自从 2017 年底发布第一款产品后，Magic Leap 这家公司的运程就一直不太好。先是产品销售受阻，接着核心高管离职，并且遭遇财务问题。新型冠状病毒疫情爆发后，Magic Leap 不得不调整销售策略，暂时放弃消费者业务，转向企业市场。同时，大规模裁员应声而至。也不全是坏消息，Magic Leap 最近又获得 3.5 亿美元融资，并且有望达成一系列关键企业战略合作。与此同时，创始人罗尼·阿伯维茨（Rony Abovitz）将卸任 CEO 一职，董事会正在物色更有企业市场经验的人选。在此之前，凭借着“一条在体育馆地板跃起的大鲸鱼”，Magic Leap 成功塑造了一个 AR 黑科技公司的形象，以及足够激动人心的未来——从移动计算迁移到空间计算。一轮接一轮的融资，背后站着高通、Google 和阿里巴巴等大型科技公司。Magic Leap 融到的金额，比一些上市科技公司市值都要高。这家曾经描述了宏大愿景 AR 公司，为何如今陷进低谷？它所声称的消费级 AR，离我们还有多远？很多人把 Magic Leap 的低谷简单归结为“产品不行”，这个判断并不完全准确，至少得在前面加上一个限定条件：对普通消费者来说，Magic Leap 第一款 AR 眼镜“Magic Leap One 创作者版本”（后改名 Magic Leap 1） 确实不到及格线。但对于开发者和企业市场来说，Magic Leap One 并没有那么不堪。它和 AR 领域另一主要参与者微软 HoloLens 相比，体验其实相差不大。甚至，有的人会觉得 Magic Leap One 体验要比 HoloLens 第一代好那么一点。如今，微软 HoloLens 稳步前进，迭代了第二代，而 Magic Leap 问题频出，第二代产品不见影踪，甚至有了出售公司的传闻。或许，在最初选择了截然不同的市场开拓思路时，就已经决定了两个产品如今的差别。从一开始，Magic Leap 就旗帜鲜明地面向消费者市场，希望能用 AR 眼镜取代手机、电脑和其他屏幕。而 HoloLens 发布之初，在 C 端赢得极大呼声，但却从来没有打过消费者市场主意，而是专注于企业市场。微软 HoloLens 团队负责人艾利克斯·吉普曼（Alex Kipman）一直都认为，消费者 AR 时机仍不成熟。最新的消息表明，HoloLens 第三代产品专为国防和企业客户开发，不会有消费者版本。销售数据证明了 HoloLens 的判断。Magic Leap CEO 罗尼·阿伯维茨曾希望他们的产品卖出 100 万台，后来调整为 10 万。但事实上，根据 The Information 援引消息人士的报道，Magic Leap One 在上市六个月后仅售出了 6000 台。而 AR 企业 Rave 的首席科学家卡尔・古塔格（Karl Guttag）从消息人士处获悉，这台设备销量低于 2000 台，因为大多数都是免费送出的。相比之下，微软在 HoloLens 发布两周年（2018 年 5 月）之际，宣布销量为 5 万台左右。2018 年底，微软还获得了美军的 10 万台订单。2019 年 12 月，在消费者市场折戟的 Magic Leap，不得不调整路线，从消费者市场转向企业用户。Magic Leap 的转变事实上说明了，消费者 AR 眼镜市场在当下远未成熟。以 Magic Leap 产品为切入点，我们可以一瞥 AR 眼镜离真正的消费级还有多远。首先从最基本的产品层面来说，AR 眼镜一直没能解决最核心的问题——消费者为什么要购入一个全新品类的设备，并且戴在头上几个小时？手机最初的核心功能是打电话，后来接入了蜂窝网络，让用户很方便地 24 小时在线。这些都是台式电脑和笔记本不能实现的。AR 眼镜仍未找到类似的核心价值点。戴着 AR 眼镜玩城市探索游戏（比如《Pockmon Go》）或 AR 导航，或许是不错的切入点，但受众不够广泛，并且使用频次不够高。Magic Leap One 发布后比较尴尬，常用演示都是一些小体验或者艺术作品，缺少真正的“杀手级 App”。其次在技术层面，AR 眼镜面临性能、续航和佩戴舒适度之间的矛盾，而且还没有通用的交互方式。要想通过眼镜呈现更好的 AR 效果，就得加入特定的零部件，实现 6 自由度追踪和 SLAM（同步定位和地图构建）能力。如果把这些因素都考虑进入，一款 AR 眼镜的重量，至少超过了 500 克（参考 HoloLens）。500 克是什么概念？普通眼镜重量大多在 10 克以上、30 克以下。10 多倍于普通眼镜重量，这样的 AR 眼镜跟佩戴舒适度很难沾上边。为了降低重量，一些 AR 眼镜会采用分体式设计（计算和显示单元分开）。Magic Leap 和苹果传闻中的 AR Glass，都是这样做的。通过这种方法，Magic Leap 把重量降到了 316 克，比 Beats Studio 无线耳机重 56 克，跟普通眼镜重量还是有一定距离。Magic Leap One 的续航时间仅有 3.5 小时，远远不能支撑消费者日常使用。在电池技术没有大进步的情况下，要想延长续航时间，只能增大电池体积。如此一来，又回到了 AR 眼镜重量这一问题。每次计算平台的更迭，背后必然是交互方式的革命。电脑背后是用户图形界面、键盘和鼠标。手机背后是触控屏幕和多点触控技术。AR 眼镜呢？至少目前还没有一套通用的、符合人体工程学的交互方案。或许有人会提到像钢铁侠那样手势交互，以及基于智能语音助手的语音交互。手势交互是 HoloLens 的主要交互方式，但在企业端有效，不等于在消费者市场行得通。手势交互有几个明显的短板：没有触觉反馈，长时间举着手很容易疲劳，以及在公共场合显得很怪异。至于语音交互，更加适合私密空间内，比如自己家里和车上，很少有人会在地铁上呼叫 Siri 播放一首音乐。并且，习惯性的、目标明确的任务用语音交互还行，比如设置闹钟、播放音乐、呼叫联系人和打开空调。逛淘宝、挑外卖和刷抖音，这类没有明确目标的动作，用语音交互就会很别扭和低效。Magic Leap One 进行了另一种交互方式的尝试——手柄。这是在 VR 眼镜中证明还算高效的交互载体，但 VR 的场景主要是室内，而 AR 涉及室外场景。让消费者随身携带一个手柄，显然也不是最佳方案。在消费级 AR 眼镜还有诸多短板的情况下，过度营销给消费者高期待，无疑是危险的。从体育馆地板上跃起的鲸鱼，到掌心的大象，Magic Leap 擅长用一个又一个的 YouTube 视频营销造势。但罗尼・阿博维茨后来接受 The Information 采访时承认，公司在展示技术时发布了误导性产品演示视频。有的视频是特效制作出来的，来自新西兰一家特效公司 Weta Workshop，并不是 AR 眼镜真实效果。Magic Leap 所采用的宣传手法，多少与硅谷一种隐秘的创业文化有关：Fake it till you make it，意思是先把自己的想法宣传出去，吸引投资人和人才加盟，然后去完成所宣传的目标。在医疗高科技血液诊断公司 Theranos 倒台后，这种文化越发被诟病。和 Theranos 一样，高调宣传博取注意力同时，Magic Leap 在产品上保持绝对神秘。公司 2010 年成立，但直到成立 6 年后，才让媒体体验那台体积很大的原型机。成立第 7 年，第一款产品 Magic Leap One 才正式亮相。事实上，Magic Leap One 本质是一个开发者版本，售价 2295 美元起，并不真正面向消费者销售。但 Magic Leap 此前给公众塑造的高期待，还是与实际交出的产品形成了反差，公司不可避免被贴上了“骗子”标签。在 AR 眼镜领域，还有一家热衷于视频营销的公司 Daqri。这家公司已经进行资产清算，被 Snap 所收购。一位 Daqri 前员工在接受采访时说：“一直有人在制作视频。营销，是深植于这家公司 DNA 的一部分。而营销部门，也成为了公司的核心部门。”在消费者市场不顺、转向企业市场的 Magic Leap，会是下一个 Daqri 吗？[1] 为什么我不看好 AR 眼镜？ - 知乎吴升知[2] 硅谷的隐秘创业文化：骗子和英雄往往只是一念之差[3] 从神坛跌落，它的命运或许是对所有AR创业者的警醒

On Friday, the New York Times released a bombshell report which said the FBI reacted to Donald Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey in May 2017 by opening an investigation into the president’s ties with Russia.On Saturday, on Twitter, Trump reacted with familiar anger and abuse. Also true to form, Comey was more arch.“I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made,” he wrote, adding an attribution: “FDR.”According to practice firmly established in the age of government and scandal by tweet, journalists raced to check whether Franklin Delano Roosevelt actually said those words. The answer was that he did – or some of them.According to records made available online by the Franklin D Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, Roosevelt made the remark on the campaign trail, in a speech in Portland, Oregon, on 21 September 1932.“My friends,” he said, “judge me by the enemies I have made.”The man who would become the 32nd president was referring to the owners of power utilities whose actions he deemed to be against the interests of the American people. The transcript records that his remark was greeted with: “Cheers, prolonged applause.”On Saturday, thanks to the miracles of Google, it also quickly became clear that Comey was by no means the first public figure to have reached for – and slightly misquoted – FDR’s Portland speech. Topics James Comey Donald Trump Trump-Russia investigation US politics Social media news

