba’s President Raul Castro and spoke to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani by phone but took an icy stance with Kim in 2009 as North Korea was escalating missile and nuclear tests.“Since I came into office, the one thing I was clear about was, we’re not going to reward this kind of provocative behavior,” he said in 2013. “You don’t get to bang your — your spoon on the table and somehow you get your way.”Trump has portrayed his diplomacy with Kim as happening due to a special personal chemistry and friendship, saying he’s in “no rush” to get Kim to commit fully to denuclearization.___BIDENJOE BIDEN, responding to Trump’s tweet referring to impeachment proceedings led by House Democrats as a “lynching”: “Impeachment is not ‘lynching,’ it is part of our Constitution. Our country has a dark, shameful history with lynching, and to even think about making this comparison is abhorrent. It’s despicable.” — tweet Tuesday.THE FACTS: Biden may want to heed his own words about using the word loosely.An October 1998 clip of him in a CNN interview shows him using the same word to refer to the impeachment process against Democratic President Bill Clinton.“Even if the president should be impeached, history is going to question whether or not this was just a partisan lynching or whether or not it was something that in fact met the standard, the very high bar, that was set by the founders as to what constituted an impeachable offense,” Biden said in that interview.In a tweet later Tuesday, Biden apologized for making a similar reference two decades ago while arguing Trump’s offense was more extreme.___CLIMATETRUMP: “I withdrew the United States from the terrible, one-sided Paris Climate Accord. It was a total disaster for our country. ... So, we did away with that one.” — remarks Wednesday in Pittsburgh.THE FACTS: The U.S. hasn’t withdrawn from the accord and it won’t be out before the next election, at the earliest.According to the terms of the agreement, the first day Trump can begin the formal process of withdrawing from the 2015 landmark deal is Nov. 4, when the U.S. can submit a letter of notice to the United Nations. Withdrawing takes a year, meaning the U.S. could officially leave the day after the Nov. 3, 2020, presidential election.Under the agreement, every country created and chose its own goals to reduce carbon pollution.___ECONOMYTRUMP: “When I took office, everybody said that China would be the largest economy in the world within the first two years.” — remarks Wednesday to reporters.THE FACTS: Not everyone said that because the chances of it happening are none to slim.Even if the U.S. economy had not grown at all since 2016, China’s gross domestic product — the broadest measure of economic output — would have had to have surged an unimaginable 79% in three years to pull even with America’s. That comes to growth of more than 21% a year — something even China’s super-charged economy has never approached.___Associated Press writers Seth Borenstein, Paul Wiseman, Robert Burns and Zeke Miller contributed to this report.___Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck

Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has accused Jair Bolsonaro of turning the coronavirus pandemic into a “weapon of mass destruction” in a high-profile intervention some have seen as the start of an attempted political comeback.In a wide-ranging video manifesto – which allies, adversaries and analysts took as a signal Lula would seek to challenge Brazil’s far-right leader in the next presidential election – the leftist condemned Bolsonaro’s handling of a crisis that has killed more than 127,000 Brazilians.“Yes, so many deaths could have been avoided,” claimed the 74-year-old, who governed Brazil from 2003 until 2011.“We are in the hands of a government that attaches no value to life and trivialises death. An insensitive, irresponsible and incompetent government that flouted World Health Organization guidelines and turned the coronavirus into a weapon of mass destruction.“The overwhelming majority of those killed by coronavirus are poor, black, vulnerable people who were abandoned by the state,” he added.Lula is currently barred from running for office after being stripped of his political rights in 2018 when he was imprisoned for corruption and sidelined from a presidential race Bolsonaro went on to win.But some suspect Lula’s conviction could soon be overturned because of questions over the impartiality of his judge Sergio Moro who, after jailing Lula, was made Bolsonaro’s justice minister.That would allow Lula to run against his political nemesis in what would be the sixth presidential run of his four-decade career.In his 24-minute pronouncement Lula, who became Brazil’s first working-class president when he was elected in 2002, dropped a major hint he was plotting a revival.He described how during the Covid-19 lockdown – which he spent at home after being released from prison last November – he had “reflected a great deal about Brazil and myself, my mistakes and successes, and the role there still might be for me in our people’s struggle for better living conditions”.