Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, is hardly the first foe of President Vladimir Putin to suddenly suffer a life-threatening medical emergency, or a lethal one, under suspicious circumstances. The 44-year-old dissident — a target of a number of attacks over the years — was in intensive care after being stricken Wednesday while on a flight back to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk. Allies believe he was poisoned; his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said that shortly before boarding, he had a cup of tea at an airport coffee shop.Soon after, she recounted on Twitter, he was sweating, asking her to speak to him so he could focus on the sound of a voice, finally groaning in pain and staggering to the plane’s toilet. By the time the flight made an emergency landing in Omsk, another Siberian city, he had collapsed.If proof emerges — and it may, because Navalny’s family and supporters were trying to get him to a toxicology unit in Europe for specialized treatment — his fate would be grimly reminiscent of a string of cases in which dissident figures ended up sickened or dead of apparent poisoning.Putin critics such as Bill Browder — the U.S.-British businessman who has spearheaded international Magnitsky Act legislation to help foreign governments target oligarchs after Russian whistleblower lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in 2009 under jailhouse torture — say the point of such attacks is not only to surreptitiously remove figures the Russian president finds nettlesome, but also to do so with a brazenness that lays down warnings to others and reveals a terrifying degree of impunity.Navalny — who has likened Putin and his party to a gang of crooks and thieves — was well aware of the risks. Twice before, he had been doused in public by unknown assailants with a green-tinted antiseptic. After the first assault, he made a defiant appearance with his face painted green, calling on supporters to help him fight Kremlin-backed corruption. The second assault was more serious, leaving him with chemical burns.Decades ago, Russian intelligence’s penchant for poisonings was the stuff of Cold War legend. In 1978, on London’s landmark Waterloo Bridge, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was jabbed in the leg with a toxin-tipped umbrella, dying days later. The intelligence services of the then-Soviet Union and Bulgaria were suspected.Even Nobel laureates were not immune. In 1971, Russia’s most famous dissident author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who later found refuge in the United States, survived a suspected poisoning attempt at a department store candy counter.Here is a look at some high-profile poisonings in recent years in which Putin’s hand was suspected. In all cases, the Kremlin denied involvement. A family photo shows Alexander Litvinenko in his hospital bed in November 2006. He died days later. Litvinenko was a onetime operative for Russia’s FSB security service who found shelter in Britain after blowing the whistle over alleged state-sponsored assassinations. He died an agonizing death in November 2006 after lingering for several weeks gravely ill in a London hospital. The fatal dose of polonium was administered in a cup of tea, investigators learned. Photographs from Litvinenko’s final days showed him bald, wan and hollow-eyed, staring out from his hospital bed. While he could still speak and communicate, Litvinenko, who had worked as a consultant to British intelligence, laid the blame for his death on Putin. A British inquiry eventually concluded that the Russian president had most likely personally ordered the poisoning.Just two weeks before his poisoning, Litvinenko tried to warn another potential target: journalist Anna Politkovskaya, whose assassination he said had been ordered by the Russian leader. Russian human rights advocate and journalist Anna Politkovskaya in March 2005. She was killed in Moscow in October 2006.(Jens Schlueter / AFP/Getty Images) The writer and activist aroused Putin’s ire with her journalistic coverage of the bloody conflict in Chechnya, including internationally acclaimed investigations of Russian human rights abuses. She was shot to death in 2006 in an elevator at her apartment block, but before that, she had been the victim of an apparent poisoning attempt.Politkovskaya fell ill on a flight to the western city of Rostov to cover the 2004 Beslan school siege in Russia’s North Ossetia republic, a horrific episode in which at least 330 people, including 186 children, were killed after Chechen rebels seized hostages and a standoff with Russian forces ensued. In an account for Britain’s Guardian newspaper, she offered a description of her poisoning that was chillingly similar to what would befall Navalny 16 years later. “The plane takes off. I ask for a tea,” she wrote. “At 21:50 I drink it. At 22:00 I realize that I have to call the air stewardess, as I am rapidly losing consciousness.” She eventually recovered, but her assassination was a scant two years later.In May 2015, Kara-Murza, a journalist turned opposition leader, fell abruptly and dramatically ill while meeting with fellow dissidents in Moscow, slipping into a coma from which he emerged a week later. Doctors told him his symptoms were consistent with poisoning, but they were unable to identify the toxin. The same symptoms struck again in February 2017, sending him into organ failure, and this time, the team treating him — the same as during his earlier bout — placed him in a medically induced coma. Once again he survived. His lawyer tried, without success, to force the opening of a criminal case into his alleged poisoning.Kara-Murza was a close associate of Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister who became a fierce Putin critic and an icon of dissent. He was gunned down in 2015 just outside the walls of the Kremlin.The former spy was imprisoned at home in Russia as a double agent, but eventually traded to Britain in a prisoner exchange. He made a peaceful life for himself in the English cathedral town of Salisbury, making the unusual decision to live under his own name. He seemingly believed himself safe, but former spymaster Putin was reported to take betrayals such as his very personally.Along with his daughter Yulia, Skripal was nearly killed in 2018 by exposure to a military-grade nerve agent. Father and daughter eventually recovered.And although British authorities painstakingly reconstructed the movements of his alleged assailants, identifying them as Russian intelligence operatives and naming them, Moscow never relented in its insistence that the pair were innocent tourists taking in the sights of Salisbury.

MOSCOW — A court in Ukraine has ruled that officials in the country violated the law by revealing, during the 2016 presidential election in the United States, details of suspected illegal payments to Paul Manafort.In 2016, while Mr. Manafort was chairman of the Trump campaign, anti-corruption prosecutors in Ukraine disclosed that a pro-Russian political party had earmarked payments for Mr. Manafort from an illegal slush fund. Mr. Manafort resigned from the campaign a week later.The court’s ruling that what the prosecutors did was illegal comes as the Ukrainian government, which is deeply reliant on the United States for financial and military aid, has sought to distance itself from matters related to the special counsel’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential race.Some of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has dealt with Mr. Manafort’s decade of work in Ukraine advising the country’s Russia-aligned former president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, his party and the oligarchs behind it.After President Trump’s victory, some politicians in Ukraine criticized the public release by prosecutors of the slush fund records, saying the move would complicate Ukraine’s relations with the Trump administration.In Ukraine, investigations into the payments marked for Mr. Manafort were halted for a time and never led to indictments. Mr. Manafort’s conviction in the United States on financial fraud charges related to his work in Ukraine was not based on any known legal assistance from Ukraine.Two Ukrainian members of Parliament had pressed for investigations into whether the prosecutors’ revelation of the payment records, which were first published in The New York Times, had violated Ukrainian laws that, in some cases, prohibit prosecutors from revealing evidence before a trial.Both lawmakers asserted that if the release of the slush fund information broke the law, then it should be viewed as an illegal effort to influence the United States presidential election in favor of Hillary Clinton by damaging the Trump campaign.ImageArtem Sytnik, the head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, said he had revealed the information about Paul Manafort “in accordance with the law in effect at the time.”Credit...Oleksandr Stashevskyi/Associated PressThe Kiev District Administrative Court, in a statement issued Wednesday, said that Artem Sytnik, the head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, the agency that had released information about the payments, had violated the law. The court’s statement said this violation “resulted in meddling in the electoral process of the United States in 2016 and damaged the national interests of Ukraine.”A spokeswoman for the anti-corruption bureau said she could not comment before the court released a full text of the ruling. In an interview last June, Mr. Sytnik said he had revealed the information “in accordance with the law in effect at the time.”The court also faulted a member of Ukraine’s Parliament, Serhiy A. Leshchenko, who had commented on Mr. Manafort’s case and publicized at a news conference materials that the anti-corruption bureau had already posted on its website.Mr. Leshchenko said he would appeal the ruling, and that the court was not independent and was doing the bidding of the Ukrainian government as it sought to curry favor with the Trump administration.“This decision of the court is for Poroshenko to find a way to Trump’s heart,” he said, referring to President Petro O. Poroshenko. “At the next meeting with Trump, he will say, ‘You know, an independent Ukrainian court decided investigators made an inappropriate move.’ He will find the loyalty of the Trump administration.”Mr. Leshchenko said the prosecutors’ revelations about Mr. Manafort were legal because they were “public interest information,” even if they were also potential evidence in a criminal investigation.Mr. Manafort has not been charged with a crime in Ukraine, and earlier this year, Ukrainian officials froze several investigations into Mr. Manafort’s payments at a time when the government was negotiating with the Trump administration to purchase sophisticated anti-tank missiles, called Javelins.Ukraine’s prosecutor general said the delay on Mr. Manafort’s cases was unrelated to the missile negotiations. In total, the United States provides about $600 million in bilateral aid to Ukraine annually.Earlier this month, the special counsel accused Mr. Manafort of violating a cooperation agreement by lying. Two of the five alleged lies, according to the filing, related to meetings or conversations with Konstantin V. Kilimnik, Mr. Manafort’s former office manager in Kiev, whom the special counsel’s office has identified as tied to Russian intelligence and as a key figure in the investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.Ukrainian law enforcement officials last year allowed Mr. Kilimnik to leave for Russia, putting him out of reach for questioning.

Amazon.com Inc. will rename Seattle’s KeyArena as the Climate Pledge Arena, placing the entertainment-and-sports venue at the forefront of the technology giant’s climate-change initiatives.The arena, which would be about twice as big as the old venue after renovation, is expected to reopen in late summer 2021 and hold up to 18,100 people.Amazon...