Google says it has deleted more than 2,500 YouTube channels tied to China as part of its effort to weed out disinformation on the video-sharing platform.The Alphabet-owned company said the channels were removed between April and June “as part of our ongoing investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China.“The channels generally posted “spammy, non-political content,” but a small subset touched on politics, the company said in a quarterly bulletin on disinformation operations.Google did not identify the specific channels and provided few other details, except to link the videos to similar activity spotted by Twitter and to a disinformation campaign identified in April by social media analytics company Graphika.The report comes as tensions between the US and China over technology and social media rise ahead of the US general election. On Wednesday, the White House said it was stepping up efforts to purge “untrusted” Chinese apps from US digital networks, calling the Chinese-owned short-video app TikTok and messenger app WeChat “significant threats.”TikTok faces a deadline of 15 September to either sell its US operations to Microsoft or face an outright ban. US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said a US campaign called “Clean Network” would focus on five areas and include steps to prevent various Chinese apps, as well as Chinese telecoms companies, from accessing sensitive information on American citizens and businesses.In the run-up to Trump’s November re-election bid, US-China ties are at the lowest ebb in decades. Relations are strained over the global coronavirus pandemic, China’s military buildup in the South China Sea, its increasing control over Hong Kong and treatment of Uighur Muslims, as well as Beijing’s massive trade surpluses and technological rivalry.Disinformation seeded by foreign actors has emerged as a burning concern for American politicians and technologists since the 2016 presidential election, when Russian government-linked actors pumped hundreds of thousands of deceptive messages into the social media ecosystem.Many have spent the past four years trying to avoid a repeat of 2016, with companies like Google and Facebook issuing regular updates on how they’re combating online propaganda.In an interview with state news agency Xinhua on Wednesday, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi accused Pompeo of trying to “drawn an iron curtain” and create new divisions, calling actions against TikTok a “a textbook case of bullying”.“Anyone can see through clearly that the intention of the US is to protect it’s monopoly position in technology and to rob other countries of their proper right to development,” said Wang.

image copyrightReutersimage captionThousands protested outside a police station in HyderabadOutrage is mounting in India after the alleged rape and murder of a 27-year-old vet in the city of Hyderabad.Thousands protested outside a police station in the city, demanding accountability. Police have suspended three officers.Meanwhile family members have turned away visiting politicians and police officials, demanding action instead.Rape and violence against women remain at high levels despite widespread public anger at high-profile cases.The victim's charred remains were discovered after she disappeared on Wednesday. Was Delhi gang rape India's #Metoo moment?Why India's rape crisis shows no signs of abatingPolice allege she was gang-raped before she was killed. Four men have been arrested in connection with the case.Two of their mothers have spoken out, calling for them to be punished if they are found guilty. "You give whatever punishment (to them). I have a daughter too," one told The Press Trust of India.At a police station on the outskirts of Hyderabad on Saturday, thousands of people gathered to protest, insisting the culprits must face the death penalty. Elsewhere in the country there were other protests and vigils for the victim - who cannot be named under Indian law.image copyrightReutersimage captionPolice used sticks to push back protesters in Shadnagar on Hyderabad's outskirtsIn the community of Shamshabad in Hyderabad, where the victim lived, residents locked the main gate and held placards saying: "No Media, No Police, No Outsiders - No sympathy, only action, justice."image copyrightReutersimage captionPeople in Delhi held a vigil on Saturdayimage copyrightAFPimage captionProtests such as this one in Amritsar continued on SundayProminent politicians have also spoken out, including Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, general secretary of the main opposition Congress party."Our mindsets have to be jolted into changing, into rejecting violence, into refusing to accept the abhorrent manner in which women are being brutalised on a daily basis," she said.Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not yet commented on the case, however.image copyrightAFPimage captionYoung members of an NGO protested in SiliguriThree police officers have been suspended following allegations by the victim's family that they had not acted quickly enough when the victim was reported missing.Officers suggested she may have eloped, relatives told the National Commission for Women, a government body.The woman had left home on her bike at about 18:00 local time (12:30 GMT) on Wednesday to go to a doctor's appointment.She called family later to say that she had a flat tyre, and a lorry driver had offered to help. She said she was waiting near a toll plaza.Efforts to contact her afterwards were unsuccessful, and her body was discovered under a flyover by a milkman early on Thursday morning.Under Indian law, a rape victim cannot be identified even after death, but on Friday the woman's name was the top Twitter trend in the country for several hours as tens of thousands of angry tweets demanded justice.India court blames 'promiscuous' rape survivorDelhi rapist says victim shouldn't have fought backRape and sexual violence against women have been in focus in India since the December 2012 gang-rape and murder of a young woman on a bus in the capital, Delhi. But there has been no sign that anti-female violence is abating.According to the latest government crime figures, police registered 33,658 cases of rape in India in 2017 - an average of 92 every day.media captionThe woman fighting back against India's rape cultureAll images subject to copyright

It is claimed that the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, had a prophetic start to his political career: he was accused (a controversial trial found him not guilty) of devising an aborted plan to press for higher wages by detonating bombs in his army barracks. Decades later, he finally seems to have managed to blow something up: his country’s image overseas.Indigenous peoples in the Amazon have warned that Covid-19 might lead to their extermination, since the government gives them no protection and their lands have been invaded by land grabbers and illegal miners, incited by Bolsonaro’s anti-indigenous rhetoric. Satellite data has shown deforestation of the world’s largest tropical forest is out of control. An already weakened economy is heading for a depression, possibly the worst crash in the country’s history. Some days ago, the veteran journalist Elio Gaspari cited a Brazilian businessman who works on international markets: “The way Brazil’s reputation is going, in a while I’ll only get responses from answering machines.”Brazil used to be seen as a kind of colourful giant, with plenty of sun, good football, great music, friendly people, and favelas where more daring visitors could spend their dollars on “real-life tourism”. While such an image might have been a cliche, it was one that gave the country a degree of soft power on the international stage. Nobody used this image better than the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “Our people’s souls, their eyes, their warmth, their rhythm, their colour and their smiles are unbeatable. The world has finally recognised it: Brazil’s time and turn have come,” he said in 2009. In June 2013, with an economic crisis knocking at the door and the uncharismatic Dilma Rousseff in power, the world watched on as protests erupted across Brazil. The period of euphoria over the country’s redemocratisationafter the 1964-1985 military dictatorship had petered out. The Workers’ party, which had symbolised the country’s best hopes, had grown corrupt in power, buying votes in congress mostly paid by construction firms in exchange for building contracts. There was a growing sentiment that democracy was not delivering what it had promised in such areas as public security, education and health. A protester in São Paulo on Sunday, whose masks reads ‘Bolsonaro out’. Photograph: Van Campos/Zuma Wire/Rex/ShutterstockThree years later, Rousseff was impeached ostensibly for window dressing government accounts, although this was a pretext for political reasons. Lula was convicted on charges of personal corruption in 2017 as part of a controversial judicial process. The former president has always maintained his innocence and argued the case against him was also politically motivated.In the years before Bolsonaro’s ascent, marginalised communities demanded their place at the country’s political centre. The black community and women fought to have power in a country built on racism, and where violence against women and members of the LGBTQ+ community has reached alarming levels. Assassinated in March 2018, Mariele Franco embodied this hard-won power: the leftwing city councillor was female, black, lesbian and from a favela.No one has better leveraged hatred, fear and frustration than Bolsonaro. He has done so especially among sections of the white middle-class, who have suffered the erosion of their buying power and watched as the black community refused to return to its historical subaltern position. And especially among men challenged by women who decried sexual harassment and misogynistic jokes. Perceiving that its cultural, racial and class privileges were threatened, a slice of Brazilian society has sensed quicksand beneath its feet.In his election victory speech last year, Bolsonaro promised “liberation from socialism, inverted values … and political correctness”. His own advocacy of violence, including praise for torture and the assassination of opponents, is interpreted by his followers as “authenticity”. He has spoken out against black people, indigenous peoples, women and the LGBTQ+ community along with his adversaries, all labelled “communists”. Brazilians who had hidden their prejudices deep in the internet’s sewers began displaying them in daylight and on social media like trophies. Bolsonaro, in power, had redeemed such people. Now the price is being paid – in human lives, and in Brazil being made into a global pariah – for this investment in hatred. The world watches as Brazil grows more militarised and authoritarian. Nine ministers are from the armed forces and almost 3,000 members of the military hold second-echelon positions.Signs of an olive-green coup abound. On Sunday, Bolsonaro arrived by military helicopter to join a protest against the supreme court and congress, which have tried to limit the president’s abuses. He then rode through the crowd on a police horse. One of his main groups of supporters, 300 do Brasil, has camped in the capital. They are armed and use Nazi symbols. Augusto Heleno, a retired general and national security adviser, drew support from retired military officers when he warned of “unpredictable consequences” for the country if the court pursued its demand for the president to hand over his mobile phones in a case involving fake news. In a public letter, the officers intimated that there was a possibility of “civil war”. The press is also under attack, transformed into an enemy of Brazil by Bolsonaro. The real Brazil never corresponded to the cliched image of a gentle giant, projected for export. But not even the most pessimistic Brazilian could have predicted that in 17 months Bolsonaro would hijack all the country’s joy and creative power. A rising number now think it is easier to survive the virus than the president.Brazil today is masked in hatred. But there are other Brazils, and they resist. This weekend, previously irreconcilable figures from the left and right and from all walks of life released a manifesto in which they declared that two-thirds of Brazilians want a government that respects the constitution and want to feel “joy and pride in being Brazilian once again”. Jurists from across the country published a statement in the country’s leading newspapers demanding the armed forces respect democracy. It is not just the country’s image that is being contested: it is the country’s soul.• Eliane Brum is a Brazilian journalist, author of The Collector of Leftover Souls – Dispatches from Brazil. This piece was translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty.