“I put myself at the disposal of the Brazilian people, especially the workers and the excluded,” he announced, before concluding: “From the bottom of my heart, I tell you: I’m here. Let’s rebuild Brazil together.”Allies from Lula’s Workers’ party (PT) were even more explicit, sharing his speech on Twitter under the headline: “In historic address, Lula puts himself at the disposal of the people to be president again.”Lula’s former foreign minister, Celso Amorim, told the Guardian the address left no doubt the leftist “wanted to be, and would be” a key player in the 2022 election.“This is a turning point, in my opinion … For me, we are clearly going to see a Lula-Bolsonaro dispute,” he predicted.Amorim admitted Lula’s participation depended on the courts and suggested Lula could champion another candidate or run as vice-president.“But he is clearly putting himself forwards as a leader. Whoever the candidate is, the leader is Lula … He is clearly positioning himself as the central figure. Whether he will do that like Cristina Kirchner, or whether he will be the [main] candidate – we don’t know any of this yet and it will depend on a number of factors that don’t all depend on him.”Kirchner, Argentina’s president from 2007 to 2015, staged a dramatic political comeback last October as her country’s vice-president.Lula offered a withering critique of Bolsonaro’s 20-month-old administration in his declaration, which was timed to coincide with Brazil’s independence day.He accused the pro-gun populist of overseeing an “intolerable” assault on Brazil’s indigenous communities, entering into a “humiliating” relationship with the United States, and being obsessed with destroying Brazilian culture and arming citizens. “The people don’t want to buy revolvers or rifle cartridges – the people want to buy food,” Lula said.The ex-president also alluded to reports about Bolsonaro’s alleged ties to members of Rio’s mafia: “With the rise of Bolsonaro, paramilitaries … and contract killers have stopped being covered by crime reporters and are showing up in diary columns.”Daniela Campello, a politics professor from the Getulio Vargas Foundation, called Lula’s address an unambiguous statement of his presidential aspirations.“He absolutely presented himself as [Bolsonaro’s] chief opponent ... and I think there is now the expectation that somehow he will become eligible [for election] again.”“But the feeling I have is that we’re stuck in a dispute of the past that looks hardly at all to the future,” Campello added. “I didn’t see a new agenda here. Unfortunately, right now the left lacks fresh air.”

Does someone need to impose order on the West Wing? The answer is obvious. But it wouldn’t matter whom you put in the job—George Patton, Angelo Dundee, Judge Judy, Darth Vader. If the president is going to outsource significant authority to Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and other staffers, and allow them to report directly to him, no chief of staff can perform the role as other presidents have utilized it.

Swami Sivasubramanian lives in a wooded area in the Seattle suburbs that’s a favorite with opportunistic local bears. From time to time, usually on garbage night, the animals wander into Sivasubramanian’s backyard to pillage his trash. But try as they might, he and his family had never managed to spot the intruders.“My wife really wanted to see these bears in action,” says Sivasubramanian, Amazon’s VP of machine learning. “She will always try to stay up looking for bears to visit, and she wants me to give her company.”Sivasubramanian cops to being kind of lazy on that front. But as a technologist, he’s much more proactive. He founded his solution in DeepLens, a new video camera system from Amazon Web Services that lets anyone with programming skills employ deep learning to automate various tasks. DeepLens let him placate his wife by building “a machine learning model that actually detects a bear and sends a text to her phone, so that she can wake up, saying, ‘Hey, a bear is right there digging up the trash,’ ” he says.DeepLens can perform plenty of other machine-vision tricks, such as figuring out if food is a hot dog or not a hot dog (yes, that’s a Silicon Valley reference). It can also transfer an artistic style from one image to an entire video sequence. It’s just one of a myriad of ways that Amazon is utilizing AI and machine learning across its many businesses, both for carrying out internal processes and for improving customers’ experience.Since its earliest days, Amazon has used AI to come up with product recommendations based on what users already said they liked. The algorithms behind those systems have been tweaked again and again over the years. These days, thanks to machine learning, the recommendations have gotten more dynamic, says Jeff Wilke, the CEO of Amazon’s worldwide consumer division. “Say there’s a new piece of fashion that comes into the fall season,” he explains, “In the past it might take longer for the algorithms that we use to realize that people who bought these shoes also bought this top. And with some of the new techniques