Drug overdoses killed more than 72,000 people in the United States last year – a new record driven by the deadly opioid epidemic, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control.The CDC estimates that 72,287 people died from overdoses in 2017, an increase of about 10% from the year before.A majority of the deaths – nearly 49,000 – was caused by opioids, according to the new data. And the biggest driver was the dangerous synthetic opioid fentanyl, which killed more than 29,000 people, followed by heroin and other drugs.The rising overdose numbers make the drug epidemic more deadly than gun violence, car crashes or Aids, which have never killed as many people in a single year. It represents nearly 200 people dying from overdoses every day in 2017.The highest death rates came in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio.Some states – Massachusetts, Vermont, Wyoming and Montana – have begun to reduce their number of deaths.But across the country deaths have continued to rise, despite efforts to tackle the spread of opioid addiction through education, treatment and law enforcement measures.The CDC’s statistics are preliminary because some deaths are still under investigation.On Thursday, the Trump administration proposed that US drugmakers cut production quotas of the six most abused opioids by 10% next year to fight the nationwide addiction crisis.In a statement, the justice department and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said the proposed cut would be in keeping with Donald Trump’s effort to cut opioid prescription fills by one-third within three years.The president also pressed the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to sue drug manufacturers over the opioid crisis.“I’d like to bring a federal lawsuit against those companies,” Trump said during a meeting of his cabinet at the White House. He did not name the companies.The justice department and the DEA said they are proposing to cut production quotas for oxycodone, hydrocodone, oxymorphone, hydromorphone, morphine and fentanyl by 7% to 15%, depending on the compound, in 2019.Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed by states, counties and cities against opioid manufacturers including Purdue Pharmaceuticals LP, Endo International plc, Mallinckrodt and Johnson & Johnson, seeking to hold them responsible for contributing to the epidemic. Those companies were not immediately available for comment.Last year, the Trump administration declared a “public health emergency”, calling the epidemic “worst drug crisis in American history”. But the declaration did not come with additional funding to treat or prevent drug addiction.He also suggested the death penalty for dealers, a proposal that has gained little support from drug abuse and judicial experts.The surge in fentanyl, which is synthetically produced and can be 50 times stronger than heroin, has led to a sharp spike in deaths even as use of opioids overall has been rising for years. The drug is mostly brought into the country from overseas, especially China, and sometimes mixed in with heroin without users knowing it.

Islamic State has begun to reassert itself in its heartlands in the Middle East and continues to seek opportunities to strike in the west, the United Nations has said.A report to the UN security council based on recent intelligence from member states describes how the group is mounting increasingly bold insurgent attacks in Iraq and Syria, calling and planning for the breakout of its fighters from detention facilities and exploiting the weaknesses of local security forces.The report portrays an organisation that has suffered significant setbacks but is tenacious, well-funded and still poses a considerable local and international threat.Though Donald Trump said Isis had been “largely defeated”, the claim has been repeatedly questioned by analysts, allies and some senior US officials. A Pentagon report warned of a resurgence in August, before the killing by US special forces of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-declared caliph and former leader of Isis, in October.The new leader of Isis is believed to be Amir Mohammed Abdul Rahman al-Mawli al-Salbi, who is also known as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi. He is one of the group’s founding members and led the enslavement of Iraq’s Yazidi minority and oversaw operations around the globe.The UN report says the general strategic direction of Isis is unlikely to change but the new leader’s Turkmen ethnicity suggests he may be only a temporary choice until the group finds a more legitimate “emir”, potentially a direct descendant from the Quraysh Hashemite tribe who could command the full support of more remote “provinces” or affiliates of the group.One challenge for Isis will be to rally supporters behind the new leader if security concerns prevent any direct communication.The group does not lack funds, the report says. In Iraq it continues to finance its operations by investing in legitimate businesses and commercial fronts, and in Syria it has resumed extortion operations during daylight hours. Such efforts raise sufficient resources to cover the group’s running costs and allow pensions to be paid to widows or orphans of dead fighters.The issue of foreign fighters remains acute, the UN notes, with between half and two-thirds of the more than 40,000 who joined the “caliphate” from overseas still alive.There are grave concerns about detention centres and camps in Syria set up to house members of the group and their families who fled its last redoubts. Al-Hol camp, controlled by Syrian Kurdish forces, contains more than 70,000 people living in appalling conditions.“The current improvised holding arrangements are a recipe for radicalisation and despair, especially in the case of minors … Repatriation of these people to their states of origin and/or nationality will be challenging in the short term but holds out the greatest hope of mitigating the longer-term threat,” the report says.Many analysts predicted Isis would return to a low-level insurgency after losing the vast territory of its so-called caliphate in 2017, and would frame its heavy defeat as a temporary setback.Last year Isis suffered further setbacks in Afghanistan, where thousands of its fighters have been killed by the Taliban, and Libya, where only a couple of hundred of loyal militants remain.The group remains too weak to pose a significant direct threat to Europe, where it remains reliant on attacks by “homegrown terrorists”. These tend to be unreliable and relatively low-impact, the report says.

Searing temperatures and drought conditions throughout much of the American West has caused many communities to ban traditional Fourth of July fireworks displays.The heatwave across much of the West, where wide swaths have been charred by wildfires and the mercury has risen to triple digits in some places like California and Arizona, caused local officials to nix Independence Day fireworks.In Colorado, 40 percent of the state's towns and communities canceled fireworks displays.Seven communities in Arizona canceled their displays as well.Officials in Winters, California cited "poor quality and smoke covering the town" as the central reasons to skip the fireworks there.And in Parowan, Utah, law enforcement officials put a ban in place of "ALL fireworks."Today, Parowan City announced online that they were also canceling the fireworks show "due to the extremely dry conditions this year."Despite the news of the cancellations, not all the skies will go dark all. Some communities who are going fireworks-free, are trying out a less combustible alternative: drones.Intel made a hit during the Winter Olympics in South Korea when they put on display a choreographed series of drones.Initially, Travis Air Force Base outside San Francisco, which lies an hour south of the Yolo and Napa county fires exploding there that has forced many residents to evacuate, opted for the Intel drone works this year.But due to the wind speeds, the drones were also grounded for at least one day."The drone show scheduled for July 4, 2018, at Travis Air Force Base has been canceled and rescheduled," a statement by the military base confirmed.It added the drones would take flight instead on July 5 "pending adequate weather conditions."In a separate statement Intel acknowledged that it had to cancel the drone alternative due to the conditions."We decided to cancel the performance today as a result of high winds that would have interfered with drone flight. Our drones can fly in winds up to 18 miles per hour, but the forecast calls for winds over 30 mph for the time frame we were planning to fly. We emphasize safety in our drone performances, including in our operations, the design of the drones, and the use of systems like geofencing and auto-land contingencies," read the statement.Aspen, Colorado, and a group of Arizona towns will also be experimenting with drone shows.Colorado firefighters are working to put out six wildfires, all being called "Spring Fire," which have been ravaging 123 square miles of terrain.The bone-dry, blustery conditions caused by drought across the West were expected to persist through the end of July in California, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, U.S. fire officials said. Southwest states like Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado are expecting downpours to quell the fire risk, the National Interagency Fire Center reported.Wildfires in Northern California are endangering around 1,000 homes and structures.Predicted cool temperatures offer some hope that some 2,500 residents, who have been forced from their homes for days, could return.State officials are concerned about the shifting wind conditions and heavy, thick brush that can fuel the fires could make containment difficult.Blazes in three rural counties, including Napa and Yolo, tore through almost 73,000 acres and is only 15 percent contained, fire officials confirmed.To battle them, firefighters have utilized a mix of aircraft, bulldozers and backfires.Since Sunday, wildfires in Utah has ravaged 47 square miles and destroyed 20 to 30 structures that include homes and cabins in high altitude mountainsides, Gov. Gary Herbert said.As many as 200 to 300 homes have been evacuated and remain threatened by wind-fueled fires raging near a fishing reservoir southeast of Salt Lake City.And in New Mexico, three national forests have yet to see a blaze breakout, but shuttered for the holday because of the threat of wildfire.ABC News' Max Golembo, Bonnie Mclean and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Searing temperatures and drought conditions throughout much of the American West has caused many communities to ban traditional Fourth of July fireworks displays.The heatwave across much of the West, where wide swaths have been charred by wildfires and the mercury has risen to triple digits in some places like California and Arizona, caused local officials to nix Independence Day fireworks.In Colorado, 40 percent of the state's towns and communities canceled fireworks displays.Seven communities in Arizona canceled their displays as well.Officials in Winters, California cited "poor quality and smoke covering the town" as the central reasons to skip the fireworks there.And in Parowan, Utah, law enforcement officials put a ban in place of "ALL fireworks."Today, Parowan City announced online that they were also canceling the fireworks show "due to the extremely dry conditions this year."Despite the news of the cancellations, not all the skies will go dark all. Some communities who are going fireworks-free, are trying out a less combustible alternative: drones.Intel made a hit during the Winter Olympics in South Korea when they put on display a choreographed series of drones.Initially, Travis Air Force Base outside San Francisco, which lies an hour south of the Yolo and Napa county fires exploding there that has forced many residents to evacuate, opted for the Intel drone works this year.But due to the wind speeds, the drones were also grounded for at least one day."The drone show scheduled for July 4, 2018, at Travis Air Force Base has been canceled and rescheduled," a statement by the military base confirmed.It added the drones would take flight instead on July 5 "pending adequate weather conditions."In a separate statement Intel acknowledged that it had to cancel the drone alternative due to the conditions."We decided to cancel the performance today as a result of high winds that would have interfered with drone flight. Our drones can fly in winds up to 18 miles per hour, but the forecast calls for winds over 30 mph for the time frame we were planning to fly. We emphasize safety in our drone performances, including in our operations, the design of the drones, and the use of systems like geofencing and auto-land contingencies," read the statement.Aspen, Colorado, and a group of Arizona towns will also be experimenting with drone shows.Colorado firefighters are working to put out six wildfires, all being called "Spring Fire," which have been ravaging 123 square miles of terrain.The bone-dry, blustery conditions caused by drought across the West were expected to persist through the end of July in California, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, U.S. fire officials said. Southwest states like Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado are expecting downpours to quell the fire risk, the National Interagency Fire Center reported.Wildfires in Northern California are endangering around 1,000 homes and structures.Predicted cool temperatures offer some hope that some 2,500 residents, who have been forced from their homes for days, could return.State officials are concerned about the shifting wind conditions and heavy, thick brush that can fuel the fires could make containment difficult.Blazes in three rural counties, including Napa and Yolo, tore through almost 73,000 acres and is only 15 percent contained, fire officials confirmed.To battle them, firefighters have utilized a mix of aircraft, bulldozers and backfires.Since Sunday, wildfires in Utah has ravaged 47 square miles and destroyed 20 to 30 structures that include homes and cabins in high altitude mountainsides, Gov. Gary Herbert said.As many as 200 to 300 homes have been evacuated and remain threatened by wind-fueled fires raging near a fishing reservoir southeast of Salt Lake City.And in New Mexico, three national forests have yet to see a blaze breakout, but shuttered for the holday because of the threat of wildfire.ABC News' Max Golembo, Bonnie Mclean and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared Wednesday that Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China — a dramatic step that could transform the US’s relationship with the territory.Pompeo’s announcement comes one day before China is expected to pass a controversial national security law that will criminalize “treason, secession, sedition (and) subversion” against the government in Beijing, CNN reports. It will also allow Chinese security forces to operate in Hong Kong “to fulfill relevant duties to safeguard national security in accordance with the law.”Critics fear it will be used to target not just protesters but also the media, international businesses, and anyone else in Hong Kong who tries to challenge Beijing’s authority. And it may be what triggered Pompeo to decline to certify Hong Kong’s autonomy. “Beijing’s disastrous decision is only the latest in a series of actions that fundamentally undermine Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedoms and China’s own promises to the Hong Kong people under the Sino-British Joint Declaration, a UN-filed international treaty,” Pompeo said in a statement on Wednesday, referring to China’s national security law.The Sino-British Joint Declaration refers to a treaty between the United Kingdom and China that mapped out the future of Hong Kong, a former British colony. Britain agreed to return the territory to China on July 1, 1997, on the promise that China would give Hong Kong a “high degree of autonomy” for 50 years, until 2047. Pompeo, in his certification, is saying Beijing has reneged on this binding promise.“After careful study of developments over the reporting period, I certified to Congress today that Hong Kong does not continue to warrant treatment under United States laws in the same manner as US laws were applied to Hong Kong before July 1997,” Pompeo’s statement continued. “No reasonable person can assert today that Hong Kong maintains a high degree of autonomy from China, given facts on the ground.”Pompeo is required to assess Hong Kong’s autonomy annually to determine whether it still merits the special trading and economic benefits it enjoys from the US, which aren’t extended to mainland China. The State Department had to make this assessment as part of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act signed by President Donald Trump late last year, an attempt by Congress to signal its support for the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. (The bill also includes provisions to sanction those who violate human rights in Hong Kong.) But Beijing has increasingly encroached on Hong Kong’s semi-autonomy, trying to bring it closer under its control and stamp out dissent. Last year, the Hong Kong government — whose chief executive, Carrie Lam, is closely tied to Beijing — introduced an extradition bill that set off months of pro-democracy protests by Hongkongers who interpreted the legislation as another attempt to curtail Hong Kong’s freedoms and rule of law. Pompeo cited some of these points in the official certification he sent to Congress. In it, Pompeo says that Beijing has slowly been eroding freedoms, but that since his last report, “China has shed any pretense that the people of Hong Kong enjoy the high degree of autonomy, democratic institutions, and civil liberties guaranteed to them by the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Basic Law.”The secretary of state’s declaration doesn’t trigger any actions directly; it’s up to Trump to decide what steps to take and whether to formally revoke Hong Kong’s special status. Such a move could have unpredictable consequences. The US could risk tens of billions in trade, and it could jeopardize Hong Kong’s standing as a global financial hub. “That status is really critical to Hong Kong’s economy, and that’s obviously very related to Hong Kong’s ability to protect that separate identity,” Jacob Stokes, a China analyst at the US Institute of Peace told me last week, before Pompeo’s decision.Hong Kong — and its relatively strong rule of law — is a gateway for foreign companies who want to do business in China but without some of the risks. That’s also a boon to China that could go away if the Trump administration pursues this “nuclear option,” as Ho-Fung Hung, professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins, described it to NPR’s Marketplace.Removing the status entirely might send the wrong signal, too: that Hong Kong is too far gone — something that could actually undermine the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong if the US sends the message that the territory is a lost cause. Which is why the Trump administration is likely weighing several different options. The New York Times reports that the Trump administration is considering applying tariffs to goods coming from Hong Kong, taxes from which it had previously been exempt. But Pompeo’s announcement is still an incredibly strong signal from Washington to Beijing, particularly as the Trump administration has vowed to punish China for its role in the pandemic. The declaration that Hong Kong is no longer autonomous is a powerful acknowledgment of the erosion of the territory’s freedoms under China’s control. And it’s a clear show of support to the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, which has decried China’s encroachment even as pro-Beijing Hong Kong officials have dismissed concerns that it will diminish the territory’s freedoms. Pompeo has previously described China’s new proposed national security law as a “death knell” for Hong Kong. Chinese officials claim the law is meant to target the alleged “foreign influence” China says is driving the unrest in Hong Kong. But that is largely disinformation; China has blamed outsiders for fueling violence in Hong Kong to deny the grassroots resistance.The reality is that the law is very clearly targeted as a catchall against dissent and anyone challenging Beijing’s authority. China has, at least rhetorically, honored the “one country, two systems” rule. In practice, though, it has sought greater and greater control over Hong Kong. The national security law is merely a much more direct and obvious step toward what Beijing has been trying to accomplish for years: one country, one system.That’s because this law is coming directly from China, rather than from the Hong Kong government, which would at least give it the veneer of legitimacy. Ho-Fung Hung, a professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University, told me last week that Beijing may have stepped in directly because it learned a lesson from the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests, which ultimately defeated the legislation and embarrassed China.“It will be a huge embarrassment if it tried to push through the local legislature that is eventually shelved because of local protests,” Hung said. “Beijing didn’t want to reach that event. Beijing even didn’t trust the local legislature, so it adopted this kind of extreme route to directly legislate.”“And it is a big, risky move,” he added, “because it tears down all the remaining pretension of ‘one country, two systems.’”China’s dramatic escalation also comes as the whole world — and the media, which had devoted a lot of attention to the Hong Kong protests — is distracted by the pandemic and as Hong Kong itself is under social distancing restrictions. The imposition of those rules gave Hong Kong some cover to quell protests (while also helping to successfully control the outbreak there).But China had long made it clear it had no tolerance for the protesters or even more peaceful challenges to its authority, such as when pro-democracy candidates in Hong Kong dominated local elections. And now China has at least hinted at how it plans to consolidate its control.The introduction of the law has still sparked resistance in Hong Kong, with protesters congregating and defying social distancing rules that ban large gatherings last weekend. Police cracked down on the protests, arresting more than 100 people. But what happens when China implements the law — which could happen as soon as August, per CBS News — is still unclear.Whether the US’s decision will have ramifications for China’s power grab is also uncertain. China has previously resisted any interference by the State Department into what it considers its internal affairs. “As to the erroneous foreign interference in Hong Kong affairs, we will take necessary measures to fight back,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Wednesday, after Trump said Tuesday that the US might “do something” about Hong Kong. How China responds will depend on what the Trump administration does following this certification. Some lawmakers have cautioned the administration against trying to use Hong Kong as a cudgel in its separate battle with China. “The U.S. response to the Chinese government’s actions must be decisive, clear, and taken to protect U.S. national interests and to support autonomy and democratic freedoms in Hong Kong provided under international law,” House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (D-NY) said in a statement. “US policy toward Hong Kong should not be a pawn in whatever games Secretary Pompeo or President Trump is playing with Beijing.”But Pompeo’s announcement today risks further souring relations between Washington and Beijing, with Hong Kong caught in the precarious middle.Alex Ward contributed reporting to this story.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.

