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Still Separate, Still Unequal: Teaching about School Segregation and Educational Inequality (Published 2019)

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Although many students learn about the struggles to desegregate schools in the civil rights era, segregation as a current reality is largely absent from the curriculum. This teaching resource uses Times articles and Op-Eds to investigate the issue.

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pKWwfxNP7d7o7o1_US7zmFb_PMNEnz6Ji17HO4iXgd0/edit

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/15/health/vaping-thc-wisconsin.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FMarijuana%20and%20Medical%20Marijuana&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=collection

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https://newsela.com/read/US-space-command/id/48322/

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Frida Ghitis writes that President Trump would have us believe his withholding of the military aid had nothing to do with his desire for an investigation of Joe Biden. But none of this is normal. In fact, his proposed deal with the President of Ukraine was a crass move that put Trump's personal political interests above those of the country he swore to serve.

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The Ukraine scandal has a lot of similarities to Watergate.

By

Ms. Holtzman sat on the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate.

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Credit Credit Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

For those of us who were there during Watergate, the Ukraine scandal is beginning to sound like an echo chamber.

Multiple reports say that President Trump used his office to press Ukraine's president to investigate Joe Biden and provide damaging information about him, though there is no evidence of wrongdoing on Mr. Biden's part. This was a bid to affect the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, just as the Democratic National Committee headquarters break-in at the Watergate complex aimed to affect the 1972 presidential election.

Mr. Trump's reported actions would amount to a Nixonian misuse of presidential power that threatens our democracy and constitutes high crime and misdemeanor. The Constitution is clear: A president who uses presidential powers for purely personal and political reasons, as Mr. Trump appears to have done, commits an impeachable offense.

Mr. Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani have already acknowledged much of what has been reported about the Ukraine affair. On July 25, Mr. Trump spoke by phone with Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and is said to have mentioned Mr. Biden eight times. It was not casual name dropping. Mr. Giuliani also spoke with Ukrainian officials at Mr. Trump's direction starting last May, urging them to investigate Mr. Biden.

Mr. Trump admits that about a week before the infamous phone call, he put nearly $400 million in congressionally appropriated military aid for Ukraine on hold. It was not released until Sept. 11,after news broke of a whistle-blower complaint about the Zelensky call, a complaint that the inspector general for the intelligence community found "credible" and "of urgent concern." This strongly suggests there was no legitimate reason for the hold.

The Trump administration is expected to release a redacted version of the whistle-blower's complaint this week, and Mr. Trump says he'll supply a transcript of the Zelensky call. But an unredacted version of the complaint must be released, and since the transcripts Richard Nixon turned over to Congress were doctored, Congress should also demand a backup recording of the call. Assuming Mr. Trump refuses, Ukraine undoubtedly has a transcript and a recording. That recording could well be analogous to the Nixon White House tapes, which showed the president's personal involvement in the cover-up, and Congress should request it immediately.

But even if it isn't conclusive evidence of a shakedown, such a tape of the conversation is likely to show that Mr. Trump, like Mr. Nixon, used his presidential powers against political opponents. Among the grounds for the 1974 committee vote to approve three articles of impeachment against Mr. Nixon was that he authorized I.R.S. audits of political opponents on his "enemies list" as well as an illegal wiretap on a White House staff member who worked for his chief presidential rival.

Like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Trump appears to have acted for his own personal political interests as opposed to a legitimate national interest. Mr. Nixon used his personal lawyer to pay hush money to the Watergate burglars. Mr. Trump used his personal attorney as the go-between with Mr. Zelensky, urging the Ukrainian president to work with Mr. Giuliani to investigate Mr. Biden.

Going through Mr. Giuliani says it all. If Mr. Trump had a shred of evidence against Mr. Biden or any legitimate governmental objective in view, he would have directed the Justice Department or State Department to work directly with Ukraine.

Holding up military assistance to coerce Ukraine into investigating Mr. Biden is itself a grave, impeachable abuse of power if done for personal and political reasons. The inspector general made a reference to a promise to a foreign leader in the whistle-blower's complaint, though we don't yet know what it was. If Mr. Trump promised to reward Ukraine with military aid for finding dirt on Mr. Biden, that could constitute bribery, a separate constitutional ground for impeachment.

It's a violation of campaign finance law to solicit campaign help from a foreign country, as Mr. Trump knows well from the Russia collusion investigation. It's also Nixonian.

Although we didn't know this at the time of his impeachment, Mr. Nixon also secretly sought the help of a foreign government during his 1968 election campaign. Worried that the Vietnam peace treaty President Lyndon B. Johnson was pursuing would cause his defeat, Mr. Nixon sabotaged it by secretly promising South Vietnam it would do better under a Nixon presidency. It worked. The treaty talks failed, voters elected Mr. Nixon, and peace did not come for many more years.

As the legal commentator Benjamin Wittes noted last week on the website Lawfare, in addition to constituting abuse of power, pressuring Ukraine to investigate Mr. Biden and his son for political purposes violates their civil liberties. That also recalls Watergate, because Mr. Nixon violated the civil liberties of Daniel Ellsberg, who was being prosecuted for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Among the grounds for Nixon's impeachment was his involvement in breaking into Mr. Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, seeking information to smear him.

Like Mr. Nixon's, Mr. Trump's reported actions demand impeachment - the one remedy to protect the rule of law, the rights of Americans and the integrity of our elections from a president bent on violating them. The framers created the impeachment power to safeguard democracy. It is Congress's urgent responsibility to use it now.

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Opinion | I Voted to Impeach Nixon. I'd Do the Same for Trump.

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The Ukraine scandal has a lot of similarities to Watergate. By Ms. Holtzman sat on the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate. For those of us who were there during Watergate, the Ukraine scandal is beginning to sound like an echo chamber.

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https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/25/us-china-cold-war-and-rising-protectionism-could-split-world-order.html

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https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/13/asia/hong-kong-airport-protest-explained-hnk-intl/index.html
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infantry and weapon carrier manufacturing

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Hypersonic weapons are the center of a new arms race between China, the US and Russia

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Hypersonic weapons travel more than five times the speed of sound and can evade traditional missile defense systems. It's no wonder why Russia, China and the United States all want them as part of their military arsenals.

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https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/26/world/meanwhile-america-analysis-9-26-intl/index.html

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https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/26/politics/donald-trump-impeachment-threat-democrats/index.html

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trump stares impeachment in the face and doesn't like what he sees - cnnpolitics

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Trump stares impeachment in the face and doesn't like what he sees

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Donald Trump's political tragedy is that he really does believe the call with Ukraine's President was "perfect," though it may yet doom him with the stain of impeachment.

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https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/25/us-china-cold-war-and-rising-protectionism-could-split-world-order.html

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https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/26/politics/ukraine-call-whistleblower-complaint-donald-trump/index.html

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By Meg Wagner

Updated 7:23 a.m. ET, September 25, 2019

What's happening: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

Call transcript: Trump has pledged to publish an un-redacted and declassified transcript today of a phone call with Ukraine's leader at the center of what Democrats allege is his abuse of presidential power.

Trump at the UN: The President is scheduled to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the United Nations this afternoon.

Behind closed doors, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not specify to her colleagues yesterday exactly how the impeachment inquiry will play out. In part, that's by design.
Here's what you need to know about what happens next:

What committees are involved? Each of the six committees - Judiciary, Intelligence, Ways and Means, Financial Services, Oversight and Foreign Affairs - will continue with their investigations, looking at different elements of Trump's presidency, his past and his businesses. Months ago, these committees sorted out the different areas they are investigating, and many of the investigations are still charging ahead or their fights are tied up in court. If the Democrats decide to impeach President Trump, the Democrats on these committees will each provide their input over what they believe should be included in articles of impeachment, which will be introduced by House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler. (Pelosi will have the ultimate say on this.)

When would an impeachment vote happen? The House Judiciary Committee will consider the articles of impeachment resolution and schedule a vote on it. If it passes the House panel, then the full House is expected to take it up. If a majority of House members vote for the resolution, then the House will have impeached Trump. To convict the President and remove him from office, it would require support from a two-thirds majority of the Senate, a highly unlikely proposition.

So in the end, what's changed? Not a whole lot, other than Pelosi formally endorsing an impeachment inquiry. But for the past couple months, the House Judiciary Committee has made the case that it was already conducting an impeachment inquiry with the goal of deciding whether to vote on articles of impeachment. There will not be a separate vote to open up an impeachment inquiry, Democrats say. Pelosi would not give a timeframe over this process but she told her colleagues it would be done "expeditiously," and Nadler has hoped to conclude it by the end of the year.

A source close to the White House who routinely speaks with Trump says the President does not want to be impeached.

Despite his comments that he believes the process might help him politically, Trump, according to the source, has worried about the possibility of being impeached for nearly a year, dating back to the weeks that followed the November 2018 midterms when Democrats won the House.

His decisions to quickly authorize the release of the call transcript, as well as the whistleblower complaint, are signs of Trump's wariness of the potential of entering the history books as an impeached president, the source added.

A White House official said a declassification process is currently underway for releasing the whistleblower complaint which is expected to be handed over to Congress by Thursday.

What's happening: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

Call transcript: Trump has pledged to publish an un-redacted and declassified transcript today of a phone call with Ukraine's leader at the center of what Democrats allege is his abuse of presidential power.

Trump at the UN: The President is scheduled to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the United Nations this afternoon.

Behind closed doors, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not specify to her colleagues yesterday exactly how the impeachment inquiry will play out. In part, that's by design.
Here's what you need to know about what happens next:

What committees are involved? Each of the six committees - Judiciary, Intelligence, Ways and Means, Financial Services, Oversight and Foreign Affairs - will continue with their investigations, looking at different elements of Trump's presidency, his past and his businesses. Months ago, these committees sorted out the different areas they are investigating, and many of the investigations are still charging ahead or their fights are tied up in court. If the Democrats decide to impeach President Trump, the Democrats on these committees will each provide their input over what they believe should be included in articles of impeachment, which will be introduced by House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler. (Pelosi will have the ultimate say on this.)

When would an impeachment vote happen? The House Judiciary Committee will consider the articles of impeachment resolution and schedule a vote on it. If it passes the House panel, then the full House is expected to take it up. If a majority of House members vote for the resolution, then the House will have impeached Trump. To convict the President and remove him from office, it would require support from a two-thirds majority of the Senate, a highly unlikely proposition.

So in the end, what's changed? Not a whole lot, other than Pelosi formally endorsing an impeachment inquiry. But for the past couple months, the House Judiciary Committee has made the case that it was already conducting an impeachment inquiry with the goal of deciding whether to vote on articles of impeachment. There will not be a separate vote to open up an impeachment inquiry, Democrats say. Pelosi would not give a timeframe over this process but she told her colleagues it would be done "expeditiously," and Nadler has hoped to conclude it by the end of the year.

A source close to the White House who routinely speaks with Trump says the President does not want to be impeached.

Despite his comments that he believes the process might help him politically, Trump, according to the source, has worried about the possibility of being impeached for nearly a year, dating back to the weeks that followed the November 2018 midterms when Democrats won the House.

His decisions to quickly authorize the release of the call transcript, as well as the whistleblower complaint, are signs of Trump's wariness of the potential of entering the history books as an impeached president, the source added.

A White House official said a declassification process is currently underway for releasing the whistleblower complaint which is expected to be handed over to Congress by Thursday.

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House launches Trump impeachment inquiry: Live updates

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By Meg Wagner Updated 7:23 a.m. ET, September 25, 2019 What's happening: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Call transcript: Trump has pledged to publish an un-redacted and declassified transcript today of a phone call with Ukraine's leader at the center of what Democrats allege is his abuse of presidential power.

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donald trump's ukraine call was incredibly stupid (opinion) - cnn

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Trump's Ukraine call was incredibly stupid

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Trump's decision to push Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate a political opponent one day after the country heard special counsel Robert Mueller testify before Congress suggests a man with a political death wish, writes Michael D'Antonio.

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CLOSE

WASHINGTON - Tensions between the U.S. and Iran accelerated sharply following the Trump administration's accusations that Tehran was behind a weekend attack on oil facilities in Saudi Arabia.

The attack, which disrupted more than 5% of the world daily oil supply, reignited fears of a military confrontation in the Middle East and comes amid months of growing hostilities between the U.S. and Iran.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced on Tuesday that "there will be no talks with the U.S. at any level" - remarks apparently meant to end all speculation about a possible U.S.-Iran meeting between the two countries' presidents at the U.N. later this month.

Here's a closer look at Saturday's attacks and other recent events that inflamed hostilities in the Middle East:

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Iran denies responsibility

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed Iran but offered no specific proof that it was behind the drone strikes on the world's largest oil processing facility and a major oil field Saturday. The installations, operated by state-owned Saudi Aramco, produce more than half of the country's crude oil.

Iran has denied any involvement in the strikes, but Yemen's Iranian-backed Houthi rebels claimed responsibility. Saudi investigators said their initial findings suggest the weapons used "came from Iran" but did not speculate on where the weapons were launched.

The U.S. government released satellite images showing the extent of the destruction and suggested the assault originated in Iran or Iraq rather than Yemen, where Saudi Arabia is fighting the Houthi rebels.

President Donald Trump said Monday that it looks as if Iran was responsible - but he doesn't want war.

"Well, it's looking that way," Trump said when asked whether Iran is responsible for the missile and drone strikes. "As soon as we find out definitively, we'll let you know. But it does look that way."

Earlier Monday, Trump questioned Iran's denials of involvement, referencing an incident earlier this summer when Iran shot down a U.S. drone by claiming it was in Iranian "airspace."

"They stuck strongly to that story knowing that it was a very big lie," Trump wrote on Twitter. "Now they say that they had nothing to do with the attack on Saudi Arabia. We'll see?"

On Sunday, Trump suggested on Twitter that the U.S. is prepared to retaliate.

"There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!" he wrote.

More: Iran denies attacking Saudi oil sites but prepared for 'full-fledged war'

Iran and U.S. 'spies'

The attacks on the Saudi oil facilities come less than two months after tensions between the U.S. and Iran escalated over Iran's claim that it had arrested 17 spies recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Iran's semi-official Fars news agency claimed in July that 17 spies had been taken into custody and said some of them already had been sentenced to death. The arrests reportedly occurred over several months, and those taken into custody worked on "sensitive sites" in the country's military and nuclear facilities, an Iranian intelligence official told a press conference in Iran.

Trump called Iran's claim "totally false. Zero truth." Pompeo, a former CIA director, also dismissed the report, saying Iran has a long history of lying.

More: Truth or lies? What we know about Iran's claim that it arrested 17 spies working for the CIA

Iran seizes tanker

Just days before Iran claimed it had arrested spies for the CIA, Iran's Revolutionary Guard seized a British-flagged tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, ratcheting up hostilities in the Middle East.

The Revolutionary Guard said its naval forces had seized the Stena Impero tanker July 19 for allegedly violating maritime rules and regulations in the Persian Gulf. A dramatic audio recording released days later provided the tense moments leading up to the raid, which included the Guard's forces rappelling from helicopters to the ship's deck.

Two weeks ago, Iran released seven of the tanker's 23 crew members.

More: How to turn Iran's tanker mischief against the Islamic Republic

Drone drama

The day before the British ship was seized, Trump announced that the USS Boxer destroyed an Iranian drone that came within 1,000 yards of the warship and ignored multiple calls to stand down.

Neither Trump nor the Pentagon spelled out how the Boxer destroyed the drone or provided any video or other evidence from the incident. Several U.S. officials said the ship used electronic jamming to bring it down rather than hitting it with a missile.

Iran, however, said that all of its drones in the Persian Gulf had safely returned to their bases and suggested the U.S. had destroyed its own drone by mistake.

Trump, however, insisted there is "no doubt" that a U.S. warship destroyed an Iranian drone.

President Donald Trump (Photo: VPC)

More drone drama

The USS Boxer incident was not the first drone drama in the region this summer.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards shot down a U.S. surveillance drone in June, a bold strike that drew a stern warning from Trump and prompted top Pentagon officials to formulate military response options.

Iran said the drone was destroyed over its coast and said the incident sent a "clear message" that the Persian Gulf nation was ready to defend itself from what it views as Western aggression. The Pentagon, however, said the incident played out in international waters over the Strait of Hormuz.

Regardless, the U.S. prepared to make a retaliatory strike on Iran, but Trump canceled the attack at the last minute.

Trump said U.S. forces had been "cocked and loaded," but that he called off the attack just 10 minutes before it was to take place after learning that 150 Iranians would die in the strike.

Other tensions

Tensions between the U.S. and Iran have been building for months after the Trump administration pulled out of a 2015 nuclear deal negotiated by President Barack Obama's administration and other world powers.

Those tensions escalated in June, when two tankers reported they had been attacked about 25 miles off the southern coast of Iran.

The Front Altair, loaded with the flammable hydrocarbon mixture naphtha from the United Arab Emirates, radioed for help as it caught fire. A short time later, the Kokuka Courageous, loaded with methanol from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, also called for help.

The U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet said it received two distress calls and sent the guided-missile destroyer USS Bainbridge to the scene.

No nation or group claimed responsibility, and Iran denied it was involved in the attack.

But Pompeo told reporters the attack was the work of Iran. Pompeo said the assessment was based in part on U.S. intelligence, the expertise needed for the operation and other recent incidents in the region, which the U.S. also has blamed on Iran.

Sanctions

With tensions mounting, the Trump administration announced July 19 it is imposing new sanctions on a senior member of the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah.

The administration also announced a $7 million reward for information leading to the capture of 25-year fugitive Salman Raouf Salman and described the actions as part of its "maximum pressure" campaign on Iran.

The administration announced its actions on the 25th anniversary of an attack Salman is accused of ordering on a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The attack killed 85 people and wounded hundreds of others.

Since then, the U.S. and other nations have accused Salman of plotting other attacks from a base in Lebanon. Officials believe he is still in the Middle East, but do not know exactly where.
Contributing: Associated Press, John Bacon, David Jackson, Kim Hjelmgaard
Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/09/17/how-did-tensions-between-united-states-and-iran-reach-point/2340811001/

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Iran said there will be no talks with the US following growing tensions. How did things get to this point?

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CLOSE WASHINGTON - Tensions between the U.S. and Iran accelerated sharply following the Trump administration's accusations that Tehran was behind a weekend attack on oil facilities in Saudi Arabia. The attack, which disrupted more than 5% of the world daily oil supply, reignited fears of a military confrontation in the Middle East and comes amid months of growing hostilities between the U.S.

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Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, will appear before the House Intelligence Committee at 9 a.m., as an impeachment showdown heats up in Congress.

Here's what you need to know:

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Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, will appear before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday. Credit Credit Al Drago/Getty Images

A whistle-blower in the intelligence community accused President Trump of using his office to try to get Ukraine's government to help him in the 2020 presidential election, according to a complaint released Thursday by the House Intelligence Committee.

"In the course of my duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election."

The complaint goes on to say the president's personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani is "the central officer in the effort," but that Attorney General William P. Barr "appears to be involved as well."

Joseph Maguire, the intelligence chief at the center of the fight over a whistle-blower complaint about President Trump's dealings with Ukraine, will make a much-anticipated appearance on Thursday morning before the House Intelligence Committee.