we can detect those things earlier, those correlations. And then surface the new top earlier in the season.”The Echo Dot–and every Alexa-powered device–is infused with Amazon AI. [Photo: courtesy of Amazon]Other Amazon AI and machine-learning efforts power the Alexa voice assistant, give users of Amazon Web Services access to cloud-based tools, allow shoppers to grab items and walk immediately out of Amazon Go stores, guide robots carrying shelves full of products directly to fulfillment-center workers, and much more. And while the technology is vital to Amazon across most of its businesses, the range of its applications is still stunning. It’s also a key reason why the company (briefly) hit $1 trillion in market cap, and stands every chance of getting back there for the long haul.A company-wide mantra at Amazon is that every day is “Day One,” a humble contention that for all Jeff Bezos’s brainchild has accomplished, it’s just getting started. When it comes to AI and machine learning, Sivasubramanian doesn’t just pull out the standard “Day One” reference. He jokes that “it’s Day One, but it’s so early that we just woke up and haven’t even had a cup of coffee yet.”Dance of the robotsDeep inside Amazon’s 855,000-square-foot fulfillment center in Kent, Washington, 18 miles south of Seattle, a bunch of orange Amazon robots are doing a dance. Balanced on top of each of the orange machines is a yellow pod with nine rows of product-packed shelves on each of four sides. Powered by AI, each of the robots automatically sprang into action when someone somewhere in the Pacific Northwest purchased something on Amazon.com, and each is now autonomously maneuvering its way around the others in a bid to get to a station at the edge of the fenced-off robotic field where a worker will pluck the item in question and put it on a conveyor belt toward another worker who will box it up.At the scale that Amazon processes orders, peak efficiency is essential. Magnified over millions upon millions of orders a year, even a second or two saved per order makes a huge bottom-line difference.For some time, Amazon has used machine learning in its fulfillment centers “to improve our ability to predict what customers are ordering and place it in the right place,” says Wilke, “And also to improve the efficiency and speed with which we get things to consumers.”It might not seem all that sexy, but a recent AI-based innovation that allows workers in those fulfillment centers to skip one manual item scanning step per order is a big win for the company. The new technique is being applied to Amazon’s long-standing stowing process, which lets workers store items that have arrived from distributors and manufacturers anywhere on a warehouse’s shelves–so long as their location is recorded in a computer so that they can be found again on the first try. The method which has been in use has involved workers grabbing an item out of a box, using a bar-code scanner to scan it, placing it on a shelf, and then scanning the shelf. The dual scanning associates the item with its location.Now, thanks to a combination of advanced computer vision and machine-learning technology, workers will be able to simply pick up an item in both hands, slide it under a scanner mounted nearby and place it in a bin. The system is smart enough to recognize where the item was placed and record it for future reference, without the worker having to scan the bin.Brad Porter, Amazon Robotics’ VP of engineering at Amazon Robotics, says that freeing up the hand that would have been used to wield a bar-code scanner is a big boon to efficiency. “After about five minutes of doing it myself, I realized that I could pick up five or six small items… hold them in my left hand, grab one, scan it, put it in, grab one, scan it, put it in,” he says. “It’s super natural, super easy.”Robots at an Amazon fulfillment center. [Photo: courtesy of Amazon]The new system, which took about 18 months to develop, uses computer vision and machine learning algorithms to evaluate how a worker is touching items and determine when those items have been placed in a bin. Porter characterized the algorithms as among the “more sophisticated” news Amazon is using, given the need to tell whether a worker is holding up an item alongside a bin or actually placing it inside one. The system has to be able to work in different lighting conditions, and regardless of how full the bins are–something that can vary dramatically depending on time of year.In recent weeks, Amazon has turned the new system on at its Milwaukee fulfillment center and is getting ready to do the same in about 10 other centers. Given that any changed methods must not introduce inefficiencies in Amazon’s fulfillment centers without a massive negative impact, Porter’s team had to be sure the new innovation was ready. They asked, “Are we going to turn the [system] on for peak [holiday season] this year,” he says, “and we pretty much made the decision that we’re ready to go.”It’s not clear when–or even if–Amazon will roll out the new system at all of its fulfillment centers. Regardless, Porter is already thinking