Brazil passed Italy and Spain on the list of countries with the most coronavirus cases last weekend, then passed the United Kingdom on Monday afternoon. Only Russia and the United States have more ― although researchers have said that a lack of testing means Brazil’s count is likely far higher than official figures suggest. There are many factors that determine how bad a country’s outbreak becomes, but one unmistakable commonality between the three countries at the top is that their hard-right leaders have downplayed the severity of the crisis and embraced outlandish conspiracy theories, ensuring the outbreaks would be worse than they should have been. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro’s lax response to the coronavirus made his country’s emergence as the world’s newest coronavirus hot spot tragically inevitable. “Everyone who’s been watching Brazil, who’s been seeing the numbers increase day after day, week after week, knew that it was headed in this direction,” said Anya Prusa, a senior associate at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Brazil Institute in Washington. “It’s not a surprise, but it is a real humanitarian tragedy.” Andre Coelho via Getty Images People mourn during a mass burial of coronavirus pandemic victims on May 19, 2020, in Manaus, Brazil. Brazil has over 270,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and more than 17,000 deaths caused by the virus. Deep social inequality and large populations already vulnerable to infectious diseases meant that limiting the spread of the coronavirus in Brazil required an aggressive response. Instead, Bolsonaro dismissed the pandemic as a media conspiracy and the disease as a “tiny flu,” fought with governors and state officials over social distancing measures, fired one health minister and drove another to quit, and largely left Brazilians ― especially the poorest and most vulnerable ― to fend for themselves. “Brazil went into this with a number of challenges that have been exacerbated by the government response at the very top,” Prusa said. “It is a disaster. And it didn’t need to be a disaster of this size.” Andressa Anholete via Getty Images Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's lax response to the coronavirus outbreak ensured his country's crisis would be worse than it should have been. The disaster will likely only worsen in the coming weeks as Bolsonaro continues to downplay the pandemic. Brazil’s state public health systems are reaching their breaking points. Its Indigenous populations have warned that a slow government response has put them further at risk as the virus spreads. Outbreaks in some of Brazil’s poorest communities have been met by aggressive and deadly police crackdowns rather than a robust public health response. And as Brazil reaches the heights of its pandemic, it has no health minister ― the oncologist who previously held the position quit last Friday, just 28 days into his tenure, after refusing to endorse Bolsonaro’s efforts to expand the use of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug that is not proven to work against the coronavirus, to treat infected patients. The most dire predictions from the outset of Brazil’s pandemic have come true, including one from the prior former health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, who forecast that the virus could quickly inundate hospitals and state public health systems. Photos of mass graves in the Amazon region have spread globally as the virus overwhelmed public health systems in poorer and financially strapped states. On Monday, São Paulo Mayor Bruno Covas warned that the public hospitals in his city ― the largest and wealthiest in Brazil ― could reach their capacity by the end of May. — Leonardo Benassatto (@leobenassatto) May 19, 2020 Joenia Wapichana, the first Indigenous woman elected to Brazil’s national Congress, told HuffPost in April that the virus would spread rapidly once it reached Indigenous lands. But despite those warnings, government agencies were slow to deliver aid to Indigenous groups or to protect their lands, The Associated Press reported this week. Illegal raids from miners, loggers and agribusiness interests have increased, despite government guidance to avoid Indigenous lands, as the pandemic and Bolsonaro’s opposition to regulatory enforcement conspired to limit oversight from environmental agencies. At least 38 Indigenous tribes now have confirmed COVID-19 cases, according to the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples in Brazil, the country’s largest tribal organization. The virus has killed 89 Indigenous Brazilians in the Amazon region, the group said in a statement this week that argued the actual number of infections and deaths among tribes is likely far higher than documented. Indigenous leaders also worry that the pandemic could soon reach Brazil’s isolated groups ― those that have no known contact with outside communities ― after a member of the isolated Awá Guajá people attacked a hunter from another tribe last week, according to the Forest Guardians, a group of tribal leaders that protects the Amazon rainforest from illegal incursions. The attack was likely the result of the Awá Guajá feeling increasingly threatened by outside invaders and accidentally targeting a member of a friendly tribe, the Forest Guardians said in a statement circulated by the nonprofit Survival International. “If you don’t put an end to the invasions of our territory, the uncontacted Awá Guajá people will die,” the statement said. “Once again, we are warning the Brazilian government and the international community that the Awá Guajá people are currently suffering a genocide.” Amanda Perobelli / Reuters People gather next to ambulances on March 29, 2020, after residents of São Paulo's biggest favela, Paraisópolis, hired an around-the-clock private medical service to fight COVID-19. Brazil’s other potential hot spots were its dense pockets of poverty ― the informal favelas of cities like Rio de Janeiro and the suburban periphery neighborhoods of São Paulo and other metropolitan regions. Long victims of government neglect and stigma, many of those communities lack access to basic sanitation and health care, which, along with their small and tightly packed houses, leave them vulnerable to infectious disease outbreaks. But favela residents have seen little help from the government as the pandemic worsens. “The word ‘favela’ has not been heard from any government official,” Gilson Rodrigues, a favela leader in São Paulo, said in a Facebook Live broadcast in March, Americas Quarterly reported. “We need to organize and protect ourselves.” Favela residents across Brazil have organized to manufacture their own hand sanitizer, monitor residents’ health, and create news apps to combat the spread of misinformation about the virus. But the government’s response, at least in some parts of the country, has been to continue ramping up a deadly drug war. “The world needs to know what is happening in Rio de Janeiro. The state of Rio de Janeiro, governed by [Witzel], is using pandemic isolation as a strategy for violent police actions,” Raull Santiago, a community activist in Rio’s Complexo do Alemão favela, tweeted Tuesday. “The [World Health Organization] says that to beat the coronavirus, we need to do social isolation. But police have been carrying out violent operations in the slums and putting us at risk of violent death.” The operations have also drawn out crowds of angry and scared residents who oppose the tactics of a police force that killed nearly five people per day a year ago. “In Brazil, the pandemic brought deaths, thirst, hunger, extreme difficulties,” Santiago said in a follow-up tweet. “And our leaders still incite violent actions by the police. It is a lot of human rights violations.” Bolsonaro dismissed the pandemic as a media conspiracy and the disease as a “tiny flu,” fought with governors and state officials over social distancing measures, fired one health minister and drove another to quit, and largely left Brazilians ― especially the poorest and most vulnerable ― to fend for themselves. Bolsonaro has pushed states and cities to abandon social isolation measures and business closures in favor of kickstarting the economy, especially as the pandemic has left many Brazilians facing food shortages and little choice but to continue working, even as the pandemic worsens. But if Brazil doesn’t curb its outbreak, that will do little to boost economic growth. “If you don’t contain the spread of the virus, then it doesn’t matter what economic measures you use,” Prusa said. Leaders in neighboring countries like Argentina and Paraguay have openly worried about how Bolsonaro’s refusal to respond will affect their countries, where aggressive measures have limited outbreaks. Rates of deforestation, meanwhile, have continued to skyrocket in the Amazon during the pandemic, sparking fears that Brazil could experience an even worse fire season than it did in 2019 when record blazes and Bolsonaro’s environmentally destructive policies made him a pariah on the world stage. Bolsonaro has continued to ignore the devastation. On Tuesday, he met with the heads of two major Rio de Janeiro soccer clubs about efforts to restart Brazil’s professional league. Later, he sat for an interview with a prominent online journalist. Hours after Brazil’s Ministry of Health reported more than 1,100 deaths, Bolsonaro cracked a joke about chloroquine. RELATED... 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Twitter has removed more than 170,000 accounts the social media site says are state-linked influence campaigns from China focusing on Hong Kong protests, Covid-19 and the US protests in relation to George Floyd.The company announced on Thursday that 23,750 core accounts – and 150,000 “amplifier” accounts that boosted the content posted by those core accounts – had been removed from the platform after being linked to an influence campaign from the People’s Republic.Researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that while Twitter is blocked from access in China, the campaign was targeted at Chinese-speaking audiences outside the country “with the intention of influencing perceptions on key issues, including the Hong Kong protests, exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui and, to a lesser extent, Covid-19 and Taiwan”.The researchers analysed 348,608 tweets between January 2018 and April 2020 and found most tweets were posted during business hours in Beijing between Monday and Friday, and dropped off on the weekends.The tweets usually contained images featuring Chinese-language text, with researchers finding that the primary targets of the campaign were people living in Hong Kong, followed by broader Chinese diaspora.The vast majority of the accounts (78.5%) had no followers and 95% had fewer than eight followers, but those accounts had a high level of engagement, albeit not organic. That pointed to the use of commercial bot networks, the research said. A total of 156 tweets from accounts with no followers received more than 50 likes, and 26 tweets from accounts with no followers received more than 10 retweets.One tactic the researchers observed in accounts that were excluded from the dataset were legitimate older accounts that had been hacked, or bought and then used as part of the campaign.For example, one account changed its photo from a Bangladeshi man to a Chinese woman and abruptly switched to posting in Chinese in opposition to the Hong Kong protests.The ASPI researchers said repurposed accounts on Facebook contributed a significant portion of the activity observed there.The major themes of the tweets were that that Hong Kong protesters were violent, and the US was interfering with the protests; accusations about Guo; the Taiwan election; and praise of China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.Despite the removal of these accounts, the researchers found that the campaigns were persisting both on Twitter and Facebook through repurposed accounts and new ones.Focus has now shifted to the Black Lives Matter protests in the US, accusing the country of “hypocrisy for its criticism of the response by police to protests in Hong Kong, while the US’s own police and troops use violence against protests in the US, and warns Hong Kong protesters not to think they can rely on the US for support against China’s national interests”.ASPI found that the campaign operators also appeared to have sought to heavy engagement on some tweets to boost them to the the top of Twitter’s search for specific hashtags.“This allowed the campaign to effectively drown out organic activity on that hashtag for a period of time,” the researchers said.At the same time, Twitter also released the details of 1,152 accounts associated with promoting state-backed political propaganda from Russia, and 7,340 accounts promoting to Turkey’s AK party and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.“Technical signals point to the network being associated with the youth wing of the party and a centralised network that maintained a significant number of compromised accounts,” it said.Twitter said in the future, it would provide the archive of impression counts and other relevant information to understand the impact such campaigns have, and work with academic organisations to achieve that goal.This month Australian researchers found that thousands of pro-Trump, Republican or QAnon-related accounts had been boosting misinformation about the origins of Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic.Guardian Australia has sought comment from Twitter on whether it was undertaking similar analysis of these accounts. Topics Twitter China Black Lives Matter movement Hong Kong Asia Pacific Internet news