It is unclear how much Mr. Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, will be able to disclose about the whistle-blower's complaint, much of which remains classified. His office transmitted a declassified version of it to Congress's intelligence committees late Wednesday, after a classified version had been made available for review by select lawmakers.

He is also expected to avoid revealing any details of the whistle-blower's identity, which could be a violation of the law.

Mr. Maguire will be able to discuss why he and his general counsel disagreed with the inspector general for the intelligence agencies that the complaint needed to be handed over to the congressional intelligence panels.

The differences of opinion between Mr. Maguire and Michael Atkinson, the inspector general, will be at the heart of many questions from House Democrats, who objected angrily to Mr. Maguire's refusal to share the material with Congress, which they said was required by law. The Democrats will also hammer away at the consultations between Mr. Maguire's office, the Justice Department and the White House, seeking to find out whether the administration influenced Mr. Maguire's decision. They plan to seek assurances that the whistle-blower will be protected.

Mr. Maguire is expected to argue that his own lawyers reached the same conclusions as the Justice Department's, and he will have a chance to defend his reputation. The dispute has put Mr. Maguire, a former Navy SEAL and three-star admiral, in a bind, caught between a duty to inform Congress and legal advice that said the complaint could not be handed over.

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A worker cleaning a reflecting pool near the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. Credit T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

House Democrats passed a significant milestone late Wednesday: 218 lawmakers, a majority of the House, are now on the record supporting an impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump's behavior.

Though the number is not exactly predictive of how lawmakers might vote on actual articles of impeachment, it spoke to the growing consensus among Democrats that emerging details about Mr. Trump's attempts to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to help tarnish a leading Democratic rival may reshape Mr. Trump's presidency and the 116th Congress.

Democrats pledged to maintain their legislative work independent of the inquiry, but any cooperation with the White House could soon collapse as the specter of impeachment clouds out other topics.

Republicans have made clear that they believe Democrats are rushing prematurely into a grave proceeding, but several members of the president's party who saw the classified complaint on Wednesday either called for its public release or said they were troubled by what they saw.

Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, emerged from reading the whistle-blower complaint on Wednesday evening and urged both parties not to rush to "partisan tribalism." Republicans he said, "ought not be rushing to circle the wagons and say there's no there there, when there's obviously a lot that is troubling there."

The speaker is scheduled to step before the cameras at 10:45 a.m. for her weekly news conference, and rarely has there been one of such interest.

A day after throwing her support behind an inquiry, Ms. Pelosi spent Wednesday locked in strategy meetings with her leadership team, top aides and the leaders of six committees investigating Mr. Trump. The objective: Sketch out a path for an investigation that could lead to articles of impeachment that would formally charge Mr. Trump with high crimes and misdemeanors.

Many questions remain unanswered about how quickly the House may move to assemble potential articles and on what topics.

Democrats are not yet ready to limit their inquiry to just the Ukraine episode. They plan to continue investigating other, unrelated matters as possible impeachable offenses, including the findings of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who investigated Russia's interference in the 2016 elections and Mr. Trump's attempts to derail that inquiry. Those topics could help populate impeachment articles.

But during a meeting with members of her leadership team, the speaker initiated a discussion about whether Democrats should limit their case strictly to the Ukraine matter and attempts by Mr. Trump and his administration to keep it from Congress, people familiar with the conversation said. An aide to Ms. Pelosi cautioned that no final decisions had been made.

In a positive sign for the speaker, the House's inquiry is already getting results, at least in the form of documentary evidence.

First on Wednesday, the White House released a reconstruction of a call between Mr. Trump and the Ukrainian leader that showed the American president pressing his counterpart to work with Attorney General William P. Barr and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, to investigate Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other Democrats.

Later in the day, Mr. Maguire's office shared a copy of the whistle-blower complaint with the intelligence panels for the first time.

Mr. Trump spent the morning re-tweeting supporters, White House and campaign aides and family members, who echoed the talking points that his White House blasted out Wednesday to friends and foes alike - the real scandal is with former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the Democrats, the whistle-blower is politically biased, the news is all fake, perpetuated by a corrupt Washington.

Mr. Trump may have an opportunity to speak with reporters before the fund-raiser, which begins at 10 a.m., an hour after the start of the congressional hearing.

The president is slated to leave for Washington just before noon. If he chooses to, he can watch the congressional hearing on TVs on Air Force One.

But either way, Mr. Trump will be back by midafternoon - plenty of time for tweeting.

Nicholas Fandos is a reporter in the Washington bureau covering Congress. @npfandos

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Intelligence Committee Releases Whistle-Blower's Complaint: Here's What You Need to Know

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Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, will appear before the House Intelligence Committee at 9 a.m., as an impeachment showdown heats up in Congress. Here's what you need to know: A whistle-blower in the intelligence community accused President Trump of using his office to try to get Ukraine's government to help him in the 2020 presidential election, according to a complaint released Thursday by the House Intelligence Committee.

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House Intelligence Committee releases whistleblower complaint about Trump

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The House released a redacted version of the whistleblower complaint that has embroiled President Donald Trump in an impeachment inquiry.

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US-China cold war and rising protectionism could split world order

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Experts say the world may face a "multi-dimensional cold war" as nations are "pressured to take sides" between the U.S. and China.

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China at 70 aims to strive for lead role in post-cold war international order

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China strives for lead role in post-cold war international order

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Foreign Minister Wang Yi joins parade of top officials singing the party's praises ahead of 70th anniversary on October 1.

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Moscow (AFP) - Moscow and Tehran on Monday blamed US policies for tensions in the Middle East while Russia said it welcomed French efforts to save the Iran nuclear deal.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif condemned Washington's latest actions in Syria as he visited Moscow for talks with Russia's top diplomat Sergei Lavrov.

At the weekend US forces attacked jihadist leaders in northwestern Syria, in what a battlefield monitor called a missile strike that left at least 40 dead.

"Together with Russia and Turkey, Iran has ensured relative security and calm in Syria," Zarif told journalists after talks with Lavrov.

"But the United States is creating a new unstable situation east of the Euphrates in Syria including through actions they've undertaken in Idlib."

Moscow has said that the Americans hit the region "without advance notice to Russia or Turkey", threatening a fragile ceasefire in the province of Idlib.

Lavrov also accused Washington of seeking to "provoke" Tehran after the United States withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal last year.

"Our American partners are openly seeking to provoke Iran with the support of some of their regional allies," he said.

Lavrov commended France for trying to break the impasse and convince the United States to offer Iran some sort of relief from sanctions it has imposed on the Islamic republic.

"We are hoping that this useful initiative of the French president will bear fruit," he told reporters.

"We wish them luck."

But Zarif warned that Iran would continue to curtail its commitments under the 2015 deal if Europe did not protect Tehran from the US sanctions.

"We would of course take a third step," Zarif said.

Iran has hit back with countermeasures in response to the US withdrawal from the nuclear deal, which gave Tehran relief from sanctions in return for curbs on its nuclear programme.

It has been threatening to take a third step in reducing its commitments to the deal after already increasing its uranium enrichment and stockpile.

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Russia, Iran blame US for regional tensions

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Moscow and Tehran on Monday blamed US policies for tensions in the Middle East while Russia said it welcomed French efforts to save the Iran nuclear deal. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif condemned Washington's latest actions in Syria as he visited Moscow for talks with Russia's

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Web address  :https://time.com/5686129/iran-nuclear-deal-negotiation/

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whistleblower says white house officials intervened to 'lock down' records of trump-ukraine phone call - cnnpolitics

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Whistleblower says White House officials intervened to 'lock down' records of Trump-Ukraine phone call

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The whistleblower complaint on President Donald Trump and Ukraine was released Thursday morning, accusing the President of using his power "to solicit interference from a foreign country" in the 2020 election.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/09/25/trump-held-back-aid-ukraine-why-was-us-sending-aid-begin-with/

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Trump administration officials tried to "lock down" the transcript of the US president's controversial phone call to Ukraine's leader, according to a whistleblower's report.

In the call, Mr Trump pushed Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate corruption claims involving the son of Joe Biden, the leading Democratic presidential hopeful.

The newly released report says the transcript was not stored in the computer system normally used for such information.

Instead, it says, it was stored in a separate system used to store "classified information of an especially sensitive nature".

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White House 'tried to hide Trump call transcript'

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Trump administration officials tried to "lock down" the transcript of the US president's controversial phone call to Ukraine's leader, according to a whistleblower's report. In the call, Mr Trump pushed Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate corruption claims involving the son of Joe Biden, the leading Democratic presidential hopeful.

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https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/25/us-china-cold-war-and-rising-protectionism-could-split-world-order.html

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https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/15/politics/trump-nato-us-withdraw/index.html

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Frida Ghitis writes that President Trump would have us believe his withholding of the military aid had nothing to do with his desire for an investigation of Joe Biden. But none of this is normal. In fact, his proposed deal with the President of Ukraine was a crass move that put Trump's personal political interests above those of the country he swore to serve.

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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/rouhani-trump-iran-us-trust-chris-wallace

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US-China cold war and rising protectionism could split world order

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Experts say the world may face a "multi-dimensional cold war" as nations are "pressured to take sides" between the U.S. and China.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/09/25/us-tried-fix-ukraines-government-we-exported-our-corruption-instead/

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President Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the InterContinental Barclay New York hotel during the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 25 in New York. (Evan Vucci/AP)

The reaction to today's disclosure of a rough transcript of a conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has understandably focused on what it means for the House of Representatives' impeachment inquiry. That makes sense: For Americans, the question of whether Trump will complete his term of office is the most pressing issue.

Stepping back from more immediate concerns, though, the rough transcript reveals something else about the state of U.S. democracy and its relationship to global politics. This most recent corrupt episode in the recent history of U.S.-Ukrainian relations demonstrates that the fundamental axiom of U.S. foreign policy - that America has a right to lead because it is better than other countries - has been deeply tarnished. Like an accessory to Paul Manafort's already ostentatious ostrich jacket, the Trump memorandum symbolizes how the United States now exports its political dysfunction. And that means the stakes of the impeachment inquiry matter deeply to the world.

It's worth remembering how optimistically Americans used to see their country's role in the world - and how they saw U.S. leadership as an inevitable force for good. In 1995, on a visit to Kiev, President Bill Clinton Ukraine to "the ranks of the world's great democracies." As evidence of the country's new status, he directed its people to "the sight of your flag flying next to the American flag at the White House" when then-Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma had come to Washington, D.C., shortly before. The mark of a great democracy was aspiring to match the American standard.
The lost art of ideological warfare
Americans who prided themselves on being thoughtful cosmopolitans thrilled to this latter-day vision of "the city upon a hill." Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's sweeping about America's role in the world that, "We are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and see further than other countries," was, in its way, the polite, upscale version of Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red White and Blue." Both celebrate an American exceptionalism confident in the essential goodness of the United States (even if that goodness is defined a little differently in each text).

Critics, especially academics, long predicted the demise of this optimistic vision of American strength. They argued that it would fail because of external factors - a military or economic rival (in the 1990s, Japan or Germany; in the 2000s and afterward, China) or imagined "clashes of civilizations" stirring up passions that liberalism couldn't control.

Yet those arguments got it wrong. The greatest challenge to the post-Cold War liberal order, in the end, has come from the country that was supposed to lead it.

To some extent, that's a result of our own political paralysis. Polarization has made it all but impossible for the Senate to pass even uncontroversial or for the government to commit to basic tasks like passing a budget.

But the faltering of the United States has also come about by choice. The election of Trump proved decisively that having democratic institutions did not mean the United States would stand up for the liberal order. Trump's "America First" sloganeering during the campaign, his inaugural address after it and his to the U.N. General Assembly this week all reflect the administration's reflexive hostility to liberal or internationalist views of world order.

Trump, however, did not invent those trends. Hoover Institution scholar Larry Diamond argues that the world has been suffering from a "democratic recession" for more than a decade, well before Trump came down the gilded escalator to launch his campaign. And big trends like that manifest in smaller dysfunctions first. The American experience with Ukrainian politics - and vice versa - displayed those dysfunctions. In the 1990s, Clinton, Albright and a swath of American intellectuals assumed that U.S. experts would spread democratic practices around the world, thereby helping to consolidate the liberalizing wave. By the mid-2000s, though, folks like Paul Manafort - a former Republican consultant - had instead begun political skill on behalf of clients like Ukrainian oligarchs.

Twenty-four years after Clinton boasted about Ukraine's democracy, as the Varieties of Democracy project measurements show, Ukraine is substantially less democratic. We can't pin all of this on Manafort, but he still reportedly made millions by playing a part in the country's shift away from what Americans assumed would be the natural outcome of their country's example and strength.

Manafort, of course, later took on another client: the long-shot presidential candidate Trump. In all of the hoopla about Russia's interference in U.S. elections via social media, the fact that Trump's campaign manager might have acted as a bagman for a Russian-backed political party in Ukraine went mostly ignored.
Trump thinks Biden pulled a scam in Ukraine because it's what he would have done
To be clear, the story here isn't about relationships between individual people; Zelensky comes from a different part of the Ukrainian political ecosystem than did Manafort's backers. Rather, it's about the fact that money can buy officials and influence in Washington as it can in Kiev. Little wonder that Zelensky made sure to tell Trump that he had stayed in Trump Tower when he was last in New York City.

At a minimum, the ease with which Trump winkingly suggested that he wanted assistance in digging up dirt on a rival clearly demonstrates that the president was willing to skim a little off the top. Moreover, he was willing to do so while working out a deal meant to advance two countries' national interests. That isn't the act of a government that stands taller and sees further. It isn't even the action of a grim realist calculating what would put America first. It's the modus operandi of a Mafioso.

All of this suggests that, somewhat incredibly, the stakes for a Trump impeachment inquiry are even greater than the fate of the Trump administration. During the Watergate proceedings, legislators made clear that their goal was to ensure that no president was above the law. President Richard M. Nixon's gravest sins involved using government agencies, from the IRS to the CIA, to go after his political enemies at home.

As far as we can tell, Trump's actions - seeming to seek a smear job to be carried out by another country - are even worse, since they involve using foreign policy tools for private domestic gain. If that really happened, allowing it to go unpunished wouldn't just hurt American democracy: It would devastate an earlier America's optimistic vision of world order and further undermine the foundations of global freedom.

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Perspective | The U.S. tried to fix Ukraine's government. We exported our corruption, instead.

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The reaction to today's disclosure of a rough transcript of a conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has understandably focused on what it means for the House of Representatives' impeachment inquiry. That makes sense: For Americans, the question of whether Trump will complete his term of office is the most pressing issue.

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https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2019-09-26/ai-could-receive-up-to-1-billion-in-us-federal-funding-next-year

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https://time.com/5686817/america-strategic-triad/
I dont know how to put a picture on this.

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https://www.dailyherald.com/article/20190925/news/309259917/

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/world/europe/cold-war-trump-russia-china.html

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Is this the start of an economic cold war between China and US?

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First it was the trade war and geopolitics, now Beijing and Washington are at odds over currency.

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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/submarine-carrying-165-million-in-🤬-captured-by-coast-guard-drug-bust-2019-09-24/

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https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/09/26/whistleblower-complaint-dana-bash-cover-up-sot-newsroom-vpx.cnn

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whistleblower complaint:  cnn's dana bash says the allegation is that this is a coverup - cnn video

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Whistleblower complaint: CNN's Dana Bash says the allegation is that this is a coverup - CNN Video

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The House Intelligence Committee has released the declassified whistleblower complaint regarding President Trump's phone call with Ukraine president Zelensky. CNN's Dana Bash breaks down the allegation from the complaint.

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CLOSE

NEW YORK - As President Donald Trump kicks off his third United Nations General Assembly on Monday, escalating tension between the U.S. and Iran will be only the beginning of his trouble.

From navigating a growing controversy over his interactions with Ukraine to avoiding a repeat of the embarrassing moment when world leaders erupted into laughter during his 2018 U.N. remarks, the meeting will be full of potential pitfalls for an "America first" president who rubs many allies the wrong way.

Trump arrives in New York as questions continue to mount over whether he pressured Ukrainian leaders to investigate the family of Joe Biden, his top Democratic opponent - a scandal that only increases the likelihood of the president stepping into an international kerfuffle. Trump acknowledged Sunday that he spoke with the president of Ukraine about an investigation into Biden, but called the conversation appropriate.

Adding to the danger for Trump: A meeting with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that is scheduled for Wednesday.

"This is, I think, going to be the most watched bilateral meeting at the General Assembly and this will have the intensity of international focus on a very new Ukrainian president," said Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Viral moments: That time Hugo Chavez called Bush 'the devil,' and other UN moments

Trump-Ukraine: Explaining the whistleblower complaint, phone call with Ukraine president about Biden

In an address to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday and in meetings with a dozen presidents and prime ministers, Trump will stress the importance of U.S. sovereignty. It's a message that plays well with his supporters in Pennsylvania and Florida, but could complicate his ability to build coalitions on global hot spots such as Iran and Venezuela.

The recent missile and drone attack on oil facilities in Saudi Arabia will present a major test of Trump's foreign policy: Can he continue to tout a go-it-alone worldview while also courting allies to agree to an international response to Tehran?

Foreign policy experts are skeptical.

Tension with Iran

The Sept. 14 attack on Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally, will be top on the agenda at behind-the-scenes meetings. A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preview the president's strategy, said Trump will use the U.N. meeting to try to build a consensus on what to do about Iran.

The strike threatened an outsized impact on Asia, and the official said the president is particularly keen to raise the issue with leaders from that part of the world. Trump will meet with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, South Korea's Moon Jae-in and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi - all of whom represent top destinations for Saudi oil.

But Trump, who has not directly blamed Iran for the attack, faces a huge roadblock: U.S. allies are still miffed over his decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement last year. Trump has tried to convince other countries to take a harder line with Tehran. And that has only alienated some of them more.

Ned Price, a special assistant for national security under President Barack Obama and former CIA analyst, predicted little chance for success.

"It is fanciful on the part of the administration to think that they can suddenly snap their fingers and have the rest of the world come along," Price said.

Iran didn't help its cause with the attack, he said. The strike "certainly complicates efforts" by Europeans to circumvent crippling U.S. sanctions. But even such a brazen attack, he said, "has not moved even our closest friends into our corner."

Ukrainian wrinkle

Trump's meeting with Ukrainian comedian turned president Zelensky wouldn't have drawn much attention if it took place a week ago. Now, it will be one of trickiest moments for Trump to navigate at the U.N.

Both Trump and Zelensky will be heavily scrutinized following reports that Trump leaned on the Ukrainian leader to launch a probe into the family of Joe Biden, who is leading in polls for the Democratic presidential nomination. Trump addressed the issue Sunday before making stops in Texas and Ohio with visiting foreign leaders.

"The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption - all of the corruption taking place - it was largely the fact that we don't want our people like Vice President Biden and his son" contributing to the corruption already in the Ukraine," Trump said.

The Trump-Zelensky meeting at the U.N. will almost certainly breathe new life into the widening scandal.

