notes a big surprise in the Easter Sunday letter from the pope:The pope's remarks drew a response from Andrew Yang, who'd attempted a run for the U.S. presidency while advocating for a universal basic income. On Twitter, Yang called the Pope's remarks "game-changing."

Donald Trump has falsely claimed a report issued on Thursday by a Department of Justice watchdog “totally exonerates” him of allegations of collusion with Russia or obstruction of justice.The president also claimed to have the support of “the real FBI. Not the scum on top.”Trump was responding to the inspector general’s review of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state – not alleged coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow.Nonetheless he attempted to conflate the two, telling reporters at the White House: “I think the report yesterday, maybe more importantly than anything, it totally exonerates me. There was no collusion, there was no obstruction, and if you read the report you’ll see that.”Trump added: “What you’ll really see is you’ll see bias against me and millions and tens of millions of my followers that is really a disgrace and yet, if you look at the FBI, and you went in and polled the FBI, the real FBI, those guys love me and I love them.”The investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump aides and Moscow by special counsel Robert Mueller has, Trump claimed, been “totally discredited”.The DoJ inspector general’s report found no evidence that the former FBI director James Comey was motivated by political bias and did not fault his decision that Clinton should not face prosecution. It did conclude that he was “insubordinate” in failing to follow protocol and that he himself used a personal email account to conduct official business.FBI agents were also criticised for making politically charged remarks in text messages. Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were having an affair at the time, showed a “willingness to take official action to impact” Trump’s election chances, the report said.Trump rejected the inspector general’s conclusion that there was no political bias in the FBI’s actions. “The end result was wrong,” he said. “There was total bias. That was the most biased set of circumstances I’ve ever seen in my life. Comey was the ringleader of this whole, you know, den of thieves. It was a den of thieves.”Asked if Comey should be jailed, the president said: “What [Comey] did was criminal. What he did was a terrible thing to the people. What he did was so bad in terms of our constitution, in terms of the wellbeing of our country. What he did was horrible. Should he be locked up? Let somebody make the determination.”Trump held the impromptu question-and-answer session after appearing on Fox & Friends, the reverently pro-Trump morning show which conducted its broadcast from the North Lawn of the White House. In a basic and blatant mischaracterisation of the report, Trump said it had shown the FBI was biased against him “at the top level” and was “plotting against my election”. He added: “I’m actually proud because I beat the Clinton dynasty, I beat the Bush dynasty. Now, I guess, hopefully I’m in the process of beating very dishonest intelligence.”Discussing his supporters, Trump told Fox: “I have the real FBI. Not the scum on top, not Comey and that group of people.” He then repeated a threat to “get involved” with the Department of Justice, a possible move which, though never defined, has prompted alarm among constitutional experts.Trump’s TV foray was preceded by an early morning Twitter blast.“The IG Report is a total disaster for Comey, his minions and sadly, the FBI,” Trump wrote. “Comey will now officially go down as the worst leader, by far, in the history of the FBI. I did a great service to the people in firing him. Good Instincts. Christopher Wray will bring it proudly back!”He also posted: “FBI Agent Peter Strzok, who headed the Clinton & Russia investigations, texted to his lover Lisa Page, in the IG Report, that ‘we’ll stop’ candidate Trump from becoming President. Doesn’t get any lower than that!”Comey defended his actions in the New York Times on Thursday, writing: “Nothing in the inspector general’s report makes me think we did the wrong thing.”Clinton responded pointedly by tweet, writing: “But my emails.”When Trump fired Comey in May last year, the handling of the Clinton investigation was cited as the reason. Trump, however, told NBC “this Russia thing” was part of his decision. He has since denied that motivation. In April, the two men exchanged public attacks after Comey published a book, A Higher Loyalty.The firing of Comey led to the appointment of Mueller. The former FBI director has indicted four Trump aides. His former campaign manager Paul Manafort was sent to jail by a judge in Washington on Friday for violating his bail conditions. He has pleaded not guilty to financial charges. The former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, and former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos are cooperating with investigators.Trump’s supporters seized on the DoJ report. Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer, said on Thursday: “Mueller should be suspended and honest people should be brought in. Strzok should be in jail by next week.”On Friday, Giuliani told Fox it was time to “clean up the FBI” and suggested the president would not be interviewed by Mueller, a meeting which has been the subject of negotiations for some time.“Why would he get interviewed by a corrupt investigation?” Giuliani said.Chuck Todd‏, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, tweeted: “Today’s Potus performance was breathtaking in the sheer number of provable falsehoods, intentional mischaracterizations and outright lies uttered. Clearly someone feels emboldened. Will GOP leaders continue to shrug this off? Bury their head in the sand?” Topics Donald Trump Trump administration Trump-Russia investigation James Comey FBI Hillary Clinton US politics news

Northern California immigration attorneys are reeling after learning of a controversial Trump administration decision to move hundreds of immigrant detainees’ court hearings out of San Francisco and to a new courthouse in Van Nuys, a neighborhood in north Los Angeles.Legal aid attorneys and public defenders who represent the majority of detained immigrants in northern California say the government did not consult with them about the move.They are concerned the transfer will in effect deny legal counsel to thousands of people facing deportation while undoing years of work by Bay Area not-for-profit organizations and local governments to provide more robust legal services for immigrants in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention.“It’s a clear step away from justice,” Raha Jorjani, director of the immigration representation unit of the Alameda county public defender’s office, said.Under the new plan, starting 3 February, detainees held at the Mesa Verde Ice processing facility in Bakersfield will have their cases heard before judges in the Van Nuys immigration court, which opened last November.Since Mesa Verde first opened in 2015, its detainees’ cases have been heard before judges in San Francisco’s immigration court. In recent years, most detainees have started appearing via video conference, rather than being transported to the court.Responding to the growing numbers of detainee cases on the San Francisco immigration court’s docket, dozens of not-for-profit groups and government agencies teamed up to build a network of free legal resources, said Valerie Zukin, who coordinates the Northern California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice.One effort Zukin oversees is the “attorney of the day” program, which ensures that an immigration attorney is in the courtroom whenever detainees at Mesa Verde and other Ice jails have their first hearings in San Francisco.Zukin said that in 2017, only about 2% of these hearings in San Francisco’s court were being attended by an attorney to assist detainees. Today, her network of 35 legal aid groups covers more than 80% of hearings.“We’ve been spending years training people and fundraising to make these programs possible,” said Zukin. “I can say with confidence there is no program like this in southern California yet.”Studies have shown that detainees who have access to legal counsel are much more likely to obtain a bond for release and avoid being deported.The Executive Office of Immigration Review did not immediately respond to questions from the Guardian about why the agency is transferring cases out of San Francisco. A spokesperson for Ice wrote in an email that it did not comment on “pending procedural changes”.However, several immigration attorneys in the Bay Area confirmed the EOIR’s decision by sharing emails the federal agency had sent in the past few days to legal aid groups.“We were hearing conflicting information from different sources over the past few months,” said Jorjani. In December, immigration attorneys asked EOIR officials if they were in fact considering the move.“We were told not to worry,” said Jorjani.But the rumors persisted. On 14 January, the Alameda county and San Francisco county public defenders sent a joint letter to the EOIR asking again about the possible move.“We just received notice the court was moving all Mesa Verde cases to Van Nuys,” said Francisco Ugarte, the managing attorney for the San Francisco public defender’s immigration unit. “It would be one thing if they communicated to us this was their plan,” Ugarte said. “These are secretive decisions made by a secretive administration.”Ugarte oversees a team of nine attorneys who defend indigent clients facing immigration cases that are often triggered after a person is arrested and charged with a crime. He estimated that over the past couple years, possibly 100 of the San Francisco public defender’s clients had been held in detention at Mesa Verde.Jorjani said the abrupt decision would probably disrupt existing attorney-client relationships and would cut off detainees from access to the Bay Area’s robust legal community.Some assistance is provided with public funding. In July 2018, the city of Oakland and Alameda county allocated a little over $1m to hire immigration attorneys to represent detainees. San Francisco allocated over $800,000 the same year to expand its public defender’s immigration unit.Starting in 2016, Jorjani led a movement among Bay Area immigration attorneys to more aggressively challenge decisions made by immigration judges by filing petitions in federal district court. In recent cases, Jorjani’s team has succeeded in winning new bond hearings and the release of detained clients.She said the transfer of cases to southern California would make it much more difficult for her team to provide this type of advanced defense.“They need to halt this decision right now and get input from community stakeholders,” said Ugarte. Topics Trump administration California US immigration news