BERLIN -- The German economy shrank by 2.2% in the first quarter compared with the previous three-month period as shutdowns in the country and beyond started to bite, official data showed Friday. That means Europe's biggest economy went into recession following a small dip at the end of last year.The figures from the Federal Statistical Office offered a first glimpse of the damage caused by the coronavirus crisis to Europe’s biggest economy, which the government is trying to limit with a raft of rescue programs.The decline in the January-March period was the biggest since 2009. It followed a 0.3% gain in last year's third quarter and a 0.1% contraction in the fourth quarter — the latter figure revised down from the initial report in February of zero growth. That revision put Germany into a technical recession, defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, in the first quarter.March was the month in which the coronavirus pandemic hit Europe, with first Italy and then other countries imposing sweeping restrictions on public life and businesses. Germany itself started shutting down in mid-March. It never ordered factories closed, but companies did largely stop production in some areas — such as the automaking sector — and supply chains were disrupted.Recent data showed a 15.6% month-on-month decrease in factory orders in March, and a 9.2% drop in industrial production.The country started loosening restrictions on April 20 and the process has gathered pace recently. Shops have now reopened, restaurants are gradually opening up and auto production has restarted.

The president of the Workers’ Party, Senator Gleisi Hoffmann, told journalists that Mr. da Silva had not given up on his quest to return to the presidency. “Lula remains our candidate, first of all because he is innocent,” she said. “If he is jailed, we will consider him a political prisoner and we will be by his side.”Mr. da Silva, 72, kept a low profile on Thursday, receiving a string of visitors in his office at the Lula Institute in São Paulo, including party leaders and his handpicked successor, former President Dilma Rousseff.While Mr. da Silva is not the first Brazilian leader engulfed in scandal — former President Fernando Collor de Mello stepped down to avoid being impeached in 1992 and Ms. Rousseff was impeached on charges of manipulating the budget to hide economic problems — his fall is striking nonetheless. He left office eight years ago with a record approval rating of 87 percent, and he has held an ample lead in polls for October’s presidential election.Mr. da Silva’s imminent imprisonment also sends a chilling message to other prominent political figures caught up in corruption investigations. The threat of jail time has been one of the most important tools in the large-scale investigation known as Lava Jato, or Car Wash, which has ensnared not only Mr. da Silva, but also dozens of business and political leaders, including President Michel Temer.Last July, Mr. da Silva was convicted on corruption and money laundering charges and sentenced to almost 10 years in prison. In January, an appeals court unanimously upheld the conviction and increased the sentence to 12 years. Mr. da Silva maintains that the prosecution was an underhanded ploy masterminded by rivals to keep him off the ballot.