Trump has likened the Ukrainian imbroglio to the years long probe into whether his campaign conspired with Russia during the 2016 election. Special Counsel Robert Mueller released a report this year that did not establish any collusion between Moscow and Trump. Russian President Vladimir Putin is not expected to attend the U.N. this year.

"Keep playing it up," Trump said on Friday, taunting reporters in the Oval Office. "Because you're going to look really bad when it falls."

Thunberg on center stage

Trump has done little to hide his disdain for multi-nation efforts to address climate change, arguing that those deals put the U.S. at an economic disadvantage.

His decision to begin pulling the U.S. out of the 2016 Paris climate agreement angered other world leaders. This year the rest of the world is doing something about it: They're staging a climate summit during the U.N., a move that will put a spotlight on the president's position in his hometown.

French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and German Chancellor Angela Merkel will all attend the climate summit. Trump will instead host a separate summit nearby focused on religious freedom.

The Trump administration will send a career diplomat, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Marcia Bernicat, to the climate summit.

Bypassing the climate meeting will play well with his supporters at home, who don't want the president to bow to international pressure, but it also means giving center stage to 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg.

The Swedish teen, who has gained a global following, will speak at the summit. In the past, Thunberg hasn't shied from taking on Trump.

"My message to him is just to listen to the science," she said in August after crossing the Atlantic in an emissions-free yacht to arrive in New York. "And he obviously doesn't do that."

Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at the International Crisis Group, said that for Trump's first two years, world leaders were trying to feel him out or avoid an angry tweet. This time, he said, the climate summit shows that their hesitancy to criticize is lifting.

"This year there's a really different dynamic," Gowan said. "The star of this General Assembly is going to be Greta Thunberg, it's not going to be Donald Trump."

Venezuela stalemate

Eight months after the U.S. and other countries recognized Juan Guaido as Venezuela's leader, Nicolas Maduro remains in power. Trump has imposed sanctions, hosted Guaido's wife at the White House and threatened military action, but little has changed.

This year's U.N. offers Trump an opportunity to chart a new course with allies or risk deepening questions about whether the current strategy is working.

Trump will attend a meeting with other leaders Wednesday to discuss Venezuela. It will be his first major international event on the issue since former top national security aide John Bolton left the White House over a series of disagreements on foreign policy.

Bolton was widely seen as a hawk on Venezuela, pushing for U.S. military action to counter Russian and Cuban influence in the South American country. But Trump has countered that conventional wisdom, claiming Bolton was "holding me back."

At home, Venezuela has become a foil for Trump to highlight the dangers of socialism, a message he uses to attack Democratic policies. Trump has raised Venezuela nearly four dozen times at his political rallies since last year, almost always in the context of the Democratic Party.

"Trump has given very hard line comments on Venezuela," Gowan said. "It'll be interesting to see if he gives any hint that he might be willing to sort of look for some sort of compromise solution."

U.S. v. U.N.

Trump meets with world leaders this week staffed by a new National Security Adviser, Robert C. O'Brien, and a new U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Kelly Craft. But observers expect to see little change in Trump's antagonistic view of the U.N. itself.

The president, who once described the U.N. as "not a friend of democracy," has consistently questioned multi-national organizations like the U.N. The awkwardness of slamming the U.N. while simultaneously attempting to advance an agenda there was underscored last year when members of the General Assembly laughed at Trump.

"I didn't expect that reaction," Trump said, attempting to recover. "But that's okay."

This year Trump's isolation may be compounded by the fact that one of his staunchest allies on the world stage, Benjamin Netanyahu, will be absent. Israel's longest-serving prime minister is struggling to cobble together a government - and avoid a corruption indictment - after a disastrous Sept. 17 election.

All of it points to a president who will be surrounded by nearly 200 world leaders and a coterie of aides, but who will remain mostly on his own.

"The headline from this summit is going to be the same as the headline from the G-7," said Stewart Patrick, an expert on global governance at the Council on Foreign Relations, referring to last month's Group of Seven meeting in France.

"Donald Trump is the odd man out."

Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/09/23/donald-trump-united-nations-presents-tension-ukraine-iran-china/2372962001/

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Trump at UN: Tensions loom on Ukraine scandal, climate change and Iran

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CLOSE NEW YORK - As President Donald Trump kicks off his third United Nations General Assembly on Monday, escalating tension between the U.S. and Iran will be only the beginning of his trouble. From navigating a growing controversy over his interactions with Ukraine to avoiding a repeat of the embarrassing moment when world leaders erupted into laughter during his 2018 U.N.

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US-China cold war and rising protectionism could split world order

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Experts say the world may face a "multi-dimensional cold war" as nations are "pressured to take sides" between the U.S. and China.

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It's easier to love Apollo 11 if you were around to see it happen. For those who didn't camp along the Cape Kennedy causeway to watch the Saturn 5 liftoff on July 16, 1969, or huddle around a rabbit-ear TV to watch Neil Armstrong climb down the ladder and walk on the surface of the moon four days later, it'll always have a whiff of cable-channel documentary. And yet it doesn't for Elon Musk.

Musk was born in 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, two years after the Apollo 11 landing and half a world away from the country that achieved the great lunar feat. But somehow, he absorbed the primal power of the thing he was not there to see happen. "Apollo 11 was one of the most inspiring things in all of human history," he said in a July 12 interview at the Hawthorne, Calif., headquarters of SpaceX, the rocket company he founded in 2002 that has since become its own icon of space exploration. "I'm not sure SpaceX would exist if not for Apollo 11."

Today, SpaceX is one of a handful of powerful players-starry-eyed billionaires and the world's two richest countries-competing in a race to set up shop on the moon. In the 1960s, it was a two-party sprint between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to be the first to get boots on the lunar surface, but this time around the U.S. finds itself in a bigger, multifront competition with private companies like SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and international powers, most critically China.

Like the Soviet Union and the U.S. during the Cold War, Beijing is using its space ambitions as a powerful ideological-and even expansionist-tool of statecraft. In January, China successfully landed Chang'e-4, a small base station and rover, on the far side of the moon, becoming the first nation to touch down in that unseen hemisphere. "We are building China into a space giant," Chang'e-4 chief designer Wu Weiren said at the time.

Last year, Ye Peijian, the leader of the country's lunar program, described the agency's work by invoking Beijing's growing dominance across the South China Sea islands: "The universe is an ocean, the moon is the Diaoyu Islands, Mars is Huangyan Island. If we don't go there now, even though we're capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants." That may just be celestial saber rattling, but it's gotten the attention of Western observers. "I have no doubt that within the next five years, they will complete [their own space station] and announce a manned lunar program," says Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national-security affairs with expertise in space, science and technology at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.
Read more: Welcome to TIME Immersive's Apollo 11 Landing on the Moon experience
Driving the new space race is a potent mix of economic, technological and geopolitical imperatives. There are possible fortunes to be made from lunar ventures. Space-based businesses currently contribute $350 billion to global gross domestic product, a figure projected to jump to $1.4 trillion by 2040, according to Morgan Stanley. The moon could become a first outpost in efforts to colonize and exploit space. Just one example: there's intense speculation about the fortune to be made from mining the moon for rare-earth metals used in electronics manufacturing. With current spacecraft tech, that fortune is canceled out fast by the billions of dollars it would cost to ship goods between Earth and the moon, but technology changes, and no one wants to be left out of a potential lunar gold rush.

There are scientific and technological reasons to go to the moon too. Observatories on the lunar far side-shielded from earthshine and earthly radio emissions-would be more powerful and see farther than telescopes on the surface of the planet or orbiting it. And while NASA has been known to oversell the commercial spin-offs from the space program ("Off the Earth, for the Earth" is one of the agency's slogans, by now shopworn), there's no denying the decades of evidence that technology first developed for space travel often has terrestrial applications: scratchproof glass; lightweight, high-storage batteries that make cordless tools possible; memory foam and fireproof fabric; and, most significantly, GPS navigation all had their origins in systems designed for exploring space.

Future benefits could include applications in artificial intelligence, biometric sensors and air-traffic control, as well as crop fertilizers and greenhouse LEDs adapted from systems now in development for establishing otherworldly agriculture.

Then, too, there is the fact that any road to Mars likely runs straight through the moon. Homesteading a world that is only three days from Earth is the best way to test the life-support infrastructure that would be needed on a far more distant-and a good deal less barren-Mars.

All the lunar competitors are eyeballing the same spot on the surface: the south pole, which is as close to a fertile crescent as exists on the moon. The southern craters, cast in permanent shadow, are home to plentiful deposits of water ice, which could be used to sustain humans and their crops. The water can be broken down into oxygen, which can then be used as atmosphere for crews, and hydrogen, which-recombined with the oxygen-can make a simple, powerful and clean rocket fuel. Wrestling water and rocket fuel off Earth for a deep-space mission is a lot harder and more labor-intensive than carrying it up from the moon, where the gravity is one-sixth that of Earth, and then parking it in lunar orbit. Spacecraft on their way to Mars could, in theory, stop by the moon to top off their tanks before lighting out for deeper space.

None of that is outside the reach of current technology, but since the final Apollo lunar mission returned home in 1972, NASA's crewed space program has pursued much narrower goals, contenting itself with dog paddling in low Earth orbit. And since the final NASA space shuttle stood down in 2011, the U.S. has not even had its own way to get astronauts into space, instead buying seats-at a cool $80 million per round trip-aboard Russia's Soyuz spacecraft.

Now, though, there is a renewed focus on lunar dominance. In March, Vice President Mike Pence, the head of the newly re-established National Space Council (it had been disbanded since 1993), announced that the Trump Administration would put Americans on the moon by 2024. "It is the stated policy of this Administration and the United States of America to return American astronauts to the moon within the next five years," he said at a council meeting in Huntsville, Ala. "'Urgency' must be our watchword."

The timing for such a challenge was good because Florida's Space Coast is once again buzzing with activity. NASA leased Cape Canaveral's launchpad 39A, from which nearly all of the Apollo lunar missions took off, to SpaceX, which has plans for a crewed flight around the moon as early as 2023. "I can't believe we get to use that pad," says Musk. "We're not worthy! This pad is too good."

The company also holds the lease on nearby pad 40 and has built a 54,000-sq.-ft. hangar on the Canaveral grounds for rocket processing. Its Hawthorne, Calif., factory teems with workers and clangs with machinery under construction, including two Dragon spacecraft being readied in a clean room, one to test the ship's escape system, the other for an automated flight to the International Space Station. But SpaceX envisions much more. "We really want to have a vehicle that is capable of sending enough payload to the moon such that we could have a full lunar base, like we've got a permanently occupied base in Antarctica," Musk says. "[But] it'd be absolutely way cooler to have a science base on the moon."

Similarly, NASA has leased Canaveral's launchpads 36 and 11 to Blue Origin, the rocket company owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Blue Origin has built a glittering $200 million factory on the Canaveral grounds and is planning a 90-acre expansion. In May, Bezos unveiled a mock-up of the company's Blue Moon lunar lander and echoed the Trump Administration's 2024 target date. "'It's time to go back to the moon," he told a crowd in Washington, D.C., "this time to stay."

NASA itself is stirring anew, its partnerships with private companies begun under the Obama Administration now bearing all manner of fruit. SpaceX and Virginia-based Orbital Sciences have made frequent uncrewed cargo runs to the International Space Station, and both Boeing and SpaceX hope to fly crews as early as next year. United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, may supply the upper stage of the new rocket NASA hopes to use to send astronauts on the 2024 lunar trip.

Meanwhile, on Canaveral's launchpad 39B, NASA has erected a $500 million, 10.5 million-lb., 38-story mobile launch tower that will service that new rocket: the giant Space Launch System (SLS)-NASA's 21st century version of Apollo's Saturn 5 moon rocket. Since Pence's announcement, NASA has accelerated the timelines for SLS launches and the completion of the Orion crew vehicle-the modern analogue of the Apollo orbiter-as well as soliciting bids for a new lunar lander.

NASA is calling the latest lunar push the Artemis program, named after the mythical sister of Apollo. It's all, deliberately or not, an echo of President Kennedy's 1962 promise to have American astronauts on the surface of the moon by the end of the 1960s-a hard target and a fixed date that he challenged the country to meet. If Artemis succeeds, it will re-establish American primacy in space and prove that a riven country can once again do great things. If it fails, the U.S. will cede the moon, and its potential, for what could be decades to come.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) caught the world napping. The People's Republic didn't launch its first satellite until 1970 and for decades was a space backwater. But in 2003, that started changing when China launched its first taikonaut-the Chinese equivalent of the American astronaut and the Russian cosmonaut. China has now flown multiple crewed missions, conducted spacewalks, and built and launched a mini space station. The country has also flown four robotic lunar missions, most spectacularly earlier this year, with the landing of the Chang'e-4 base station and rover on the far side of the moon.

Beijing has been explicit about the country's plans for a south-pole lunar base-Chang'e-4 landed within what would be the Antarctic Circle on Earth. The CNSA has not officially disclosed whether a future base would be crewed or robotic, but as recently as 2017, Xinhua, the official state news agency, reported that Yang Liwei-the country's first taikonaut-announced that China was indeed "making plans for a manned lunar landing." Yang is to China what Neil Armstrong is to the U.S. and Yuri Gagarin is to Russia, and if he were speaking out of turn, Beijing would surely not let so influential a voice go uncontradicted.

But some observers in the West are incredulous. "When we're dealing with the Chinese space program, the only thing we can rely on are the government's periodic white papers and the Party Congress reports," says Dean Cheng, senior research fellow for Chinese political and security affairs at the Heritage Foundation, a D.C. think tank. "Their last white paper, in 2016, did not mention a manned lunar program."

China also says nothing at all about its space expenditures-or at least nothing remotely believable. The figure most widely cited in the press for the annual CNSA budget is $8 billion, or about 40% of NASA's projected $20 billion. But most experts dismiss this figure as an almost laughable lowball. "[China's] space program is embedded in their military," says Cheng. "The defense-budget figure is generally cited as about $250 billion. It's a polite fiction." In truth, he argues, China likely spends vastly more on both defense and space, and its infrastructure shows it: "If they can sustain four different launch sites and two state-run [space-related] corporations with 90,000 employees, we should just pack it in if they're doing it on $8 billion."

NASA, by comparison, gets by on relative pan scrapings. The agency's funding peaked in 1966, at just over $5.9 billion, the equivalent of $47 billion in 2019 dollars-more than twice what NASA gets today. After Pence announced the 2024 target for a return to the moon, the Trump Administration requested an additional $1.6 billion outlay, a figure not yet approved by Congress. Even if it were, it would still be well short of the $5 billion annual supplement many insiders believe is needed to make a 2024 moon landing happen. But the public buy-in for such a funding commitment just isn't there. "We could fly more often with more funding if the nation wanted to fly more often," says Orion program manager Mark Kirasich.

If China has a lead in finance and government commitment, however, by all appearances it's far behind the U.S. in rocketry know-how. Getting to the moon begins with the problem of figuring out a way to get very heavy machines to move very fast. The Apollo era's orbiter and lunar lander together weighed about 96,500 lb. That required building the massive Saturn 5 rocket, a leviathan that stood 363 ft. tall and generated a thrust of 7.6 million lb. For the more ambitious missions of the 21st century, NASA is designing the SLS to generate 8.8 million lb. of thrust. The additional muscle is key to getting the permanent infrastructure of the Artemis program off the ground. The plan is first to launch a mini space station, known as Gateway, into a near-lunar orbit. Crews of four astronauts would then fly an Orion out to Gateway, dock with it and take a lander down to the surface.

"This time when we go to the moon ... we're going to go sustainably," says NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine. "We're going to learn how to live and work on another world so that we can eventually go to Mars." Initially, Gateway will make the Artemis missions more difficult and expensive than the Apollo missions, but in the long run it may be as affordable or cheaper. That's because Orion is reusable. The lunar lander would be as well-at least partly. Like the original Apollo lunar module, the new version will be a two-part vehicle-a descent and ascent stage stacked one on the other. They land on the surface together, and when it's time to leave, the ascent stage blasts off with the crew, leaving the descent half behind. That ascent stage could then be used again.

Like the International Space Station, Gateway will be expandable, with multiple docking ports for international or private partners to attach modules to conduct experiments and stage lunar landings. Gateway will fly what's known as a near-rectilinear halo orbit, a series of elliptical circuits that can be adjusted with a relative puff of propellant, opening all parts of the moon to landing and exploration. Want to land at the south pole? Nudge your orbit one way. Want to land in the north? Nudge it the other. The Apollo spacecraft were locked in tight equatorial orbits, limiting potential landing areas.

First, though, NASA needs its rocket, and the SLS has been in start-stop development since 2005, with flat funding leading to repeatedly missed deadlines. Earlier this year, the Government Accountability Office issued a report finding that the SLS, the Orion and related systems have cost about $16 billion so far, some $1.8 billion more than was planned, largely thanks to delays. Now, however, the space agency insists the SLS is almost ready, and has an ambitious schedule, with the first crewed mission for around the moon planned for 2023.

Musk has moved more quickly still. The SpaceX Dragon, he says, may be ready to take a crew of astronauts to the ISS within the next six months. And though SpaceX's biggest rocket, the Falcon Heavy, does not have the propulsive power of the SLS, at more than 5 million lb. of thrust, it's the most powerful currently flying. In late June, SpaceX announced that as early as 2021, it will launch the Falcon Super Heavy rocket-with 10.8 million lb. of thrust-topped by a stainless steel, -180-ft. orbiter called Starship, with room for 100 passengers. That's 17 times the size of the Orion, which has room for four to six astronauts. It's the Super Heavy, not the existing Falcons, Musk believes, that will get humans past the "flags-and-footprints" model of the Apollo era and toward a more permanent presence on the moon and, later, Mars.

"We could sort of do a repeat of Apollo 11, a few small missions [with the Falcon Heavy], but the remake's never as good as the original," he says. Musk has already sold a handful of round-trip tickets to the moon aboard a future Starship, to Japanese fashion billionaire Yusaku Maezawa.

While Musk makes no secret at all of his plans, Bezos and Blue Origin's are, at the moment, more of a mystery. The company's main building and factory in Kent, Wash., could just as easily be one of Bezos' Amazon fulfillment centers-though it's not without a certain wit. There is a planter in the lobby that, on closer examination, turns out to be an engine bell used on an actual rocket; a huge model of the U.S.S. Enterprise just off the factory floor; and a spacecraft door from the Battlestar Galactica set propped up on display like a huge piece of sculptural art.

With its Amazon parentage, Blue Origin is not running short of funding anytime soon, but space programs are exceedingly expensive, with burn rates of billions before making any of that money back on paying customers, and there are only so many Prime shipments that can pay the freight. So at this point, says CEO Bob Smith, "there's no question that our job at Blue at this phase of its life is to be a self-sustaining business." The company's primary goal is to become a launch-service provider, like SpaceX, and then to start flying paying customers to space.

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket-named, like most of Blue's vehicles, after U.S. space heroes, in this case Al Shepard, the first American in space-is fully reusable, designed to take payloads and people to suborbital space, for several minutes of zero G. That may seem like small-bore stuff: limited science and a vanity vacation for people with the money to afford it. But all of the hardware being developed for New Shepard is also intended for use on the much larger, soon-to-be-flying New Glenn rocket (after John, the first American to orbit Earth), the eventual New Armstrong (after Neil, the first person on the moon) and, most significantly, for Blue Moon, the company's future lunar lander.