Clint Eastwood has been working in Hollywood longer than many folks posting here, and haven't been denied work. Neither has John Malcovich or Robert Duvall. There may be some political bias in Hollywood, but the primary bias is profits. Plenty of actors of the "right" political alignment can't get work either, and it's mainly because the bean counters have decided their names won't sell movies. Let's face it, the real bias in Hollywood is age, beauty and sex. If your a male actor, and you keep yourself in reasonable shape, you can keep going for a long time. If you're a woman, you're often dead in the water by your mid-40s. There are exceptions, but those exceptions are usually actors of such significant renown, or more wisely, like Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford, have their own production companies and act as their own executive producers, and thus have a helluva lot more clout when they go out looking for cash to make a film.As to editing films for various markets, that's been going on for decades. China may be the most visible form of that, but producers are also mindful of countries like Malaysia, Singapore and the like where domestic censorship and decency laws means they often have to recut films, sometimes redubbing lines, sometimes outright filming alternate scenes, just to get past the censor.This all boils down to one thing. Hollywood has only one bias; and that's money. The same town that could produce an anti-establishment film like Easy Rider could pump out what could only be regarded as the greatest pro-war film ever made; Patton, and all within a few years of each other. And you know why? Because someone somewhere thought "I bet these films can make money".If the likes of Vince Vaughan and Tim Allen have a problem, it's simply that no one is very interested in seeing their films (I feel bad about Allen, because, after all, he made Galaxy Quest, the best Star Trek movie ever made).

closeVideoCory Booker and Kamala Harris reverse course and endorse Joe BidenIt seems like just yesterday that then-2020 hopefuls Booker and Harris were attacking their Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden; reaction from Mark Steyn, author and columnist.New Jersey Sen. Cory Anthony Booker will be among the speakers to address the 2020 Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Thursday.During the final night of the convention, the longtime senator will try to rally support for presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.THE 2020 DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION: WHAT TO KNOWBooker had served as Newark's mayor from 2006 until October 2013 when he won a special election to replace Frank Lautenberg as senator. In 2014, Booker won the election for a full term and became the ninth African American senator in U.S. history.Booker has touted that he has dedicated his political career to "fighting for those who have been left out, left behind or left without a voice." Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. during a Democratic presidential primary debate Texas Southern University in Houston on Sept. 12, 2019. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip) As a senator, Booker has long advocated for criminal justice reform and frequently speaks out about increasing the minimum wage. Booker was also seen as a leader in the fight to protect the Affordable Care Act. He championed proposals to "build upon the law, increase access to care and lower costs."WHAT TO WATCH FOR WEDNESDAY AT THE DNC: HEAVY HITTERS GO TO BAT FOR BIDENHe was deemed a rising star in the Democratic Party and even spoke at two previous Democratic conventions, in 2012 and 2016. However, his presidential run fizzled earlier this year.In January, the Democrat pulled his bid from the race, but he pledged to do “everything in my power to elect the eventual Democratic nominee for president.”By March, Booker endorsed Biden, announcing on Twitter that the former vice president would “restore honor to the Oval Office and tackle our most pressing challenges.”Booker will run for reelection to the Senate this year. A handful of candidates have launched campaigns for the seat, but Booker is expected to have an easy path to reelection.The Associated Press contributed to this report.

It was a brutal morning for special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors as federal judge T. S. Ellis repeatedly questioned the broad scope of the probe of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians during the 2016 presidential election.An hour-long hearing on the defense ’s motion to dismiss the 32-count indictment against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, which includes bank fraud and tax evasion, among charges, was a proceeding that was part comedy and part boxing match.Judge Ellis hit prosecutor Michael Dreeben right out of the gate, at times mocking and laughing at assertions made by the attorney, known by many as something of a criminal law savant.“These allegations clearly pre-date the appointment of the special counsel,” the 30-year veteran of the bench said just two minutes into the hearing. “None of it had any relation to the campaign.”Interrupting Dreeben repeatedly, the judge then offered his own view of why federal investigators went after Manafort, saying it was part of “a time-honored practice” of prosecutors,” adding, “You get somebody in a conspiracy and then you tighten the screws.” The judge added, “Ive been here a while, the vernacular is ‘to sing,” referring to prosecutors persuading a defendant to talk.The judge appeared inclined toward the defense argument that the Special counsel appointment order was overly broad, the judge added, “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that,” referring to a prosecutor using charges as leverage over a defendant to get more information or wrap up other potential targets.The judge said a prosecutor’s job is “to get an indictment,” adding, “(President) Trump’s prosecution or impeachment- that’s what you’re really after.”Dreeben appeared caught off guard, as the judge repeatedly peppered the attorney about the prosecution's motives.“We are the Justice Department. We are not separate from the Justice Department,” Dreeben asserted, trying to regain his footing.As Dreeben attempted to explain that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is supervising the Russia investigation, set out in an August 2017 memo the specific parameters of the Manafort investigation to include his work in Ukraine, the judge shot back, “What we don’t want - we don’t want anyone with unfettered power.”He added that “nobody has unfettered power", expanding his comments to include government more broadly. “Not even the President of the United States.”The judge then asked the government to give him an unredacted copy of the memo. Dreeben said he would have to run that request by the “national security community” so as to safeguard sensitive matters in the document that relate to the ongoing investigation.The judge, at one point, even tried to ask why the government would take over an existing criminal case in Virginia against Manafort - but then hand off another matter concerning President Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen to New York. Dreeben said he was “not at liberty to say why.”The judge asked why Mueller couldn’t just hand the case against Manafort back to Virginia prosecutors, and Dreeben tried to explain that the Special Counsel’s Manafort indictment arose from it’s original authority to investigate the Trump campaign and any links to Russia.Manafort lead defense attorney Kevin Downing spent little time arguing his motion to dismiss.While Dreeben tried three times to argue the government’s case against dismissing the indictment, at one point the judge - who said he is “not a fan of football” referenced a sports show in which one commentator is known for saying, “Come on man” to his fellow announcers’ suggestions —- said, “I understand your argument, but ‘Come on, man.’”The judge said he would take all arguments “under advisement” and would rule another day.And though the day appeared to be a clear win for the defense, one former criminal defense attorney who spent 10 years arguing cases before Judge Ellis tells ABC News, “Be careful. He’s very unpredictable.”A trial for Manafort is set for July 10.During his address to the National Rifle Association in Dallas later on Friday, Trump praised the judge as “really something very special...he's a respected person."

“We started at zero on the wall, and we compromised a lot after that, and we are now asking them to change, too,” said Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard, Democrat of California and a member of the 17-member House and Senate conference committee tasked with hammering out a compromise.Mr. Trump caught on. When Mr. Shelby presented him with the Democrats’ demand, he rejected it quickly, according to two people briefed on the exchange.“These are the people coming into our country that we are holding and we don’t want in our country,” the president told reporters at the White House on Monday. “That’s why they don’t want to give us what we call ‘the beds.’ It’s much more complicated than beds, but we call them ‘the beds.’”In private, Republicans responded with a plan that would exempt many detained immigrants from the cap, including those people either charged with or convicted of crimes, including misdemeanor drug offenses and violent felonies. That, in turn, was rejected by Democrats.“You have ICE agents picking up mothers and fathers and children in their own neighborhoods. That’s why the beds issue is so much more important than the wall,” said Ms. Roybal-Allard, whose Los Angeles-area district is 85 percent Hispanic, the highest percentage of any district in the country.The number of beds occupied by detainees fluctuates over time, influenced by a variety of factors, including ICE enforcement policies and the flow of migrants at the border with Mexico. The rate of that flow is unpredictable and determined by factors such as the performance of the economies north and south of the border, crime, gang activity and the business practices of coyotes paid to transport migrants from Mexico and Central America to California and the Southwest.