HONG KONG—After a series of high-profile arrests here in recent days, demonstrations erupted in multiple districts as we saw the 13th week of unrest play out in exchanges of fire and water.Protesters gathered at several locations before marching for hours even though the organizers did not secure police permissions for public assemblies. The marchers had no apparent destinations in mind.It was hot, raining, sticky. Tens of thousands of protesters, perhaps more, defied police orders and blocked off streets. The city’s subway operator shut down the station closest to the Chinese central government’s liaison office in Hong Kong. Police sealed tram tracks, blocked traffic, and put up barricades in anticipation of protesters swarming the site. They stationed water cannon trucks by the headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army, spewing blue dye at anyone who went near the building.Helicopters hovered above the crowd, while those below used their umbrellas to minimize its surveillance. Blackshirts hurled Molotov cocktails from an overpass toward riot police that were approaching them, as well as over barricades and onto the grounds of the government headquarters. Nearby, police fired tear gas from a fifth-floor rooftop. Miles away, protesters left handwritten notes on road signs and other surfaces informing anyone passing by of police movements.A block from the police headquarters, protesters built a barricade using bus stop signs and various types of barriers found on Hong Kong’s streets. It spanned six traffic lanes, then they packed it with debris and set it alight.Passers-by and residents—not protesters—heckled the police, or raised their middle fingers, or simply cheered on the blackshirts. It’s a common sight now. Often, by the time groups of riot police charged down a street, the blackshirts already were gone, disappearing into car parks or alleyways, or dashing around street corners.“Saturday a new ‘Goddess of Democracy’ was erected on a university campus. She’s meant to be a successor to the 10-meter-tall statue created during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.”The day’s events followed a wave of arrests and attacks on pro-democracy figures. Joshua Wong, who was the face of the Umbrella Movement in 2014, was stuffed into a car. Agnes Chow, one of Joshua Wong’s colleagues in the pro-democracy group Demosistō, was taken from her home. Wong was charged with inciting, organizing, and participating in an unauthorized assembly, specifically one in June where blackshirt protesters surrounded the police headquarters. Chow faced charges of inciting and participating in the same event.Police rounded up lawmakers, too. They accused Au Nok-hin of assaulting a police officer by speaking—speaking—through a loudspeaker. They took in Jeremy Tan for obstructing a police officer. They nabbed Cheng Chung-tai for “conspiracy to commit criminal damage.” Pro-democracy lawmakers have been consistently present at demonstrations, often making demands for high-ranked police officers to reign in their subordinates, and encouraging blackshirts to stay safe when they’re on the street.Police picked up a former University of Hong Kong student union president, Althea Suen, saying she was involved in the storming of the legislature on July 1. And they took the leader of a banned pro-independence party, Andy Chan, at the airport before he was able to board a flight to Japan.In separate incidents, armed men attacked two activists and protest organizers, Max Chung and Jimmy Sham. Four men beat up Chung with metal rods and umbrellas, while masked individuals assaulted Sham and a companion using a knife and baseball bat.The arrests and attacks came just days after chief executive Carrie Lam called for communication with the protesters and general public, saying, “We should prepare for reconciliation in society by communicating with different people . . . We want to put an end to the chaotic situation in Hong Kong through law enforcement and so on. At the same time, we will not give up on building a platform for dialogue.”The blackshirt protesters of Hong Kong have for weeks put forward five demands—a complete withdrawal of an extradition bill that would have provided cover to move anyone who disagrees with the Chinese Communist Party’s policies to detention facilities in the mainland, a retraction of the government’s label of protests as “riots,” the release of those who have been arrested, an inquiry into recent police conduct, and universal suffrage. (Hongkongers get to vote for district councils and legislators, but not the chief executive, who is chosen by a 1200-person committee mostly packed with pro-China businesspeople.)Carrie Lam had assessed the protesters’ appeals and submitted her conclusion to Beijing in a report. The Chinese government then ordered her not to give in to any demands made by Hongkongers, according to three individuals close to the matter who spoke to Reuters. Hu Xijin, the chief editor of Party-run media organization Global Times, claimed this was fake news that was part of a “public opinion war” meant to whip up unrest in Hong Kong and drive a wedge between Beijing and the city’s government, perpetuating the claim that the protests in Hong Kong are devised by foreign “black hands.”The Chinese Communist Party expects Hongkongers to submit and surrender, contradicting what Lam stated could be a conversation between the city’s officials and the public.“Younger blackshirts repeatedly have framed their movement as one that is a matter of life or death.”As demonstrations drag on in Hong Kong—and they are expected to continue into October, at least—there is a desperation that occasionally seeps through. Weeks ago, graffiti and banners that read “If we burn, you burn with us”—lifted from a line said by Katniss Everdeen in Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay—started to show up on the streets. Today, “You can’t kill us all” was sprayed in red along a road. Younger blackshirts repeatedly have framed their movement as one that is a matter of life or death, an attitude that allows for unpredictable escalation in violent tactics as they become increasingly comfortable with confronting and clashing with riot police week after week.Beijing consistently misreads—or misrepresents—the protesters in Hong Kong. Global Times calls Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow “secessionists,” though neither has advocated for the city’s independence. Though they aren’t leaders of the blackshirts, the consequence of a mass-scale anonymity is that those who don’t wear masks bear the brunt of the clampdown.Saturday, as marches across the city were kicking off in the rain, a new “Goddess of Democracy” was erected on a university campus—the result of a crowdfunding campaign that raised HK$200,000 ($25,500) in a matter of hours. She is a young woman in a t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, face obscured by a gas mask, head covered by a hardhat. She clutches an umbrella in her right hand, and in her left hoists a black flag with white text that reads, “Free Hong Kong. Revolution now.” She’s meant to be a successor to the 10-meter-tall statue created during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.Beijing’s playbook might work within mainland China, where the central government has total control over the security apparatus and how information is presented in media and online. But in Hong Kong, the conditions are different, and its tactics are backfiring. Every move by the government to suppress the uprising has flopped, instead energizing the blackshirts and their supporters to keep doing what they have been doing.

Cleo Wade loves you. She really does. “I don’t need to know you to love you,” Ms. Wade said on a recent Thursday afternoon, in her spacious one-bedroom apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park in the East Village of Manhattan. Dressed casually in a striped La Ligne sweater, she was seated on her living room floor before a wall covered with biodegradable botanical wallpaper, as lavender-scented incense burned and Donny Hathaway played softly in the background. It’s the type of place where one would imagine Ms. Wade dreams up her fortune-cookie-size poetic self-affirmations like: “Self-love: it costs nothing and you gain everything” “Be yourself. I love you like that.” ImageA handmade sign greets visitors to her apartment. Credit...Amanda Jasnowski Pascual for The New York TimesAnd now they have been compiled in a book, “Heart Talk: Poetic Wisdom for a Better Life,” published by Simon & Schuster in March. Pouring herself a second cup of turmeric-infused ginger tea, Ms. Wade apologized for feeling tired. She had spent the previous night in a floral Erdem gown at the New Museum, where she hosted a book party with old classmates from elementary school and newer pals like Elaine Welteroth and Prabal Gurung.“If people treat ‘Heart Talk’ less like a book and more like a best friend, I would really like that,” said Ms. Wade, 29, who has a mop of springy caramel-hued hair and an enviable closet of Gucci and Stella McCartney. Her social calendar and political activism have been chronicled in Vogue and Marie Claire, and she has also been linked romantically to Senator Cory A. Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, though their current status is unknown. In the book’s acknowledgments, Ms. Wade writes: “To my partner, Cory, for being a constant source of light and inspiration in my life. You have truly been my rock during this process.” (Asked if they were currently dating, Ms. Wade, who is extremely reticent about her personal life, declined to clarify the status of their relationship.)ImageMs. Wade's new book is filled with handwritten notes and self-affirming poems. Credit...-Being the world’s most tireless BFF is part of her package, as her book underscores. Filled with handwritten notes and underlined sentences, “Heart Talk” reads more like a user guide for a vague set of life’s hardships than as anything too preachy or precious. Her brand of pin-able prose (sample line: “I love myself more than I loved the idea of an ‘us’”) and emotional transparency (she often posts screen grabs of her girlfriends’ breakup text messages) appeals to a social media generation that expresses their hopes and fears through the brevity of Instagram posts and political T-shirts. Indeed, a number of young women at last month’s March for Our Lives protests against gun violence quoted Ms. Wade’s works on their handmade signs and tagged her on Instagram. Sample placard: “May all children have the freedom to safely be children.”“I connect with my audience because I start with where they are in life, and I just try to walk with them,” she said. “I want you to rip out pages and put them on your fridge.”‘It’ Girl to Instagram PoetMs. Wade traces her empathetic nature to growing up poor in a biracial family in New Orleans. Her father, Bernardo, who is black, is an art photographer. Her mother, Lori, who is white, is a chef. Her parents divorced when she was 5, and she fell in love with writing at 6, after taking a summer course in poetry. In high school, she experimented with a quirky fashion style cultivated from thrift shops and hand-me-downs.“We didn’t have a lot of money, so I became expressive through whatever weird thing I could find,” she said.Her fashion sensibility led her to skip college and move to New York in 2006, where she interned at M Missoni and worked as an office manager at Halston. Ms. Wade’s photogenic looks and penchant for wearing arty headpieces soon helped her achieve lucrative “It” girl status that resulted in consulting for Alice & Olivia and appearing in advertising projects for Cartier and Armani.“I was making money for the first time in my life, but I realized I wasn’t happy,” Ms. Wade said. “Nobody tells you what to do when your girlhood dreams bump into your womanhood dreams.” Seeking perspective, she packed her vintage pink typewriter and traveled across the world, from Morocco to Mexico, where she reacquainted herself with painting and poetry. Fashion was replaced by a new artistic mission: “How can I be a better friend, a better sister, a better daughter and be better to other women?” she said. It was around this time, in 2014, that she posted her first Instagram poem on the “unbreakable nature” of “women everywhere.” She traded her paintbrush for a pen and rebranded herself as a high-profile social butterfly with a social conscience, making appearances at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia with her close friend Katy Perry and at the Lower East Side Girls Club in Manhattan with the actress Reese Witherspoon to talk about self-esteem.“I watched how personal her connection was to all the girls,” Ms. Witherspoon said. “They revere her in the way that you would adore your favorite loving, creative aunt or older sister.”ImageCredit...Amanda Jasnowski Pascual for The New York TimesMs. Wade blushed when the topic of her romantic life was brought up. She has long refused to discuss her relationship with Mr. Booker, once telling New York magazine, “I don’t confirm or deny anything in the romantic realm.” After much prodding during her interview this time, she finally said, “We’re very close, and I consider him family.”Putting down her teacup on one of her small serving trays that reads, “keep your reality, I am fine with my dreams,” she explained that her uncharacteristic tight lips were less for personal reasons than for philosophical ones. “Listen, I put my friends’ text messages on the internet,” she said. “But, every time I am interviewed, who I’m dating is the second question. For Cory, it’s the 10th question, even if that. It never ends up being a qualifier for men, but that’s not the same for women.” Appearing deep in thought as to not mince her words, Ms. Wade took a deep breath. “Men shouldn’t define women who are speaking about their work and what they’re trying to do in the world,” she said. And just like that, she had effortlessly created another affirmation right out of thin air.