NASA has solicited bids for lunar landers from multiple companies for its Artemis program, but there's no doubt that Blue Origin has a huge head start. "We don't know what everyone else has until they actually give all their proposals out," says Smith. "But we've been working on it for a while. We've gotten very good interactions with NASA ... about what our thoughts are in terms of how we would go back to the moon by 2024."

As for China, whatever its goal, the country's crewed deep-space ambitions rely heavily on a new version of its Long March rocket series, called Long March 5. It has been poised to take a robot probe to and from the moon at the end of this year, and another mission to Mars in 2020. However, early development efforts haven't gone smoothly. A 2016 test flight of the rocket more or less succeeded, with only a few trajectory problems on the way to orbit. But a 2017 launch failed, with the payload never reaching space. And a test planned for July of this year was postponed-a failure made public by European Space Agency satellite images, published online, showing the ships carrying the rocket idling at port well after they were supposed to have been en route.

"This is really the first time the Chinese have had a significant slip in their space program," says Cheng. "Sometimes they've had to stretch definitions or goals, [but] they haven't had programmatic misses like the Long March 5." And Long March 5 isn't even the rocket that would take taikonauts to the moon. It's a development phase intended to lead to the more powerful Long March 9. If China can't get the 5 off the ground, it surely isn't getting its bigger brother to fly.

There are also some questions about whether China's moon plans are actually a tactical misdirection, a way to play the public relations game while focusing on less flashy but more practical research and security projects in Earth orbit. "China certainly isn't racing the U.S. to the moon or anywhere else in space," says Gregory Kulacki, the China project manager of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a U.S.-based science-advocacy nonprofit. "You can't win a race you already lost 50 years ago."

Of course, there doesn't have to be a race at all, and international cooperation often works far better than competition. The U.S. has 15 partner nations working on the International Space Station. Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan and Canada have all contributed modules, and astronauts from 18 countries have flown aboard. With mounting tensions between the U.S. and Russia, space-station collaboration has been an effective pressure-release valve, especially when crews have to face problems together.

In 2015, a suspected ammonia leak in the American portion of the station required astronauts to hunker down in the Russian segment until the all-clear was sounded. Retired astronaut Terry Virts, who was aboard at the time, recalls that Dmitry Rogozin, then the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of defense and space industries, who had been involved in a heated exchange with D.C. over the invasion of Crimea, promptly radioed the station. "'American colleagues,'" Virts recalls him saying, "'you can stay as long as you want. We are going to work on this together.'"

In a world facing borderless threats like climate change and emerging diseases, that kind of cooperation will be increasingly important, and space is a good way to build trust. Collaboration between the American and Chinese space programs, however, is for now effectively prohibited by a 2011 spending-bill clause known as the Wolf Amendment, out of concern for technology transfers that could compromise national security. Technically, NASA could cooperate with China on civil projects that have no military applications, but practically, there is too much dual use in any space technology ever to clear that bar. And a space race with China, rather than a space partnership, has political utility in the U.S., in the same way the competition with the Soviet Union did 50 years ago. "[Former NASA administrator] Mike Griffin, Elon Musk and other U.S. space personalities routinely play on U.S. anxieties about China to get Congress to fork over more money," says Kulacki. "Pence seems to be using the same playbook."

Ultimately, playbooks and politics are-or at least ought to be-minor matters in the far larger mission to make human beings what they briefly were half a century ago: a species of two worlds. Michael Collins, command-module pilot for Apollo 11, remembers being especially struck by a refrain he heard over and over when he and the rest of the crew were on a world tour following the mission. "I thought that when we went someplace they'd say, 'Well, congratulations. You Americans finally did it,'" he recalled in a recent interview. "And instead of that, unanimously the reaction was, 'We did it. We humans finally left this planet.'"

Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.

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Dueling Superpowers, Rival Billionaires. Inside the New Race to the Moon

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It's easier to love Apollo 11 if you were around to see it happen. For those who didn't camp along the Cape Kennedy causeway to watch the Saturn 5 liftoff on July 16, 1969, or huddle around a rabbit-ear TV to watch Neil Armstrong climb down the ladder and walk on the surface of the moon four days later, it'll always have a whiff of cable-channel documentary.

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September 25 at 4:14 PM Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that John E. Herbst served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009. He served from 2003 to 2006.
After trading some political pleasantries with Ukraine's new leader, President Trump began to make his case that the United States was an indispensable friend.

"We do a lot for Ukraine," Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a July 25 call, according to a rough transcript made public by the White House on Wednesday.

Trump gave no specifics of the United States' assistance in the call, but went on to bash European allies - and Germany's Angela Merkel in particular - as not doing enough to aid Ukraine.

But now the entire U.S. aid package to Ukraine - almost $400 million - has become a key exhibit in possible impeachment probes. On Tuesday, Trump acknowledged he ordered the aid withheld during the summer before making the July call with Zelensky, who was encouraged by Trump to work with the U.S. attorney general to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
[Trump ordered hold on military aid days before calling Ukrainian president, officials say]
Since the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States has consistently supplied foreign aid to Ukraine, partly to foster the pro-Western political and military links in a key country bordering Russia.

"Our efforts have been designed to promote stability, to protect the integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, and to help it reform," said John E. Herbst, who served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006 and is the director of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council.

Although the United States is one of the country's biggest foreign-aid benefactors, other countries have also sent significant assistance to Ukraine.

The European Union and its financial institutions have provided more than $16.5 billion in grants and loans to support its reform process since 2014. In addition to those E.U. funds, Germany on its own has pledged millions of dollars in assistance, as has Britain. And Japan, meanwhile, has given $3.1 billion in assistance to Ukraine to the establishment of diplomatic relations in the early 1990s.

In 2014, after Russia annexed the region of Crimea and sparked war in Ukraine's east, Congress enthusiastically passed legislation that imposed sanctions on Russia and increased ongoing military assistance to Ukraine. The money has provided cybersecurity and intelligence support, as well as training and equipment, to the country's armed forces.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Trump said he had withheld aid - which was eventually released on Sept. 11 after lawmakers raised concerns - and would do it again "until such time as Europe and other nations contribute to Ukraine because they're not doing it."

In a White House released transcript of the July call between Trump and Zelensky, both leaders complain about European countries, singling out Germany, for not doing enough to help Ukraine - though it was not clear they were specifically discussing financial assistance.

"Germany does almost nothing for you," Trump said to Zelensky, according to the transcript. "All they do is talk and I think it's something that you should really ask them about. When I was speaking to Angela Merkel she talks Ukraine, but she doesn't do anything."

Zelensky told Trump he had met with the German chancellor as well as French President Emmanuel Macron and told them that they were not enforcing sanctions against Russia and "not working as much as they should work for Ukraine."

U.S. assistance (and the threat of withholding it) has played a role in efforts to root out corruption and promote transparency in a country that has long grappled with cronyism.

Viktor Yanukovych, the country's notoriously corrupt president from 2010 to 2014, was convicted of treason by a Ukrainian court and sentenced in absentia in January to 13 years in prison. While in power, Yanukovych was widely seen as a pro-Russian puppet: The court ruled that he called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine and that he violently quashed pro-Western democracy protests in Kiev.

While the protests eventually led to Yanukovych's ouster, corruption in Ukraine remains a problem. The country scored 32 out of 100 on Transparency International's 2018 corruption perceptions index. Zelensky, a television comedian with no prior political experience, won the presidency in part by promising to tackle corruption.

The United States has in the past expressed concern about increasing security aid to the country because of graft.
[The full Trump-Ukraine timeline - as of now]
"We got used to assistance becoming more and more conditional," said Alyona Getmanchuk, director of the New Europe Center, a Kiev-based think tank. But she noted that conditions imposed in the past were about "helping Ukraine move forward and reform itself" - including encouraging the Kiev government to provide more transparency or adopt new national security measures that would further integrate it with the United States and NATO.

Thanks in part to the United States, Ukraine three weeks ago launched an anti-corruption court that aims to deal with high-level and political graft, Getmanchuk said.

But Trump's alleged request to Zelensky, which he has denied, makes the prospect of future U.S. aid more worrying, she said.

"If those conditions are directed at making Ukraine a subject of an internal political fight, that's not a good sign," she said. "That's why I'm concerned."

Analysts worry that if Trump was acting with the investigation of his political rival in mind, the ramifications could affect Ukraine's other bilateral relations.

The concern in Kiev could be that if it is seen as overtly cooperating with the president's demands to launch an investigation, "another country could also seek to undermine Ukrainian ties," said Mark D. Simakovsky, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

"Politicizing assistance to Ukraine is very dangerous, because it will ultimately erode Ukraine's assistance and independence at a time when it needs the United States most," he said.

"Ukraine, unfortunately, is in the president's crosshairs," he added.

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Trump boasted about aid to Ukraine. But the U.S. isn't Kiev's only friend.

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September 25 at 4:14 PM Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that John E. Herbst served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009. He served from 2003 to 2006. After trading some political pleasantries with Ukraine's new leader, President Trump began to make his case that the United States was an indispensable friend.

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https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3029735/china-and-us-new-cold-war-more-difficult-soviet-era-says

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kong-may-topple-communism-11569453043

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https://www.history.com/news/what-goes-on-at-area-51

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Cold War Political Cartoons Funny Cold War Little Countries Cold War Begins Little Cold War Countries Freezing Cold Cartoon People Historical Cold War Era Cold War Memes Cold War Drawings Brazil and the Cold War Carrton Cold War Cold War Falgs Funny Cold War Cartoons The Cold War and Australia

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trump stares impeachment in the face and doesn't like what he sees - cnnpolitics

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Trump stares impeachment in the face and doesn't like what he sees

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Donald Trump's political tragedy is that he really does believe the call with Ukraine's President was "perfect," though it may yet doom him with the stain of impeachment.

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trump stares impeachment in the face and doesn't like what he sees - cnnpolitics

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Trump stares impeachment in the face and doesn't like what he sees

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Donald Trump's political tragedy is that he really does believe the call with Ukraine's President was "perfect," though it may yet doom him with the stain of impeachment.

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https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/air-force-warns-storming-area-51-facebook-event/story?id=64389885

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dow shrugs off impeachment talks and aims for more gains - cnn

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Dow shrugs off impeachment talks and aims for more gains

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The Dow and the US stock market aimed for their second day of gains on Thursday, as hopes for a trade deal with China continue to carry equities higher.

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As Hong Kong entered the 16th straight week of unrest, protesters adopted origami cranes as symbols of resistance, sang their new anthem, burned the Chinese national flag, erected barricades, threw petrol bombs and beat opponents unconscious. The protest movement in the semiautonomous region now has taken on characteristics of an insurgency as people across Hong Kong society vigorously challenge local authorities.

The 79-day "Umbrella" protest of 2014, as large as it was, had little lasting effect on Beijing, which has ruled...

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Opinion | Hong Kong May Topple Communism

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As Hong Kong entered the 16th straight week of unrest, protesters adopted origami cranes as symbols of resistance, sang their new anthem, burned the Chinese national flag, erected barricades, threw petrol bombs and beat opponents unconscious. The protest movement in the semiautonomous region now has taken on characteristics of an insurgency as people across Hong Kong society vigorously challenge local authorities.

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"I feel hopeful seeing the power of all these people here today," one teenager said of the protest, which drew tens of thousands of demonstrators.

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Young people took to New York City's streets on Friday to rally for action to fight climate change. Credit Credit Mark Abramson for The New York Times

[Read more live coverage of the climate strikes.]
They packed Foley Square and the streets around City Hall, and jammed the stairs leading out of nearby subway stations. They carried handmade signs like one that said, "There is no plan(et) B," and chanted, "Sea levels are rising and so are we!" Later, they paraded out of the square, headed to another rally at Battery Park.

Frustrated by what they consider officials' failure to adequately address a crisis, thousands of young people marched through Lower Manhattan on Friday during a day of global climate protests.

Those who rallied said that too little was being done to stem the rise of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. One test of their message will come on Monday, when world leaders convene at the United Nations to discuss what they are ready to do about climate change.

The crowd totaled at least 60,000, according to an afternoon estimate from Mayor Bill de Blasio's office. In a sign of how difficult crowd sizes can be to pin down, organizers put the figure at 250,000. A permit had been issued for 5,000, prompting some organizers to joke that their efforts to publicize the event had been too successful.

Many of the participants were students who had the blessing of city school officials to take the day off. Schools excused the students' absence if they had their parents' permission to take part in the protests.

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Demonstrators gathered near City Hall for the protests. Many participants were students who had taken the day off with the blessing of the city's school system. Credit Stephen Speranza for The New York Times

At Battery Park, demonstrators cheered when Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish activist who shot to global fame for inspiring worldwide student strikes, ascended a stage in the late afternoon and said, "This is the biggest climate strike in the history of the world."

Ms. Thunberg, who sailed to New York in an emissions-free yacht last month, directed part of her remarks at leaders setting climate policy.

"Change is coming whether they like it or not," she said, adding, "Do you think they hear us?"

Mina Garcia, 12, of Manhattan said that she was "astounded" by the experience of seeing Ms. Thunberg speak. "She's able to do so much," Mina said. "It shows no matter how small you are and how little you feel, you can stand up to someone and make a difference."

One of the youngest organizers of the New York event was Marisol Rivera, 13, who attends school in Brooklyn. Marisol was 6 when the roof of her house in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood collapsed during Hurricane Sandy, nearly hitting her.

She also has relatives in Puerto Rico whose lives were upended by Hurricane Maria two years ago. The strike in Manhattan was also billed as a "Puerto Rico Day of Action."

"I feel hopeful seeing the power of all these people here today, calling to end fossil fuels and build a better future for us," she said.

As the rally began in Foley Square, Mr. de Blasio's office said on Twitter that "The #ClimateStrike is about our future. Either we have one or we don't."

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo issued a statement on Friday that targeted climate change deniers. "Our young people understand climate change is no longer up for debate - it's reality based in science." the statement said.

Thousands of people gathered in Foley Square in Manhattan before marching to Battery Park. Credit Mark Abramson for The New York Times

Andy Gao, 16, a junior at Brooklyn Technical High School, said that the recent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong had inspired him to attend the demonstration in New York.

"They are fighting for their future," he said, "and people here care about our future, too. If our planet is burnt and polluted, what future will we have? Better to strike today than to stay in school and do nothing about it."

Ajani Stella, 13, an eighth-grader at Hunter College High School, said that he had been "invested in the movement for fossil fuel divestment." He said that when he was 10, he had taken the issue to the board of the Teachers' Retirement System of the City of New York, which, with 200,000 members, is one of the largest pension systems in the United States.

Amid the sophisticated discussions, it was clear that young people were driving the day. Signs dashed off in ballpoint pen or colored marker included insults about President Trump, and riffs on Dr. Seuss ("I speak for the trees!") and WALL-E, the movie robot that collects trash on a desolate Earth.

But the crowd was a New York crowd, with a range of personalities. The drag queen Lady Bunny, 57, carried a sign that read "I'm Greta's mom." (When asked if she was actually Greta's mother, Lady Bunny joked, "No, I'm her brother Hansel.")

"We've got to call out both political parties on climate change," said Lady Bunny, who was wearing a blond wig, generous false eyelashes and a blue-and-purple muumuu.

Students from the Bronx High School of Science gathering under a banner depicting Earth. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Environmental activists were thrilled by officials' decision this week to allow the city's 1.1 million public school students to be excused from class for the protests.

Teachers and other school employees were told they could not attend because the Education Department had determined that doing so would violate rules ensuring a "politically neutral learning environment," as would schools staging their own protests on school property.
[Teachers in New York City were barred from attending protests.]
Yet at the usual morning drop-off time, elementary school students appeared to be staging rallies led by parents or the students themselves.

"P.S. 10 kids wouldn't take no for an answer," said Elizabeth Meister, whose fifth-grader at the school in Park Slope, Brooklyn, helped organize a demonstration at which children waved signs and sat down in their schoolyard for 15 minutes instead of filing in for class.

A planned field trip to a protest nearby had been canceled.

The decision to prohibit school staff members from participating in demonstrations underscored how hard it is to separate the politics of climate change from teaching the science of it - even in liberal-leaning New York, and even in a school system that some experts consider a national leader in bringing climate-related issues to the classroom.

A demonstrator showing off a placard for the climate strike. Credit Brittainy Newman/The New York Times

Many critics of the protest, including climate-change deniers, argued that Mr. de Blasio was using classroom attendance to promote a political aim. The New York Post's editorial board called the decision "out-and-out government sponsorship of a particular point of view."

Education Department officials did not say how many students missed school to attend the rally. They provided raw attendance figures, saying that 87.4 percent were in school on Friday, compared with 92.3 percent last Friday, a difference of about 53,900 students.
Michael Gold and Azi Paybarah contributed reporting.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misidentified the location of Marisol Rivera's school. It is in Brooklyn, not the Bronx.

Anne Barnard covers climate and environment for the Metro desk. She was Beirut bureau chief from 2012 to 2018. She joined The Times in 2007 after covering the Middle East and the Iraq war for The Boston Globe.

@ABarnardNYT

James Barron is a Metro reporter and columnist. He is the author of the books "Piano: The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand" and "The One-Cent Magenta" and the editor of "The New York Times Book of New York."

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: New Yorkers Welcome Swedish Activist, 16. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Climate Strike N.Y.C.: Young Crowds Demand Action, Welcome Greta Thunberg

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"I feel hopeful seeing the power of all these people here today," one teenager said of the protest, which drew tens of thousands of demonstrators. [Read more live coverage of the climate strikes .] They packed Foley Square and the streets around City Hall, and jammed the stairs leading out of nearby subway stations.

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(Image: © Elon Musk via Twitter)

It looks like will have a pretty nice visual aid when he gives his highly anticipated Starship update this weekend.

On Saturday (Sept. 28), the SpaceX founder and CEO plans to reveal the latest design details of Starship and Super Heavy - the 100-passenger spaceship and the huge rocket, respectively, that the company is developing to send people to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations.

The talk will take place at SpaceX's South Texas facilities near the village of Boca Chica, where the company is building a Starship prototype known as . And this test vehicle is really starting to take shape, as two photos Musk tweeted on Sunday (Sept. 22) reveal.
Related: SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy Mars Rocket in Pictures

Adding the rear moving fins to Starship Mk1 in Boca Chica, Texas pic.twitter.com/HWLihqihph September 22, 2019

One of the pictures shows technicians installing stability-controlling rear fins on Starship Mk1, . The other image shows the Mk1 bottom half, now finned up, apparently getting ready for a big construction milestone.

"Bottom half of Starship at night. Top half with forward fins & header tanks probably stacks on Wednesday. Three Raptors already installed," about this second photo.

In another Sunday tweet, Musk added that the Mk1 fairing - the protective "nose cone" that surrounds payloads during launch - will be mounted by Saturday. So, the billionaire entrepreneur will likely have a fully stacked Mk1 as his backdrop when he makes his presentation.