Trump’s core message in announcing a U.S.-mediated halt to fighting between the Turks and Kurds was that in his calculation, these costs are eclipsed by the benefits of extracting the United States from the Middle East, at least militarily. Yes, the Trump administration will for now keep a small number of forces in Syria around oil facilities in the north and at a base in the south, has yet to pull U.S. troops from conflict zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recently deployed thousands of American soldiers to Saudi Arabia after Iranian attacks on oil facilities there.But what should be obvious to allies and adversaries alike from Trump’s comments today, if it wasn’t evident already, is that his heart isn’t in these deployments and in involving the United States in any regional conflicts. The president’s goal “is to have all American troops out of Syria, and that’s something that we believe will ultimately happen,” a senior Trump-administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters after the president’s speech.In remarks that America’s enemies, from ISIS to the Taliban to Iran will no doubt heed, Trump made clear that while he is willing to make some modest diplomatic and economic investments in molding developments, he has little appetite for expending military resources to secure U.S. interests—even when it comes to something as central to the defense of the homeland as preventing the resurgence of the world’s most virulent terrorist groups with, relative to the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a small deployment of U.S. troops.“Let someone else fight over this long-bloodstained sand,” Trump said today, regarding territory on which more than 11,000 Kurdish fighters perished in the fight against ISIS so U.S. troops didn’t have to. (The president thanked these fighters for their “sacrifices” and said they’d “been terrific.”) The United States has done a “great service” and “great job” for Turkey, Syria, and the Kurds by engineering a pause in their perpetual fighting, he argued, “and now we’re getting out.”Even as he denounced Barack Obama for not retaliating militarily against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against civilians in 2013, Trump expressed the very same fatalism about the Middle East that had prevented his predecessor from pulling the trigger to enforce his infamous “red line.”“We have avoided another costly military intervention that could’ve led to disastrous, far-reaching consequences,” Trump said of his decision not to oppose the incursion by Turkey. “We have spent $8 trillion on wars in the Middle East … But after all that money was spent and all of those lives lost, the young men and women gravely wounded—so many—the Middle East is less safe, less stable, and less secure than before these conflicts began.”

Towards the end of our conversation about his new memoir, For the Record, David Cameron’s mobile rings. His daughter Nancy is on the line. She wants to know if he will be free to come and see her awarded a school prize. “I’ll be there, darling,” he assures her. “I’ve almost finished all these hideous interviews.”For the past week, and for the first time in more than three years, Cameron has barely been off the airwaves or out of the media. The hideous interviews have come thick and fast. Some of the headlines they have made have been calculated, like the settling of scores with Boris Johnson and Michael Gove over Brexit. Others have been inadvertent, like the revelation that Cameron lobbied for the Queen to “raise an eyebrow” about the Scottish independence campaign during the referendum in 2014.At his launch party on Tuesday, the former prime minister joked that there were two hardback bestsellers being published this month. “One’s a book about a riven society and a dangerous dictatorship,” he told guests. “And the other’s by Margaret Atwood.” His own book, it is clear from our interview, has a wider purpose. Three years after his premiership collapsed in the wake of the vote to leave the EU, Cameron is trying to regain the right to be heard, above all on Brexit and on the referendum that swept him from office.“I totally understand that there will be some people I will never convince, who will say you should never have had it,” Cameron says of the 2016 vote. He knows that millions of remain voters blame him viscerally for everything that has happened since then and probably always will. “But I think there are a lot of people who can also see that there was a growing inevitability about having a referendum and, yes, there was a problem in the Tory party, but the relationship with the EU was a far bigger one. Britain’s position was becoming more tenuous, and we had to fix it. I hope that I can convince people that it was an honest and thought through attempt to deal with the issue.”This is the nub of the case that weaves its way right through the 700 pages of Cameron’s memoir and through much of what he has said in interviews this week. The UK’s relationship with the EU was always both necessary and contingent, he argues. Until now, every prime minister for the last 40 years has simultaneously wanted a seat at the top table and a special deal for Britain. Every one of them, even Tony Blair, felt they had to fight off moves to political union. “These weren’t pretend ghouls and ghosts,” Cameron says. “They were real.” It’s a useful reminder that Cameron, so often dismissed as an insouciant optimist, is at heart a very practical politician.He is insistent that British ambivalence has origins that long predate the migration crisis or the rise of Nigel Farage. Cameron traces the roots back to Margaret Thatcher’s support for the EU single market in the 1980s. “The single market was both the best thing and the worst thing for Conservatives. We created it. But then we didn’t like the legislation that was needed to make it work.”“The EU is a law-based organisation that doesn’t like exceptions,” he continues. “The differing speeds issue had to be addressed, especially with the eurozone.” Cameron thinks the balancing act would have had to continue even if remain had won in 2016. He quotes the downbeat assessment of an anonymous official (surely the Bank of England deputy governor, Jon Cunliffe) telling him “it would have kept us in the EU for another 10 years”.“My biggest regret”, he says, is that he let expectations about his 2015-16 renegotiation get too high. “I should have made it clear that some of the things my colleagues were arguing for were not available – picking and choosing which laws to obey, radical cuts in the budget, some sort of country club membership. These things are not possible.” He thinks there was more substance to the renegotiation deal he brought back from Brussels in February 2016 than is now acknowledged. The concessions he achieved were “a big deal for the EU. They hated it.”Some of that defiant confidence drains away when Cameron talks about the referendum process itself. He thought “a lot” about writing a enhanced majority threshold into the referendum legislation, but it never happened. “I agonise about that one.” He thought the Electoral Commission “got it wrong” by insisting the choice on the ballot was between remain and leave, not yes (Cameron wanted a yes-to-Europe campaign) and no. He had always thought June 2016 would be the optimum date. Now he is not so sure. “We lost the vote so it’s worth asking the question.” He is scathing about Labour’s role in the campaign under Jeremy Corbyn. “They were awol.”Cameron’s own stance on Europe has not changed three years on. “I’m a remainer,” he says, without equivocation. And it is as a remainer, albeit a pragmatic one, that he has watched events unfold – and now unravel – since he walked away in July 2016.He says supportive things about Theresa May. “She was definitely a moderniser.” But his disagreement with her Brexit strategy is barely concealed. He approves of the fact that “she got a deal”. He “shares her frustration” that it was then voted down by “the people who most wanted Brexit”. But, crucially, he says that “picking one of the existing models, a Norway-style model, would have been a safer and more secure way to deliver Brexit while safeguarding the economy.”And he is critical of her failure to adapt her strategy after the 2017 election. “If you think about it like that, then the red lines, the election result and not reaching out more until too late to other support have had an impact. You need Labour support for a partnership Brexit. If you go back to the beginning, to 2016 and particularly after 2017, you might have been able to get more buy-in. The government went in a different direction, with the red lines and all the rest of it.”And, now, today, under the very different leadership of Boris Johnson? Cameron’s answer may surprise many, since he admits he is open to a second referendum if Johnson fails to make a deal. “I think it is more difficult now. Logically, where we are is either Boris gets his deal and brings it back and passes it, or there are three options: you can find another deal, you can have a general election, or you can have a second referendum. We’re running out of ways to get unstuck what is stuck.“I think the first choice is to deliver the first referendum with a deal. But I’m not keen at all on no deal. That would be a big risk for the country. But if we get stuck, it [a second referendum] should be an option and it shouldn’t be ruled out. I think we’re better off in, trying to fight for Britain’s interests rather than trying to form a partnership which I think we could make work but which isn’t the answer.”Cameron’s memoir ranges wide across many issues. He remakes the case for his Tory party modernisation project during the opposition years from 2005 and for the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition’s austerity programme after 2010. Though he admits that “some of the early speeches were a bit ‘Hello birds. Hello trees.’” he is convinced that his 11-year leadership has been hardwired into “a modern compassionate Conservative party”. The book also contains some very good anecdotes about everything from Brussels summits to visiting Balmoral. Many who read the pages on the death of his son Ivan in 2009 will be moved to tears.In the end, though, everything in Cameron’s story always comes back to Brexit. “It is very difficult to try to put Brexit to one side because it’s so massive,” he admits. But he sticks to his fundamental argument about his defining legacy. “It wasn’t some cranky view that there would have to be a referendum. The idea that this was just a Tory party drama, a Tory obsession, is not correct. Yes, it was a particularly big problem for the Conservative party and the pressure was growing and growing. But I was wrestling with a genuine problem. The trouble was I lost.” Topics David Cameron Brexit Politics books Autobiography and memoir Biography books European Union Europe features