The Trump campaign probably broke the law—and certainly trashed norms of republican constitutionalism dating to the very origins of the United States—when it made a campaign prop of the White House. But was Trump troubled? Absolutely not. He basked in the moment. He invited his supporters to bask with him. Bask they did.Donald Trump is a dreadful public speaker, but a master communicator.When he chooses to deliver a formal oration, as he chose to do on the fourth night of the convention, he visibly bores himself. He comes alive only when he can free-associate onstage about his grievances, bigotries, and hatreds. And while those speeches may seethe with dark energy, they are hemmed in by his shrinking vocabulary and egocentric content. How much rhetorical juice can be squeezed from the single and endlessly recycled lemon They were mean to me?But even provided with the most humdrum text, Trump finds ways to convey his powerful message: All those decencies that irritate and chafe you, that you don’t dare disregard? I dare. I dare for you. Mid-speech, Trump expatiated on the greatness of the American past. “Our American ancestors sailed across the perilous ocean to build a new life on a new continent,” he began. Almost any other candidate, even any other Republican, would feel some need to acknowledge the experience of Native Americans and enslaved Africans, to place a question mark over the concept of wild frontier and open range—the literal phrases in his text. But Trump knows that millions of his fellow Americans are sick and tired of having to pretend to care about Black and Indigenous people. He wants them to know that he doesn’t care either. That’s what they love about him.The night before Trump’s acceptance address, a Trump supporter shot three people, killing two, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The 17-year-old crossed state lines to carry his AR-15-style rifle to a scene of confrontation that ended in death. Some presidential nominees might have felt obliged to say something about that. Again: not Trump. “In the strongest possible terms, the Republican Party condemns the rioting, looting, arson and violence we have seen in Democrat-run cities like Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, and New York,” he said. Trump spoke not a word to his followers urging them to put down their guns and quit the provocateur tactics that have so often accelerated disorder into violence. He knows that millions of his fellow Americans regard an armed white vigilante as an honorary law-enforcement officer. He wants them to know that he agrees. That’s something else they love about him.But here’s the most important thing Trump communicates, and why his setting last night resonated so powerfully, all the way to the partisan fireworks on the National Mall spelling out TRUMP and 2020. Trump’s big reelection pitch is “law and order.” He delivered that message while himself defying the laws and rules governing the use of government resources for partisan purposes. He delivered that message after another of his 2016 campaign chairs was indicted. He delivered that message while furiously battling in court to defeat subpoenas from New York prosecutors apparently investigating him, his family, and his companies for bank fraud. He delivered that message while running out the clock on congressional subpoenas investigating him, his family, and his companies for tax fraud. No president since Richard Nixon has seen so many of his closest associates convicted of, or pleading guilty to, criminal wrongdoing.

Black voters—how to engage them and motivate them—is a looming danger for the Democratic party. The debate at Tyler Perry’s studios in Atlanta laid bare a stark reality for the party: Its current four frontrunners are all white and its candidates of color are understandably frustrated by that.After all, it’s not as if this year’s Democratic frontrunners have demonstrated the same kind of facility with African-Americans as past white nominees like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Sen. Bernie Sanders have all struggled to make much of a dent with black voters nationally or in the early primary states. And while Vice President Joe Biden’s standing in the polls can be largely attributed to black voters as his campaign has essentially been an Obama nostalgia tour, his record on race is so spotty one would think a candidate of color could exploit it to great effect.Recent polling has found that an overwhelming majority of black voters (85 percent) will back any of the Democrats over Trump in 2020. Their level of enthusiasm, however, is a genuine cause for concern.Renewed engagement in off-year elections from voters of color should be encouraging for the Democrats, and many of the party’s brightest new stars like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Stacey Abrams are non-white. And yet, in the presidential field, the candidates of color have so far been coming up short.After a brief surge, Sen. Kamala Harris is now fending off reports of a campaign in disarray. Once viewed as a serious threat to win the predominately black South Carolina primary, her support there is at 3 percent. Sen. Cory Booker, who never forgets to remind debate audiences that he lives in a predominately black community, is at 1 percent in South Carolina. Former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, who set himself apart from the rest of the 2020 field early with ambitious policies on immigration, wasn’t even able to make the most recent debate stage.Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign, while surprisingly resilient, has been frequently overshadowed by her stubborn refusal to fully condemn Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and the fact that white supremacists like David Duke think they have common cause with her.Only Andrew Yang, the least well-known of all the minority candidates prior to the primary, has seemed to inspire a devoted following though he’s largely viewed as a one-issue candidate and hasn’t cracked the top tier of any presidential polls so far.With Booker and Harris in particular, their underperformance is stunning. While perhaps not as well-known as Sanders, Warren, or Biden, both had built some national name recognition and both leaned heavily on their backgrounds as an advantage when it comes to building the kinds of coalitions that power Democrats to victory.And yet, despite widely lauded debate performances, neither candidate has really broken though. It’s true that both have faced withering criticism from the left wing of the party’s base—Booker for his longstanding ties to the financial industry and Harris for her controversial record as a prosecutor—but there may be something more insidious at play.It appears that many Democratic voters—black and brown ones very much included—have internalized the racialized rush to judgment about electability that took place after the 2016 contest.Although Hillary Clinton was a white candidate, many pundits felt in hindsight that she had leaned too hard on her black and brown constituency, losing the mostly white so-called heartland in the process. Most of those pundits ignored the fact that Democrats have been bleeding support from these voters for decades. It’s fair to say most Democrats were shell-shocked after election night, and black voters, who have historically been distinguished by their pragmatism, took to heart the idea that following eight years of Obama maybe what America wanted was a white person in the White House.A USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times national poll from this summer found that Democrats on the whole believe that at an older, moderate white man would be their ideal candidate to take down Trump. While that same poll found that African-Americans preferred a candidate of color, it’s fair for their read of white voters’ inclinations to be more cynical.This may account for some of Biden’s unwavering support in the black community, which he claimed to be a part of at the most recent debate. It’s true that there is a genuine affection and appreciation for his loyal support of the first black president and that his is the field’s most familiar face. But he also has enjoyed the privileges of being a straight white man running for president.He can stumble through debates and stick his finger in Sen. Warren’s face and emerge relatively unscathed, while Harris, Booker and every other candidate of color must somehow persuade a 98 percent white electorate in the first two primary contests to take a chance on them instead.Clearly, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick seems to think the uphill battle is worth fighting. He’s jumping into a race that was already the most diverse in the history of this country. He too may have to suffer indignities like Booker’s Rhodes Scholarship being largely forgotten in favor of Buttigieg’s, or Biden’s real-time erasure of Harris’ historic Senate win, when he said at the debate that he had the support of the only black woman elected to the Senate. As he corrected himself to say he’d meant the first black woman elected to the Senate, Harris waved her hands, laughed and said “I’m right here.”Some things never change, and even as black and brown voters are expected to bail out Democrats regardless of quality in election after election, black and brown candidates are expected to be twice as thick-skinned as their white peers even as they try to overcome amorphous concerns about their electability.The ability to withstand all that certainly generated a lot of confidence from Democrats in Barack Obama, and that resilience was borne out in his two resounding presidential election victories. If any 2020 candidate of color can pull off the same feat of rallying the party behind them, defeating Trump may feel like a relatively small hurdle in comparison.

The main, motivating thesis of Brexit: The Uncivil War – an unpicking of the Vote Leave campaign’s success in getting Britain to … well, vote to leave the EU – was that nobody got the right information to the right people in the right way, or fully recognised it as their job to make sure this happened. And when that is a drama’s thesis, a heavy duty hangs on the writer, in this case James Graham. It is incumbent upon him, in an era besieged and almost defined by misinformation, not to add to the chaos.That duty was not clearly fulfilled. Brexit: The Uncivil War focuses on events from the point of view of the Leave campaign director, Dominic Cummings, played by Benedict Cumberbatch with his customary wit, intelligence and energy. You can see why he was catnip to a dramatist otherwise looking out at a sea of grey suits and wondering how to get inside the heads of shapeshifters like Cameron or Gove (as Gertrude Stein famously said of her old home, torn down to make way for something new – “there is no there there”) or persuade viewers that Boris Johnson is real enough to be a protagonist in anything other than the rolling Boris Johnson show that is his life.Cummings elicits strong feelings in everyone who deals with him. They either think (like Dominic Cummings) that he’s a maverick genius who the establishment conspires to keep from greatness, or that he’s a self-aggrandising pillock who should confine himself to the 8,000-word blogposts about how thick everyone else is he likes to churn out, instead of insinuating himself into British politics. No doubt Graham began with his scepticism tanks brimming o’er, but somewhere along the line he seems to have succumbed to the dramatist’s temptation of falling in love with his subject. His Cummings – who closes his eyes in a store cupboard so he can calibrate the nation’s needs from the “hum” Britain gives off, which is quite a dramatic device to gift anyone, and who has so many eureka moments that Greece should slap a tariff on them as soon as it can – seems overall to be one that derives from taking Cummings at his own visionary valuation. A trick many people manage to pull off, of course (see Boris Johnson, above) and one that is probably responsible for as much entrenched privilege in the world as any public school network. But it’s never a good thing, and particularly not here.As a result of Cummings’ centrality and portrayal as a political savant, everyone around him is reduced to a cipher. Farage and Banks become cartoonish buffoons instead of dangerous shit-stirrers (a definite dereliction of duty), Gove and Johnson puppets worked by the unseen hand instead of senior Tory ministers with practical and moral responsibilities they abandoned in piles by the roadside to what both at one stage believed (and in Johnson’s case stated in a newspaper column) to be ruin, and everyone else enthralled – or in Daniel Hannan’s case, pathetically bleating – lackeys. I’d especially like to know how Matthew Elliott feels about being portrayed as a borderline simpleton whenever Cummings heaves into view.While it wasn’t simplistic in the sense that everyone involved with leave was pure evil while everyone remaining was an angel guarding the truth and democracy with flaming sword, it was superficial. All the main issues are touched but never dwelled on. We get a glimpse of the old versus new guard divide, a brief dissection of the difference between the official campaign and Farage’s fascistic version, Leave.EU, and touch on the usefulness of the latter in allowing the former to keep its hands (technically) clean, and the willingness of those (like billionaire Robert Mercer) to chuck spanners in the democratic works knowing the consequences will never affect them.Then we get working-class characters who sport either emotive speeches on their alienation from society and the political process in unlikely detail (unlikely, I mean, because people are rarely so articulate about the ineffable, not because they are working class) or faces full of dumb despair. Data manipulation by AggregateIQ gets more of a look-in, but even that felt oddly skimmed over now we have learned so much about it and the company’s links with Cambridge Analytica. Captions, including one that informed us Vote Leave had since been found guilty of breaking electoral law, were added presumably in haste before the end credits, heightening the sense of boxes being ticked; of dramatised headlines rushing past you rather than issues being embodied or explored; above all, of opportunities wasted.Still, as the title notes, Brexit is a war, and we are only at the beginning. Dramatists should find the next decade or so a grimly fertile one for narrative crops. Possibly the only native one we will actually be self-sufficient in. Take back control! Topics Television TV review Benedict Cumberbatch Channel 4 Dominic Cummings reviews