Donald Trump’s raison d'être has been to repeal and replace Barack Obama’s presidency, so why did he choose to replicate what might have been the worst part of his legacy, namely Obama’s infamous “red line” debacle in Syria (which signaled weakness and empowered Russia) and his withdrawal from Iraq (which led to the rise of ISIS)?In case you’ve forgotten, not long ago, Trump was calling Obama literally the founder of ISIS. The literal part was, of course, absurd. But by failing to leave a residual force behind in Iraq, Obama squandered the hard-fought gains made during the Iraq surge, allowing for the rise of the Islamic State. But isn’t that exactly what Trump has done in Syria? According to Kurdish forces on the ground, hundreds of ISIS family members and militants have already escaped. Of course, another problem is that weakness invites provocation. By allowing his red line in Syria to be trampled, Obama signaled weakness to authoritarians like Vladimir Putin. In fact, Donald Trump has been arguing for some time that the reason Russian President Putin was so bold to invade and occupy Crimea was that he had so little “respect” for Barack Obama. But by that same logic, one could conclude that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan respects Trump even less than Putin respected Obama (at least in Crimea the U.S. didn't have troops). Erdogan had so little respect that he told Trump he planned to invade northern Syria whether or not U.S. troops were there. Or, at least, that seems to be what Donald Trump's own administration officials have said while defending the president. Whether they understand how pathetic such a defense paints the president is another question. To be sure, we will have to see how this so-called “ceasefire” or “pause” plays out, but by betraying our allies, and by empowering Turkey, Syria, Russia, and Iran (what a quadrifecta!), America has created a situation where our allies no longer trust us and our adversaries no longer fear us. That is the (very) bad news.If there has been one bright spot to this, it’s the fact that so many Republicans did publicly criticize Trump for his behavior in Syria. Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger was especially outspoken, calling Trump’s decision to pull out of northern Syria “a shortsighted decision with very real and long-lasting implications.” And he’s far from being alone, even if some of Trump’s newfound Republican critics—see Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Rep. Dan Crenshaw—are still too afraid to tag (or even mention) Trump’s name in their critical tweets. I’m left wondering if this criticism of Trump’s policy in Syria might signal that some Republicans are moving toward impeachment over his Ukraine call? On one hand, it has now been demonstrated that Republicans (especially when they join together) can criticize Trump with impunity. Might this embolden Republicans to criticize Trump on other things? Could it be that they are learning his bark is worse than his bite? “The Syria debacle has introduced a new variable into the impeachment drama.”That’s one possibility. It’s also possible that criticizing Trump on Syria could actually have the opposite effect, providing cover for Republicans to oppose impeachment. Think of it. A Republican who distances himself from Trump on Syria can then proudly boast that he has bravely criticized Trump, but that “what he did with Ukraine was bad—but not impeachable.”Regardless, the Syria debacle has introduced a new variable into the impeachment drama, and it’s fair to say that the world could look very different by the time the Senate considers whether to remove Trump from office.Here are a couple of possible scenarios: Now that Trump has shown just how little he cares about American commitments abroad, and about defending borders other than the U.S-Mexico border, what happens if Putin tests him on the edges of NATO—or if Iran gets the message and starts a war with Israel?People who are utterly confident in Trump’s ability to constantly escape consequences for his actions fail to factor in that, eventually, his chickens may come home to roost. Political gravity, eventually, reasserts itself.

The triplicate paper, in essence, makes it look like the opioid epidemic was mostly the fault of Big Pharma’s marketing, not the result of an economic shock. But David Powell, a senior economist at Rand and an author of the triplicate paper, thinks both could be true. To get the worst drug overdose epidemic in U.S. history, he says, “you need a huge rise in opioid access, in a way that misuse is easy, but you also need demand to misuse the product.”The next step will be for researchers to see how the marketing of opioids interacted with economic conditions to increase the likelihood that a given place would succumb to addiction. In the meantime, researchers working on the ground say opioid addiction looks like the result of a perfect storm of poverty, trauma, availability, and pain.When Silva, the Bucknell sociologist, asked her subjects about their painkiller addictions, they would often link their problems back to the decline of coal. When the coal jobs went away, they said, families fell apart. Some people started drinking heavily and abusing their children—who then went on to be traumatized themselves and sought the relief of OxyContin. Some grew bored and aimless without a job, and they started abusing drugs to fill the time or to ease their sense of purposelessness. Some had to switch to other manual jobs, and days of heavy lifting eventually took their painful toll. OxyContin was just a short doctor’s visit away—in one case, a doctor would simply refill opioid prescriptions by phone. “The men and women in this book suffer from physical pain—muscles torn and backs worn out by heavy lifting and repetitive tasks,” Silva writes. But they also “turn to food and Percocet, heroin and cigarettes, to manage the feelings of anxiety, disappointment, and trauma from their pasts.”Her interviewees had easy access to opioids, yes, but they also felt betrayed by the world. When Silva presented her work recently, an economist told her, “This is, like, an everything problem.”“I thought that was a really smart way of putting it,” she told me. Indeed, in one of their studies, the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who coined the “deaths of despair” hypothesis, noted that opioid overdoses, suicides, and alcohol abuse are the results of “cumulative distress,” or the overall “failure of life to turn out as expected.”The solutions to this “everything problem” are not clear. Silva told me that the opioid epidemic had made some of her interviewees even more resentful, because they saw their neighbors as too weak to pull themselves out of addiction. At times, they seemed to almost celebrate the pain of withdrawal from opioids, as a necessary way of toughening up. “They actually end up supporting programs that would give people less help or less aid, because they feel like it’s enabling to keep giving help to people who refuse to get better,” she told me.One of Silva’s interviewees tried to convince her that stress is how people grow. But stress can also make people hurt. Olga Khazanis a staff writer atThe Atlantic and the author ofWeird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World. Connect Facebook Twitter

“Wow,” Trevor Noah said on Tuesday after revealing the news that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has dropped out of the 2020 presidential race. “I don’t think anybody saw this coming,” he added. “Because when this race started, she was one of the favorites.”The Daily Show host went on to compare this election “twist” to how “in season seven of Game of Thrones, we all thought Daenarys would become queen, but then in season eight we realize it was a shit TV show that none of us should have watched.”“Now, what’s been really interesting for me has been to see the conversations that have been sparked by Kamala dropping out,” Noah said. While some people say it “proves that even in the Democratic Party black women don’t have the support that they deserve,” others say “there wasn’t enough black girl magic to erase Kamala’s record as a prosecutor.” The host said he thinks it’s “a little bit of both” but ultimately had a different takeaway from the news. “All I know is, Cory Booker, I’m going to say a phrase you’ve probably never heard before in your life: You are now the blackest person in the room. Don’t let us down, Cory!” That may have been meant as a playful shot at the New Jersey senator, but it came out as an even harsher dismissal of recent 2020 entrant Deval Patrick.