The Raptor is the next-generation engine that will power Starship and Super Heavy. Both the Mk1 and the Mk2 - another prototype that SpaceX is developing at its Florida facilities - will feature at least three Raptors, Musk has said. (The goal is to improve the final Starship design via some intracompany competition.)

As currently envisioned, the final Starship will have six Raptors and the Super Heavy 35 of these engines. But those numbers could change; we'll have to wait until Saturday to learn more.

The Mk1 and Mk2 are second-generation Starship prototypes. The first, a stubby vehicle known as Starhopper, sported just a single Raptor. Starhopper was retired last month after acing its second untethered test flight, a Boca Chica jaunt that took the craft about 500 feet (150 meters) into the air and featured a sideways translation to a landing pad.

We should see the Mk1 in action soon. SpaceX aims to fly the vehicle to an altitude of about 12 miles (20 kilometers) in October, then attempt an orbital test flight shortly thereafter, Musk has said.
Have a news tip, correction or comment? Let us know at community@space.com.
Things should continue to move quickly if these flights go well. SpaceX representatives have said that the first operational Starship-Super Heavy flight could occur as early as 2021. The initial commercial launches will likely loft communications satellites, but passenger flights may not be far behind: Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has booked a round-the-moon Starship mission, which is currently targeted for 2023.

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SpaceX's Next Starship Prototype Nearly Finished, Elon Musk Says (Photos)

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(Image: © Elon Musk via Twitter) It looks like will have a pretty nice visual aid when he gives his highly anticipated Starship update this weekend. On Saturday (Sept.

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https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/02/politics/nuclear-treaty-inf-us-withdraws-russia/index.html

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Capitalism creates prosperity. By channeling energies into production and innovation, it has enabled billions of ordinary people to live better than the royalty of old. But capitalism puts power into the hands of owners, including hard-to-love billionaires and multinational corporations. It's blamed for widening the gap between rich and poor. Many people equate it with cronyism and the capture of government by special interests. One camp says the solution is to clean up capitalism: End subsidies and protections for businesses, dismantle monopolies and unwind red tape. Another camp says government needs to play a bigger role because the profit motive of capitalists can't be relied upon to meet society's needs.

The Situation

Inequality has gotten both better and worse. Inequality between nations has diminished with the rise of China, India and other nations that have turned to capitalism and free markets. At the same time, inequality between rich and poor within nations has gotten worse. Overall, the bottom half of the world owns less than 1% of the world's wealth, while the top 1% of adults own 47%. Capitalism and free markets are being challenged by both the left and the right. Two U.S. senators campaigning to become the Democratic Party's presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, argue that the economic system is "rigged" to benefit the wealthy. On the right, President Donald Trump has labeled himself "Tariff Man" and moved to restrict immigration, even though the free flow of goods and people is fuel for growth in capitalist economies. Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world's biggest hedge fund, says discontent with disparities in wealth could boil over into revolution.

The Background

Capitalism is built on profit-seeking by private owners of property. Individuals and companies own land, machines and other assets, and they hire workers to use that "capital" to create products and services for sale. In theory - and usually in practice - competition for customers induces capitalists to improve. The "invisible hand" of the free market, rather than government, guides who does what. The Scottish economist Adam Smith wrote in 1776, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." The American economist Milton Friedman argued in the 1970s that maximizing profits for shareholders, subject to following the law, should be the only objective of corporations. Corporate boards largely embraced that message. But there has since been a growing movement toward so-called stakeholder capitalism, which demands that companies balance the interests of shareholders against those of employees, customers and society. In August 2019, Business Roundtable, an association of U.S. chief executive officers, endorsed that idea, abandoning its support for Friedman's view. Germany already requires 50% employee representation on large corporations' supervisory boards, which make strategic decisions.

The Argument

The free-market fix for capitalism is more capitalism: Breaking up the tech giants would level the playing field for competitors. Erasing tariffs would benefit the poor, who spend a bigger share of their income on imported products. Loosening limits on the types of homes that can be built would make housing more abundant and affordable. Restrictions on lobbying would give politically unconnected companies a fairer shot. Many of these fixes are supported by people on the center-left such as Warren, who calls herself "a capitalist to my bones." On taxes, capitalists are divided. Some say lower taxes will spark more growth and prosperity. Others cite high-tax Scandinavia as a model: Unleash private enterprise to create prosperity, and then use taxes and transfers to offset the income inequality that inevitably results. Another approach - either instead of or, more often, in addition to making capitalism work better - is for the government to take over parts of the economy where the capitalist system has failed to provide basic needs. In this vision, the government would build more housing instead of simply giving incentives for private construction. It would guarantee state jobs for people who got laid off in the private sector, averting a decline in employment whenever the economy slows. In the U.S., this viewpoint propels the argument for replacing the patchwork of private health plans that leave more than 30 million people uninsured with government-provided coverage for all. It's also behind the push for free or debt-free college education to uplift the less advantaged. Those ideas come from the left. On the right, the "national conservatism" movement would rein in free markets by engaging in industrial planning and protecting key industries from foreign competition. The upshot: Some on the left embrace capitalism, and some on the right mistrust it.

To contact the author of this QuickTake: Peter Coy in New York at pcoy3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this QuickTake: Lisa Beyer at lbeyer3@bloomberg.net

First published Sept. 11, 2019

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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Capitalism creates prosperity. By channeling energies into production and innovation, it has enabled billions of ordinary people to live better than the royalty of old. But capitalism puts power into the hands of owners, including hard-to-love billionaires and multinational corporations. It's blamed for widening the gap between rich and poor.

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Trump Plans to Tear Up a 31-Year-Old Nuclear Weapons Treaty. Now What?

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President Donald Trump revealed Saturday the United States intends to withdraw from a 31-year-old nuclear weapons agreement with Russia.

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Trump Plans to Tear Up a 31-Year-Old Nuclear Weapons Treaty. Now What?

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President Donald Trump revealed Saturday the United States intends to withdraw from a 31-year-old nuclear weapons agreement with Russia.

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https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-aron-putin-russia-military-20190425-story.html

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China and US in new 'cold war' says former US Ambassador to China

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US Ambassador under Obama, Max Baucus, warns that the US-China dispute is 'much more difficult, much more pervasive' than the cold war.

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Key point: The Soviet Union did not have to go away. Moscow could have found a way to survive and even win.

In 1969, a Soviet dissident named Andrei Amalrik wrote an essay called "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?" It predicted the demise of the Soviet system, most likely in a conflict with China. Amalrik, as it turned out, was wrong about a war with China, but he was only off about the end of the USSR by a few years. No one took Amalrik very seriously at the time; I was assigned his book, like most young graduate students in Soviet affairs, primarily to critique it. Today, people with almost no memory of the period accept the Soviet collapse as just another inevitable historical moment.

But did it have to happen? Could the Soviet Union have won the Cold War? Or at the least, could the Soviet Union have survived until today, and remained a viable competitor to the United States while celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 2017, or the centennial of the founding of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 2022?

Counterfactual history, the game of "what if," is an intellectually hazardous exercise. No one can really explain what didn't actually happen. And in any case, why bother? Maybe the Persians could have beaten the ancient Greeks; maybe Columbus could have taken a wrong turn and been lost at sea; maybe the first atomic bomb could have been a dud and convinced everyone to go back to the drawing board. But the Persians did lose, Columbus did make it across the Atlantic, and the Trinity test did light the sky with nuclear fire. It would take a lifetime to imagine the alternatives, none of which are real.

The reason we even think about these alternate possibilities, however, is to prevent us from making the mistake of believing in inevitability. The inability to see alternatives leads to lazy strategic thinking, which is why so many programs-including the department I once chaired at the Naval War College, Strategy and Policy-use counterfactual history. Otherwise, we risk failures of strategic imagination. I will never forget, for example, the military student I had many years ago who insisted that the American victory in the War of Independence was inevitable. What would it even look like, he sputtered, if North America had stayed British?

There was a long silence in the room until one of his classmates quietly suggested the alternative with two words: "Like Canada?"

Especially for many of my younger students, the victory of the American-led coalition of democracies now seems like a natural end to a struggle that really wasn't all that dangerous, and whose outcome was foreordained. But to the people who fought the Cold War, there were many days where it all seemed to be a lot more tenuous. There were many moments where this planetary conflict- as I called it in a 2003 book, the fight to "win the world" -with the Soviet Union seemed a near-run thing. With that in mind, let's consider five historical periods where different choices could have led, if not to global victory, at least to survival and a fighting chance for the since-departed Land of the Soviets.

1938: Stalin doesn't kill all the smart Communists

Was Stalinism an inevitable outcome of the Soviet experiment? This is one that historians of the Soviet period have long loved to argue about, and it won't be settled here. But it is undeniable that Stalin's purges of the Soviet military and the Communist Party struck down some of the best and brightest from the generation of the Revolution. Shortly after leading Bolshevik Sergei Kirov was gunned down (on Stalin's secret orders) in Leningrad in 1934, Stalin initiated a cyclone of murder and repression that exterminated mostly imaginary enemies in the Party and the military.

To replace all this slaughtered talent, Stalin promoted younger people with little experience (but whose loyalty was now beyond question) into positions of great authority. Western Sovietologists used to call these people "The Class of '38," because they leapfrogged into senior jobs when the purges ended in 1938 to replace the men who'd been shot. This resulted in bizarre personnel situations; in the military, for example, Stalin wiped out so many officers that the military academies had to be graduated early when the Nazis attacked in 1941. Young twenty-somethings who might have been lieutenants were suddenly given senior commands as majors, colonels, even generals.

In the Party, the young civilians who were brought to the fore not only lacked expertise, they lacked courage and initiative. They had, really, only one important skill: they knew how to survive in Stalinist Russia. Their sense of self-preservation would serve them well in the daily grind of Soviet life, but they had no vision and no ability to deal with crises. Stalin, like the ancient Greek solons, cut down the tallest stalks of wheat in his field, and all that was left was the kind of mediocrity that led to Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and a host of lesser, deservedly forgotten incompetents.

Could the murdered generation of Bolsheviks have saved the USSR? If you read Stephen Cohen's classic book, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, you certainly might think so. Others counter that without Stalin, the Soviet Union would never have survived World War II. (A few of us might argue, of course, that Stalin's idiocy and misplaced egomania also helped spark that war.) Still, assuming Hitler was defeated, the Soviet Union would at least have entered the 1950s with battle-hardened revolutionaries at the helm, instead of the cautious bureaucrats who rammed the whole thing into the ground.

Before he died, Stalin warned his inner circle that without him, they would be as helpless as kittens. He had a point-but only because he had taken every step to ensure it.

1947: Truman loses his nerve

In early Cold War history, 1949 looks like a really bad year: the Soviets exploded their first nuclear bomb, and China emerged from the wreckage of world war and civil struggle in Asia as the world's largest communist power. The West by this point had endured repeated Soviet challenges: Stalin, now in control of several conquered European states (including a quarter of Germany) had already tried to leave troops in Iran in 1946, among other daring plays. No one needed convincing that NATO, formed during the West's annus horribilis in 1949, was a good idea. Leaders in the U.S. policy establishment, such as Paul Nitze, were already warning of doom while drafting documents like NSC-68, and the North Korean attack on South Korea a year later made such warnings seem prescient.

The real test of American nerve, however, came two years earlier. In 1947, President Harry Truman had to decide whether America really was going to step into Britain's shoes as Europe's postcolonial police officer. Greece was in the middle of a civil war with Communist rebels. Other parts of Western Europe, broken in spirit and bankrupt from two world wars in thirty years, were also ripe for revolution and conquest. Soviet ideology chief Andrei Zhdanov had proclaimed the "two camps" thesis, in which there were only two choices-socialism or capitalism-for the rest of the world. The pieces were in place. All that was necessary for a Soviet advance was an American retreat.

Imagine that in 1947, Truman abandons the Greeks. He pulls America home, politically as well as militarily. That means, among other things, the Marshall Plan is never implemented. It also means that Truman will never have to respond to the Berlin Blockade, because the Blockade never happens: without American leadership, the currency reforms in Germany's western zones never take place. The Federal Republic of Germany is never created, and with the western zones left to rot in economic ruin, they likely fall prey to Soviet "aid" over time.

Likewise, Truman decides that America's disengagement from Europe means no CIA meddling in the Italian elections in 1948. Italy (like unfortunate Czechoslovakia the same year) gets pulled into the Soviet orbit by electing Communists. France, already home to a strong Communist party, follows suit. The Greek Communists, unopposed, complete their conquest, and the Iron Curtain now extends from the English Channel to the Aegean, and across to the Sea of Japan.

NATO is never formed. Some version of America's "special relationship" with the United Kingdom remains, with America and the British Commonwealth facing a Europe ruled, either overtly or by proxy, from Stalin's chambers in the Kremlin. Awash in Europe's resources, Stalin builds an empire that lasts, and America remains a naval power left to patrol the seas with its British, Canadian, and Australian friends-mostly to make the world safe for Communist shipping.

Of course, Truman actually did plunge into the Cold War competition, and the Soviet chance for victory slipped away for another quarter-century. Democrat or Republican, U.S. presidents after Truman were all dedicated Cold Warriors. America and Europe, taking their halting first steps in 1949 as an alliance, soon became a nuclear-armed porcupine the Soviets could attack only at their own peril.

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Five Ways Russia Could Have Won the Cold War

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Key point: The Soviet Union did not have to go away. Moscow could have found a way to survive and even win. In 1969, a Soviet dissident named Andrei Amalrik wrote an essay called "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?" It predicted the demise of the Soviet system, most likely in a conflict with China.

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Before he began swatting at the Democratic Party's impeachment inquiry earlier today, President Donald Trump was at the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, where he devoted more than four minutes to a markedly more critical message on China than his address to the same hall last year, in which he praised Chinese President Xí Jìnpíng 习近平.

South China Morning Post has two notable quotes from Trump's speech:

After China's WTO accession, "Not only has China declined to adopt promised reforms, it has embraced an economic model dependent on massive market barriers, heavy state subsidies, currency manipulation, product dumping, forced technology transfers and the theft of intellectual property and also trade secrets on a grand scale."

"The world fully expects that the Chinese government will honour its binding treaty made with the British and registered with the United Nations in which China commits to protect Hong Kong's freedom, legal system and democratic ways of life."

Many in Washington will likely see the tough love from Trump to Beijing, compared with the friendly talk in previous years, as a move of leadership.

But there is one China-related issue which Trump has still never talked about, and yesterday made more obvious than ever that he is intentionally avoiding leading on: Xinjiang. Reuters reports:

U.S. President Donald Trump called for an end to religious persecution on Monday at a U.S. event on the sidelines of the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations featuring a woman whose Uyghur father has been imprisoned in China...

Trump did not specifically mention Xinjiang and he left the meeting before the woman, Jewher Ilham, spoke, but Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo listened as she slammed the Chinese government. Pompeo said her father - a Uighur scholar - is serving a life sentence as a prisoner of conscience...

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan will host a separate event on Tuesday on the "human rights crisis in Xinjiang" in China...

A State Department official said at least 31 countries were expected to attend. The event will be co-hosted by the Netherlands, Germany, Canada and Britain, diplomats said.

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Trump attacks China, defends religious freedom, totally ignores Uyghurs

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Before he began swatting at the Democratic Party's impeachment inquiry earlier today, President Donald Trump was at the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, where he devoted more than four minutes to a markedly more critical message on China than his address to the same hall last year, in which he praised Chinese President Xi Jinping.

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https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/24/bnp-paribas-jean-lemierre-on-us-china-trade-war-hong-kong-protests.html

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US and China are not heading into a 'cold war,' says BNP Paribas chairman

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The U.S. and China are not heading into a "cold war" even though trade tensions have escalated, said Jean Lemierre, chairman of France's largest lender, BNP Paribas.

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US-China cold war and rising protectionism could split world order

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Experts say the world may face a "multi-dimensional cold war" as nations are "pressured to take sides" between the U.S. and China.

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https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/25/us-china-cold-war-and-rising-protectionism-could-split-world-order.html

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https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/24/politics/trump-iran-talks-unga/index.html

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https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/25/opinions/impeachment-inquiry-of-trump-opinion-granderson/index.html

Mueller Report

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Yemen's war has to end. And the secret is that the way it ends is no secret at all.

On Sept. 14, a drone attack on Aramco facilities in Saudi Arabia destroyed approximately half of Saudi crude oil production. The Houthi militia in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack; Saudi Arabia and the United States, however, are pointing fingers at Iran. This situation threatens to turn regional tensions into a shooting war, as well as destabilizing the global economy. And for Yemen, the risk of being drawn into a war between states, and not merely between proxies, is now very real. If more evidence was needed for the urgency of a political solution in Yemen, then these attacks provide it.

Most wars appear to have no solution. They are occasioned by rival states, fueled by rival ideologies and impermeable to the cries of the victims. Yemen is in some ways no different. Every single family in the country has lost a generation of education among its children; every single family has seen a relative or a friend killed. Few see the sense in a war among their leaders that costs each and every one of them so dearly.

This is a conflict the international community can resolve. And because we can, we must. The details of this settlement are in plain sight. Seven elements will necessarily underpin any agreement to end the war.

First, the monopoly on force must be returned to the government of Yemen. No Yemenis outside the state should be allowed to use violence to achieve their ends. This is a simple but absolute requirement. The militias that fight over Yemen's land must be replaced by the exclusive authority of the state. This can be achieved through a process overseen by the United Nations of gradually transferring weapons from the militias to the new government.

Second, the government must be more than a coalition. It must be an inclusive partnership among the political parties that now take different sides. This is the state that will require that differences be resolved through politics and that force is its servant and not its threat.

Third, the government must ensure that its country will not be used for attacks on neighbors or even those beyond. This must be a compact between Yemen's new leaders and its neighborhood.

Fourth, the government will adopt and uphold its historic responsibility of ensuring the safety of the trade that has for millenniums depended on the security of its seas. Yemen will police its borders, and it will be supported by those who benefit from this assurance.

Fifth, the people of Yemen will eliminate and outlaw from its territory the terrorist threat that even now we see.

Sixth, Yemen's neighbors will guarantee the prosperity and stability of its population through trade and the generosity that will remove the scars of this war.

And finally, it will be the people of Yemen and their leaders who decide on the future of the state. No others need apply. The future shape of Yemen can, and indeed should, be determined only by Yemenis free of the duress of war and willing to negotiate the future of their country in good faith.

These seven elements are known to all in Yemen who study peace and to the leaders around the world, particularly those in the region who have spent blood and treasure on seeking a way back to a society of civility and a state of accountable governance that can ensure stability. The application of these principles can transform Yemen from a source of violence, terror and humanitarian crisis into an island of relative stability in an increasingly volatile region.

With the requisite political will on all sides, I know this can be done. But to do so requires us to convince leaders that stability and their region's security is best reached not through military pressure but through a genuine and tested cooperation with their enemies. I am not the first to suggest a bold move to end this war and make peace. Just a little short of a year ago Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis put out an urgent call for an immediate end to the fighting in Yemen. These two statesmen believed not only that ending the fighting was the right thing to do, but also that it could be done. They were right then, and it is right now. My hope is that the people who care will now turn that call into a present reality.