Here are the week’s top stories, and a look ahead. Also, we’re following breaking news about the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jet, which killed the more than 150 people aboard. Boeing identified the plane as a 737 MAX 8, the same model that crashed in October in Indonesia. ImageCredit...Alex Brandon/Associated Press1. 47 months.The sentence for Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, struck many as lenient, compared with the 19 to 24 years recommended under sentencing guidelines. Mr. Manafort, above in 2017, had perpetrated a decade-long, multimillion-dollar fraud scheme, but Judge T.S. Ellis said he lived “an otherwise blameless life.”This week, a judge in federal court in Washington will sentence Mr. Manafort on two conspiracy charges, which carry a maximum penalty of five years each. Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, will also be sentenced this week.And Michael Cohen, the president’s former fixer and personal lawyer, sued the Trump Organization for refusing to pay him $1.9 million in legal costs. We also obtained six checks from Mr. Trump to Mr. Cohen that show how the president tried to prevent alleged sexual misconduct from going public.Have you been keeping up with the headlines? Test your knowledge with our news quiz. And here’s the front page of our Sunday paper, the Sunday Review from Opinion and our crossword puzzles.____ImageCredit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times2. House Democrats tried to put to rest an uproar over Representative Ilhan Omar’s remarks, seen by some as anti-Semitic, with a bill condemning hate.The scandal overshadowed the passing of a comprehensive reform bill — dismantling voting barriers, limiting money in politics and imposing stricter ethics rules on federal officials. Above, Ms. Omar at a news conference for the reform bill with Speaker Nancy Pelosi.In last week’s will-they-or-won’t-they 2020 developments: John Hickenlooper, a two-time Colorado governor, is running for president. Former Vice President Joe Biden is 95 percent sure he is, too. The leading Democratic candidates have largely broken with consensus-driven politics and embraced progressive ideas. Here’s what that means for moderates.Check our candidate tracker for updates on the crowded presidential field.____ImageCredit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times3. The southern border is experiencing a “humanitarian catastrophe,” according to Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security secretary.She urged Congress to support the president’s border wall, although it was not clear how that would solve the humanitarian crisis. Her testimony came as the number of migrants crossing the border without authorization reached an 11-year high in February. Above, migrants in Penitas, Tex., turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents in February.And now, new data shows that 245 children have been newly removed from their families since a federal judge ordered the government to halt routine separations.The Senate is poised to overturn the president’s national emergency declaration this week. The only question: how big the Senate margin will be.____ImageCredit...Pablo Rochat4. Happy bullversary! It’s been 10 years since the bull market began. But most aren’t celebrating the more than $30 trillion in wealth generated since then. We wrote about how the psychological and financial damage inflicted by the 2008 financial crisis continues to weigh heavily. The caution around stocks could last for decades.On the jobs front, the economy produced a mere 20,000 jobs in February. It was the smallest gain in well over a year, but there were encouraging signs in the data as well.Separately, a Chinese official has suggested a trade compromise with the United States that could make a pact easier to reach. But he did not answer a question about whether President Trump and President Xi Jinping might meet in Florida this month to seal a trade deal.____ImageCredit...Doug Mills/The New York Times5. In news from around the world: North Korea is adding to its weapons arsenal and nuclear infrastructure, which President Trump publicly acknowledged after longtime warnings from intelligence officials.Satellite imagery taken Friday showed that the Sohae satellite launch site was being rebuilt. North Korea had begun dismantling the site after talks between Kim Jong-un, the country’s leader, and Mr. Trump last summer, but the progress is now in doubt. Above, the two leaders in Hanoi, Vietnam, last month.We also wrote about how the Philippines is grappling with the growing presence of the Islamic State in its southern region, where weak policing and dense forests offer a haven for insurgents.____ImageCredit...Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images6. The U.S. women’s soccer team sued U.S. Soccer, accusing it of “institutionalized gender discrimination,” just three months before the Women’s World Cup.The pay gap and differences in training, coaching and even medical treatment aren’t limited to soccer. In golf last year, for example, the world’s top-ranked woman earned as much as the 33rd-best man. Above, the team at the 2015 Women’s World Cup in Vancouver.We compiled eight other times in recent memory when women fought for equality in sports, including the ways W.N.B.A. players are speaking out about their own pay gaps. N.B.A. players, in their starting salaries, make about eight times as much as the average W.N.B.A. player.____ImageCredit...NIBSC/Science Source7. The global health community reached a milestone: A second patient with H.I.V. was reportedly cured of the infection that causes AIDS.The procedure that cured the first man of H.I.V. infection seems to have cured a second patient. Both milestones resulted from bone-marrow transplants given to infected patients. But the transplants were intended to treat cancer in the patients, not H.I.V.Translating the latest success into a practical treatment will take years — if it happens at all. Other recently revealed advances are more likely to affect the immediate course of the AIDS epidemic, including monthly injections of long-acting H.I.V. drugs.____ImageCredit...Paul Beaty/Associated Press8. There were several #MeToo developments.The singer R. Kelly appeared in his first interview on CBS after being charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. In an interview with Gayle King, that was parodied on “Saturday Night Live,” Mr. Kelly portrayed himself as the victim of a smear campaign fueled by social media.“The face-off between the wrathful Mr. Kelly and the stoic Ms. King was a clash of temperaments,” our TV critic writes. “But it was also a collision of eras: the moment of the reckoning coming face-to-face with decades of impunity.” Above, Mr. Kelly leaving jail in Chicago on Saturday after being detained for missing child support payments.Separately, Mario Batali agreed to give up his stake in all of his restaurants, more than a year after the chef was accused of sexual misconduct. Of all the famous chefs and restaurateurs accused of sexual harassment, Mr. Batali is the first to pay such a price.____ImageCredit...Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York Times9. And now for something completely different: the work songs of cowboy poets.Ranchers and seekers of the “mythic West” travel each year to Elko, Nev., to practice a tradition born of labor and regional identity. Our reporter and photographer traveled to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, now in its 35th year, and recorded 10 readings from the poetry event. Above, the poet Deanna McCall in downtown Elko.In the poem “Sweetly Singing,” Amy Hale Auker writes, “Ours is a work song— / a song of doing, with hands and hearts.”____ImageCredit...Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro. Source photograph: Larry Busacca/Getty Images.10. Finally, don’t miss our best Weekend Reads.We talked to a swimmer saved by what she lost, and the owners of the world’s last Blockbuster store in Bend, Ore., who have no plans to close. We also have The Times Magazine’s annual music issue and the 25 songs that matter right now, including Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s “Apeshit,” Robyn’s “Honey,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”For more suggestions on what to read, watch and listen to, may we suggest these eight new books our editors like (or these famously scathing reviews of classic books from the Times archive), a glance at the latest TV recommendations, and our music critics’ latest playlist.Have a melodic week, and enjoy that extra hour of sunlight today.____Your Weekend Briefing is published Sundays at 6 a.m. Eastern.You can sign up here to get our Morning Briefings by email in the Australian, Asian, European or American morning, or here to receive an Evening Briefing on U.S. weeknights.Browse our full range of Times newsletters here.What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at [email protected].

Essential workers at major companies like Amazon, Instacart, and Target across the United States on Friday protested for better safety protections, working conditions, and pay during the coronavirus pandemic. The event attracted considerable media attention and political support, pushing companies to respond to the basic demands workers have been asking for since the beginning of the disease’s spread in the US and signaling that these workers have a sympathetic ear in the broader public.By some measures, the protests — along with a recent series of walkouts or “sickouts” at Amazon’s warehouses and a general strike at Instacart — could be seen as underwhelming. Participation hasn’t been enough to shut down warehouses or, according to companies, slow down overall business. Both Amazon and Instacart have said they’ve seen record sales during the pandemic, and despite labor actions, there seem to be no signs that growth is slowing down.“While there is tremendous media coverage of today’s protests, we see no measurable impact on operations,” wrote Rachael Lighty, an Amazon spokesperson, in a statement to Recode, which also stated that the company is committed to worker safety has spent $800 million on additional worker safety measures since the pandemic hit. Target and Instacart also sent statements saying that the companies are committed to worker safety; a spokesperson for Target said the company is aware of fewer than 10 Target workers who attended protests.But regardless of scale, the protests were historic and, to a degree, effective. For the first time, organizers brought together a coalition of low-paid, non-unionized, often temporary employees from some of the largest companies in the US. They gained the backing of major political leaders like Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who tweeted in support of workers. And more importantly, their protests drew significant media coverage and public support at a time when the customers are more grateful and sympathetic than ever to the workers essential in keeping them supplied with food and necessary goods during the pandemic. Publications like the Washington Post, the Los Angles Times, and Vice as well as broadcast networks like CNN covered the event, and social media posts about it were shared widely. Many of the places where workers gathered to protest, such as New York and California, currently have stay-at-home orders. In pictures and video of the events from those locations, protesters are largely seen wearing masks and face coverings. It’s unclear if workers were able to maintain social distancing in each protest.“We haven’t seen anything like this since the 1930s — a crisis like this and workers who are hurting badly,” said Thomas Kochan, a professor at MIT who leads research on work and employment. Kochan explained that, in the past, times of severe crisis have led to workers gaining rights, and he thinks the current conditions will “wake up” the general public to long-standing labor issues. Organizers of the protests at different companies have remarkably similar demands: more access to protective gear like masks and gloves, extended time off to recover from sickness, and higher pay. While companies have changed policies in response to some of their concerns, workers say it isn’t enough. Instacart shoppers, Amazon pickers, and FedEx delivery workers have been meeting virtually through the pandemic on Zoom, Telegram, Facebook, and other platforms to coordinate today’s action.“We formed this alliance because we all have one common goal, and it’s to save our communities and save our families,” said Christian Smalls, the lead organizer of the strike and a former Amazon warehouse employee at its Staten Island, New York, facility. In March, Amazon fired Smalls after he organized a walkout at the facility where he worked. The company said he was fired for violating social distancing rules, an allegation that Smalls has denied. After the firing, a top lawyer at Amazon called Smalls “not smart or articulate” in leaked notes from an executive meeting. Amazon’s top leaders appeared to view Smalls as a flawed leader who wouldn’t be effective in organizing his peers..But Amazon may have underestimated Smalls. In the wake of his dismissal, the 31-year-old father of three gained the support of the mayor of New York City, State Attorney General of New York, and several senators to investigate the circumstances his firing. And now, with Friday’s protests, Smalls has proven that there’s an audience for worker issues beyond any one worker or company. So while we aren’t witnessing a strike like the historic and violent May Day worker protests of 1886, when hundreds of thousands of workers demanded an 8-hour workday, Friday’s action was nevertheless a potent reminder that in a pandemic, companies can’t simply ignore workers’ demands. In the age of social media, even small groups of workers can attract huge amounts of attention.Support Vox’s explanatory journalismEvery day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today