Industrial orders rose by 27.9% in June over the previous month, according to figures from the Economy Ministry adjusted for seasonal and calendar factors.That was more than double the increase economists had expected, and followed an already strong 10.4% increase in May.“Today's numbers suggest that the industry could catch up with the momentum in the rest of the economy,” he said in a research note.Germany's economy took a massive hit during the pandemic shutdowns, shrinking by 10.1% during the April-June period from the previous quarter as exports and business investment collapsed.Even with the surge in June, industrial orders are still down by more than 11% on the year.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: How far can the White House go in blocking an impeachment inquiry? The White House counsel has called the House probe illegitimate and said President Trump had no need to cooperate, yet witnesses have been coming forward in the past few days, such as a recalled ambassador to Ukraine on Friday and the current ambassador to the European Union, who is expected this week. Gregg Nunziata served in senior counsel roles for Republican Senator Marco Rubio and the Senate Judiciary Committee, so he's going to give us some analysis. He's in our studios. Good morning.GREGG NUNZIATA: Good morning, Steve.INSKEEP: How well is the White House legal strategy working?NUNZIATA: It's not much of a real legal strategy, honestly. It's - the White House counsel sent a letter that is full of hyperbole, attempts to completely delegitimize congressional oversight of the president, and it tries to support that political argument with a quasi-legal case to claim that congressional oversight in this instance is somehow unconstitutional itself. I don't think it convinced any lawyers. I think it probably alienated some likely allies on Capitol Hill by suggesting that Congress has no role here.And it also hurts, I think, the president's legal strategy going forward. You want the White House counsel's office to be laser-focused on really defending institutional prerogatives of the president and of the White House, and they failed to do that here, and they kind of threw out some credibility.INSKEEP: Well, that's an interesting point that you make because the White House counsel - it's tempting to call him the president's lawyer, but he's not, right? I mean, he is the counsel for the presidency, who is supposed to defend the office and the institution.NUNZIATA: That's correct, yeah.INSKEEP: And you're saying that's not really happening here.NUNZIATA: No, I think this letter was a mistake. You know, and the letter also - to the extent the White House counsel's office should be engaged in trying to protect this president from impeachment, the letter practically writes another article of impeachment for Democrats in Congress by refusing to cooperate with their, I think, legitimate oversight into some of these questions that happened around the call with the leadership of Ukraine.INSKEEP: But this is classic political strategy by President Trump, which has seemingly worked for him before, which is just refuse everything, deny everything, say that even if I did it it was great. Is there some benefit to the president in this kind of scorched-earth policy? Because it is a negotiation, maybe if he takes an extreme position, he doesn't have to give up quite as much in the end to the House investigators.NUNZIATA: There may be a political benefit, but if I were counseling the president, I would suggest leaving those kinds of political tactics to the political operation in the White House, the communications team. I do think that the lawyers in the White House need to have real legal credibility, and this wasn't a serious legal argument whatsoever. I mean, the question here - there was a call, and a call that I think raised a lot of eyebrows. The president certainly speaks in ways that are impolitic, that a lot of politicians wouldn't - uses phrases a lot of politicians wouldn't use. To many of his supporters, that's an asset.But the question here was - was this conversation with Ukraine just the president kind of being the president, or was it part of a larger strategy, a part of a larger story between our two governments? It appears that it's been a larger. We have...INSKEEP: Because of Rudy Giuliani's months-long efforts to gain dirt in Ukraine - that sort of thing.NUNZIATA: Correct. And then the next question is, what was the nature of that story? Was it a legitimate attempt to put pressure on Ukraine, to clean up some of its practices? Or was it connected to something less legitimate, namely the president's personal and political interests?INSKEEP: Do you feel you understand what is happening in this respect - the White House counsel says totally illegitimate inquiry, we're not going to cooperate with you at all, and yet members of the executive branch are stepping forward and testifying anyway?NUNZIATA: Well, you know, that's another aspect to this in which I think the counsel's office made a mistake because now you have these witnesses having to come forward in some legal jeopardy to themselves. The White House no longer has control as it should have over this process, to be able to protect legitimate claims of executive privilege and the like. I mean, we're kind of in the Wild West here with testimony coming from individual members and former members of the government just speaking on their own, outside of coordination with the government.INSKEEP: One other thing to ask about - of course, the president was seeking political dirt or information, an investigation of Joe Biden and of his son. And Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, also has involvement in China. He's now resigning from a hedge fund that he was involved in in China. Are there - in your view, however inappropriate it may have been for the president to pursue them, are there legitimate questions about Joe Biden and his family here that deserve to be investigated?NUNZIATA: Yes. I mean, I think there's legitimate questions to investigate. I think, frankly, anyone who's been exposed to the business of foreign advocacy in Washington and foreign lobbying probably would tell you that the whole field needs to be cleaned up. And this is not just a question of president - Vice President Biden or his son or his family; it's an industry in Washington that has many unsavory aspects.INSKEEP: Mr. Nunziata, thank you so much.NUNZIATA: Thank you for having me, Steve.INSKEEP: Gregg Nunziata held senior Republican counsel positions on Capitol Hill and now advises business.Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Illustration: Rebecca Zisser/HuffPost; Photo: Getty MANCHESTER, N.H. ― It is early September, and Cory Booker is telling me he is done with stunts. When the New Jersey senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate was a council member and then mayor of Newark, one of his major goals was to bring attention to the problems of his poor, majority-minority 277,000-person city ― a feat he often excelled at with his outsize charisma and his savvy use of social media. Booker once held a hunger strike in the courtyard of a housing project to protest gang violence. He started a feud with Conan O’Brien after the late night host joked about wanting to flee Newark. He was one of the first Democrats ever to complete the food stamp challenge. But now, in a campaign-rented recreational vehicle departing the New Hampshire Democratic Party Convention and heading north toward the Maine border, Booker says he doesn’t need to turn himself into a shiny object for the benefit of the media. “When I became mayor of a city that everybody was trying to get away from, or when I was trying to beat a machine, getting attention was what I needed to do,” Booker says. “I got very good at getting this small city ― maybe bigger than some cities that other people are mayors of ― my job was to get resources and attention.” But “when I became a senator, my first year, I wouldn’t do interviews, I didn’t talk in caucus,” he continues. “I didn’t need to draw attention to myself as a United States senator. What I wanted to do was to pass criminal justice reform, work across the aisle.” The Booker campaign is seemingly pursuing the same heads-down approach, doing everything you are supposed to do to win a presidential nomination: barnstorming through Iowa and New Hampshire; building up ground games to rival those of the leading candidates; generating big ― if not game-changing ― moments at debates; and releasing policy papers that earned plaudits from wonks. He’s garnered more endorsements from state legislators than any other candidate has. The other campaigns are watching for his breakout moment. Sure, the Booker team members are frustrated with his place in the polls. But they are, perhaps surprisingly, Zen about the future of the race and their man’s place in it. “We just have to keep raising money, and I will be the nominee,” Booker says, confident enough that he openly muses about what kind of general election campaign he would run. (He wants to go to states you don’t expect Democrats to campaign in during the general, like South Carolina and West Virginia.) “Organize like hell and hope you get hot at the end,” is how his campaign manager Addisu Demissie described the campaign’s strategy in a conference call with reporters in the spring. Booker recently expressed it in emoji form: turtle emoji, greater-than sign, rabbit emoji. Just two weeks later, that tone radically changed: The Booker campaign announced it needed to raise $1.7 million in 10 days to give him a hope to compete. Instead of quietly making this appeal to top donors, the campaign put their desperation on full blast. The team leaked a memo from Demissie to NBC News, then held a press conference call to discuss it. “If we’re not able to build the campaign organization, which means raise the money that we need to win the nomination, Cory’s not going to continue running and consuming resources that are better used on focusing on beating Donald Trump,” Demissie told the reporters on the call. Scott Eisen via Getty Images Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker speaks at the New Hampshire Democratic Party Convention in Manchester on Sept. 7. The alarmist tone of the note immediately generated skepticism among both reporters and the other campaigns, leading them to believe it was a carefully orchestrated political stunt to generate attention and dollars from a candidate that had no real intention of quitting. (Demissie’s memo included a preemptive rebuttal of this argument, noting, “This isn’t an end-of-quarter stunt or another one of those memos from a campaign trying to spin the press.”) In the end, Booker’s campaign succeeded. It raised $1.7 million in the final 10 days, the most successful 10-day period of his campaign to date, and hit more than $6 million in the quarter overall. Booker also qualified for the next two presidential debates. Stunt or not, the episode raised a larger question: Just how did Cory Booker find himself in this position in the first place? ***** Booker has been receiving presidential hype since before he even entered the Senate, when he dazzled the national press with heroic anecdotes from his term as mayor: He ran into a burning building to save a constituent and, guided by Twitter, went around shoveling the sidewalks and driveways of elderly residents after snowstorms. In 2012, the Obama campaign regularly deployed him as a surrogate. The Clinton team did the same in 2016, and strongly considered him for vice president, to the point where Clinton-Booker placards had been printed. In the summer of 2018, The New York Times identified him ― along with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Vice President Joe Biden, California Sen. Kamala Harris and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren ― as one of the five leading contenders for the Democratic nomination. Suffice it to say, the first eight months of the Booker campaign have fallen short of those expectations. Voters in the early states, ticking off which candidates they’re considering, routinely list Booker as the second or third choice, often behind Warren or Biden. But, if you look at the horse race numbers from those same polls, only between one out of every 100 and one out of every 20 voters considers him their top choice. Even in the areas where he theoretically should excel ― with black voters, with young people ― Booker polls, at best, in the high single digits. Jim Demers, a former New Hampshire state legislator who is now a top Booker adviser ― his duties include driving the aforementioned RV ― said Booker’s campaign at the moment resembles former President Barack Obama’s at the same point in 2007. (Demers would know, since he was Obama’s New Hampshire campaign chair.) “The size of the field has made it very difficult to process the candidates beyond the two or three who had the highest name recognition right now,” Demers said, dismissing candidates who have spiked in the polls before Labor Day. “The real voters start paying attention. This is movement time.” Demers is right: With just a few debates left, the number of chances to make a shock-and-awe impression to move the polls is dwindling, and the top three candidates ― Biden, Warren and Sanders ― have displayed vulnerabilities aplenty without another candidate rising to challenge them. If it’s movement time, then time is running out for Booker to be more than everyone’s second or third choice. ***** That morning in September, Booker strolls onto the stage at Southern New Hampshire University at 10 a.m. Biden spoke before him and failed to rouse the still-drowsy crowd. Booker begins with a version of his stump speech, which opens with the story of how his family, turned away from buying homes in a suburb of Newark because they were Black, was eventually able to purchase one with the help of white activists inspired by the civil rights movement. About three minutes into the speech, Booker’s lines start generating audible cheers from the crowd. Six minutes in, Booker delivers one of his favorite lines ― “We gotta beat Donald Trump. But beating Donald Trump is the floor. It is not the ceiling.” ― and the applause and cheers are loud enough that he has to pause before continuing. By the 10-minute mark, Booker has the crowd echoing another one of his signature lines ― “We will rise” ― in a call-and-response pattern. He leaves to a standing ovation. In a different race, one where there weren’t more than a dozen candidates still running, the post-event headlines might have focused on Booker’s strong performance. But Booker isn’t running in that race. He’s running in the race where Warren got a standing ovation that lasted more than two minutes before she even said a word, and where her picture was splashed across the top of the New Hampshire Union Leader the next morning. In Iowa, this is what it takes. Bernie doesn’t do it. Joe hasn’t done it so far. Right now, they’re winning on name recognition. But once the rubber hits the road, that’s not going to cut it. Tom Courtney, a former Iowa state senator After his speech, a pair of cable news interviews and a gaggle with reporters who peppered him with questions about his low standing in the polls ― “We do not want to win the summer news cycle, we want to win the election,” he says ― Booker is off to a volunteer thank-you event at a pub across the street from the arena. Outside, he greets a group of volunteers from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, one of whom is wearing a cow outfit and holding a sign declaring: “Climate change cow says: Go vegan or we all die.” “My vegan people!” he calls out, before taking a selfie with the group. (While Booker is a vegan, the PETA group members say they have been attending events with all the candidates to talk to voters about how a vegan diet can help the environment.) Inside is a gathering of relatively rare creatures in Democratic politics: Booker loyalists. While Warren, Biden, Harris, Sanders and even the unorthodox entrepreneur Andrew Yang have their legions of devoted online followers, Booker does not. It’s a puzzling development for a man who came to national attention, in no small part, because of his ability to grab attention on Twitter. “I don’t know anybody who doesn’t like Cory Booker,” said one Democratic operative, requesting anonymity to speak candidly about one of the party’s brightest lights. “But he isn’t anybody’s first or second choice. There are only so many voters of so many persuasions, and his ability to draw those voters is limited when he doesn’t have a core constituency of his own.” Booker’s campaign, during its scramble to raise the self-imposed requirement of $1.7 million, seemed to acknowledge his difficulty building a uniquely loyal constituency. Many of its email pleas focused not on helping Booker win but simply on keeping him in the race. And many of the big names who endorsed keeping Booker in the race – former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, Iowa Auditor Rob Sand and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser – have not actually endorsed his candidacy. “It would be a loss for not only our party but for our country if someone like him was shut out of this race because he couldn’t raise enough money to compete,” Demissie wrote in one email. Booker asked for donations even “if you haven’t settled on a candidate but you think I bring an important perspective to this campaign.” Talking to the assembled Booker supporters, there is no uniform reason for their support: Some like his emphasis on combating gun violence, others his promise to unify the country, another says he could replicate Obama’s path to victory in 2008. But they all have one thing in common: They have met Booker in person. The Booker campaign hopes a lot more voters can do the same. During one trip to the Hawkeye State in early June, Booker stopped in Keokuk, Iowa, an 11,000-person city on the Mississippi River in the state’s far southeastern corner, where he gathered 50 people at a coffee shop, and then hung around to take selfies, record videos for friends of attendees who couldn’t make the event, listen to the whispered concerns of seniors and eventually leave with a piece of coffee cake he would give to a staffer. (The frosting wasn’t vegan.) He then spent 40 minutes at a house in nearby Burlington, where a group of less than a dozen women discussed the closure of a Planned Parenthood in the city. “Each one of the people here is going to tell 20 people about what happened,” said Tom Courtney, a former Iowa state senator who hosted the event. “In Iowa, this is what it takes,” Courtney continued. “Bernie doesn’t do it. Joe hasn’t done it so far. Right now, they’re winning on name recognition. But once the rubber hits the road, that’s not going to cut it.” Booker is betting a lot on Iowa. Even Demers acknowledged one of the two candidates from New England ― Sanders or Warren ― is more likely than not to win the New Hampshire primary. That leaves Iowa as Booker’s only major chance to make an impact before African American voters ― a key part of his theoretical winning coalition ― begin voting in larger numbers in Nevada and then South Carolina. Booker said he personally considers his team’s Iowa operation ― he has 50 paid employees in the state ― to be as strong as any campaign’s, save Warren’s. Ditto with his team in New Hampshire, where he has 30 staffers on the ground. Boston Globe via Getty Images Booker records a video of himself using Celia Botto's phone as she cheers behind him during a campaign stop in Manchester, New Hampshire, on July 13. Back in Manchester, Booker makes his way through the crowd, feeling the love, grabbing people’s phones to quickly snap a selfie. (Booker always takes the selfies himself. “You can always take the picture quicker than they can,” he says. “Most people don’t know the volume down button on iPhones is a picture taker.”) Booker delivers a quick speech to the gathered supporters. “We are building this campaign brick by brick by brick!” he exclaims. “We’re going to make sure the next president of the United States is bald!” ***** Booker’s next stop in Manchester is at Brookside Congregational, part of the liberal-leaning United Church of Christ, with a Black Lives Matter sign out front and a crowd of about 30 inside. Booker’s here for a question-and-answer session sponsored by the Granite State Organizing Project, which is focused on criminal justice reform, affordable housing and immigration. The questions start coming, and they are coming from the left end of the political spectrum. Throughout the campaign, Booker has announced his occasional “frustration” with the primary conversation. He first shared it onstage at an event with Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and has repeated it several times since. I asked Booker to explain what he meant. “I get people asking me about Greenland!” Booker said, referring to Trump’s desire to purchase the North Atlantic island. “That same week, Title X funding was being cut. Nobody asked me about that.” “It frustrates me, as the guy who lives in the inner city, when people ask ― almost as a litmus test ― first, it was ‘Is Donald Trump a racist?’ Then, it was ‘Is he a white supremacist?’” he continued. “That’s not the issue. The issue is we have a problem with white supremacy in this country. And yeah, he’s a problem. But the bigger problem is white supremacy in this country. And what’s your plan for that?” Booker’s annoyance, at times, can seem a little convenient. He entered the race under fire from the left because of his support for charter schools, his past embrace of technology companies and his ties to his home state’s powerful pharmaceutical industry. But it’s the newer debates that seem to get under his skin. He bristles when he thinks progressives are getting ahead of the country, and complicating both campaigning and governance. Questions about whether prisoners should be allowed to vote annoy him, he has said, because the focus should be on getting people out of prison in the first place. I’m a guy that’s really good at pulling people together for a common cause. That doesn’t mean I don’t stand my ground. I’m not a kumbaya guy. Cory Booker The overall effect is that Booker is in a bit of a never-never land, ideologically. He’s assembled a liberal voting record in the Senate, but declines to engage in either an out-and-out race to match Sanders on the left or the name-and-shame tactics Warren employs against Facebook and other modern-day malefactors of great wealth. But he also declines to engage in the hippie-punching many of the moderate candidates frequently deploy ― think Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet’s criticisms of “Medicare for All,” or Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s attacks on proposals to wipe away student debt. At the church, the litmus test question is about defunding Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Booker doesn’t directly engage, turning down the opportunity to provide a quick sound bite that would please activists and the media. Instead, he turns in a 15-minute answer that touches on the “deep hypocrisy” of some devout Americans, “the radical work of love,” cruelty to animals, environmental racism and the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and ultimately the fear Latinos living in Booker’s inner-city neighborhood in Newark feel. “All the issues we’re talking about are deeply interrelated,” Booker says. The crowd is nodding, listening intently. But just a few minutes later, Booker has the once-somber crowd in stitches. He’s recounting the story of his clash with O’Brien, noting he once banned the late night host from Newark Liberty International Airport, and their faux-feud ended with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton forcing them to negotiate a truce. The abrupt switch from wonky and serious to gut-busting points to another critique of Booker’s campaign frequently tossed around in D.C. circles: that he’s “goofy.” Booker has at times embraced this, giving interviews about his love of Star Trek and making a surprise appearance at Comic-Con. But some operatives think it undercuts Booker’s more serious moments. It, along with Booker’s general love of hope-and-change-and-love-and-togetherness rhetoric, presents another challenge the Booker team is striving to overcome. Booker routinely tells audiences to watch “Street Fight,” the Oscar-nominated documentary depicting his first rough-and-tumble campaign against then-Newark Mayor Sharpe James, to get a taste of how he would handle a campaign against Trump. “I’m a guy that’s really good at pulling people together for a common cause,” Booker says. “That doesn’t mean I don’t stand my ground. I’m not a kumbaya guy.” But even as Booker tells voters to turn on Netflix and watch an 83-minute-long testament to his toughness, he can’t help but sprinkle in a joke. He typically notes “Street Fight” lost the Academy Award for Best Documentary that year to “March of the Penguins.” “Penguins aren’t even that cute,” he tells audiences, in another line that usually wins laughs. “I’m cuter than a penguin.” ***** Last Tuesday morning, the Booker campaign held a conference call to announce it had raised $6 million, with a third of that coming after their desperate ask for more cash. With that funding it was able to hire 40 more staffers, in the early states and at its headquarters in Newark. Demissie insisted again that most voters were undecided. After the success of their big fundraising ask and in the service of “radical transparency” ― a radical transparency that did not extend to releasing the campaign’s average donation size or cash-on-hand number ― he said they were setting a $3 million fundraising goal for the month of October. “We’ve seen in the last 10 days that voters want Cory to be one of their choices,” Demissie said. “If you tell people the truth, and you let them know what you need, they’ll come to your aide, because they want Cory to be in this race until the end.” Whether they want him to win is an entirely different matter. RELATED COVERAGE 2020 Democrats Demand Answers In Botham Jean Witness Death: 'Horrific' Cory Booker Calls Out Beto O'Rourke's Late Support For Gun Licensing Democrats To Face Tougher Criteria For Presidential Debate In November Download Calling all HuffPost superfans! Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter Join HuffPost