Two years ago, Amazon introduced the idea of high-tech, cashierless shopping with a store that was a cross between a 7-Eleven and a Pret A Manger sandwich shop. Now, Amazon is bringing the same concept to a full-size supermarket. On Tuesday, Amazon will open the doors to a 10,000-square-foot Amazon Go Grocery store in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, less than a mile from the tech giant’s downtown Seattle headquarters. It’ll be stocked with 5,000 different products — from organic fruit to grass-fed beef — and outfitted with cameras, sensors, and computer vision that eliminate the need for shoppers to fork over cash or plastic before walking out the door with their groceries. The new store, which is the first of its kind in the US, highlights Amazon’s unsated appetite for gobbling up market share in the $900 billion US grocery industry, even after spending nearly $14 billion in 2017 to acquire Whole Foods and making same-day grocery delivery a free perk for Prime members last year. At the same time, the expansion of the cashierless store concept raises the question of when — not if — the technology will be ready for installation in Whole Foods stores, and what might happen to the chain’s thousands of cashiers when it is.“There’s no plans to put this in a Whole Foods, for now,” Amazon Go’s vice president Dilip Kumar told Recode on a tour of the new store Monday. “For now, what we are focused on is this concept and see what customers think of it — [and] go from there.”“You would understand why that’s an obvious question,” I told him. Kumar laughed. “You would understand why I can’t comment on that,” he responded.Twenty-five years ago, Amazon was simply an online purveyor of books making a radical bet on what the future of consumerism might look like. Just over two decades later, Jeff Bezos’s company has grown into the largest online retailer in the US (it’s now eight times the size of the No. 2 competitor); it’s a mainstream provider of entertainment through its Prime Video offering; and it’s the largest cloud computing company in the world.But in Amazon speak, “it’s always Day 1,” which means the company is just scratching the surface of what it might accomplish. In the case of the grocery industry, though, Amazon’s grocery delivery service languished in business purgatory for a decade, unable to crack the code on the right economic model that would both be affordable to a mass customer base but lucrative enough to sustain the business. Still, the food and beverage category is too large for a company with Amazon’s ambitions to ignore, so first came the Whole Foods purchase and then the launch of Amazon Go stores.Since the opening of the first Amazon Go store on the ground floor of the company’s downtown Seattle headquarters in January 2018, Amazon has added more than 20 new locations, with eight in New York City, six in Chicago, and four each in San Francisco and Seattle. Those stores sell breakfast items, sandwiches, salads, and snacks, and they are aimed at enticing busy working professionals in corporate districts on their way to and from work, and on lunch breaks. Many feature both local and national food and beverage brands, including some of Amazon’s own labels, like Happy Belly and Whole Foods’ 365 Everyday Value brands. (The new Amazon Go Grocery store also sells a cross section of local, mainstream, and private-label brands.)Over time, Amazon’s online dominance has solidified a virtuous cycle, where new merchants with new products attract new shopping, and Amazon reaps the benefits of sales as well as shopper and seller data to help hone its retail machine. In the case of the Amazon Go brick-and-mortar stores, Amazon gains insights into its customers’ shopping behavior that it can’t already glean from shopping data on its website. Customers scan an Amazon Go app at a turnstile upon entering and can simply exit without checking out when they are done. Shoppers who want to pay in cash can ask a store associate to swipe them in, an addition to the original idea that was implemented after some municipalities banned cashless stores.The original Amazon Go stores have received high marks from shoppers in online reviews, but their technology infrastructure is expensive to build out. That fuels speculation from industry analysts that Amazon Go might need to expand into a format where each shopper is spending more per visit. In fact, the original prototype for Amazon Go back in 2015 was a 15,000-square-foot supermarket that Jeff Bezos reportedly vetoed after a visit, according to a Bloomberg News report. “There were specialty counters where Amazon employees posing as baristas, butchers, and cheesemongers took orders and added items to Bezos’ imaginary bill,” Bloomberg reported. But Bezos didn’t like that customers would have to wait for their meat or cheese to be weighed and added to their bill when the whole point of the store was to eliminate wasted time at checkout.Five years later, the supermarket concept is finally launching, but at two-thirds of the prototype size and with a simple format more reminiscent of a Trader Joe’s than a Stop & Shop, Kroger, Walmart, or even Whole Foods. There’s no deli counter, butcher, or bakery, likely because of the additional friction they’d add to a shopping experience that Amazon and Bezos imagined would be quicker than that of competing stores. Produce items are sold by the unit or bundle rather than by weight, so that the cameras and computer can handle the price computations. But building technology advanced enough to accurately identify and associate unpackaged items with a specific shopper still proved a substantial hurdle.Shoppers typically spend more time picking up, placing down, and just handling produce than they do with packaged items, which adds complexity to the computer identification process. And that’s not even taking into account the physical differences from one pear to another. “So how do you take into account color and shape and other characteristics ... to just be able to associate that to the right customer account?” Amazon’s Kumar asked rhetorically.The new store will employ workers who unpack inventory behind the scenes and restock shelves and produce bins. Other staff will greet shoppers at the entrance and check IDs in a section where beer, wine, and liquor is sold. Amazon wouldn’t disclose how many people work on any given shift, but the company said it hired “several dozen associates” to work at the store. Amazon argues that Amazon Go stores aren’t eliminating jobs, but instead are shifting worker roles to different kinds of labor.Still, the lack of cashiers — of which there are more than 3.5 million in the US — is notable when you consider that Whole Foods has around 500 stores. Whole Foods stores are typically two to five times the size of the new Amazon Go Grocery store, which means that even if it is successful, there’s no guarantee that the technology is good or cheap enough to be transplanted into the organic grocery store chain anytime soon. But when the tech is further developed, it would be surprising if Amazon doesn’t bring it to Whole Foods, especially if customers’ behavior signals they’d want it. And then, the cashier question is one Amazon will face again.

Early this past March, a team of U.S. Marine Raiders—the Corps’ Special Operations forces—found itself locked in a firefight with well-entrenched jihadist insurgents in the mountains near the town of Makhmur in northern Iraq. The Marines were attached to an Iraqi counterterrorism task force at the time. Their mission was to clear the insurgents out of a tunnel complex at the base of the mountains. Before the last shots were fired that day, more than two dozen jihadists had been killed, and their redoubt was captured. Two Marines, Captain Moises A. Navas and Gunnery Sergeant Diego D. Pago, lost their lives in savage, close-in fighting. They are among the last few American service members to be killed in Iraq, a country the United States hoped to transform into a pro-Western bulwark against terrorism and instability in the Middle East, but failed to do so.The Marines were killed in action against soldiers of the most feared and successful jihadist organization in history—the Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and Daesh. ISIS has distinguished itself in a crowded field through acts of ghastly, unspeakable violence against all “infidels and apostates,” and its establishment in northern Iraq and Syria of a short-lived, rigidly intolerant proto-state, “purified” of all concessions to modernity and religious toleration. The caliphate was methodically destroyed by a U.S.-led multinational coalition between 2014 and 2019.Now, just a bit more than a year after the fall of ISIS’s last redoubt in Syria, there is a strong consensus among Middle East experts and military analysts that ISIS is on the rebound, taking full advantage of the weakness of the Iraqi government and the swirling chaos that prevails throughout the region. Meanwhile, ISIS’s affiliates in North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula are gaining in numbers and capability.According to a recent report submitted to the U.N. Security Council by a panel of international experts, ISIS has been “mounting increasingly bold insurgent attacks in [Iraq and Syria], calling and planning for the breakout of ISIS fighters in detention facilities, and exploiting weaknesses in the security environment of both countries.”Despite the October 2019 death of ISIS’s supreme leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at the hands of a Delta Force squadron, the group remains well-funded and organized. At least 20,000 of the estimated 30,000 foreign fighters who participated in its earlier conquest remain alive and committed to the cause.A week after the Marine Raiders’ battle in the cave complex in March, ISIS released another in a long line of propaganda videos, depicting graphic scenes of recent beheadings of Iraqi soldiers and a savage ISIS attack on ordinary Iraqis in Kirkuk Province, whose only offense seems to have been they were enjoying playing a pickup soccer game. The narrator in the film intones, “America thinks that victory is killing one or more leaders… or losing control of a city or land. No, defeat is the loss of the will to fight. Your armies do not scare us.” According to Hassan Hassan, an ISIS expert at the Center for Global Policy in Washington, D.C., Islamic State fighters in early April “conducted several attacks in Kirkuk, Diyala, and Saladin [provinces in Iraq]. Such attacks included the attempted storming of the counterterrorism and intelligence directorate in Kirkuk, and several coordinated attacks in Saladin. The attacks were among the most sophisticated in years.”Experts agree that President Donald Trump’s decision to pull most of America’s military forces out of Syria last October has been an important factor in opening the door for ISIS’s resurgence. The decision effectively greenlighted a Turkish attack on the Kurds of the Syrian Democratic Forces, key U.S. allies in the fight against ISIS. These troops had been guarding about 10,000 captured ISIS fighters in various detention centers and prisons. The Turkish incursion forced a significant percentage of the Kurdish guards to withdraw from the detention centers and redeploy elsewhere. Hundreds of ISIS fighters, including a number of senior members of the organization, have escaped, and others may well do so in the coming months, with the help of their brothers on the outside. One of Baghdadi’s last public acts was to call on his brothers and sisters to rise up and free those who remained detained. At the Hasaka prison in northeastern Syria, which holds between 4,000 and 5,000 captives, ISIS militants began breaking down doors and digging holes in walls between cells in late March. A riot broke out, and a number of ISIS fighters escaped before order was restored. Five weeks later, in early May, ISIS fighters briefly took control of the same prison.Jailbreaks, of course, played a crucial role in Baghdadi’s successful strategy for establishing the caliphate in the first place. After American combat forces left Iraq in late 2011, ISIS fighters freed many hundreds of detained al Qaeda in Iraq (ISIS’s precursor) combatants from prisons in Tikrit, Kirkuk, and even the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.According to the U.N. report, Syrian Democratic Forces in the region have been unable “to maintain adequate control over a restive population of detained ISIL fighters, as well as family members, numbering more than 100,000.”Most of the captured family members remain at the al-Hol refugee camp in Syria near the Iraq border, where they live in appalling squalor with inadequate food and sanitation—a recipe for despair and radicalization of the young adult males. Idlib Province in Syria, the site of the last caliphate stronghold, remains dominated by ISIS fighters and those friendly to them. Anbar Province of Iraq, near the Syrian border, also remains a hotbed of ISIS activity, according to the report.The U.N. report is bad news, of course, but to serious students of the War on Terror, it is hardly surprising. Way back in December 2017, as ISIS’s last toehold in Iraq fell, President Trump declared that ISIS had been “100 percent defeated.” The statement was one in a long line of naïve and wildly over-optimistic pronouncements by American war leaders engaged in counterinsurgencies, including, most famously, George W. Bush’s May 1, 2003 triumphal declaration aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” and General William Westmoreland’s claim that he “had the enemy on the ropes” in Vietnam, two months before the Tet Offensive of January 1968 forced Washington to admit it couldn’t win in Southeast Asia by force of arms.“America’s adversaries, ISIS included, have an inconvenient habit of resurrecting themselves from defeat.”In Vietnam, American soldiers and Marines often had the demoralizing experience of engaging Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regiments and divisions their superiors had declared vanquished or destroyed. Like corks floating in the ocean surf, these phoenix-like fighting organizations would reappear again and again after being “defeated.”So it is in the Global War on Terror, where America’s adversaries, ISIS included, have an inconvenient habit of resurrecting themselves from defeat. Not long after the Taliban and al Qaeda had been routed in Afghanistan, both organizations resurfaced with a vengeance. Today, the Taliban is a much more powerful organization than it was before the United States launched its October 2001 unconventional assault with the help of the Northern Alliance. Indeed, most experts on the War in Afghanistan believe the Taliban has a very good chance of reestablishing control over vast swaths of that nation’s countryside as soon as American forces depart.Under the leadership of an uneducated Jordanian thug named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) became the dominant force in the hydra-headed insurgency against the Americans in Iraq by 2005. By late 2007, Zarqawi’s organization had been severely degraded by a bold new American counterinsurgency strategy, a surge in U.S. combat power, and an alliance with the militias of a group of Sunni tribal sheikhs who had become disillusioned with AQI’s shockingly violent tactics.Taken together, these developments resulted in a considerable diminution of sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites in Anbar Province and in Baghdad, and they broke al Qaeda’s hold over a number of other insurgent groups. Civilian casualties dropped off markedly.Military analysts praised the surge and the Americans’ new counterinsurgency strategy effusively, seeing it as a major turning point in the conflict that might well bring order and security to the entire country.Sadly, the success of that strategy proved to be fleeting. Once U.S. combat troops left, writes defense analyst Carter Malkasian, the sheikhs “were too divided and isolated to mount an effective resistance” against a resurgent ISIS, and “almost everything the United States fought for between 2003 and 2007 was lost.”The new American strategy tamped down the violence, but did little to enhance the effectiveness of the Iraqi security forces, or the legitimacy of the government in Baghdad in the eyes of its own people, especially the disenfranchised Sunni minority. That government remains deeply corrupt, faction-ridden, and criminally unresponsive to its citizens, even today. Back in 2008 historian Thomas Powers called Iraq “a seething cockpit of warring religions, political movements, social classes and ethnic groups, many influenced by Iran.” And so it remains today.The loss of the new caliphate in 2019 has done little to damage the highly sophisticated social media-driven propaganda campaign of the Islamic State, with its celebration of extreme violence against unbelievers, and its alluring promise of eternal salvation for martyrs. The dream of re-establishing that caliphate remains strong in the hearts of the believers, while the fecklessness of the government in Iraq, and its failure to address the grievances of Sunni Muslims, who constitute about 20 percent of its population, only lend credence to predictions that ISIS will rise again in the very heart of the Middle East.