about how to improve it. That boils down to leveraging advances in camera technology and machine-vision processing speed. He imagines upgrading the system with more cameras involved, making it possible to recognize bar codes on a package without the worker even having to orient it towards a scanner. It might only save half a second per item, but at Amazon’s scale, that makes it very sexy indeed.Grab and goGiven that the heart of the new fulfillment center system involves using cameras and AI software to detect someone holding an item and placing it on a shelf, you might think that the same technology is in use at Amazon Go, Amazon’s automated grocery stores that allow customers to walk in, grab what they want, and simply walk out the door, with everything being charged to their account automatically.Not so, says Porter. Although there is likely some consultation going on between AI scientists across the company, Go’s hardware, which includes color and depth cameras, as well as weight sensors and algorithms, was independently developed. It reflects five years of work developing systems capable of tracking people’s handling items in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, and colors in complex environments like crowded grocery stores.As of now, there are only four Amazon Go outlets–three in Seattle and another in Chicago, with more on the way. But they are able to handle a steady flow of customers who can scan their phone upon entry, shop as much or as little as they want, pick thing off of shelves and put them back, and accurately track what they end up leaving with, regardless of numerous potential pitfalls along the way.Amazon Go only looks like a typical small grocery on the outside. [Photo: courtesy of Amazon]Dilip Kumar, the vice president of Amazon Go, says that the very act of customers picking up an item presents a challenge to the system, since it blocks the cameras’ view of an item. Go’s systems must be capable of tracking what each customer in the store has picked up–possibly including multiple identical items–regardless of how crowded the store is and even if two people dressed identically are standing side by side and reaching across each other for purchases. “You could be picking up an item here, [or] I could be picking an item there. We still need to be able to associate my pick to me and your pick to you,” Kumar says. “The challenge with all of this is not just being able to build a sensor, but also dealing with varying lighting conditions. You can look at color temperature. Things vary. What’s pink is not always pink throughout the day.”To deal with all of this, Kumar’s team designed algorithms that analyze what the cameras are seeing and look for interactions people have with products. In order to work, they have to be able to determine who took what at “the moment of truth” as an item is removed from a shelf.Kumar won’t say how accurate Go’s systems are, but it’s clear the company wouldn’t make them available to the public if they were prone to high error rates. Fo over a year, the original Seattle store–which is on the ground floor of the headquarters building in which Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos works–was accessible only to employees as the company fine-tuned the system.Next up for the Amazon Go technology, Kumar says, is to boost its algorithms so that they’re more powerful “per unit of compute” and to take advantage of cheaper sensors. Combine those two factors and Go’s systems could well be capable of more quickly identifying new items in stores without having to train the algorithms to recognize them. That’s important, he points out, when between 20% and 30% of items are new at any given time.Asked if Amazon plans on porting the Go platform to its Whole Foods empire, Wilke says that’s not likely. Rather, he sees Go as just one of many ways–including Amazon Pantry, Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, and others–of getting groceries and other items to customers. Ultimately, Wilke says, machine learning is an “advancing” technology, “which allows us to make some of these experiences better.” He adds that “real estate is hard,” and that Amazon doesn’t have long-standing expertise in it. But if a recent story by Bloomberg’s Spencer Soper is correct–he reported that Amazon is considering opening 3,000 Amazon Go stores over the next few years–the company isn’t fazed by the prospect of learning as it goes.Alexa skills for allOdds are that when most people think of Amazon and AI, they think of the company’s digital assistant, Alexa. To date, people have bought millions of Alexa-powered Echo devices, and third-party developers have built more than 45,000 skills–essentially voice-powered apps–that can do everything from help with recipes to play family games to read the news.Along with cranking out its own Alexa gizmos at a furious rate, Amazon has been working on helping third-party hardware manufacturers integrate Alexa directly into their products. Known as Alexa Voice Service, the initiative has spawned about 100 products so far from companies like Sonos, Ecobee, Sony, Lenovo, and