Teva Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. (Teva) has been charged with conspiring to fix prices, rig bids, and allocate customers for generic drugs, the Department of Justice announced today.According to a superseding indictment filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the company participated in three conspiracies from at least as early as May 2013 until at least in or around Dec. 2015. “Today’s charge reaffirms that no company is too big to be prosecuted for its role in conspiracies that led to substantially higher prices for generic drugs relied on by millions of Americans,” said Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. “The division will continue to work closely with our law enforcement partners to ensure that companies that blatantly cheat consumers of the benefits of free markets are prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”Count one charges Teva for its role in a conspiracy that included Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Inc., USA (Glenmark), Apotex Corp. (Apotex), and others. On May 7, Apotex admitted to its role in this conspiracy and agreed to pay a $24.1 million penalty. On July 14, a grand jury returned an indictment against Glenmark for its role in the same conspiracy, which today’s indictment supersedes. According to the charge, Teva, Glenmark, Apotex, and unnamed co-conspirators agreed to increase prices for pravastatin and other generic drugs. Pravastatin is a commonly prescribed cholesterol medication that lowers the risk of heart disease and stroke. Count two charges Teva for its role in a conspiracy with Taro Pharmaceuticals U.S.A., Inc. (Taro U.S.A.), its former executive Ara Aprahamian, and others. On July 23, Taro U.S.A. admitted to its role in this conspiracy and agreed to pay a $205.7 million penalty to resolve that charge as well as its role in a separate antitrust conspiracy. Aprahamian was indicted in February 2020 for his role in the conspiracy with Teva, among other charges, and is awaiting trial. According to the charge, Teva and its co-conspirators agreed to increase prices, rig bids, and allocate customers for generic drugs including, but not limited to, drugs used to treat and manage arthritis, seizures, pain, skin conditions, and blood clots. Count three charges Teva for its role in a conspiracy with Sandoz Inc. and others. In March 2020, Sandoz admitted to its role in this conspiracy, as well as in conspiracies with other generic drug manufacturers, and agreed to pay a $195 million penalty. According to the charge, Teva and its co-conspirators agreed to increase prices, rig bids, and allocate customers for generic drugs including, but not limited to, drugs used to treat brain cancer, cystic fibrosis, arthritis, and hypertension.“During these difficult times, it is absolutely essential that our pharmaceutical companies conduct business with the well-being of the consumer in mind,” said Acting Special Agent in Charge Steven Stuller, U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General. “When generic drug companies conspire to artificially increase prices, they do so to the detriment of many who depend on these medications to maintain good health. Along with the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and our partners at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the USPS Office of Inspector General remains committed to investigating those who would engage in this type of harmful conduct.”“Today’s charges, the latest in a series of law enforcement actions taken against large drug companies, confirm that this kind of criminal behavior in the generic pharmaceutical industry will not be tolerated,” said James A. Dawson, Acting Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office. “Price fixing and bid rigging is a crime, and the American people—who rely on these drugs to treat serious ailments—are the ones who pay the price when companies like Teva conspire to raise their costs. The FBI remains committed to holding companies accountable for their illegal and reprehensible activity.”“Today’s superseding indictment against Teva is another important step in this ongoing criminal investigation, which has already recovered hundreds of millions of dollars,” said U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. “Along with our partners at the Antitrust Division, we remain heavily focused on illegal price fixing and market allocation in generic drugs and on addressing the impact those practices have on federal healthcare programs like Medicare and Medicaid.”Teva is the seventh company to be charged for its participation in conspiracies to fix prices, rig bids, and allocate customers for generic drugs. Five previous corporate cases were resolved by deferred prosecution agreements, and Teva’s co-conspirator Glenmark is awaiting trial. Four executives have also been charged; three have entered guilty pleas, and one is awaiting trial.A criminal charge merely alleges that crimes have been committed. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.Each of the charged offenses carry a statutory maximum penalty of $100 million for companies. The maximum fine may be increased to twice the gain derived from the crime or twice the loss suffered by the victims of the crime if either amount is greater than $100 million. This case is the result of an ongoing federal antitrust investigation into price fixing, market allocation, bid rigging, and other anticompetitive conduct in the generic pharmaceutical industry, which is being conducted by the Antitrust Division with the assistance of the United States Postal Service Office of Inspector General, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Washington and Philadelphia Field Offices, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Anyone with information on market allocation, price fixing, bid rigging, or other anticompetitive conduct related to the generic pharmaceutical industry should contact the Antitrust Division’s Citizen Complaint Center at 1-888-647-3258 or visit www.justice.gov/atr/contact/newcase.html.

PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea—Vice President Mike Pence and Chinese President Xi Jinping presented conflicting visions for trade and security in the Asia-Pacific, as the U.S. and China vie for global influence.At a meeting of Pacific Rim leaders Saturday, China’s leader invoked the dark lessons of World War II to warn against conflicts and unilateralism, while Mr. Pence attacked China’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative for saddling smaller nations with unsustainable debt....

In November, at the most important Communist Party meeting, which takes place every five years, Mr. Xi called on officials to strengthen the party in “government, the military, society and schools, north, south, east and west.” The message was quick to reach party members lower down in the ranks.Soon after Mr. Xi’s speech, party officials in the central province of Hunan issued a notice to members instructing them to write the party into legal documents for private and state-owned companies alike. The document was accidentally made public when a local state-owned newspaper published it, but it was quickly taken down.Over the past year, the state-owned oil giant Sinopec has begun to ask its foreign joint venture partners to legally require “party-building work,” according to one executive with direct knowledge of the requests who was not authorized to speak publicly. Party building is an amorphous term that can mean general recruiting and educating but can also refer to more direct, specific activity. The foreign executive told Sinopec that putting the party in the joint venture’s legal documents would pose major problems for the head office overseas.Sinopec did not respond to several requests for comment.Dongfeng Motors, Cummins’s partner and one of China’s biggest carmakers, has long had strong Communist Party ties.Instructors at Communist Party schools have used Dongfeng’s joint venture with Nissan as a model of how the party can be involved with business, according to the book “The Party” by Richard McGregor. When the partnership was negotiated, Dongfeng insisted that the new company give the chief party representative a senior management role, with a salary and compensation for expenses.Today, Dongfeng’s Communist Party committees are working to expand their influence further. In other Dongfeng joint ventures, committees have tried to make the party more relevant for employees by holding social events.In 2016, a group of employees from Dongfeng-Cummins traveled to the site of the Communist Party’s first base, according to Dongfeng’s website. On a rainy day, the group dressed in Red Army outfits, huddled together to hold a red flag with the hammer and sickle and smiled for the camera.

