Harris also complained that only a handful of Benedict students were given tickets for Trump’s appearance. Most seats were occupied by administration officials and Trump supporters.

Trump received the award for the First Step Act, which has allowed thousands of non-violent offenders to gain early release from federal prison.

The First Step Act was greeted as a bipartisan success but it is not without its critics among campaigners and even those who supported it.

Factcheckers have said Trump’s regular claim about African American unemployment being at its lowest point ever is, at least under modern methodology, accurate – up to a point.

Harris had been among 10 Democrats expected to attend the forum at Benedict College.

Mayor Steve Benjamin told the Associated Press he was working with college officials to coordinate what was now being called the Collegiate Bipartisan Presidential Forum. The original organisers said they would still have a role.

Cory Booker said on Twitter: “Donald Trump was given a platform unchecked for close to an hour. The Bipartisan Justice Center allowed him to create some illusion of support from this community when, in fact, he excluded it.”

The National Weather Service described the conditions as “the strongest since the 2017 wine country fires and potentially a historic event given the strength and duration of the winds”.

The Kincade fire broke out late on Wednesday night and has so far destroyed nearly 50 structures.

Meanwhile, millions across the state will have their power cut again as California’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), said it would shut off electricity for the third time in as many weeks. PG&E said it would begin blackouts in the afternoon for about 940,000 homes and businesses in 36 counties for 48 hours or longer throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, wine country and Sierra foothills. An estimated 2.35 million people are due to be affected, thousands more than previously predicted.

The tumultuous Kincade fire spread to 25,455 acres in the wine-growing region of Sonoma county, with meteorologists warning of severe, windy conditions beginning Saturday night that could see gusts of up to 80mph. The entire communities of Healdsburg and Windsor were ordered to evacuate.

The Tick fire is currently 25% contained, while the Kincade fire is 10% contained.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has declared a local emergency to assist with battling the blazes, and thousands of firefighters have been deployed to both locations.

The power shutoff in Geyserville created a dangerous challenge when it came time to evacuate residents as the blaze crept nearer. Typically during evacuations, local authorities deploy reverse 911 calls to alert individual residents. With the power out, evacuees reported being awakened in the early hours by frantic knocks on their front doors.

Though nine wildfires are currently burning throughout the state, none have reached the level of death and destruction witnessed in the past few years. Nevertheless fears remain, especially among those who lived through the devastation of the previous fires. The Kincade fire was starting to skirt along the path of the 2015 Valley fire, which killed four people and burned through more than 76,000 acres.

The harsh fire weather conditions have spread beyond the state, kicking up flames in parts of Baja California, just across the border from San Diego in Mexico.

The former South Carolina congressman Mick Mulvaney replaced Kelly and still fills role in an acting capacity. He is under pressure, having told reporters Trump did make Ukraine the subject of a quid pro quo, withholding nearly $400m in US military aid while asking for political favours, the issue at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.

Taylor testified that he was told the aid would be withheld until Ukraine conducted the investigations Trump requested. Sondland and Taylor have testified and detailed their concerns about the influence of Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Taylor wrote that he thought it was “crazy” to withhold aid for help with a political campaign.

The top US diplomat for Europe told the committees he had not known US aid may have been withheld in order to pressure Ukraine’s new president to conduct investigations helpful to Trump, a source told Reuters. The source said Reeker was prepared to say he had largely left Ukraine policy to Kurt Volker, then US special representative for Ukraine negotiations, and others.

Another diplomat, George Kent, testified that he was told to “lie low” and defer to three political appointees. Yovanovitch has accused the Trump administration of recalling her based on false claims.

The House committees have scheduled several depositions for next week, all behind closed doors. On Monday, former deputy national security adviser Charles Kupperman is due to testify. On Tuesday, lawmakers expect Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council’s top expert on Ukraine.

On Friday this week, Kupperman received a subpoena. He asked a federal court if he should comply or follow Trump’s directive not to, because he “cannot satisfy the competing demands of both the legislative and executive branches”. Without the court’s help, he said, he would have to make a decision that could “inflict grave constitutional injury” on Congress or the presidency.

Also on Friday, a federal judge rejected a claim by Trump and his Republican allies that the impeachment process was illegitimate because the full House had not voted to authorize it. The judge ordered the administration to give the judiciary committee secret material from the former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 US election.