Let us be clear: Yemen cannot wait. And moreover, Yemen need not wait. And neither should we.

Martin Griffiths (@ose_yemen) is the United Nations special envoy for Yemen.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some . And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | The Secret of Yemen's War? We Can End It

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Yemen's war has to end. And the secret is that the way it ends is no secret at all. On Sept. 14, a drone attack on Aramco facilities in Saudi Arabia destroyed approximately half of Saudi crude oil production. The Houthi militia in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack; Saudi Arabia and the United States, however, are pointing fingers at Iran.

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https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-impeachment-inquiry-09-25-2019/index.html

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https://www.studentnewsdaily.com/daily-news-article/world-1-nigerians-leave-south-africa-following-attacks/

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https://newsela.com/read/egypt-queen/id/24736/

https://www.history.com/news/archaeologists-identify-mummified-legs-as-queen-nefertaris

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https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/18/americas/bahamas-us-medics/index.html

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https://www.businessinsider.com/greta-thunberg-bio-climate-change-activist-2019-9#on-monday-thunberg-joined-two-other-youth-activists-in-opening-the-un-climate-action-summit-with-tears-in-her-eyes-she-chastised-world-leaders-you-have-stolen-my-dreams-and-my-childhood-with-your-empty-words-1

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About 75 people actually approached the gates Friday morning.
ASSOCIATED PRESS

Topline: Although Facebook took down the viral event invite to "Storm Area 51," only 150 people showed up Friday (and two were detained) outside the secret government facility's gates to see the extraterrestrial evidence long-rumored to be housed there.

Key background: It started off as a joke. Matty Roberts created a Facebook event July 27, called it "Storm Area 51: They Can't Stop All Of Us," and scheduled it for September 20. After about three days, the event page took off, with over 2 million Facebook RSVPs and another 1.2 million marked as "interested" in attending before site administrators took it down.

Since then, other associated events, like music festivals, sprung up in place of raiding the base and will run throughout the weekend

The festivals ultimately attracted 1,500 people to neighboring towns, according to the Associated Press. Of that number, 150 people traveled within sight of the Area 51 gates and about 75 actually approached the gates Friday morning.

Two individuals were detained by the local sheriff's deputies. It's unclear who was detained and why, although one woman allegedly attempted to duck under the gates and a man was allegedly publicly urinating in the vicinity.

Some of the attendees showed up at the gates as early as 3 a.m.

Crucial quote: "People desire to be part of something, to be ahead of the curve. Area 51 is a place where normal, ordinary citizens can't go. When you tell people they can't do something, they just want to do it more," said University of Nevada sociologist Ken Borer in an interview with the local ABC affiliate.

Chief critic: The U.S. military. Warnings were issued that lethal force would be used if necessary to keep people from entering Area 51.

What to watch for: The conspiracies surrounding Area 51 and its purported uses. Although rumors circulated about the base for decades, the CIA only acknowledged its existence in 2013 when a report from 1992 was declassified. It stated that the base was used to test spy planes. But it's still mostly unclear what the government uses the facility for.

Follow me on Send me a secure Twitter.tip.

I'm a New York-based journalist covering breaking news at Forbes. I hold a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Previous bylines: G

... Read More

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2 Million People Said They Would 'Storm Area 51'⁠-But Only 150 Showed Up

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Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin Topline: Although Facebook took down the viral event invite to "Storm Area 51," only 150 people showed up Friday (and two were detained) outside the secret government facility's gates to see the extraterrestrial evidence long-rumored to be housed there.

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Italian authorities have closed roads and ordered the evacuation of huts on the Italian side of (CNN) - Mont Blanc, following warnings that part of a glacier could collapse at any moment.

A staggering 250,000 cubic meters (8.8 million cubic feet) of ice could break away from the Planpincieux glacier on the Grandes Jorasses mountain in the Mont Blanc massif, experts at the Valle d'Aosta regional government and the Fondazione Montagna Sicura (Safe Mountain Foundation) reported in an analysis published this week.

While it's impossible to predict the exact timing of the collapse, observations in August and September showed that the glacier was shifting at a speed of 50 to 60 centimeters (20 to 24 centimeters) a day, experts said.

"These phenomena once again show that the mountain is going through a phase of strong change due to climatic factors, therefore it is particularly vulnerable," Stefano Miserocchi, mayor of nearby Courmayeur, said in a statement. "In this case, it's a temperate glacier particularly sensitive to high temperatures."As a precautionary measure, Miserocchi ordered the closure of roads in the Val Ferret valley and the evacuation of mountain huts in the Rochefort area.

He added that a glacier collapse would not threaten residential areas or tourist facilities.

With 11 peaks above 4,000 meters (13,123 feet) between Italy and France, Mont Blanc is Western Europe's highest mountain range and is popular with hikers, climbers and skiers.

Alpine glaciers are melting as a result of rising global temperatures.

According to the latest registry of glaciers, their surface area decreased from 609 square kilometers (235 square miles) in 1989 to 368 square kilometers (142 square miles) now -- a fall of 40%, La Repubblica reported.

During the same period, the number of glaciers decreased from 1,381 to 903.

In a speech on climate change to the United Nations General Assembly in New York Tuesday, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte referred to the Mont Blanc warning. "It is now news that a glacier on Mont Blanc risks collapsing," he said. "It's an alarm that cannot leave us indifferent. It must shake us all and mobilize us."

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mont blanc glacier could collapse at any moment

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Mont Blanc glacier could collapse at any moment, Italy warns

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Italian authorities have closed roads and ordered the evacuation of huts on the Italian side of (CNN) - Mont Blanc, following warnings that part of a glacier could collapse at any moment.

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https://www.newscientist.com/article/2217611-ipcc-report-sea-levels-could-be-a-metre-higher-by-2100/

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"You, the first person to read this, are temporarily in charge of this shelter. You should begin the immediate-action program outlined on the following pages to protect yourself and others who follow you into this shelter."

This is followed by a list of instructions: check incoming people for nuclear contamination, establish medical aid areas, set up a communications center. No, it's not from a new dystopian novel - it's taken verbatim from a 1960s fallout shelter management guide provided by Stanford to the shelter managers.

At the height of the Cold War, Stanford and the Office of Civil Defense, a federal agency established by Franklin D. Roosevelt, designated as many as 56 fallout shelters on campus. The University managed these shelters, which collectively had a maximum occupancy of 49,269 people, as a part of emergency plans in the event of a nuclear strike or natural disaster.

As time went on, student pushback, disagreement among faculty and the decay of supplies led to the gradual decommission of the shelters. Today, an abandoned fallout shelter off of Junipero Serra Boulevard - discovered only a few years ago when an undergraduate was found squatting in it - harkens back to a unique era of Stanford's history featuring the University's first formal protest and a 100-member student congress.

While some fallout shelters persisted through at least the early 1990s, no one really knows about them today.

"I cannot find anyone who knows about the presence of any shelters in residences," Residential & Dining Enterprises spokesperson Jocelyn Breeland said in an email to The Daily. "My guess is that over the past 30 years anything that might have been considered a shelter has been repurposed out of existence."

Keith Perry of the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) also confirmed that fallout shelters are no longer part of the University's current emergency management program. Organized under Stanford Environmental Health & Safety, OEM is charged with creating a disaster-resilient campus and helping mitigate potential risks.

Although the shelters and their history have fallen off Stanford's radar, University Archaeologist Laura Jones M.A. '84 Ph.D. '91 was aware of at least one remnant.

To Launer's team, the extension cord in the dry grass was an obvious fire hazard, prompting them to follow it to the bunker. (Courtesy of Alan Launer)

In 2013, Associate Director of Conservation Planning Alan Launer '81 M.S. '81 and a field crew noticed an out-of-place extension cord running through the dry grass near the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), an interdisciplinary research lab in the hills between the Dish and Stanford Golf Course. Launer's team watches out for conservation concerns at Stanford, and those foothills house the endangered California tiger salamander.

The cord was threaded through a pipe into a thick concrete structure submerged in yellow invasive grass and poison oak, a structure the team had walked around for two decades. The potential hazard pushed Launer and his team to open up the rusted hatch on top.

"We always thought it was a water tank," recounted Launer, "until they opened it up and oh my God -"

Inside the seemingly humdrum structure was a hodgepodge of food and appliances: mason jars of mixed nuts, bedding and pillows, an oversupply of honey, fans, an electric massager, melted candles and more. A fifth-year undergraduate had been siphoning electricity from CASBS and living in the concrete structure - which appeared to be an old bomb shelter.

The scene left by the squatter was a shock to Launer. In addition to the student's eclectic mix of possessions, the shelter was also blanketed in colorful chalk doodles. (Courtesy of Alan Launer)

Launer called the University's public safety department, and they came out and investigated. Launer said that they did not find any evidence of criminal activity, other than trespassing.

"As I recall, they put up notices stating that the bunker would be sealed off and that all personal belongings needed to be removed ASAP," he said.

According to Launer, the student removed his stuff but was caught soon after trying to move back in. At that point, he was "talked to by either a dean or Public Safety." An adviser was ultimately able to secure housing for the student.

A bit of a hike off the main road, Provost Drell and I got to see the shelter ourselves, while Launer and Jones gave us background on the structure.
(CLYDE JOHN/The Stanford Daily)

Launer took Jones, Provost Persis Drell- who grew up on campus in the 1960s - and me back to the site in July to see the shelter. The concrete bunker has since been welded shut and is checked by Launer's team several times a year. Due to the small size, it is unlikely that the shelter was a part of the suite established for the public by the Office of Civil Defense in 1963.

Rather, the structure is more likely a personal fallout shelter - not unheard of for that time period. When it came to bomb bunkers, publications like "Popular Mechanics" sold booklets for as low as 25 cents with do-it-yourself guides and blueprints. "You Can Build a Low-Cost Shelter Quickly," articles advertised.

Jones also reminded us that the Lathrop family, that of Jane Stanford, inhabited the land well into the 1940s and 1950s, suggesting the fallout shelter could have been theirs. In fact, the Lathrop house was just up the hill from the site. Regardless, the small shelter provides a window to Cold War-era Stanford - when fallout shelters took center stage.

'Dark, cramped and dank'

The shelters at Stanford varied widely in size and location. The largest location, with a maximum capacity of 5,345 people, was housed underneath Hoover Tower. The smallest, which could carry a mere 51, resided in the basements of Wilbur Hall. In terms of structure, they ranged from repurposed basements to rooms constructed specifically as a shelter.

A map of the fallout shelters on campus when they were first designated in 1963.
(Special Collections & University Archives)

According to a National Fallout Shelter Survey (NFSS) printout in Special Collections, Stanford was not the only university in the Bay Area preparing for the worst. University of California, Berkeley, maintained 60 shelters, while Santa Clara University and San Jose State housed 12 and eight, respectively.

Fallout shelters in residence halls were not uncommon, with records identifying shelters in the basements of Roble, Stern, Crothers and Toyon Halls. In 1989, Daily reporter Jeff Brock '93 gained access to a neglected shelter under Casa Zapata. During this time, the University was no longer maintaining these facilities; while some shelters decayed behind locked doors, others were converted to storage.

"Inside the dark, cramped and dank room is an odd mixture of old and new. Like most former shelters on campus, it is sometimes used for storage," Brock wrote in a 1989 Daily article. "Alongside Macintosh computer boxes and magazines dated 'July 1986' are fallout medical kits and 17-½ gallon canisters of water dated 'July 1962.'"

In addition to these items, Brock found can openers, napkins, wire, toilet paper and commode lids. It was his narrative and journey into the shelters that initially piqued my interest in the story.

According to a 1968 memo from Ed Scoles M.B.A. '57, who at the time was the assistant business manager of university residences, only about half of the licensed shelters were actually stocked with supplies at the height of the fallout shelter program. The most common food items stored in the shelters were biscuits and crackers.

Scoles's memo also details that the Stanford Fire Department inspected stocks of supplies every 30 days, with periodic water testing. A shelter management course enrollment sheet reveals that a wide range of people managed these shelters, from firemen and police officers to food service employees and the treasurer to the City of Palo Alto.

Shelter management guides and sample schedules published by the University paint a clear picture of what day-to-day life inside the bunkers would be like. Mornings would begin at 7:00 a.m. with "lights on," followed by the doling of daily rations and breakfast. Information sessions, evacuation trainings and fire drills filled most of the day, with free time, recreational activities and meals interspersed. Evenings ended with moderate quiet hours starting at 8:00 p.m. and "lights out" at 11:00 p.m.

"Those were the rough days," former Civil Defense Coordinator John Marston recalled in 1989. "The directors of the dorms were very organized in case we had a red alert."

Beginning of the Shelters

But to more accurately describe the shelters and the controversy surrounding them, we must go back to their origins at Stanford - nothing a trip to Special Collections & University Archives can't solve.

Similar to the shock Launer's team felt when its members opened the concrete slab in 2013, students returning to campus from their holiday vacations 50 years prior were met with a similar, ominous surprise.

According to Scoles's memo, the shelter program at Stanford was launched during winter break, December 1962. Scoles wrote in 1968 that originally 27 shelters were marked with signs and stocked, while The Daily reported five years earlier that 18 shelter areas were established.

Scoles noted that some students objected to the program and described the fallout shelters as a brief "cause celebre." Several letters in The Daily confirm this sentiment, including one penned by Peter Oppenheimer. The Daily was unable to confirm whether the author was, in fact, the same Peter as the son of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb.

In his book "Stanford in Turmoil," former provost and president Richard Lyman explained that some critics of the Vietnam War believed that "by cooperating with the government in preparing for war, the university tacitly condoned the war policy." He added, however, that some members of the Stanford community saw this connection as "far-fetched."

Disagreement even consumed faculty, who argued over the merits of the shelters in a panel on civil defense at Stanford.

"Citing the horrors of Bamburg, Dr. [Leonard] Herzenberg asserted that the shelters on the Stanford Campus are far from adequate," wrote Daily reporter Pell Fender '66. "Dr. [Theodore] Roszak predicted that if further shelters were installed at Stanford, they may be considered to be provocative of nuclear war."

On April 15, 1963 - a week after the group was formed to "host debates on off-campus issues, with the purpose of publishing statements" - the Stanford Student Congress voted 70-27 on a resolution to suggest the University refuse further federal funds for shelters, donate the remaining rations, remove all shelter signs and encourage research toward peaceful resolutions in conflicts abroad.

"The United States Government should discontinue the Federal fallout shelter program with the funds for civil defense to be turned over to an international agency such as World Health Organization, or UNESCO," ended the congress's resolution.

Stanford's first protests

In a letter to the congress's speaker, Nils Wessell '64, then-President Wallace Sterling Ph.D. '38 reminded students that policy concerning the shelters was the result of discussions with staff, the Committee of University Policy and the Board of Trustees.

Newspaper clipping from The Daily, dated April 26, 1963.
(RALPH PEER/The Stanford Daily)

"Should further Federal funds be offered us for expansions of the fall-out shelter program, we shall consider the issue on its merits, as indeed we did initially," wrote Sterling. "We have no intention, however, of advising the United States Government as to how it should proceed in this matter. Nor do we intend to remove fall-out shelter signs from campus."

Earlier that month, a student group called the Peace Caucus requested to meet with Sterling and pushed for the abolishment of the shelters, writing to The Daily that "the presence of fallout shelters in our society enhances the probability of thermonuclear war."

According to Lyman's book, the administration's refusal to meet with the caucus prompted calls from the Peace Caucus for a "permanent vigil" at Sterling's office during the day and at his home during the evening. With no set policy or precedent for protests of this kind, Sterling soon declared that vigils must not interrupt the educational processes or business of the University and cannot take place in private residential areas.

The vigil took place as planned, and Stanford security officers confiscated student body ID cards from protesters at Sterling's home, which meant their case would go before the Judicial Council.

"Vigilists stated that they had no real hope of abolishing fallout shelters on campus," wrote Daily reporter Bert Carp '66 L.L.B. '68. "But that they did hope to bring about a change in University policy regarding debate, and introduce the vigil as a new method of exerting the influence of student opinion."

After threats of dismissal from the administration, the Peace Caucus ended the evening vigils outside Sterling's home but persisted with protests during the day in Main Quad. According to Lyman, the demonstrators, satisfied with the administration's willingness to reach a solution, concluded the entire vigil after about a week.

Two weeks after the vigil ended, a panel of administrators discussed the fallout shelter controversy in front of a "near-capacity crowd" at Cubberley Auditorium. The forum included Dean of Students H. Donald Winbigler, Vice President for Business Affairs Alf Brandin '36, Director of University Relations Lyle M. Nelson and Director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) Wolfgang Panofsky.

The Fallout Shelter Committee

Surveyors checked the status of each shelter, also noting whether it was stocked or not. On this first page, recognizable locations like many residence halls and libraries are mentioned. (Special Collections & University Archives)

During the panel, Nelson confirmed that the granting of federal funds did indeed motivate the Trustees' decisions to accept the fallout shelter program. Panofsky, a member of then-President John F. Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee, strongly expressed his opposition to the program.

"When asked if the shelters might give Americans a 'false sense of security,' Panofsky asserted 'the program is so essentially ineffective that it leads to no false sense of security.'" Fender wrote.

Acknowledging the administration's attempt to explain and listen, The Daily would describe the panel as a "significant turning point in the history of student-Administration relations at Stanford." The immediate controversy over the fallout shelter program gradually petered out, but the spirit of the protests lived on. It would frame future demonstrations on campus, including a graduating senior's anti-NATO protest at 1963Commencement, the Stanford Committee for Peace in Vietnam's sit-in at the lobby of Sterling's office and the election of David Harris '67 - who ran on the elimination of the Board of Trustees and fraternities, legalization of marijuana and an end to University cooperation with the Vietnam War - as 1966Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) President.

The shelter détente did not last very long, as the controversy resurfaced following a survey of Stanford's shelters conducted by the U.S. Army in 1965. The inventory found that, while 27 shelters (accounting for a capacity of 11,703 people) were stocked with food and supplies, 29 shelters (accounting for 30,790 people) remained unstocked and unmarked.

Moreover, the shelters were the subject of vandalism. During the 1963 protests, exterior signs were torn down and never recovered, with Scoles estimating in his 1968 memo that only 10% of the signs remained in place.

Frank Holt, Santa Clara County's Civil Defense Coordinator, formally recommended to Brandin in 1967 that federal funds be utilized to stock 10,000 more spaces by June 1968.

After Brandin failed to respond to his request, Holt followed up, prompting a staff meeting revisiting the fallout shelter program in April 1968. In his notes from the meeting, Sterling's executive assistant Frederic Glover '33, described the shelters as a "pesky problem" - referring to the controversy they caused just a few years prior.

The outcome of the meeting was the formation of the Fallout Shelter Committee, a group tasked with determining the future of the fallout shelter program. Originally, Sterling tapped Sidney Drell - the father of current provost Persis Drell - to lead the committee.