The district councils have no direct governing role. They advise the government on local issues like the provision of public facilities and services — garbage collection, traffic congestion. Yet they also matter beyond that immediate mandate, especially these days. Thirty-five of the 70 members of the Legislative Council are directly elected by voters in their respective geographical constituencies. One is a district councilor elected by and from among all the district councilors. Another five LegCo members are elected by all voters (by proportional representation) from a slate of any candidates nominated by at least 15 district councilors each. LegCo is currently dominated by the pro-establishment camp. The next election is scheduled to take place in September 2020.Perhaps even more important, 117 seats are reserved for district councilors on the election committee, the 1,200-member body that chooses Hong Kong’s chief executive. Thanks to the pro-democracy camp’s victory on Sunday and its new commanding majority of district council seats, all 117 of those election committee members will likely be from among its ranks. During the election for chief executive in 2017, the pro-democracy camp held around 350 seats of the remaining (nondistrict councilor) 1,083 seats in the election committee. (I say “around 350” because, again, classifications vary and so counts do, too.) Even if democrats can hold on to those or do a bit better — the committee will be reconstituted before the next election for chief executive (how? it’s complicated) — they may not reach the simple majority (601 seats) needed to select the next chief executive.But the greater their presence on the committee, the more difficult it will be for the Hong Kong government, or the Chinese authorities in Beijing, to manipulate or dominate the selection process. Many of the election committee’s members represent special interests — the business sector, religious groups, rural associations — and given the new balance of power, some of them, especially the business sector, may now leverage their own votes to ask more from the government.

Unlike bin Laden or Baghdadi, Soleimani had the power and resources of an entire state at his back—and open support at high levels of the government in the state where he was killed. Both bin Laden and Baghdadi died in hiding and on the run; Soleimani traveled openly in the region where his forces operated. “It’s one thing to kill someone who is considered a terrorist by everyone, including the host country,” Abbas Kadhim, the director of the Iraq Initiative at the Atlantic Council, told us. “It’s another thing to kill someone who is designated as a terrorist by the U.S. but not by the host country—Iraq, in this case.”“General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the Defense Department statement said, declaring Soleimani responsible for a series of attacks on U.S.-led coalition bases over the past several months—including one in late December that killed an American contractor. “We know that the intent of this last attack was, in fact, to kill” Americans, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a press conference yesterday morning, noting that about 100 U.S. military personnel were at the attacked compound in December, in addition to about 200 contractors. “Thirty-one rockets aren’t designed as a warning shot.”That strike prompted U.S. strikes against five targets in Iraq and Syria where an Iranian-backed militia, Kataib Hezbollah, was operating. The leader of that militia, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who also served as an adviser to Soleimani, was reported killed alongside the Quds Force commander.Earlier yesterday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper had told reporters that he fully expected Iranian retaliation for the strikes on Kataib Hezbollah, but that the U.S. might act preemptively, and Iran wouldn’t like the results. Now further retaliation from the Iranian side seems all but inevitable, even if what form that will take is unclear. Further U.S. responses may be equally inevitable.“They will strike back. Just a question of target,” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which advocates for a hard-line policy toward Iran, told us. “This ends any possibility of nuclear negotiations.”Phillip Smyth, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who studies Iran’s military forces and their proxies, called the attack on Soleimani the most important decapitation strike America has ever launched, because it’s against a state-backed entity “totally different than ISIS or al-Qaeda.”“We are talking about the core leadership of a transnational Iranian-led network,” he told us. “They controlled tens of thousands of fighters throughout the region and were old hands—true believers. These were the people who were creating the future for Iran's imperial project.” (The Islamic State is believed to still have perhaps 14,000 to 15,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria, and had no territory left by the time Baghdadi was killed in October.)

The unusually rumbustious Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit that shuddered to an ill-tempered halt at the weekend proved one thing beyond any doubt: the US and China are intent on doing to the Indo-Pacific region in the 21st century what the US and the Soviet Union did to Europe in the last. Namely, use it as the primary battleground in a global turf war for power and influence.The jousting superpowers – described by Peter O’Neill, Papua New Guinea’s prime minister and Apec host, as the the “two big giants” in the room – managed to turn what is supposed to be a peaceable platform for advancing multilateral cooperation into a noisy reprise of Captain America versus the Evil Empire. This is not what Bob Hawke and Paul Keating had in mind when Apec was launched in Canberra in 1989.On this showing at least, the forum’s 21 members, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, must decide whether they want to play Cold War 2. Several have already taken sides, or are in the process of doing so, possibly without sufficient consideration. By partnering with the US in planning a major military base on Manus island in Papua New Guinea, Australia signalled that it shares the Trump administration’s hawkish view – frankly insulting to Beijing – of the need to “contain” China.Already on the US team is Shinzo Abe’s re-arming Japan. Given Tokyo’s smouldering history of bilateral enmity, periodically rekindled for political purposes by Beijing, where else has it to go? New Zealand can pretend it has its own, independent process, but when the chips are down, it doesn’t. Other, weaker actors worry about China’s behaviour but worry more about offending it. Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines fit this category.One remarkable aspect of Xi Jinping’s command performance in Port Moresby was his evident indifference to other leaders’ views. The Global Times, a state mouthpiece, declared it was “no big deal” the summit ended without the customary joint communique. Apparently China objected to a reference in the text to “unfair trade practices”. It shows just how guilty China’s president must feel that he assumed this phrase referred to him. (It did, of course.)Accustomed to having his own way, Xi does appear to have been surprised by the resistance he encountered at the summit. It seems he was anticipating an easy win for Chinese soft power diplomacy and pecuniary influence-peddling, given the absence of both Donald Trump and the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin.Xi arrived early, bearing gifts, including $4bn for PNG roadworks – this on top of $1.3bn in soft loans previously extended to various Pacific islands. But when officials excluded non-Chinese media from Xi’s private mini-summit with selected leaders, they were taken aback by the ensuing row about freedom of the press – a concept foreign to Beijing.More serious pushback was to follow, in the compact form of Mike Pence, the US vice-president. Pence had already paraded his boss’s many China grievances at the preceding Asean summit in Singapore. Now he doubled down, publicly demanding China “change its ways” on trade, intellectual property and human rights, and mocking Xi’s prized “one belt, one road” multinational infrastructure initiative as a “debt trap” for the unwary.Pence added insult to injury by suggesting Trump could impose yet higher, punitive tariffs on Chinese good in January, and by holding a meeting with Taiwan’s representative – a very deliberate provocation. All this closely followed inflammatory remarks by the US commander in the Pacific. Speaking in Canada, Admiral Phil Davidson accused China’s military of “a sustained campaign to intimidate other nations in the East and South China Seas” by militarising manmade islands. China, he said, was constructing “a great wall of Sams (surface-to-air missiles)”.But if Xi got more than he bargained for in Port Moresby, he can take solace from the fact that, tough talk aside, the US and its would-be allies as yet lack a coherent, joined-up plan to counter China’s growing sway in the Indo-Pacific. Unlike Barack Obama, who “pivoted” to Asia, it is clearly not a priority for Trump. He snubbed both Asean and Apec, and preferred to go to Paris instead to argue with Emmanuel Macron.America First nationalism, contempt for multilateral alliances and a whimsical, transactional policy approach are not the way to build a winning ideological and geopolitical strategy. Trump and his people appear intent on drawing a line; in Port Moresby they deliberately picked a fight with China. But do they have any real idea what comes next as China pushes ahead anyway, relentless, regardless, step by patient step? Little wonder Xi was not too worried. So far, he’s winning.