The impeachment inquiry is expected to lead to a House vote before Christmas, most likely sending Trump to the Senate for trial. A conviction is unlikely but the White House and Republicans have faced criticism for their response so far, chaotic and confrontational rather than coordinated and effective.

“Trump is using the same approach he did to subvert the Mueller report: undermining the legitimacy of the messenger, assigning political motives to those who testify and relying on the Fox News firewall to serve up propaganda to his base,”

Earlier in the week Republicans attempted to censure Adam Schiff, chair of the House intelligence committee, for his handling of the impeachment inquiry, only for the Democratic majority to set the resolution aside. On Thursday Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate judiciary committee and a Trump loyalist, introduced a resolution condemning the inquiry as an unfair, secretive and designed to embarrass the president.

Taylor, a respected Vietnam war veteran with half a century of public service, also described an “irregular, informal policy channel” by which the Trump administration was pursuing objectives in Ukraine “running contrary to the goals of longstanding US policy”

about 30 House Republicans barged into the secure facility where the impeachment depositions are being taken and ordered pizza. The testimony of a Pentagon official was postponed by more than five hours. The members complained about lack of transparency as evidence is being given behind closed doors.

House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry is a month old. Unlike Mueller it has moved at warp speed, subpoenaing witnesses, gathering testimony and building evidence against the president some say makes it inevitable he will be impeached by the House and put on trial by the Republican-controlled Senate.

Public opinion does not favour removing Trump from office, Ruddy argued, so the White House should avoid a politically costly battle.

.

Chief strategist Steve Bannon is long gone. Press secretary Stephanie Grisham has never given a formal briefing to reporters in the west wing. Trump does not have a permanent chief of staff, only Mick Mulvaney in an acting capacity. Earlier this month Mulvaney held a disastrous briefing in which he blurted out a confession of a quid pro quo with Ukraine, only to issue a retraction later.

“We’re in a political payback system where everyone is trying to out up each other. If you look at the poll numbers, he’s actually holding up, although there’s a hardening of people who favour impeachment and removal. He’s not actually in a bad situation.”

Trump has openly encouraged Ukraine – and China – to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter. With Taylor’s compelling evidence, it appears to be case closed. Some problems are unspinnable.

Rick Tyler, a Republican strategist and Trump critic, said the president’s exertion of pressure on the leader of Ukraine had been tantamount to blackmail and extortion.

It was such an abuse of power. I can’t think of a president who’s done anything more impeachable or worse than that. It’s indefensible and anyone who defends it is going to face some liabilities because it’s so egregious.”

He described the Republican fightback as “lawlessness, disorder and chaos. Undermining the process and smearing the witnesses and engaging in ‘whataboutism’ is the main strategy.

Republicans said little about the substance of the allegations.

Democrats are gearing up for televised hearings that could begin next month and feature dramatic and damaging testimony from the likes of former national security adviser John Bolton. Republicans are hamstrung by a torrent of revelations that makes today’s deniable rumour tomorrow’s smoking gun.

Trump retains two not so secret weapons to amplify his message: fiery rallies, which he is holding with greater frequency, and conservative media

More than half of Republicans whose primary news source is Fox said almost nothing could change their approval of Trump. For Republicans who get their news elsewhere, the figure is considerably lower.

Not all the protests are driven by economic complaints, but widening gulfs between the haves and have-nots are radicalising many young people in particular.

Oxfam said in January that the world’s 26 richest individuals owned as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population.

The internet is not a determining factor – there was no social media in the 1960s – but is clearly important. Social media and the explosion of access to information is reordering hierarchies of knowledge and communication. Authorities can fight back with extensive surveillance regimes or with digital blackouts of the kind India recently imposed in disputed Kashmir, but 20th-century power structures are under enormous pressure, analysts say.

The proliferation of protests is no guarantee that things will change.

It is also easier, in a digital, globalised world, to know how the other half (or the 1%) live.

“The traditional system of enforcing power from top to bottom is increasingly being challenged,” says Thierry de Montbrial, of the French Institute of International Relations. “There is a social revolution with a growing demand for participatory democracy.”

“The problem is what to do after the protests, how to make your point and achieve the goals you’re protesting for. That proves to be the most difficult part.”

Protests and revolutions are defined by idealised slogans, he says, but systematic change is harder work. “You can break off part of a system, but it’s very hard to break the whole structure, which is formed of institutions and networks that are difficult to break.”