Enlarge this image Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has a son on the autism spectrum and has been talking openly about the disability. Chris Carlson/AP hide caption toggle caption Chris Carlson/AP Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has a son on the autism spectrum and has been talking openly about the disability. Chris Carlson/AP During the final presidential debate of 2019, one of the moderators posed a question about a topic that rarely gets attention on the debate stage: What steps would candidates take to help disabled people get more integrated into the workforce and their local communities?For Andrew Yang, the question was both political and personal. His oldest son, Christopher, is on the autism spectrum."I have a son with special needs. And to me, special needs is the new normal in this country," Yang said on the debate stage, before asking audience members to raise their hands if they knew someone autistic or with special needs.That's a question that Yang has been asking audiences everywhere as he campaigns across the country seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. But despite his openness about the disability, some advocates say his policy proposals meant to help people on the autism spectrum and with disabilities lack heft and specificity.At a recent town hall in Salem, N.H., Yang described when Christopher received his autism diagnosis."We were first-time parents and Christopher had struggles. But as a first-time parent you don't know if that's just the norm," he said. "You think, maybe this is normal, maybe 2-year-olds act like this and 3-year-olds act like this." Getting the diagnosis, he said, was a relief for him and his wife. "We were like, OK, this is something we now understand and we can bring resources to bear."But Yang said he recognizes that not everyone has those resources. Autism can be a costly and complex diagnosis that can vary widely. Yang told NPR why he's decided to make his son's story part of his campaign. He said there wasn't really a choice."I would have no idea how not to talk about it, in the sense that it's part of our family and part of our lives," he said. "The last thing that would ever occur to me would be to somehow obscure the reality of Christopher and his autism from our story."He described Christopher as "very high-functioning" and "intellectually very gifted in some respects," while "socially and emotionally very challenged in some respects."Yang and his wife, Evelyn, have been particularly candid about the challenges they face as caregivers. Evelyn stays at home with their children, though she has recently been active on the campaign trail. She recently voiced an ad that focuses on caregivers.Yang has said that since Christopher received his autism diagnosis at age 3, Evelyn has become the "CEO of Team Christopher." He credits her with taking on the lion's share of the work while he's on the road. But he's candid that it's "very, very hard on the family.""I will say one virtue of Christopher's autism is that he has absolutely no idea what Daddy is doing. And that's true for his younger brother as well, who is 4. So there is some benefit," Yang said in response to a question about how they balance parenting with the demands of a presidential campaign. "I just told them that Daddy has a big deadline and is on the road an awful lot. They don't understand what I'm doing.""Anytime someone talks to me about running and the work I'm doing, I say really thank my wife Evelyn, because she's been working 10 times harder, keeping Christopher and the family strong and whole," he said, adding that his campaign would not be possible "without her doing the real, hard work."In December, the Yang campaign held an event focused on families and autism in Iowa City, Iowa. The stop was part of Yang's recent bus tour across the state. More than 100 people filled a cafe to speak with the Yangs.Many attendees said they didn't remember a presidential candidate ever talking about autism in the same way — or holding an event specifically focused on autism."Autism is such a common condition. You know, so many of us know somebody who's on the autism spectrum. But yet we don't have leaders who talk about autism in a positive light. You know, we currently have a leader who thinks it's appropriate some openly mock people who have developmental differences," said Jessie Witherell, a co-founder of the Iowa City Autism Community and the mother of an 8-year-old autistic son. Her group helped put together the December event.She was alluding to President Trump, who recently has mocked Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old climate activist who has Asperger's syndrome."And so you're getting to meet somebody who actually wants to address autism and reduce stigma and talk about the things that actually affect our lives — was very, very important," she added.The event was the first one of its kind Dina Bishara, another co-founder of the Iowa City Autism Community said."One thing that I think we were both very happy with is that I think the first three questions from the audience were from autistic adults," said Bishara, who moderated the conversation with Yang. "So often the conversation is dominated by parents and professionals. I was really happy that not only did autistic adults stick out this event, which was very not autism-friendly, but they had a chance to directly connect with the candidate himself, too."At the event in Salem, Yang rolled out a new plan to fund research and support children with disabilities and their families. Politics Here Are The Presidential Candidates Women Have Been Donating To Politics Andrew Yang Qualifies For December Debate, Bringing Diversity To Stage Ari Ne'eman, a senior research associate at Harvard Law School's Project on Disability and a co-founder of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said he welcomed some parts of Yang's plan, including his commitment to ending seclusion as a punishment in schools. He also praised Yang's call for increased funding for the federal law called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which gives every child the right to services and accommodations that will allow them to learn.But he also had some concerns, including the fact that Yang's proposals focus only on children, rather than also including policy directed toward disabled adults."That's a sore spot in the disability community. Often you will see the public very quick to talk about cute, disabled children, but when those children grow up, being very reluctant to provide supports and services in order to be able to have a life with dignity and independence," he said.In the NPR interview, Yang called it "mission critical that we help families get a diagnosis for a child as early as possible," but added that "it should be easier for any American to identify that they may be neurologically atypical.""I'd love to be able to help people at different stages identify neurological atypicalities because it's immensely helpful. If you don't know about something about yourself, then it's very hard to adapt and adjust," he said. "But I will say that I'm particularly passionate about helping kids and parents understand it because the early ages and stages are so crucial to kids' development where the right intervention can actually change the course of that person's life, and be the difference between them leading a happy, productive, fully integrated life and needing assistance for their entire life."Disability justice advocate and organizer Lydia X. Z. Brown said that Yang "falls into a very familiar pattern of non-autistic parents of autistic children using their children to support their own credibility as speakers about autism without actually consulting autistic people themselves."They described Yang's proposal as "limited in scope" and "lacking" compared with the disability policy platforms released by other candidates."A good policy platform at the end of the day has to be one that is devised in consultation and collaboration with directly impacted people and communities and one in which if that person is to be elected to office or to hold any position of influence will be implemented, led and led by those who belong to directly impacted communities," they said. "Yang's platform shows that he has not done even a fraction of that work."Ne'eman shared that concern. He said that Yang's plan was a positive step forward but that "he's still speaking in generalities rather than making concrete policy commitments."One big question that has been raised by advocates is how Yang's signature Freedom Dividend, which would give every American $1,000 a month, would work with the existing web of disability programs.That's one issue that Tammy Nyden, who attended the Iowa City autism event, raised. She's the mother of a severely disabled son and a co-founder of Mothers on the Front Line.She said she hasn't found her "perfect candidate" but says she was pleased to hear Yang "speak openly and proudly about his child and put it in a positive light and understand the wonderful humanity and gifts of his son instead of sometimes the way the issue is discussed.""I really appreciate Andrew Yang's platform, this idea of having a minimum income, particularly for people with disabilities," Nyden said. "One concern I have, though, is when I look at the platform, that's to replace SSDI (Social Security Disability Income) and other things. And while $1,000 is better than the I think $721 that a person with disabilities can get per month, you can't live on either of those."In the NPR interview, Yang didn't get into specifics on which existing disability programs would stack with the Freedom Dividend. And it's not something addressed in the plan his campaign released this week.But, in response to Nyden's concern, he said that "the last thing I would ever do is take anything away from Americans.""The Freedom Dividend is universal and opt-in. There are some instances where it might substitute for existing benefits. In many other instances, like Social Security, it stacks on top," he said. "So it would depend upon the source of the nature of the program."He added that the $1,000 a month payment he wants to give every American is "meant to be a foundation or floor for all Americans, but no one stops building at the floor.""If there are individuals or families that need more support and resources, that's what we should be providing," Yang said.