Hong Kong takes a break this Sunday from months of pro-democracy protests to actually practice democracy. Voters will elect local district councils in what are the only elections still not fully precooked following China’s takeover of the former British colony 22 years ago.Given the surge in people registering to vote in this election, Beijing’s nondemocratic rulers could be handed an objective measure of Hong Kong’s desire for freedom, civic rights, and rule of law.Voter registration has set a record with the biggest increase among those under 35, an age group with a heavy presence in the protests. In addition, almost every district has a pro-democracy candidate, unlike previous elections that were dominated by pro-Beijing parties – and by local issues such as trash collection.“Now we think every ... aspect of civil society is important. We hope to regain Hong Kong, bit by bit,” said 28-year-old candidate Kinda Li to the Financial Times.The vote will be the first test of public opinion since the protests began after the city’s Beijing-controlled leaders tried to ram through a proposal to allow Hong Kongers to be extradited to the mainland for criminal trials. The bill was withdrawn in the face of millions of people taking to the streets. Protesters now demand full rights to elect top leaders under universal suffrage. Is the economy running fast or slow? It depends where you look.Even before Sunday’s vote, Beijing was reminded of Hong Kong’s legacy of rule of law. The city’s independent judiciary ruled a week ago that a government ban on face coverings during protests is unconstitutional. China strongly countered that only it can judge and decide Hong Kong’s laws. Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. If pro-democracy candidates win a majority of district seats in the election, it will show strong support for the protests and might even influence who is chosen as Hong Kong’s chief executive in 2022.Most of all, it would demonstrate that Beijing’s model of governance – which is now one-man rule under Communist Party chief Xi Jinping – is losing its appeal. Hong Kong prefers a system in which candidates compete for votes by their ideas and respect for individual rights rather than one that relies on force to keep a regime in power. A small election could be a giant message for the world’s most populous country.

Berkeley Springs, a tiny tourist town nestled in West Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains, has always prided itself on being a little bit different.There is the world-famous water-tasting competition, the healing mineral springs, and the artsy town square lined with cheese shops and crystal sellers. Locals joke that massage therapists outnumber lawyers three to one. And now, there’s the couple with white nationalist ties up on the hill, too, occupying the 132-year-old Berkeley Springs Castle.The purchase of the town’s historic landmark by the founder of the VDARE Foundation fueled a delicate split in late February between some residents who loudly opposed it, others who quietly didn’t, and many who hoped they could just ignore it. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, shutting down the town almost entirely, it quickly faded into obscurity. Now, though, VDARE’s presence in Berkeley Springs has taken on a new significance as the rapid return of the tourism industry becomes even more important for people’s livelihoods and for the survival of the town of 4,000. “People have been coming here to take the waters for 300 years,” says Jeanne Mozier, vice president of the local tourism council and president of the local museum. “There’s this sense of hospitality, of being a sophisticated little town. We were never part of that entrenched, unchangeable feeling that you get in a lot of small towns in mountain areas.”The Berkeley Springs Castle, built as a summer home for a colonel, overlooks the town square in dramatic fashion and was previously owned by the late tech entrepreneur Andrew Gosline, who bought it on a whim in 2002, restored it and often opened it up for public events. “He was, in my mind, the perfect castle owner,” said Mozier, who wrote a book on the castle. “He loved it.” When Gosline’s sons put it on the market, local officials met with half a dozen potential buyers, including three women with big divorce payouts. “If I had my way, I would have resurrected Andrew,” Mozier said.The tourism council never heard from VDARE founder Peter Brimelow and his wife, Lydia, until after the couple had bought it for $1.4 million. The contract was signed at the office of law firm Trump & Trump, owned by Virginia State Sen. Charles Trump, which represented the seller. (Sen. Trump—no relation to President Trump—declined repeated requests to comment on his role in the sale.)Brimelow told The Daily Beast he and his wife chose Berkeley Springs because it was close to major cities and they “fell in love” with the town. He said they plan to use the castle for meetings and as a studio—handy considering at least three hotels have canceled conference contracts on VDARE after learning of the group’s views. (VDARE unsuccessfully sued Colorado Springs’ mayor after a hotel there canceled a conference).Many more companies have ostracized the group. Earlier this month, VDARE was booted off Facebook for running a network of fake accounts and pages posting conspiracy theories about the coronavirus and hate speech about Asian-Americans. The group has been deplatformed and demonetized by Amazon, Google, Adsense, PayPal and MailChimp.“We aren’t presumptuous about our role here. It is not our intention to change Berkeley Springs at all,” said Brimelow, who had previously told townsfolk there wouldn’t be any “tiki torches parades” or rallies. “We will be good, quiet neighbors and use the castle, to quote a local historian, ‘for the innocent and rational amusements for the polite who may assemble there.’”While they may promise to be friendly neighbors, VDARE’s views are anything but. They describe themselves as politically incorrect and vehemently against immigration (except for “perhaps for a few thousand white South Africans”). Brimelow, a former financial journalist who immigrated to the U.S. from England, has made anti-Semitic and racist remarks.The group has boosted Sandy Hook conspiracy theories and published pieces defending racist manifestos written by the El Paso and Christchurch mass shooters. Brimelow said VDARE publishes some white nationalist writers but he denied he has white nationalist views himself, instead preferring the label "civic nationalist." He has filed a libel suit against The New York Times for calling him an "open white nationalist" and a "white supremacist."In a 2016 interview, Brimelow said he preferred to live in a white society because it's “much safer” and “the civilization levels are much higher.” “Some immigrants have relatively low crime levels, again the East Asians. Some, like the Haitians, have very high crime levels. It does seem to be correlated with race,” he said.He told a conference in 2017: “There’s ethnic specialization in crime. And Hispanics do specialize in rape, particularly of children. They’re very prone to it, compared to other groups.”The group’s pseudo-intellectual manifestos on immigration have been cited by Trump's hardline immigration adviser Stephen Miller and its logo suspiciously mirrored one used by the Trump re-election campaign in 2019.Brimelow may have assumed West Virginia would welcome VDARE with open arms: It’s one of the whitest states in the country and 74 percent of Morgan County, which includes Berkeley Springs, voted for Trump in 2016.“You find certain, I guess, Klan-ish attitudes in this state [but] we tend to be pretty fair-minded and tolerant,” said Sean Conroy, a Saint Albans resident who was so concerned by VDARE’s presence in the state that he wrote a letter to the editor of the Charleston Gazette-Mail. “The opposite side of that coin would be that West Virginians are not nosy people by nature. We tend to have an attitude with neighbors of ‘live and let live’ and I think groups like VDARE exploit that.”Brimelow said VDARE’s immigration position was no different than Trump’s and he claimed the reception in Berkeley Springs had been “warm and welcoming, but private”—save for “a whopping 12 people” who vocally opposed him.On Facebook, the reception ranged from deeply disturbed to mildly celebratory. “We work hard to be a great vacation destination, and [this] would surely tarnish the friendly image,” one person wrote. “This is a beautiful family. Let's welcome them with open arms,” another wrote. “Come on guys, villains always live in spooky castles on top of a hill,” said a third. “It makes sense!”“The castle is so prominent, it’s symbolic … so it hurts in the gut but they're here now. What would we do? Foist them onto some other small town?”— Trey Johanson, local business ownerInitially, a group of residents organized to loudly oppose the move. Now, with the return of tourism so vital, they say they’d rather focus on positive initiatives they’ve come up with to counter VDARE’s message. “Over the course of our conversation we’ve come to this: well, it looks like they're our little white supremacists now,” Trey Johanson, owner of the Fairfax Coffee House, told The Daily Beast.“The castle is so prominent, it’s symbolic… so it hurts in the gut but they're here now. What would we do? Foist them onto some other small town? They’re our responsibility so we’re going to do what we call ‘little actions’ in our town to let people know what Berkeley Springs stands for and how special it is.” The town hopes to stage its first pride parade in summer and shops have put stickers in their windows saying, “All kinds welcome.”“We welcome all who welcome all,” Johanson said.Local officials say VDARE can hardly be kicked out. “It’s all of this agitation about a hypothetical,” said Mozier, from Travel Berkeley Springs, the tourism council. “Nothing has happened, these people haven't done anything.”She said the tourism board advised the town’s council to draft an ordinance giving them power to ban large gatherings, in case any tiki torches come out. But, other than that, PR consultants told Travel Berkeley Springs to ignore VDARE and just focus on their own message: that Berkeley Springs was, until the pandemic hit, on track for a banner year. “It’s not going to change the flair of Berkeley Springs,” Mozier said. “It’s not going to change our attitude about being welcoming and open and a healing place, and we’ll just see what occurs.”