others. Rabuchin explains that Alexa Voice Service is essentially a set of APIs in the cloud that enable hardware makers to utilize Alexa. Amazon makes its front-end audio algorithms available to the third parties, as well as guidance for building Alexa-powered devices.Amazon is also working with institutions to let them create customizable skills for Echo devices placed in college dorms or hotel rooms. As an example, Steve Rabuchin, VP for Alexa voice services and Alexa skills kit, recalls staying in a Marriott hotel and being able to get Alexa to turn the lights on and off, turn on the TV, change the channel, and ask where the gym was located.The next frontier for Alexa is letting consumers create their own custom skills. In the past, that required some basic software development knowledge. But Amazon wanted to democratize the Alexa skills creation process, so it launched what it calls Blueprints–a template-based Alexa skills creation tool that just about anyone can figure out.Blueprints let anyone teach Alexa new tricks, no coding required.Creating a skill with Blueprint is as easy as filling in a few fields and hitting save. And while the skills generally won’t be as sophisticated as ones built by professional developers, and can’t be made publicly available, they do allow for custom skills nearly any Alexa user to leverage AI for some highly personal purposes–such as giving instructions to a housesitter or stepping through a workout regimen.Amazon’s Echo Plus [Photo: courtesy of Amazon]Amazon AI everywhereOne of the primary drivers of Amazon’s rise to a near-trillion-dollar company has been Amazon Web Services, its massive cloud-based storage and server business. AWS has become a cloud standard for companies and developers wanting access to the same kind of AI and machine learning technology that powers Amazon offerings suxch as Alexa, Amazon Go, Amazon Prime Video’s X-Ray feature, estimates for product delivery times on Amazon.com, and more. “Our mission in AWS,” says Sivasubramanian, VP of Amazon machine learning, “is to put those machine learning capabilities in the hands of every developer and data scientist.”Sivasubramanian says that there’s excitement about machine learning’s potential in nearly every sector of the economy. But while executives at countless companies see how it can help their businesses, “it’s still in its infancy. [Those executives] look to us and say, ‘How can you actually help us take advantage of these machine learning capabilities to transform our customer experience?’ ”To date, Sivasubramanian says, there are tens of thousands of customers using AWS-based machine learning services across sectors including retail, real estate, fashion, entertainment, health care, and others. Those customers have a variety of levels of AI competence. Some are what Sivasubramanian calls experts–people with PhDs in machine learning–while others are simply app developers. Amazon has tailored its AI and machine learning offerings to match both sorts of customers’ needs.Some of those users have deep experience and the ability to build their own machine learning models; others just want to take advantage of models that have been created for them. That’s why Amazon built SageMaker, an end-to-end machine learning service meant to help developers build and train machine learning models and run them either in the cloud or on devices such as smartphones.Sivasubramanian ticks off a wide variety of examples of corporate customers using AWS’s AI and machine learning services. Among them include Intuit which is using SageMaker to build fraud-detection models; Grammarly, which predicts what a user is writing and what corrections are required; CSPAN, which analyzes thousands of hours of video in order to recognize celebrities and specific politicians, as well as to double the number of videos it has indexed; DuoLingo, which is using Amazon’s Polly text-to-speech service to generate individual language learning sessions; Liberty Mutual, which is using Amazon’s conversational API as a service, Lex, to build a chatbot that enables the insurance company to handle many users’ questions; and the NFL, which is analyzing plays in order to predict what the next one will be.He says that usage of AWS’s machine learning tools has grown 250% over the last year, and that since last November, AWS added more than 100 new features or services to its machine learning portfolio.One of them is DeepLens. Designed so that developers can build and fully train a machine learning model within 10 minutes of unboxing, the camera system is already being used in many ways Amazon never imagined.Of course, among those unorthodox applications is the project Sivasubramanian built to satisfy his wife’s request. And what he learned was that DeepLens was smarter than he even realized. “Initially, I had it notify for any animal, including my dog,” he says. “But this is the fun of machine learning: you constantly tune it to make sure you exclude things that are false positives, to make sure it gets more and more accurate. It’s an ongoing project so [my family] can have the best bear detector in the world.”