The leadership question is central and that is the thing we haven’t figured out yet: how do we actually find leadership in these inchoate displays of anger?

Nearly every faith group was on board, as were the American Civil Liberties Union and conservative Christians like me. We all embraced one view. The free exercise of religion was for every person of every faith.

The most controversial part of Barr’s presentation was his strong rebuke of the modern progressive movement and its increasingly shrill demand that all voices that dissent from its articles of belief be silenced, shamed and shunned.

His final words on this historic occasion were a ringing endorsement of Barr’s central thesis: “But let us never believe that the freedom of religion imposes on any of us some responsibility to run from our convictions. Let us instead respect one another’s faiths, fight to the death to preserve the right of every American to practice whatever convictions he or she has.”

Those who advocate silencing their opponents seem hell-bent on engulfing us in strife and increasingly heavy coercion to achieve their policy objectives. They call themselves the forces of tolerance, but they bear torches that have the stench of Smithfield rising from their flames.

Less money is spent on black patients with the same level of need as white patients, causing the algorithm to conclude that black patients were less sick, the researchers found.

Reformulating these biases in the algorithm would more than double the number of black patients flagged for additional care

black patients actually had 48,772 more active chronic conditions than white patients who had been ranked at the same level of risk

Biases like these are inadvertently built into the technology we use at many different stages, said Ruha Benjamin, author of Race After Technology and associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University.

“Pre-existing social processes shape data collection, algorithm design and even the formulation of problems that need addressing by technology,” she said.

When researchers tweaked the algorithm to make predictions about patients’ future health conditions rather than which patients would incur the highest costs, it reduced biases by 84%. “These results suggest that label biases are fixable,” the study said.

Predictive algorithms that power these tools should be continually reviewed and refined

researchers suggested similar biases probably exist across a number of industries. As algorithms are increasingly used for job recruiting, housing loans and policing, Benjamin noted that more legislation is needed to ensure algorithms take into consideration historical biases.

“Indifference to social reality is, perhaps, more dangerous than outright bigotry.”

“The Amazon is already 17% deforested, so when you calculate at the current rate of deforestation, this 20% to 25% is reached in 15 to 20 years,” he said. “I hope she is wrong. If she is right, it is the end of the world.”

Lovejoy, a professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, said that de Bolle’s projection could come true because global heating, soaring deforestation and an increase in Amazon fires have created a “negative synergy” that is accelerating its destruction

Russian troops expanded their presence across north-eastern Syria, the result of an agreement between Ankara and Moscow.

Trump announced a series of financial punishments on Ankara – including the reimposition of 50% tariffs on Turkish steel – after Turkey launched its attack on Kurdish-led forces in north-eastern Syria.

“The government of Turkey informed my administration that they would be stopping combat and their offensive in Syria, and making the ceasefire permanent,” Trump said. “I have, therefore, instructed the secretary of the Treasury to lift all sanctions imposed October 14,” he added.

Some troops would remain in Syria’s oilfields,

James Jeffrey, told the US Congress that American forces had seen “several incidents of what we consider war crimes” by Turkish forces, during the recent attack on the Kurds.

Jeffrey also said that “over 100” Islamic State prisoners had escaped during the Turkish offensive and “we do not know where they are.”

Turkish troops, allied Syrian rebel proxies, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and soldiers belonging to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, are now all present in the border zone, with Russia the only negotiating force between them.

The talks on Tuesday between Erdoğan and the Russian president defined the contours of Turkey’s long-proposed border “safe zone”: Turkish troops in the area seized since the offensive began on 9 October will remain in situ, and Russian soldiers and the Syrian army will control the rest of the frontier.

Russian ministry of defence published a map showing 15 planned border observation posts that will be manned by the Syrian regime.

fate of local military councils set up by the SDF in border towns previously under their control and what happens to the SDF’s non-Kurdish units remains unclear.

It is believed they will retain control of the approximately 90,000 men, women and children with links to Islamic State being held in Kurdish-run prisons and detention camps.

At least 120 Syrians have died and 176,000 people have fled their homes over the last two weeks of violence, with 20 Turkish civilian deaths on the other side of the border.

Republicans and business groups have long accused the bureau of regulatory overreach. In 2017, President Trump appointed Mick Mulvaney, now his acting chief of staff, to be the bureau’s acting director, and he promptly suspended much of the agency’s enforcement activity, halting investigations, freezing hiring and stopping data collection.