One week ago, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper announced nearly all US troops in Syria would be withdrawn; Sunday, Esper said those troops will be stationed in western Iraq where they will continue the fight against ISIS. The secretary’s comments come amid concerns the US withdrawal in Syria will facilitate the terrorist group’s resurgence, particularly as Kurdish allies are currently focused on an invasion by Turkey.Esper told reporters he coordinated the move with his Iraqi counterpart as he flew overnight to Afghanistan Sunday, where he plans to kindle the beginnings of a new peace agreement with the Taliban after Trump walked away from talks last month. The secretary said the troops will have two initial tasks: “One is to help defend Iraq and two is to perform a counter-ISIS mission as we sort through the next steps.”Beyond his claims the US has fully defeated ISIS, Trump has made it clear he wants to end US involvement in the Middle East. For instance, shortly after a more limited troop withdrawal was announced in early October, the president defended reducing US presence in Syria by tweeting, “GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY!” In the same tweet, he also argued that because the troops were being removed, “THE USA IS GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE!”But the move Esper announced Sunday — like Trump’s decision to send new troops to Saudi Arabia — doesn’t do that. And it isn’t clear it will silence bipartisan critics in Congress who argue Trump’s Syria policies have damaged US interests in the region.Wednesday, Trump faced a bipartisan rebuke of his Syria strategy in the House of Representatives, when that body voted 354-60 to condemn his decision to withdraw troops from that country. As Vox’s Ella Nilsen and Li Zhou reported, many of the president’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill are concerned about how the withdrawal will affect Kurdish forces, who are US allies:Trump’s decision to remove troops from Syria has previously prompted questions from many Republicans who have favored American intervention in the region and voted to preserve it. Sens. Pat Toomey (R-PA), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Joni Ernst (R-IA) were among those who argued that Trump’s actions were a “betrayal” of the United States’ Kurdish allies, when he made the announcement last week.Still others, like Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, have cited ISIS as a concern as well. Graham tweeted he hopes “abandoning the Kurds won’t come back to haunt us, ISIS won’t reemerge, and Iran will not fill the vacuum created by this decision,” but that he worries Trump’s policies could be “a disaster worse than President Obama’s decision to leave Iraq.”There are still plenty of ISIS members in the region, many of whom are being held by the Kurdish militias in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as Vox’s Jen Kirby has explained: ISIS fighters are reportedly planning mass prison breaks, and the chaos of a Turkish attacks have already allowed ISIS-linked detainees to escape from makeshift prisons in northern Syria while SDF fighters dealt with the incursion. Trump has worked to downplay concerns of ISIS prison breaks, and his administration has argued, “Turkey will now be responsible for all ISIS fighters in the area captured over the last two years.” And Trump himself has tweeted the president of Turkey “has very strongly informed me that he will eradicate whatever is left of ISIS in Syria.” But Kirby notes that might not be so simple:Though [Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan] is happy to claim he’s fighting ISIS, his focus is most certainly the Kurds. And it’s not clear Turkey itself has the capacity — or desire — to take on this responsibility of guarding ISIS fighters or how such a transfer would even work, as the SDF and Turkey are essentially battling each other.Another issue is that ISIS is known for being adaptable, and experts fear even a few ISIS escaped fighters could cause a lot of damage. “Even a small number of hardened, dedicated fighters could pose a major terrorism threat; research has proven they are far more lethal,” Brookings Institution fellow Daniel Byman wrote for Vox. “The Islamic State is highly opportunistic, and it will use the ensuing chaos and distraction of its enemies to reconstitute itself, increasing the danger of international terrorism as well as local violence.” Sunday, Trump once again downplayed such fears, tweeting what he said was a quote from Esper (Reuters’ Idrees Ali reported the president seemed to have taken some liberties with the secretary’s words) that maintained everything was going well in Syria and a reminder that he was working to end “endless wars.”However, with respect to ISIS — and to the Kurds — the full consequences of Trump’s endeavors to do so remain to be seen. The Trump administration just imposed sanctions on Turkey for invading northern Syria. But it may be too late for America’s Kurdish allies.Looking for a quick way to keep up with the never-ending news cycle? Host Sean Rameswaram will guide you through the most important stories at the end of each day.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Friday morning before dawn, U.S. forces killed Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Quds Force. Soleimani was a towering figure and in command of Iran’s often brutal tactics to retain the country’s political and ideological dominance in the region. He was revered and championed by supporters of the Islamic regime in both Iran and in the Middle East. Quds (sometimes spelled Qods) is the Arabic word for Jerusalem. The Quds Force is tasked with all the Guards’ military operations in the Middle East and beyond. But the Quds Force is not only a military force, it also determines Iran’s diplomacy in the Middle East. Gen. David Petraeus, the former commander of U.S. forces, says he once received a text message saying: “Dear General Petraeus, you should know that I, Ghasem Soleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan. And indeed, the ambassador in Baghdad is a Quds Force member. The individual who’s going to replace him is a Quds Force member.” As commander of the Quds Force, Soleimani was responsible for organizing Iran’s proxies in the region. He masterminded the killing and wounding of hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq by Iran’s proxies. He organized and led the Iraqi militias fighting and defeating Daesh (ISIS) Sunni extremists in Iraq. Soleimani was also responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Syrians by boosting Bashar al-Assad’s brutal genocidal regime in Syria. In 2019, IranWire published an extensive series on the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guards organization and its generals and commanders. We republish the Soleimani profile here. On the eve of the 1982 Operation Fath-al-Mobin, Commander Mohsen Rezaei tasked a young subordinate with raising a unit of Sar-Allah soldiers in Kerman for an upcoming major offensive aimed at ejecting the Iraqi army from Khuzestan province. The subordinate chosen for the assignment was a 19-year-old former construction worker named Ghasem (Qassem) Soleimani. Commander Hassan Bagheri, who was the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) first ground force commander and who spearheaded the Guards’ intelligence department, was skeptical of the decision, believing that new forces led by an inexperienced new commander would not have the capacity to meet the demands of such a key operation. Rezaei remained firm, however, arguing that Soleimani was more than up to the task. The unit would later grow into a battalion before eventually becoming the the Guards’ 41st Corps of Sar-Allah. Lead exclusively by Ghasem Soleimani after its initial inception, its soldiers hailed from the provinces of Kerman, Sistan, Baluchistan, and Hormuzgan. In Soleimani’s own telling, his first mission was ordered by Hossein Kharazi, then commander of the 14th Corps of Imam Hossein, to guard the 14th Corps’ flanks. Biographers favorable to Soleimani have stated that this first engagement was a resounding success, but some of his contemporaries have not been as flattering toward his leadership during the campaign. In fact the current commander in chief of the IRGC, Mohammad-Ali Jafari, wrote about the matter in his memoir: “In February 1982 during the Fath-al-Mobin operation, Hossein Kharazi’s corps was under pressure from two different sides because the Sar-Allah unit could not secure either flank, which Soleimani’s forces were tasked with protecting.” This uncomfortable divergence between myth and reality did not prevent Soleimani from hailing Operation Fath-al-Mobin as his most important success during the Iran-Iraq War. Although Soleimani had participated in previous operations, including Karbala 1 and 5, Valfajr 8, Tariq-al-Quds, and Kheibar, it was Operation Fath al-Mobin that saw him in the role of a commander for the first time. Ghasem Soleimani was born in 1958 in the Qanat-e-Melk village suburb of Kerman. Before the revolution, he had worked in Kerman’s water-treatment plant and subsequently as a construction worker. He was an athletic youth and a frequent patron of the city’s famous traditional gyms. After the start of the Iran-Iraq War, Soleimani enlisted in the IRGC in 1980, and his first assignment was to guard Kerman’s airport and fleet from Iraqi air bombardments. Months later, he was deployed to combat further west, where he took charge of his unit, which consisted of many fellow Kerman natives. “I had a huge passion for military tactics and planning,” wrote Soleimani years later in his memoir. “I really wanted to go to combat and contribute to the war. That’s why after I was deployed on my first 15-day mission, I never went back home until the end of the war.”A Building MythologySoleimani was not a yet a public figure during the Iran-Iraq War, but afterward, Commander-in-Chief of the IRGC Yahya Rahim-Safavi appointed him as commander of the Quds Corps. At the same time, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Ahmed Kazemi were appointed as commanders of the air force and ground forces, respectively. The three commanders were close friends, and Soleimani would later show his support to Ghalibaf by backing him during the 2013 presidential election. Soleimani’s fame grew exponentially during the civil wars in Syria and Yemen, where he quickly became something of a mythical figure. The roots of this myth, both fact and fiction, trace back to those early days in the Sar-Allah Corps. Anecdotes and legends of his travels run the gamut, particularly in Iraq, with stories of him pretending to be an Iraqi soldier so as to partake in a unit’s meal time or even start fights. “Soleimani’s fame grew exponentially during the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.”Yet other more fantastic stories revolve around him stealing vehicles and earning the moniker “Toyota thief” from Radio Baghdad. But whatever the veracity of the claims, Soleimani has always been well known for his charismatic personality among IRGC officers, who take great interest in his speeches. One of his favorite commanders was his own deputy in the Sar-Allah 41st Corps, Mir-Hosseini, whom Soleimani described: “When he appeared at the frontline, his presence was calming and everyone felt assured. Mir-Hosseini was not only a man, but he was truly the Corps himself.” Although Soleimani was very loyal to Ayatollah Khamenei, as an IRGC commander he did not often delve into domestic politics. Unlike many other IRGC commanders, Soleimani was careful not to criticize Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president and one of the architects of the Islamic Republic—but who also clashed with Khamenei toward the end of his life. Among Sar-Allah soldiers, there was a rumor that Soleimani voted for Mohammad Khatami in the 1997 presidential election. Nevertheless, Soleimani has in the past argued for the Basij to play a prominent role in Iranian politics and criticized any ideas to the contrary.Hezbollah TiesSoleimani and his subordinates have in the past colluded closely on the financial and construction projects of Hossein Marashi, the spokesperson for the Executives of Construction Party and former governor of Kerman. Financial involvement also extended to entities like Mahan Airline, which was later blacklisted by the U.S. because of its cooperation with the Quds Corps.Soleimani’s commentary on politics has been more often found at the local level, where he has previously come out in support of Kerman’s governor, Ali Reza Razm Hosseini. But after the governor’s scandalous resignation over the revelation of his Canadian dual-citizenship, IRGC media outlets have done their best to eliminate any trace of Soleimani’s prior support. As the Quds Corps commander, Soleimani had strong involvement with Hezbollah in Lebanon and other militant groups. Iranian state media has shown multiple photographs of him alongside Jihad Mughniyah, the son of the infamous Emad Mughniyah of Hezbollah. His daughter, Zeinab Soleimani, has also been spotted alongside Fatima Mughniyah, Emad Mughniyah’s daughter. In recent years, Iran’s foreign policy in the region has fallen deeper and deeper under the influence and control of the Quds Corps. Even many of Iran’s foreign-policy elite such as the ambassador to Iraq, Iraj Masjedi, are former IRGC commanders. The IRGC has tried to reshape the organization’s negative image by focusing on a propaganda campaign around Soleimani’s character and myth, even going so far as to float his name as a potential presidential candidate. But considering his personality and history, the presidency is not something that he aspired to—unless it had been ordered by the Supreme Leader or other prominent clerical figuresThis article was first published in IranWire, a partner publication of The Daily Beast.