Over the course of his long career as a physicist at SLAC, Sidney Drell was a staunch opponent of nuclear proliferation and remained committed to arms control. A recipient of the National medal of Science from former President Barack Obama, he was also a founding member of the JASON - an independent group of scientists that advises the United States government - and cofounder of the Center for International Security and Arms Control (now the Center for International Security and Cooperation) - a think tank on international and domestic security issues under the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

"Most summers he was part of a group called JASON, so we spent most summers either at Woods Hole or, by then, La Jolla and we would just go there for six weeks in the summer," Persis recounted. "He would also go to a bunch of conferences in Europe and we would all go with him."

Like Persis said, this particular summer, Sidney Drell was out of the country, pushing Sterling to call on Panofsky - the SLAC director who was opposed to the construction of the shelters back in 1963.

What about earthquakes?

Panofsky's committee also included Scoles, Assistant Director of University Relations Don Carlson '47, Dean of Students Joel Smith and Chair of the Chemical Engineering Department David Mason. On behalf of the student body, Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Dan Snell '70, ASSU President Denis Hayes '69 M.B.A. '74 J.D. '85 and activist Tim Buxton were also involved in discussions.

The inclusion of students in the committee was a point of concern for administrators. Glover advised Sterling that it would be best to "holdup action" on student involvement until after the ASSU election. The election pitted Hayes against incumbent Cesare Massarenti '69, a frequent critic of Sterling who spurred public protest.

"If Hayes wins, we'll deal with him as de facto president," Glover wrote. "Joel thinks it would be madness to deal with Cesare on a nomination of this nature. So we know what we wish to recommend to you, but want to delay action until next week."

Hayes ended up defeating Massarenti, and the Fallout Shelter Committee chose to incorporate student opinion into its decision-making process. On July 23, 1968, with Scoles dissenting, the committee recommended "that the University cancel its present Fallout Shelter agreement with the Office of Civil Defense unless this committee is convinced that the materials stored in the shelters at Stanford have an essential role in meeting natural disaster emergencies."

That same month, the Board of Trustees announced that Dean of the School of Medicine Robert Glaser would take over as acting president, as Sterling was set to retire. The transition caused the Fallout Shelter Committee's recommendation to be nearly forgotten.

In October, however, Glaser sent a note to Brandin that he had "reason to believe that the students are apt to make an issue of the fact that the report had never been publicized." The next week, Glaser notified the committee that he would be continuing the shelter program for natural disaster emergencies.

"I have asked that the present [shelters] be maintained as a potential resource in the case of a natural disaster such as an earthquake," Glaser wrote. "Although it is unlikely, as your report pointed out, that help would not be forthcoming from surrounding areas, it seems to me that we may as well avail ourselves of whatever facilities are presently here."

But Glaser quickly walked back on that decision after a meeting with Panofsky and the committee on October 18, in which the committee - excluding Scoles - expressed that they "felt strongly and unanimously that there was absolutely no point" in maintaining the shelters as a resource in the event of a natural disaster. As such, Glaser asked Brandin to notify Santa Clara County that Stanford would be disbanding the program.

Submerged in invasive grass and poison oak, the abandoned bunker overlooks Junipero Serra Blvd. The concrete structure may be the only remaining fragment of Cold War shelters on campus. (CLYDE JOHN/The Stanford Daily)

In 1970, however, Kenneth Pitzer, the new University president, reversed Glaser's previous decision upon reading a report titled "A Survey of Stanford Campus Vulnerability to Natural Disasters." According to Pitzer, the report recommended "very definitely" that the supplies in the shelters would be valuable; they just were not "optically arranged" at the time.

Contact Patrick Monreal at pmonreal 'at' stanford.edu.

Thus, Pitzer ordered that Stanford's program would remain "in status quo" with Santa Clara County, meaning the shelters would remain on campus. Since then, the shelters have sat, decayed and, for the most part, faded from memory.

There are very few public records in Special Collections that date past 1970. Most of what is known comes from Brock's 1989 article, in which he reported that many of the original spaces were being converted to storage.

Still, in 1989, "only the keys to the shelter below Casa Zapata could be located," and there were over 50 shelters in the 1960s. There is a chance - however small - that behind some random locked door of an old residence hall or laboratory lies a "dark, cramped and dank" relic of the Cold War.

I, for one, am still on the hunt.

Special thanks to Provost Drell, Laura Jones, Alan Launer and Special Collections & University Archives. Aside from The Daily articles, much of the historical documents can be found in the Lyman Papers, Pitzer Papers and Office of the Dean of Student Affairs, Residence Division, Records.

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Inside Stanford's Last Fallout Shelter: a time capsule to Cold War politics and protests - The Stanford Daily

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At the height of the Cold War, Stanford designated as many as 56 fallout shelters on campus. The University managed these shelters, which collectively had a maximum occupancy of 49,269 people, as a part of emergency plans in the event of a nuclear strike or natural disaster.

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A Russian cosmonaut and two astronauts - one from NASA and the other from the United Arab Emirates - are scheduled to launch Wednesday to the International Space Station.

Jessica Meir of NASA, Oleg Skripochka of Roscosmos (Russia's space agency) and Hazza Ali Almansoori, one of only two astronauts in the nascent Emirati space program, are scheduled to lift off in a Russian Soyuz rocket at 9:57 a.m. EDT from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

They are expected to arrive at the orbiting outpost at 3:45 p.m. EDT.

Skripochka is a veteran of two missions to the space station, but it will be the first for Meir and Almansoori.

Almansoori was a pilot in the UAE armed forces before he was selected for astronaut training in 2018. The flight is part of Roscosmos' "spaceflight participant" program, which allows individuals who are not part of the Russian space agency to hitch a ride on short-duration flights to the ISS.

The United Arab Emirates launched its national space program in 2017 with the lofty goal of reaching Mars by 2021 and building a settlement on the Red Planet by 2117.

"We are all proud of being representatives of our homeland on the International Space Station and raising the UAE flag onboard," Almansoori and his fellow Emirati astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi said in a phone call Monday with Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, according to the Emirates News Agency.

NASA TV will broadcast the launch live, with coverage beginning at 9 a.m. EDT. The space agency will also livestream the trio's arrival and docking, beginning at 3 p.m. EDT.

Once aboard the space station, Meir, Skripochka and Almansoori will join NASA astronauts Christina Koch, Andrew Morgan and Nick Hague; Russian cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Alexander Skvortsov; and Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano, of the European Space Agency.

Almansoori will remain at the space station for eight days. He is scheduled to return to Earth on Oct. 3 with Hague and Ovchinin, who have been living and working aboard the orbiting lab since March.
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First astronaut from UAE is set to fly to the International Space Station

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A Russian cosmonaut and two astronauts - one from NASA and the other from the United Arab Emirates - are scheduled to launch Wednesday to the International Space Station. Jessica Meir of NASA, Oleg Skripochka of Roscosmos (Russia's space agency) and Hazza Ali Almansoori, one of only two astronauts in the nascent Emirati space program, are scheduled to lift off in a Russian Soyuz rocket at 9:57 a.m.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/trump-impeachment-proceedings-trigger-caution-and-a-little-schadenfreude-overseas/2019/09/25/77b2aa08-df49-11e9-be7f-4cc85017c36f_story.html

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hong-kong-refuses-to-be-absorbed-by-an-increasingly-nasty-regime/2019/09/18/ea3ece0c-d96e-11e9-a688-303693fb4b0b_story.html

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The major question is whether President Trump used American foreign policy to try to damage a political rival.

Image

No evidence has emerged that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was trying to help his son when he pushed for the dismissal of a Ukrainian prosecutor. Credit Credit Mark Makela for The New York Times

WASHINGTON - Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry on Tuesday amid mounting furor over President Trump's efforts to pressure Ukraine's government to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., apparently the subject of a classified whistle-blower complaint the administration refused for weeks to show to Congress before dropping objections.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, said he planned on Wednesday to release the transcript of a phone call he had in July with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Mr. Trump insisted it would show that he said nothing inappropriate, but scrutiny about his conduct toward Ukraine has spread beyond the single conversation.

Here are some of the basic facts behind the controversy.

Mr. Trump is said to have pressured Mr. Zelensky to investigate Mr. Biden and his younger son, Hunter - both directly and through a proxy, Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of Mr. Trump's personal lawyers. As a leading candidate to be the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nominee, Mr. Biden is Mr. Trump's political rival.

As vice president, Mr. Biden pushed the Ukrainian government in 2015 to fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was widely seen as an obstacle to reform because he failed to bring corruption cases. At the time, Mr. Biden's son sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings.

Mr. Trump and his allies have insinuated, without evidence, that Mr. Biden was trying to protect the company from prosecution. An investigation into him, even if it were unfounded or turned up no evidence of a crime, could damage his campaign prospects by suggesting wrongdoing.

This is the big question. The White House froze more than $391 million in military assistance to Ukraine this summer that Congress had appropriated. The money was intended to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian territorial aggression, including a military conflict in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 13,000 people since 2014.

Video

President Trump is facing calls for impeachment related to a phone call with Ukraine's president. Who's the man on the other end of the phone? Credit Credit Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA, via Shutterstock

Mr. Trump has given conflicting explanations for the freeze. On Monday, he cited corruption in Ukraine as the reason for the delay. On Tuesday, he instead said he had held up the military assistance because European countries had not paid their fair share to help defend Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, from Russian incursions.

Mr. Trump directed Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, to pause the aid in the days before his July phone call with Mr. Zelensky, senior administration officials said. The Trump administration abruptly unfroze the package this month amid mounting questions about what Mr. Trump was doing with Ukraine.

An intelligence official filed a whistle-blower complaint last month about the president's actions. The inspector general for the intelligence community deemed the complaint "credible" and "urgent" and forwarded it to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, under a law that says such complaints must be shown to Congress within a week.

But Mr. Maguire refused to share the complaint with Congress, saying the Justice Department disagreed with the inspector general's conclusion that its subject matter was covered under the law that requires disclosing such complaints to Congress. The issue came into the open when the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, sent an angry letter to Mr. Maguire on Sept. 10, accusing him of violating the law.

Mr. Maguire relented as the impeachment inquiry came into focus. He was expected to release a redacted version of the complaint in coming days, people familiar with the situation said late on Tuesday. Administration officials were also said to be working on a deal to allow the whistle-blower to file the complaint to congressional investigators.

Mr. Maguire is set to testify about the matter on Thursday.

The complaint's full details remain a mystery, as does the whistle-blower's identity. Because Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani have openly acknowledged pressuring Ukraine about "corruption" and the Bidens, it is not clear how much the complaint involves that is not already in plain view.

But in a closed-door briefing with the House Intelligence Committee, the inspector general for the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, said that the complaint involved multiple actions, according to two officials familiar with his briefing, suggesting that the matter goes beyond Mr. Trump's July phone call.

The president insists that he has been unfairly accused, saying - without offering evidence - that the whistle-blower is "partisan" and that Democrats and the news media are initiating a new "witch hunt" against him. Mr. Trump has also said that he is aware that his conversations with foreign leaders are monitored by numerous government officials and that he would not incriminate himself so easily.

Mr. Giuliani has communicated with Ukrainian officials for months about the Bidens. He has also pressed them about the circumstances of the 2016 disclosures of payments earmarked by a Russia-aligned Ukrainian political party to Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump's 2016 campaign chairman, who is in federal prison on convictions related to his Ukrainian political work. Mr. Giuliani has sought information about both subjects and traveled to Madrid this summer for a meeting with one of Mr. Zelensky's top aides, whom he urged to investigate the matters.

In May, Mr. Giuliani told The New York Times that he was pushing Ukraine to investigate the Bidens "because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government."

No evidence has emerged that Mr. Biden was trying to help his son when he pushed for the dismissal of the Ukrainian prosecutor, who was widely seen in the West as corrupt. Stamping out high-level corruption in Ukraine had long been a central goal of Obama administration policy toward the country and a standard condition for Western aid. On Saturday, Mr. Biden said he had never spoken with his son about any overseas work.

Mr. Biden played a lead role in the Obama administration's diplomacy with Kiev, though administration officials worried that his son's work for the energycompany, Burisma Holdings, could create at least the perception of a conflict of interest.

But Ukraine's current top prosecutor has said there is no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens to investigate.

Michael Crowley is a White House correspondent in the Washington bureau, where he covers President Trump's foreign policy. He joined The Times in June 2019 from Politico, where he had been the White House and national security editor, and previously senior foreign affairs correspondent. A Washington journalism veteran, Crowley has also worked for Time magazine, The New Republic and the Boston Globe.

Ken Vogel covers the confluence of money, politics and influence from Washington. He is also the author of "Big Money: 2.5 Billion Dollars, One Suspicious Vehicle, and a Pimp - on the Trail of the Ultra-Rich Hijacking American Politics." @kenvogel * Facebook

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What We Know and Don't About the Trump-Ukraine Affair

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The major question is whether President Trump used American foreign policy to try to damage a political rival. WASHINGTON - Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry on Tuesday amid mounting furor over President Trump's efforts to pressure Ukraine's government to investigate former Vice President Joseph R.

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SACRAMENTO (CBS13) - A California bill that would let students sleep in longer is now on Gov. Gavin Newsom's desk.

Lawmakers passed the bill that proposes California middle schools and high schools [cannot start the school day until] 8:30 a.m. ...

If the governor signs the bill, California would become the first state to mandate schools to start later in the morning.

Rural counties would be exempt from specified start times.

Questions have been raised about the cost. Bill analysis shows tens of millions of dollars statewide would [be needed to fund the law]. That money would go to districts t make changes to school transportation routes, and hire additional bus drivers. School districts would need an additional amount, projected in the low millions, to add staff both before and after school. Districts would also need hundreds of thousands of dollars for "additional workload associated with collectively bargaining work hours."

Opponents pointed out a later start time would create unintended costs and consequences for working parents responsible for getting their children to school and still arriving to work on-time.

The Elk Grove Unified School District wrote in opposition:

"...the permissive nature of the California Education Code currently allows Local Education Agencies to set their own start times. The fact that today more than one in five school districts voluntarily meet SB 328's standards proves the bill is unnecessary for communities that would be well served by later start times.

For communities and school agencies that would be burdened by a later school schedule, however, SB 328 would present tremendous difficulties with significant opportunity costs. And because school schedules have such a wide-ranging and significant impact on operations and expenses, a great number of districts would be hurt by this legislation for a number of different reasons. Determining school schedules is a decision that even more than most should reflect specific conditions and be decided locally, not from Sacramento."

Currently, more than three-quarters of middle and high schools in California start before 8:30 am.

Before 7:30 a.m., 3.5% of schools

7:30 to 7:59 a.m., 27.7% of schools

8:00 to 8:29 a.m., 47.6% of schools

8:30 a.m. or later, 21.2% of schools

A study done by the American Academy of Pediatrics said teens not getting enough sleep was "an important public health issue that significantly affects the health and safety" of students.

Governor Jerry Brown vetoed similar legislation last session, saying:

"This is a one-size-fits-all approach that is opposed by teachers and school boards. Several schools have already moved to later start times. Others prefer beginning the school day earlier. These are the types of decisions best handled in the local community."

The bill's author, Senator Anthony Portantino, wrote the bill is needed because, "The leaders of local school districts are or should be well-aware that requiring students - especially adolescents - to wake, travel to school, and learn during early morning hours is contrary to the developmental needs and biological sleep cycles of growing minds and bodies. Yet, only a handful of districts have been proactive in doing what is right for students by making the change back to traditional school hours, which prior to the 1980s had most school opening between 8:30 and 9 a.m. Today, most middle and high schools begin at or way before 8 a.m."

Vacaville Unified implemented a later school start time last school year. Several students CBS13 spoke with said the later time didn't help. "You're really just staying up later, and you're just leaving the same amount of time and just waking up, just at a different time," Noah Windham said.

They say it's harder to fit in time for homework after getting home late from athletics, and their grades are taking a hit. But Vacaville District leaders say since this policy started, the data they've taken is mainly positive.

"Certainly first-period tardiness is way down, so that's a good sign generally. Attendance is better, grades seem a little bit better," said ED Santopadre, Assistant Superintendent, with the Vacaville Unified School District.

Other students agree with that.

"I like it because last year I used to skip first period a lot so my grade in that class dropped a lot. But this year, because I get to sleep longer, I've been getting to school on time," said senior Nika Nowroozi.

If SB 328 passes Vacaville could be one of the model districts for the state.
Published at Sacramento .cbslocal .com on Sept. 14. Reprinted here for educational purposes only. May not be reproduced on other websites without permission from CBS 13 Sacramento.

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CA bill to mandate later start to school day

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SACRAMENTO (CBS13) - A California bill that would let students sleep in longer is now on Gov. Gavin Newsom's desk. Lawmakers passed the bill that proposes California middle schools and high schools [cannot start the school day until] 8:30 a.m. ...

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https://www.foxnews.com/us/devin-sloane-sentence-college-admissions-scandal

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Faced with new allegations against President Trump and administration stonewalling, Democrats have ended months of caution.

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'No One Is Above the Law': Pelosi Announces Trump Impeachment Inquiry

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House would begin formal impeachment proceedings against President Trump, ending months of caution by Democrats.

For the past several months, we have been investigating in our committees and litigating in the courts. So the House can gather all the relevant facts and consider whether to exercise its full Article 1 powers, including a constitutional power of the utmost gravity: approval of articles of impeachment. And this week, the president has admitted to asking the president of Ukraine to take actions which would benefit him politically. The action of the Trump - the actions of the Trump presidency revealed dishonorable fact of the president's betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections. Therefore, today, I'm announcing the House of Representatives moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry. I'm directing our six committees to proceed with their investigations under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry. The president must be held accountable. No one is above the law.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House would begin formal impeachment proceedings against President Trump, ending months of caution by Democrats. Credit Credit... Erin Schaff/The New York Times

WASHINGTON - Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would initiate a formal impeachment inquiry against President Trump, charging him with betraying his oath of office and the nation's security by seeking to enlist a foreign power to tarnish a rival for his own political gain.

Ms. Pelosi's declaration, after months of reticence by Democrats who had feared the political consequences of impeaching a president many of them long ago concluded was unfit for office, was a stunning turn that set the stage for a history-making and exceedingly bitter confrontation between the Democrat-led House and a defiant president who has thumbed his nose at institutional norms.

"The actions taken to date by the president have seriously violated the Constitution," Ms. Pelosi said in a brief speech invoking the nation's founding principles. Mr. Trump, she added, "must be held accountable - no one is above the law."

She said the president's conduct revealed his "betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections."

Ms. Pelosi's decision to push forward with the most severe action that Congress can take against a sitting president could usher in a remarkable new chapter in American life, touching off a constitutional and political showdown with the potential to cleave an already divided nation, reshape Mr. Trump's presidency and the country's politics, and carry heavy risks both for him and for the Democrats who have decided to weigh his removal.

Though the outcome is uncertain, it also raised the possibility that Mr. Trump could become only the fourth president in American history to face impeachment. Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were both impeached but later acquitted by the Senate. President Richard M. Nixon resigned in the face of a looming House impeachment vote.

It was the first salvo in an escalating, high-stakes standoff between Ms. Pelosi, now fully engaged in an effort to build the most damning possible case against the president, and Mr. Trump, who angrily denounced Democrats' impeachment inquiry even as he worked feverishly in private to head off the risk to his presidency.