“It is for such reasons that the framers adopted a strong, unitary executive — headed by the president — rather than a weak, divided one,” he wrote. “Vesting such power in a single person not answerable to the president represents a stark departure from the Constitution’s framework.”

“A single-headed independent agency presents a greater risk than a multimember independent commission of taking actions or adopting policies inconsistent with the president’s executive policy,” Mr. Francisco wrote. “Unlike a multiheaded commission, which generally must engage in at least some degree of deliberation and collaboration, a single director can decisively implement his own views and exercise discretion without those structural constraints.”

In February, after Ms. Kraninger took over, the bureau eliminated tough restrictions on payday lenders that had been set to take effect later in the year. In September, though, she announced that the bureau would continue to publish a database of consumer complaints about financial companies, something Mr. Mulvaney had suggested he might eliminate.

Mr. Francisco wrote that “the proper remedy for the constitutional violation is to sever the provision limiting the president’s authority to remove the bureau’s director.”The law firm, by contrast, wrote that striking the contested provision should have practical consequences. “Parties do not seek this court’s review on constitutional questions for kicks,” its brief said. “They do so in order to obtain meaningful relief.”

“Our South Side communities, our West Side communities are littered with broken promises, unkept commitments,” Stacy Davis Gates, the vice president of the teachers’ union, said this week, alluding to Ms. Lightfoot. “This contract has to represent something different for the city of Chicago — it has got to represent something different. And she ran to do that. Period.”

Chicago, a city of 2.7 million people, faces a strained municipal budget with a looming deficit, a serious pension crisis and a school system that has struggled with its finances (though in recent months they have stabilized somewhat, largely because of increased state aid).

“The fact is, there is no more money,” Ms. Lightfoot said on Friday

In negotiations, the city has offered teachers a 16 percent raise over five years, while union leaders called for increases of 15 percent over a shorter three-year term.

Lightfoot dismissed suggestions that she was turning her back on her campaign pledges related to equity. Like union leaders, she said, she wanted more nurses in schools, more counselors, more social workers. But she questioned whether the city’s affordable housing policy should be set as part of one union’s contract negotiations, rather than in a broader conversation across the city.

“I’m seeing just a stubbornness: I think that she is mistaking intransigence for strength,” said Maressa Spinak, a special-education teacher

Even in a heavily Democratic city where support for labor unions is strong, Ms. Lightfoot faced conflicting messages on how to proceed. The editorial boards of Chicago’s two main newspapers, The Tribune and The Sun-Times, focused on the city’s bleak fiscal outlook and urged her to stand tough against some of the union’s demands.But for many moved by Ms. Lightfoot’s campaign promises about neighborhood investment and equity in schools, the lack of a deal was discouraging, confusing and highly inconvenient.

“We have two Chicagos: There’s a Chicago of workers and longtime residents,” said Ms. de Jesus Alejandre, who did not vote for Ms. Lightfoot. “And then there’s a Chicago that’s getting much more love and attention from politicians, for the rich and the elites who don’t use our public resources.”The dispute with the teachers was, in some ways, a microcosm of the broader challenge facing Ms. Lightfoot: how to lead a city with limited cash and entrenched financial problems, while trying to create equity in a place that has struggled with segregation and disinvestment for decades.

“But the fact that the mayor is talking about it, that the teachers’ union is banging the drum about it, probably means that we’re in a better place,” he said. “We’re having the conversation.”

The new sense of license to criticize Trump among military leaders originated with the president’s highly contentious decision last week to pull US troops from northern Syria. The sudden move has paved the way for a Turkish invasion that has put a prominent US ally in the fight against Isis, the Syrian Kurds, in mortal danger.

Adm James Stavridis, former supreme allied commander of Nato, told MSNBC that it was a “geopolitical mistake of near epic proportion”. He said its long-term impact would be to cast doubt on the reliability of the US as an ally.

“It’s hard to imagine how one could, in a single stroke, re-enable Isis, elevate Iran, allow Vladimir Putin the puppet master to continue his upward trajectory and simultaneously put war criminal chemical-weapon user Bashar al-Assad in the driving seat in Syria.”

“Mr Trump seems to have single-handedly and unilaterally precipitated a national security crisis in the Middle East,” he said, adding that the president had put the armed forces in a “very tricky situation”.

the decision would destabilize the region and intensify the Syrian civil war.