I've posted this before, but here it is again.The first democratically elected president of my country after the wall fell was a philosopher and a dissident. He became a dissident after publishing a book called "The fascism". The communist party removed it after few weeks, banned it for further publication and collected all copies from bookstores and libraries.How come that the communist party censored a book exposing fascism? Easy. Anyone who managed to read it went thought the detailed check list (just as you did) and realized that our society was just as fascist as the regimes in Italy for example.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]Zhelev was a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party, but was expelled from it for political reasons in 1965. He was unemployed for six years since all employment in Bulgaria was state-regulated.[2]In 1982, he published his controversial work, "The Fascism" (). Three weeks after the volume's publication in 1982, it was banned and removed from the bookstores and libraries throughout the nation, as it likened the Soviet style socialist state to the fascist states of Italy, Germany and Spain before, during, and after World War II.[3]

Money from China is still welcome in the poorer countries of Eastern Europe that are eager for investment. Chinese money is helping to finance improvements to the rail line between Budapest and Belgrade and Black Sea port facilities in Bulgaria.Chinese investments in the relatively small economies of Eastern Europe fell last year to €2 billion from €3 billion, according to the study. Since 2000, Chinese investment in the region has been about €7 billion, or about a third of what has gone to Germany. Hungary attracted about €2.4 billion of that sum, much more than any other Eastern European country.Italy has ports that are attractive to China in Trieste in the country’s northeastern region, in Genoa on the Ligurian coast and in Palermo, a Sicilian city close to Africa, where China has invested deeply.“All of these ports have the benefit of being closest to Africa,” Mr. Geraci said. “Without being in Africa,”For now, China’s most important port in Europe is the Piraeus port outside Athens, where the state-backed shipping conglomerate Cosco had taken control. Italy wants in on the action. Already this week, with the framework agreement pending, the port authority of Genoa is proceeding with a deal to create a new company with the China Communications Construction Company, Mr. Geraci said.“One way for us to increase trade values is to first increase investment” from China, he said. “This is done by these memorandums, One Belt and One Road. It is a very fertile area for investment.”The office of President Sergio Mattarella confirmed on Wednesday that Mr. Xi will meet with him in Rome on March 22 and be honored with a state dinner that evening. Mr. Xi is also scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. Mr. Geraci said China’s leader had also expressed a desire to visit Palermo.

We must “resist the temptation to become numb”, the former FBI director James Comey said in an interview in this paper. He was talking about Trump’s “norm-destroying behaviours”. So how is that resistance going? Trump thrives on destroying civilised “norms”, which is why so many watch aghast and feel powerless. He violates every rule and, well, nothing much happens; it all continues. Hearing the cries of children torn away from their parents, seeing them in cages at the border – was this a turning point? On the campaign trail, he made his feelings about minority ethnic immigrants clear, to huge cheers. They were snakes and rapists. We know the language. We have heard it used about migrants here, too. Pussy-grabbing was another accepted but “norm-destroying” behaviour. Persistent lying is tolerated.Small acts of resistance, therefore, become shards of hope. When the White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, and her crew walked into the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, the chef called the owner, Stephanie Wilkinson. She immediately came over, gathered the staff, asked what they thought and then asked Sanders to leave. Sanders’ job, after all, is defending the indefensible. Wilkinson is “not a huge fan of confrontation”. She wants her business to do well, but said: “This feels like a moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals.”Exactly. Many cheered her on. Others have left terrible reviews for her restaurant. Some Beltway types have said Sanders should not be treated like this when she is off duty, banging on about civility and neutrality. That ship has sailed. This myth of neutrality has crippled the US press, which has normalised overt calls to white supremacism.I am not surprised by what Trump does. I am horrified by the “little people” who obey his orders. History repeats itself not in grandiose narcissistic babble but through everyday collaboration in the name of “duty”. Trump did not put those kids in cages himself. Border guards did; they were recorded laughing at the children. All in a day’s work, this deliberate cruelty.The upholding of personal morality is difficult. And this instance may be a fetishisation of heroic individualism, but Wilkinson’s actions are meaningful when the Democrats seem absent, when “due process” moves so slowly, when Trump and his lackeys seem never to face any consequences.When he comes here for his three-day visit in July, there will be huge protests, yet he will hang out with Theresa May and the Queen and get the photo op he asked for. Our taxes will be spent on the £5m it will cost to police it. Something is very wrong here.I imagine that, as with the trouble-free 2003 anti-Iraq war march, most of the police will be on the same side as the demonstrators. Huge amounts will be spent on counter-terrorism and special protection officers. This visit again normalises him. What would this man have to do for May to disinvite him? She is a vicar’s daughter, the Queen is the head of the Church of England. The UN has said these latest acts may amount to torture. Are they really going to welcome him? Can no one exhibit the morality of a restaurant owner?We as individuals who continue to feel powerless will gather, knowing that not all protests “work”, but that the other options – “civility” and calls for “order” – have meant the emboldening of fascism. Trump has flourished in this fake environment of neutrality. “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral,” as the philosopher Paulo Freire said. The norms have already been destroyed. If our leaders will not take a stand, the rest of us are surely obliged to. Topics Trump administration Opinion Donald Trump US politics comment

Boris Johnson’s fascination with the life and times of Winston Churchill is well known. So it was clever of the European commission’s new president, Ursula von der Leyen, to recall on Wedneday how, in 1946, the prime minister’s hero once made the case for a “United States of Europe”.Churchill’s famous intervention helped build the momentum that led to the formation of the European economic community. Ms Von der Leyen, in a speech which preceded a Downing Street meeting with Mr Johnson, said that his postwar call for a new European family remained the best case made for the union. But she acknowledged that, three and a half years after the prime minister successfully campaigned for Vote Leave, the divorce deal between Britain and the EU was “done and dusted” and it was time “for the best and oldest friends to build a new future together”.A confirmed anglophile, Ms Von der Leyen’s charm offensive came ahead of crucial talks on what shape that future would take. The warmth of her words was disarming and effective. But Churchill’s position on the United Kingdom and Europe was perhaps a little more complicated than her speech implied. Britain, he wrote in one essay, “is with Europe, but not of it”. It is “linked, but not comprised”. Working out what that might mean, in the context of Brexit and the 21st-century global economy, is a fair summation of the task ahead for Mr Johnson. In charge of a parliamentary majority that gives him licence, Britain’s future prosperity depends on the conclusions that he reaches. The country must hope that in the months ahead, behind the inevitable prime ministerial bluster and can-do bonhomie, a sense of sober realism will kick in.If he agrees to close regulatory alignment in vital sectors such as cars, aerospace, chemicals, food and drink, and pharmaceuticals, a basic free trade deal may be possible by December. But the status of Britain’s service economy, which generates the bulk of the country’s wealth, is unlikely to be resolved by then. The same goes for the politically fraught areas of agriculture and fishing, and the implications of the government’s stated intention to end the free movement of EU citizens into Britain. The alternative to a bare-bones deal would be to crash out, hobbling the economic prospects of a supposedly free and “global” Britain. But Mr Johnson’s majority means he has sufficient room for manoeuvre to ignore the siren calls from his party’s Brexit theologians. To follow their advice would be a very high price indeed to pay for “taking back control”.