Mr. Trump, who for months has dared Democrats to impeach him, issued a defiant response on Twitter while in New York for several days of international diplomacy at the United Nations, with a series of fuming posts that culminated with a simple phrase: "PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!" Meanwhile, his re-election campaign and House Republican leaders launched a vociferous defense, accusing Democrats of a partisan rush to judgment.

"Such an important day at the United Nations, so much work and so much success, and the Democrats purposely had to ruin and demean it with more breaking news Witch Hunt garbage," Mr. Trump wrote. "So bad for our Country!

For the past two years, talk of impeachment had centered around the findings of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who investigated Russia's interference in the 2016 elections and Mr. Trump's attempts to derail that inquiry. On Tuesday, Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, told her caucus and then the country that new revelations about Mr. Trump's dealings with Ukraine, and his administration's stonewalling of Congress about them, had finally left the House no choice but to proceed toward a rarely used remedy.

"Right now, we have to strike while the iron is hot," she told House Democrats in a closed-door meeting in the basement of the Capitol. Emerging moments later to address a phalanx of news cameras, Ms. Pelosi, speaking sometimes haltingly as she delivered a speech from a teleprompter, invoked the Constitution and the nation's founders as she declared, "The times have found us" and outlined a new stage of investigating Mr. Trump.

At issue are allegations that Mr. Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to open a corruption investigation of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and his son. The conversation is said to be part of a whistle-blower complaint that the Trump administration has withheld from Congress. And it occurred just a few days after Mr. Trump had ordered his staff to freeze more than $391 million in aid to Ukraine.

Mr. Trump has confirmed aspects of his conversation with the Ukrainian leader in recent days, but he continues to insist he acted appropriately.

The president said on Tuesday that he would authorize the release of a transcript of the conversation, part of an effort to pre-empt Democrats' impeachment push. But Democrats, after months of holding back, were unbowed, demanding the full whistle-blower complaint and other documentation about White House dealings with Ukraine, even as they pushed toward an expansive impeachment inquiry that could encompass unrelated charges.

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Who Are the Main Characters in the Whistle-Blower's Complaint?

President Trump's personal lawyer. The prosecutor general of Ukraine. Joe Biden's son. These are just some of the names mentioned in the whistle-blower's complaint. What were their roles? We break it down.

Congressman: "Sir, let me repeat my question: Did you ever speak to the president about this complaint?" Congress is investigating allegations that President Trump pushed a foreign government to dig up dirt on his Democratic rivals. "It's just a Democrat witch hunt. Here we go again." At the heart of an impeachment inquiry is a nine-page whistle-blower complaint that names over two dozen people. Not counting the president himself, these are the people that appear the most: First, Trump's personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani. According to documents and interviews, Giuliani has been involved in shadowy diplomacy on behalf of the president's interests. He encouraged Ukrainian officials to investigate the Biden family's activities in the country, plus other avenues that could benefit Trump like whether the Ukrainians intentionally helped the Democrats during the 2016 election. It was an agenda he also pushed on TV. "So you did ask Ukraine to look into Joe Biden." "Of course I did!" A person Giuliani worked with, Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine's former prosecutor general. He pushed for investigations that would also benefit Giuliani and Trump. Lutsenko also discussed conspiracy theories about the Bidens in the U.S. media. But he later walked back his allegations, saying there was no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens. This is where Hunter Biden comes in, the former vice president's son. He served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company run by this guy, who's had some issues with the law. While Biden was in office, he along with others, called for the dismissal of Lutsenko's predecessor, a prosecutor named Viktor Shokin, whose office was overseeing investigations into the company that Hunter Biden was involved with. Shokin was later voted out by the Ukrainian government. Lutsenko replaced him, but was widely criticized for corruption himself. When a new president took office in May, Volodymyr Zelensky, Zelensky said that he'd replace Lutsenko. Giuliani and Trump? Not happy. They viewed Lutsenko as their ally. During a July 25 call between Trump and the new Ukrainian president, Trump defended him, saying, "I heard you had a prosecutor who is very good and he was shut down and that's really unfair." In that phone call, Trump also allegedly asked his counterpart to continue the investigation into Joe Biden, who is his main rival in the 2020 election. Zelensky has publicly denied feeling pressured by Trump. "In other words, no pressure." And then finally, Attorney General William Barr, who also came up in the July 25 call. In the reconstructed transcript, Trump repeatedly suggested that Zelensky's administration could work with Barr and Giuliani to investigate the Bidens and other matters of political interest to Trump. Since the whistle-blower complaint was made public, Democrats have criticized Barr for dismissing allegations that Trump had violated campaign finance laws during his call with Zelensky and not passing along the complaint to Congress. House Democrats have now subpoenaed several people mentioned in the complaint, as an impeachment inquiry into the president's conduct continues.

President Trump's personal lawyer. The prosecutor general of Ukraine. Joe Biden's son. These are just some of the names mentioned in the whistle-blower's complaint. What were their roles? We break it down. Credit Credit... Illustration by The New York Times

Ms. Pelosi told fellow Democrats that Mr. Trump told her in a private call on Tuesday morning that he was not responsible for withholding the whistle-blower complaint from Congress. But late Tuesday, the White House and intelligence officials were working on a deal to allow the whistle-blower to speak to Congress and potentially even share a redacted version of the complaint in the coming days, after the whistle-blower expressed interest in talking to lawmakers.

Although Ms. Pelosi's announcement was a crucial turning point, it left many unanswered questions about exactly when and how Democrats planned to push forward on impeachment.

House Democrats plan to bring up a resolution on Wednesday condemning Mr. Trump's reported behavior toward Ukraine and the whistle-blower, and demanding his administration release the whistle-blower complaint - daring Republicans to vote against it.

And Ms. Pelosi said she had directed the chairmen of the six committees that have been investigating Mr. Trump to "proceed under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry." In a closed-door meeting earlier in the day, she said the panels should put together their best cases on potentially impeachable offenses by the president and send them to the Judiciary Committee, according to two officials familiar with the conversation. That could potentially lay the groundwork for articles of impeachment based on the findings.

But whether Democrats would hold another House vote in the coming days to authorize their inquiry - as has been done in past presidential impeachments - remains to be seen. Republicans argue that without one, the House is not truly in an impeachment inquiry, no matter what Democrats say. Nor did the speaker lay out a timeline for the committees to do their work.

Some moderates who have taken on political risk to publicly support impeachment said privately that they were frustrated that Tuesday's decisions did not clarify the process going forward, and urged Democratic leaders not to lose momentum. Representative Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, one of several first-term Democrats from Republican-leaning districts that Mr. Trump won in 2016, raised concerns on Tuesday during the closed-door meeting with her colleagues about a lack of clarity in the inquiry, asking who was in charge and what the focus would be, lawmakers in attendance said. Others cautioned that an impeachment process that could not win bipartisan support would never succeed.

The decision to begin a formal impeachment inquiry does not necessarily mean that the House will ultimately vote to charge Mr. Trump with high crimes and misdemeanors - much less that the Republican-controlled Senate will vote to remove him. But Ms. Pelosi and her leadership would not initiate the process unless they were prepared to reach that outcome.

And Mr. Trump's allies mostly took it as a sign that a vote on articles of impeachment was inevitable.

Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, warned that the Democrats' move "destroyed any chances of legislative progress for the people of this country by continuing to focus all their energy on partisan political attacks." Mr. Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale, tried to turn the political spotlight onto Mr. Biden, as the campaign launched a new fund-raising plea for an "Official Impeachment Defense Task Force."

"Democrats can't beat President Trump on his policies or his stellar record of accomplishment, so they're trying to turn a Joe Biden scandal into a Trump problem," he wrote. "The misguided Democrat impeachment strategy is meant to appease their rabid, extreme, leftist base, but will only serve to embolden and energize President Trump's supporters and create a landslide victory for the president."

A smaller number of Republicans in the House and Senate reserved judgment, and signaled that they were interested in learning more facts about the Ukraine situation before denouncing the Democrats. Representative John Curtis, Republican of Utah, for example, said in a statement that he had the "utmost confidence in the investigative tools Congress has at its disposal" and would be "closely monitoring" the inquiry.

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Representative Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. The committee has been conducting its own impeachment investigation. Credit... Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Ms. Pelosi's announcement came amid a groundswell in favor of impeachment among Democrats that has intensified since late last week, with lawmakers from every corner of her caucus lining up in favor of using the House's unique power to charge Mr. Trump if the allegations are proved true, or if his administration continues to stonewall attempts by Congress to investigate them.

The outpouring reached a crescendo just after noon, when Representative John Lewis of Georgia, the civil rights icon who for a generation has been regarded as the conscience of the House Democrats, dropped his resistance to impeachment and urged his colleagues to meet what he said was the call of history.

"I have been patient while we tried every other path and used every other tool," Mr. Lewis thundered from the well of the House. "We will never find the truth unless we use the power given to the House of Representatives - and the House alone - to begin an official investigation as dictated by the Constitution."

"The future of our democracy is at stake," Mr. Lewis declared.

The House Judiciary Committee has been conducting its own impeachment investigation focused on Mr. Mueller's findings, as well as allegations that Mr. Trump may be illegally profiting from spending by state and foreign governments and other matters. But that inquiry had not gotten the imprimatur of a full House vote or the full rhetorical backing of the speaker, as Democrats remained divided about the wisdom and political implications of impeaching a president without broader public support.

Now, after the revelation of a conversation between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in which Mr. Trump pressed the foreign leader to investigate the Bidens, a cascading flood of Democrats had come out in favor of a formal impeachment proceeding.

The developments that have turned the tide began less than two weeks ago, when Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the Intelligence Committee chairman, first revealed the existence of a secret whistle-blower complaint that the intelligence community's internal watchdog had deemed "urgent" and credible but that the Trump administration had refused to share with Congress.

Democrats have given Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, until Thursday to turn over the whistle-blower complaint or risk reprisal. And they have threatened to subpoena the Trump administration for a copy of the transcript of the president's call with Mr. Zelensky and other relevant documents after Thursday if they are not shared voluntarily.

The temperature was considerably cooler in the Senate, where any charges against Mr. Trump would be weighed. Even lawmakers in the majority party were working to get to the bottom of the Ukraine situation.

When Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, offered a symbolic resolution calling for the whistle-blower complaint to be provided to both the House and Senate intelligence committees, not a single Republican objected. And the Senate Intelligence Committee was working on a bipartisan basis to demand explanations both from Mr. Maguire and the inspector general.

Reporting was contributed by Catie Edmondson, Emily Cochrane and Sheryl Gay Stolberg from Washington; Michael Crowley from New York; and Jonathan Martin from Los Angeles.

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Nancy Pelosi Announces Formal Impeachment Inquiry of Trump

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Faced with new allegations against President Trump and administration stonewalling, Democrats have ended months of caution. WASHINGTON - Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would initiate a formal impeachment inquiry against President Trump, charging him with betraying his oath of office and the nation's security by seeking to enlist a foreign power to tarnish a rival for his own political gain.

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CNBC 1 day ago Joanna Tan

"Yes, there are tensions, there are frictions, but I think everybody has understood the benefit of cooperation, if not globalization," said Jean Lemierre, chairman of BNP Paribas.

Lemierre said he was "not worried" about the Hong Kong protests and what they could mean for the reputation of the territory as an Asian financial hub as he saw a "high degree of stability" there.

The U.S. and China are not heading into a "cold war" even though trade tensions have escalated, said Jean Lemierre, chairman of France largest lender, BNP Paribas.

"I do not believe it's the beginning of a cold war. First, because I have been trained at the time of the Cold War, I know what it is - and this is not what I see today," he told CNBC's Nancy Hungerford at the Singapore Summit on Saturday.

"Yes, there are tensions, there are frictions, but I think everybody has understood the benefit of cooperation, if not globalization," said Lemierre.

The U.S. and China have been embroiled in a trade dispute for more than a year and both sides have raised tariffs on billions of dollars of each other's goods. Despite numerous rounds of negotiations, there has been no breakthrough.

Last week, a Chinese trade delegation was in Washington for another round of talks ahead of high-level meetings in October. But that meeting was cut short when Chinese negotiators cancelled a visit to the farms in Nebraska.

Their sudden departure caused U.S. markets to tumble overnight, as it dampened optimism on trade talks and dashed hopes that Beijing might be preparing to buy large quantities of American agricultural goods.

But Lemierre said he was not overly concerned about those developments.

"Trade is trade. Trade is about negotiations. When there are negotiations, there are tensions, and I'm not so much worried about this type of incident, as you mention. That's part of the negotiation process," he said.

He acknowledged that "the world is waiting for any kind of conclusion about what's happening," but added: "It will take time but once more, trade is about negotiation, tensions, and I hope it will be fixed."

Impact of Hong Kong protests

BNP Paribas, the largest lender in France, has been operating in Hong Kong since 1980 and has a relatively strong presence in the territory.

Asked if he was concerned about what the Hong Kong protests could mean for the city's reputation as an Asian financial hub, Lemierre replied: "We are not worried. We see a high degree of stability. Everybody is operating in a normal way."

The French lender was recently caught up in the Hong Kong protests when one of its employees purportedly posted messages on social media supporting pro-democracy, anti-government protests. Chinese internet users were inflamed by those comments and called for the bank to take action against the unnamed employee.

"I know it was used at a sensitive time but inappropriate words should not be used," Lemierre said.

"We have made very clear that inappropriate words were not compatible with the standards of BNP Paribas," he added.

WATCH: What is Hong Kong's relationship with China?

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US and China are not heading into a 'cold war,' says BNP Paribas chairman

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CNBC 1 day ago Joanna Tan "Yes, there are tensions, there are frictions, but I think everybody has understood the benefit of cooperation, if not globalization," said Jean Lemierre, chairman of BNP Paribas.

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The major question is whether President Trump used American foreign policy to try to damage a political rival.

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No evidence has emerged that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was trying to help his son when he pushed for the dismissal of a Ukrainian prosecutor. Credit Credit Mark Makela for The New York Times

WASHINGTON - Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry on Tuesday amid mounting furor over President Trump's efforts to pressure Ukraine's government to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., apparently the subject of a classified whistle-blower complaint the administration refused for weeks to show to Congress before dropping objections.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, said he planned on Wednesday to release the transcript of a phone call he had in July with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Mr. Trump insisted it would show that he said nothing inappropriate, but scrutiny about his conduct toward Ukraine has spread beyond the single conversation.

Here are some of the basic facts behind the controversy.

Mr. Trump is said to have pressured Mr. Zelensky to investigate Mr. Biden and his younger son, Hunter - both directly and through a proxy, Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of Mr. Trump's personal lawyers. As a leading candidate to be the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nominee, Mr. Biden is Mr. Trump's political rival.

As vice president, Mr. Biden pushed the Ukrainian government in 2015 to fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was widely seen as an obstacle to reform because he failed to bring corruption cases. At the time, Mr. Biden's son sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings.

Mr. Trump and his allies have insinuated, without evidence, that Mr. Biden was trying to protect the company from prosecution. An investigation into him, even if it were unfounded or turned up no evidence of a crime, could damage his campaign prospects by suggesting wrongdoing.

This is the big question. The White House froze more than $391 million in military assistance to Ukraine this summer that Congress had appropriated. The money was intended to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian territorial aggression, including a military conflict in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 13,000 people since 2014.

Mr. Trump has given conflicting explanations for the freeze. On Monday, he cited corruption in Ukraine as the reason for the delay. On Tuesday, he instead said he had held up the military assistance because European countries had not paid their fair share to help defend Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, from Russian incursions.

Mr. Trump directed Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, to pause the aid in the days before his July phone call with Mr. Zelensky, senior administration officials said. The Trump administration abruptly unfroze the package this month amid mounting questions about what Mr. Trump was doing with Ukraine.

An intelligence official filed a whistle-blower complaint last month about the president's actions. The inspector general for the intelligence community deemed the complaint "credible" and "urgent" and forwarded it to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, under a law that says such complaints must be shown to Congress within a week.

But Mr. Maguire refused to share the complaint with Congress, saying the Justice Department disagreed with the inspector general's conclusion that its subject matter was covered under the law that requires disclosing such complaints to Congress. The issue came into the open when the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, sent an angry letter to Mr. Maguire on Sept. 10, accusing him of violating the law.

Mr. Maguire relented as the impeachment inquiry came into focus. He was expected to release a redacted version of the complaint in coming days, people familiar with the situation said late on Tuesday. Administration officials were also said to be working on a deal to allow the whistle-blower to file the complaint to congressional investigators.

Mr. Maguire is set to testify about the matter on Thursday.

The complaint's full details remain a mystery, as does the whistle-blower's identity. Because Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani have openly acknowledged pressuring Ukraine about "corruption" and the Bidens, it is not clear how much the complaint involves that is not already in plain view.

But in a closed-door briefing with the House Intelligence Committee, the inspector general for the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, said that the complaint involved multiple actions, according to two officials familiar with his briefing, suggesting that the matter goes beyond Mr. Trump's July phone call.

The president insists that he has been unfairly accused, saying - without offering evidence - that the whistle-blower is "partisan" and that Democrats and the news media are initiating a new "witch hunt" against him. Mr. Trump has also said that he is aware that his conversations with foreign leaders are monitored by numerous government officials and that he would not incriminate himself so easily.

Mr. Giuliani has communicated with Ukrainian officials for months about the Bidens. He has also pressed them about the circumstances of the 2016 disclosures of payments earmarked by a Russia-aligned Ukrainian political party to Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump's 2016 campaign chairman, who is in federal prison on convictions related to his Ukrainian political work. Mr. Giuliani has sought information about both subjects and traveled to Madrid this summer for a meeting with one of Mr. Zelensky's top aides, whom he urged to investigate the matters.

In May, Mr. Giuliani told The New York Times that he was pushing Ukraine to investigate the Bidens "because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government."

No evidence has emerged that Mr. Biden was trying to help his son when he pushed for the dismissal of the Ukrainian prosecutor, who was widely seen in the West as corrupt. Stamping out high-level corruption in Ukraine had long been a central goal of Obama administration policy toward the country and a standard condition for Western aid. On Saturday, Mr. Biden said he had never spoken with his son about any overseas work.

Mr. Biden played a lead role in the Obama administration's diplomacy with Kiev, though administration officials worried that his son's work for the energycompany, Burisma Holdings, could create at least the perception of a conflict of interest.

But Ukraine's current top prosecutor has said there is no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens to investigate.

Michael Crowley is a White House correspondent in the Washington bureau, where he covers President Trump's foreign policy. He joined The Times in June 2019 from Politico, where he had been the White House and national security editor, and previously senior foreign affairs correspondent. A Washington journalism veteran, Crowley has also worked for Time magazine, The New Republic and the Boston Globe.

Ken Vogel covers the confluence of money, politics and influence from Washington. He is also the author of "Big Money: 2.5 Billion Dollars, One Suspicious Vehicle, and a Pimp - on the Trail of the Ultra-Rich Hijacking American Politics." @kenvogel * Facebook

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What We Know and Don't About the Trump-Ukraine Affair

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The major question is whether President Trump used American foreign policy to try to damage a political rival. WASHINGTON - Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry on Tuesday amid mounting furor over President Trump's efforts to pressure Ukraine's government to investigate former Vice President Joseph R.