Cory Booker brought a blend of uplifting eloquence and experience organizing on the streets to a candidacy that drew comparisons to Barack Obama’s, but neither quality could carry him into the top tier of the Democrats’ presidential race. Short on cash and floundering in the polls, Booker ended his White House bid on Monday. “It’s with a full heart that I share this news — I’m suspending my campaign for president,” Booker tweeted. “To my team, supporters, and everyone who gave me a shot—thank you. I am so proud of what we built, and I feel nothing but faith in what we can accomplish together.”The exit from the race by yet another prominent black lawmaker leaves what was once a historically diverse Democratic field of presidential candidates increasingly white and old. The remaining minority candidates in the race, only one of whom is African American, all face single-digit polling numbers with little time to break out of the pack before voting begins early next month.That reality has sparked discomfort and soul-searching among party activists at a time when racial justice is central to the Democratic agenda and inspiring minority voters crucial to their hopes of retaking the White House. Three out of four of the top-tier candidates dominating the race are now whites in their 70s. Yet they have drawn significant minority support, especially former Vice President Joe Biden.Although Booker drew praise for his oratorical skills and policy acumen, his brand of politics, which melded progressive policies with frequent calls for unity, seemed not to match the mood of either liberals or moderates.Booker’s campaign theme of universal love — a promise to transcend dispiriting partisan politics and the harsh tone of the Trump era — didn’t catch fire with voters on the left who have flocked to Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who both promise a fight. Centrist voters have moved toward Biden and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who offer more moderate policies and may appear less risky to some voters who fear a black candidate would lose to President Trump. Biden’s strong support among black voters, especially older ones, also proved a significant stumbling block for Booker. Booker brought to the race a storied biography as the mayor of Newark, N.J., who took up residence in the city’s housing projects and took down a corrupt administration in his path to City Hall — a quest captured in the critically acclaimed documentary “Street Fight.”But in the current campaign, Booker’s life story competed with that of another black candidate in the race, California Sen. Kamala Harris, the child of immigrants from India and Jamaica who had hoped to become the first black woman president.The New Jersey senator fell victim to some of the same strategic miscalculations as Harris, who dropped out of the race in early December. They were both counting on their backgrounds and credentials in campaigns for racial justice to prove a big draw with minority voters in key states that vote early in the primary, particularly black voters in South Carolina. But they found themselves unable to dismantle the resilient coalition backing Biden. A newly released Washington Post-Ipsos poll found Booker was the first choice for just 4% of black Democrats nationwide, while 48% named Biden as their first choice.Booker’s uneven record on progressive issues — which he tried to make a selling point, as a post-partisan candidate unencumbered by ideological barriers — instead proved a liability in this race. In a Democratic electorate that has become more starkly divided between progressives and moderates, it was never clear exactly where Booker fit.“He’s had a hard time summing up his campaign succinctly to afford him some leverage in a race where there are so many candidates,” Dante Scala, a professor of political science at University of New Hampshire, said in an interview late last year. Scala said Buttigieg had largely usurped the mantle of the candidate offering something new and “is more of a true outsider than Booker now. Maybe years ago, coming as mayor of Newark, it would have been different.”Booker’s embrace of charter schools while Newark mayor undermined his efforts to build support among teachers in Iowa and New Hampshire, an influential bloc in Democratic primaries. His past alliance with Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who funded a major education initiative in Newark, also conflicted with the party’s more critical attitude toward big tech companies.An unauthorized super PAC run by a former Stanford University classmate did not help Booker’s reformist cause. The group sought to raise money for Booker’s presidential bid even as the candidate pledged not to accept that kind of money. In the end, the super PAC didn’t raise enough money to help him much. It shut down in November.Booker’s exit creates a reckoning for the Democratic Party. After Harris dropped out, he made the point that there were more billionaires than black candidates in the presidential race. On the debate stage, Booker emerged as a provocative voice on racial-justice issues, questioning whether the white candidates with ambitious plans on race issues have shown a commitment to fighting inequality that matched their talking points.“The reality is that our primary process privileges white men above everyone else, at the expense of the party’s base,” said a statement from Steve Phillips, founder of the advocacy group Democracy in Color, who created the super PAC to support Booker.Booker pilloried Biden in one debate for his role, as a senator, in promoting mass incarceration during the Clinton era. In another, he lit into Biden for hedging on marijuana legalization, forcefully lamenting how inequality in marijuana prosecution has destroyed black lives.The only black candidate still in the running is former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who entered the race late, is showing near-zero support in polls and seems unlikely to qualify for the Democratic debates.The lack of racial diversity in the field comes at a time when Democratic Party leaders are desperate to energize minority voters. Had black voters turned out in 2016 at the rate they did when Obama was on the ticket, Democrats likely would not have lost the White House.After Harris dropped out of the race on Dec. 3, Booker warned that the scarcity of nonwhite faces on the debate stage could doom Democratic efforts to spur a large minority turnout next fall. The warnings brought him a surge of donor support, his aides said at the time. But it wasn’t evident and his campaign remained on life support. By Monday, with a depleted war chest and lacking any clear path to victory, Booker withdrew.

The UK Parliament advanced Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit legislation on Tuesday, putting the United Kingdom one step closer to (finally) exiting the European Union.Members of Parliament (MPs) voted, 329 to 299, for the Brexit bill — the legislation that will implement the Brexit deal into UK domestic law — in its “second reading,” in which MPs express their support for the main principles of the bill.This is just one stage in the legislative process, but it’s a reassuring sign for the prime minister, whose Brexit agenda has been repeatedly sidelined by Parliament and who’s still trying to get the UK out of the EU before the end of the month.But Brexit is rarely so straightforward. Just as soon as Parliament voted to advance the Brexit bill, MPs rejected Johnson’s rapid timeline to give final approval to the deal. That makes it all but certain Johnson can’t deliver on his campaign promise to Brexit by Halloween. But it also means that Johnson’s Brexit deal is still very much alive.The first roadblock came soon after this vote, with something called the “program motion” (programme motion, to the Brits). This very boring-sounding thing was the most contentious vote of the day: It had the power to make or break Johnson’s Brexit plans.The program motion lays out the timetable for a bill’s approval. With the current October 31 Brexit deadline just nine days away, Johnson wanted everything wrapped up by Thursday. You read that correctly: The prime minister wanted to push through the legislation for his Brexit deal, which he agreed to last week after years of negotiation, before this weekend so the UK can break up with the EU next week.Many MPs, including some who just supported the bill in principle, objected to this rushed timeline, saying that lawmakers didn’t have time to fully scrutinize critical legislation.The government only published the approximately 115-page legislation, referred to as the Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB), on Monday night, so MPs barely had 24 hours to digest it before the vote on the second reading. But many still did so despite the time crunch because they don’t want to be accused of what Boris Johnson always accuses them of doing: blocking Brexit.At the same time, these MPs were a little wary about Johnson’s itinerary. The government hasn’t even published a new economic impact forecast for the deal. That’s why a majority voted Saturday to withhold approval for the Brexit deal until all this legislation passed and forced Johnson to seek an extension to guarantee lawmakers had enough time to get that done. The EU hasn’t ruled on the extension request yet; the bloc doesn’t want to be responsible for a no-deal exit, and they’d likely consent to an extension so the UK can get all the legislation completed. (Also, the European Parliament must ratify the deal, and it has some questions.)But now that MPs have all but rejected the October 31 deadline, the 27 EU leaders will have to make a decision on whether to delay Brexit, and for how long. Before the votes on Tuesday, the prime minister suggested that if MPs defy him again, he would pull the Brexit legislation altogether and once again try to call an election.If Parliament “refused to allow Brexit to happen and instead gets its way,” Johnson said Tuesday, then “the bill will have to be pulled and we will have to go forward with a general election. I will argue at that election: ‘Let’s get Brexit done.’”Johnson did pause the legislation — even though Parliament just approved it. But he held off calling for a general election, which might be a sign that he realizes he won’t have support for one, as Johnson has already lost two votes in Parliament to hold a general election. The big takeaway from Tuesday is that Brexit uncertainty prevails. Johnson got a huge win when Brexit advanced, getting more support for his Brexit deal than Theresa May could ever muster. But it wasn’t enough to, as the prime minister has put it, “get Brexit done” by October 31.

TAIPEI—Millions of Taiwanese headed to the polls in an election where a victory for the president would deliver a rebuke to China’s efforts to gain control over the island democracy.President Tsai Ing-wen, whose party advocates a distinct Taiwanese identity separate from China, staked her re-election bid ahead of Saturday’s vote on a pitch to reduce Taiwan’s vulnerability to economic and political pressure from Beijing, which claims the self-ruling island as its territory....