Several developments over the past week seemed to add fuel to the protests: Wildfires ravaged parts of the country, but two firefighting helicopters were deemed inoperable because of government negligence; the minister of information announced plans to enforce a 20-cents-a-day fee for Internet phone calls, including on WhatsApp and Facebook; and there was a proposal to raise the value-added tax to 15 percent by 2022.

Thousands rushed to the streets, filling the capital, Beirut, with bonfires, destroying construction sites and advertisement boards, and tearing down politicians’ banners.

At least two prominent Lebanese politicians have publicly asked Hariri to resign. In his televised address, Hariri said that although the people have given the government many chances over the past three years, complacency and internal politics continued to stymie efforts to solve the country’s economic problems.

He suggested that anyone with a solution for the economic crisis should step up. But he did not offer any himself.

In a statement late Thursday, Mulvaney denied the quid pro quo he had previously defended as appropriate and normal.

he described why Trump had intervened over the summer to block nearly $400 million in aid Congress had appropriated for Ukraine.

Mulvaney first said the president blocked the aid because he was concerned about corruption in Ukraine and the lack of European support for the country.

The reference to the hacked Democratic National Committee’s email server elevated a Trump-backed conspiracy theory that Ukraine was involved in election interference in 2016, something U.S. intelligence officials have repeatedly attributed to Russia.

In admitting that Trump had linked politics with his Ukraine policy, Mulvaney said that critics were simply overreacting.“I have news for everybody: Get over it,” he said. “There is going to be political influence in foreign policy.”

“If the White House was withholding aid in regards to the cooperation of any investigation at the Department of Justice, that is news to us,” a Justice Department official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to contradict the acting White House chief of staff.

Whipple said Mulvaney’s strategy has been to try to normalize Trump’s un­or­tho­dox behavior by making the “insane” seem commonplace.“Trump’s actions are not defendable so the response is ‘Let’s just act like this is normal,’ ” he said. “There’s nothing normal about it.”

Several State Department officials have told congressional investigators they objected to Trump’s push to give his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, a central role in Ukraine policy.

There is a bipartisan Congressional Native American caucus, whose job is to educate, on a bipartisan basis, members of Congress about Native American issues.”

The Cherokee Nation has never sent a delegate to Congress before. While they are hopeful the House will honor the terms of the New Echota treaty, there will be a wait before – hopefully – Teehee can take up her post.

“The Cherokee Nation is in a position of relative strength, both political strength and economic strength, with the wellbeing of our citizens on the rise,”

We’re sort of standing outside of the Congress and advocating for our needs and for the government of the United States to live up to its obligations. [Now we could be] be inside Congress, and do what our ancestors contemplated when they negotiated those terms.”

the Cherokee Nation is self-governing, running and managing its own schools, hospitals and infrastructure programs, it relies on grants from the government

“[The delegate] would be entitled to membership in committees. They could vote in committees, they could introduce legislation and they could speak on the floor of the House of Representatives.

The Cherokees having a delegate – who could well opt to serve as a representative for Indian country, for Native rights in general – in the halls of Congress all the time could be enormously beneficial to all tribes, not just the Cherokees.”

“even though the Cherokee Nation congressional delegate is first and foremost and advocate for the Cherokee Nation”, he expects that being afforded a delegate to Congress is something that can help Native Americans across the US.

“In 2019, I think tribal leaders recognize the benefit of solidarity: that we get more done together than we do separately,” Hoskin said.

The White House released a statement from Mulvaney claiming “there was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election.”

Rick Perry, Trump’s energy secretary who has become a central figure in questions over whether the president sought to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, is resigning and will step down by the end of the year

S and Turkey had agreed to a five-day ceasefire in Syria, but Turkey quickly clarified that it was actually just a “pause” in operations. Experts also criticized the deal for being overly deferential to the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

U

former commander of US special forces operations argued in an op-ed that Trump is a threat to American democracy, and wrote that US military personnel feel “frustration, humiliation, anger and fear” that America is “under attack, not from without, but from within”, because of Trump’s lack of leadership.

ewer than half of Republicans believe that Trump has “definitely not” done things that are grounds for impeachment, according to a new poll from Pew Research Center.

“This is significant … As much as it’s worth celebrating, many of us are looking forward to it just being normal.”