Enlarge this image Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., has released plan that would create pilot job guarantee programs in 15 communities where unemployment is particularly high. Drew Angerer/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Drew Angerer/Getty Images Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., has released plan that would create pilot job guarantee programs in 15 communities where unemployment is particularly high. Drew Angerer/Getty Images The 2018 midterm primary season is really heating up this week, which means it's time to think about elections — like the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.No major candidates have declared that they're preparing a run against President Trump in two years, but whispers are building around potential candidates. A few of them have coalesced around a seriously ambitious policy idea — guaranteeing a job for every American who wants one. Politics Republican Fears About Holding The Senate Start To Sink In If enacted, such a program could be big or small; it could create massive reverberations in the private sector; and it could reshape monetary policy. One thing that is more certain is that Americans will be hearing about the idea of job guarantees for the next few years.But why now?"My impression is it may have been the shock effect of Trump's election and the recognition that there are a host of policies, projects, that we previously didn't think were imaginable or reasonable that are being considered on the other end of the political spectrum," said William Darity, an economist at Duke University and a proponent of job guarantee programs.On top of that, even before Trump won the presidency, 2016 candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders also showed that voters could be won over by a "Democratic Socialist," as he describes himself, who proposed massive, progressive policy overhauls that opponents also derided as being unfeasible. Sanders of Vermont is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.Proposals like a job guarantee, Medicare for all and tuition-free college have moved from the policy fringe on the left toward the mainstream in the Democratic Party, embraced by some of those interested in challenging Trump as the party tries to give voters a clear, memorable outline of what Democrats stand for. The Two-Way U.S. Unemployment Drops To 3.9 Percent — Lowest Since 2000 So here's a primer on jobs guarantees — what they are, how they would work, and why we're hearing about them when unemployment is already really low.What is a jobs guarantee?A jobs guarantee program can take different forms, but the basic idea behind any program is the same, according to Darity."Under the conditions of a federal job guarantee, everybody would be assured of getting to work if they were seeking work. So in effect, the unemployment rate would be zero," said Darity. "In an ideal world, if I lost my job in the morning, I could walk over to what we would now truly call an employment office and have new work by the afternoon."This separates it from a job subsidy program, he said, in which the government would help boost the number of jobs — perhaps massively so — but neither create all those jobs itself nor guarantee the jobs to those seeking one.The idea is that the job guarantee program could be what economists call an "automatic stabilizer" — a program that grows when the economy is in a downturn and shrinks when things are going well.But many job guarantee programs are about more than just assuring a certain quantity of jobs; they also focus on quality.Several plans — one co-designed by Darity, a proposal from New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, another outline from Sanders — also would provide wages much higher than the federal minimum wage (currently $7.25) and benefits that are unheard of for many current low-wage workers."The idea is that we would then drive bad jobs out of existence," said Darity, "because no one would be obligated to take those jobs since they would have a superior option."All of which is to say: This is a big policy idea. Implementing a job guarantee would make the federal government the employer for potentially millions — or even tens of millions — of Americans.Who is backing one?Most notably: Booker, New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Sanders. In addition, The Intercept recently reported that Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren "has begun looking closely at" the idea.Those aren't necessarily the only members of Congress who believe in job guarantees, but they do happen to all be oft-mentioned as 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls.Booker is the only one of these three with a fully fleshed-out proposal out there. His plan, unveiled late in April, would create pilot job guarantee programs in 15 communities where unemployment is particularly high.All of the jobs would give people paid family and sick leave, pay that eventually phases up to $15 an hour, and — according to Booker's website — "health coverage like that enjoyed by Members of Congress."Gillibrand, Warren and fellow Democatic Sens. Kamala Harris and Jeff Merkley co-sponsored that bill. (Harris of California and Merkley of Oregon have also hinted at possible 2020 campaigns.)Sanders also has a proposal in the works. An outline provided to NPR shows the plan would be more sweeping than Booker's pilot program by establishing 2,500 job centers nationwide.Gillibrand's office tells NPR that she has a plan forthcoming, to be released in the next few weeks.Economists have also proposed having the Labor Department invest in creating jobs in the fields of child care and building infrastructure or setting up arrangements such as "community job banks" where jobs that can be filled immediately would be posted. Enlarge this image New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who has been mentioned as possible 2020 presidential candidate, speaks onstage at the Women of the World Summit in April in New York City. Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who has been mentioned as possible 2020 presidential candidate, speaks onstage at the Women of the World Summit in April in New York City. Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images A job for everyone sounds great. What could go wrong?"Problem No. 1 is you're not just going to get people who have been unable to find work in the private sector for whatever reason," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and president of the right-leaning American Action Forum. "You're going to get a lot of people. And a lot of people means a lot of money, so the federal budget is going to explode."And with that could come another problem, Holtz-Eakin said: An expensive program could mean tax hikes. And he fears those tax hikes could exacerbate the problems that a jobs guarantee is designed to help."You're going to actually undermine the private economy that's needed to pay those bills. So it doesn't really add up," he added.But beyond the cost, there are other major potential problems. One is that businesses would have to substantially raise prices in order to compensate their employees competitively with the new government jobs. Planet Money The Perks Of Counting The Wallflowers It's also possible that the federal government, by investing all this money into the labor market, would crowd out the private sector, competing with businesses for labor and stifling growth.Proponents argue the policy's critics are overstating the potential dangers. For one, they say the program would at least partly pay for itself."I mean, if you look at all of these programs that are trying to make up for either no work or inadequate paying work as companies outsource their labor costs on us, the taxpayers," Booker said, "those programs alone are worth billions and billions of dollars."As far as higher prices, Darity believes that is not a serious argument against a job guarantee."Insofar as we're maintaining an environment in which prices are lower for products because people are poorly paid, I think that that's a real ethical concern for any society," he said.And it may be possible to avoid the crowding-out phenomenon, economist Conor Sen recently argued (Sen, to be clear, isn't a proponent of the plans — in fact, he says he feels "skepticism" about the idea). His idea is to make sure the program's funding is "countercyclical" — that is, that it shrinks in good times and grows in bad.This sounds ... out of the ordinary as far as policies go.It is. Even for Darity, who has been a fan of job guarantees for years, it's strange to have the idea in the mainstream."It's a little bit surreal, because for such a long period of time, there were some of us who were talking about this, and we were roundly dismissed or ignored, and now it looks like it's something people are viewing as a credible policy option," he said.Wait. I keep hearing we're near "full employment." Why put this plan out there now?"Full employment" doesn't mean that everyone who wants a job has one. It's a term economists use to describe, roughly speaking, the lowest the unemployment rate can be expected to go at any given time. Try to pull it even lower, the idea goes, and inflation would be the result.The current unemployment rate of 3.9 percent refers to the portion of people who are actively looking for work right now who can't find a job.But then, there are people working part time who want full-time work, and there are "discouraged workers" who have stopped looking for work. Those people are not counted in the headline unemployment rate. But count all of them, and by its broadest definition, unemployment stands at around 7.8 percent.On top of all that, in good times and bad, some people persistently just can't find work."Here we are at 4 percent unemployment, and we still have lots of pockets of insufficient opportunity," said Jared Bernstein, former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "So we need a jobs program."That "insufficient opportunity" he talks about hits some groups particularly hard. "The black unemployment rate is always twice that of the white rate," he added. "And I gotta tell you, that's not written in the Good Book somewhere. That's the outcome of a persistent market failure that's very much leavened by racial discrimination." Enlarge this image Onetime presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., visits protesters at a March rally at the Capitol during a national walkout by students calling on Congress to act on gun violence prevention. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call hide caption toggle caption Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Onetime presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., visits protesters at a March rally at the Capitol during a national walkout by students calling on Congress to act on gun violence prevention. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Doesn't that make the term "full employment" misleading?Yeah, probably. Even at "full employment," some groups are persistently far more fully employed than others.It's not that the U.S. hasn't done a major jobs program before. It has — Darity said his job guarantee plan is comparable to the employment programs of the Great Depression, like the Works Progress Administration. However, he adds that there are key distinctions."What's different about the job guarantee is that it is universal and it's permanent. So it's an option that would exist not only in times of massive unemployment, but it also would exist in times where the unemployment rate is lower," Darity said. "But we still have large numbers of bad jobs. It's not just an emergency."The point, proponents say, isn't just to keep unemployment from skyrocketing during recessions; it's to correct labor market problems that persist even when unemployment is low. And even people opposed to the idea of job guarantees agree that those problems need fixing."The reason you don't want to be dismissive of the intent of people who propose these things is there is a set of workers out there who aren't getting jobs no matter how well the economy is performing," said Holtz-Eakin.So candidates are proposing this just because they think it's the right thing to do?Candidates don't tend to put out sweeping proposals because of economics alone.So why — politically — is this happening now? One explanation is that Democrats are trying to rebuild after a devastating election in 2016, which many emerged from thinking the party didn't have a clear message for what it stood for.If the party nominates a candidate in 2020 who embraces a job guarantee program, Medicare for all and tuition-free or debt-free college, it will send a clear signal that the party has embraced a progressive platform well to the left of where it has been for decades."I do think it is further to the left than what you've seen from Democratic politicians probably since the Obamacare debate," said Adam Jentleson, who served as deputy chief of staff to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. "But that represents where the party is headed and not just where the party is right now, but where Democrats think the party is likely to be in the heat of the 2020 campaign."A policy like a job guarantee could help win over the left wing of the party. But it's also the kind of idea that may never be much more than a campaign promise.