Chris Hedges's Blog, page 43

Stocks Tumble as Virus Fears Spark Sell-Off

U.S. stocks fell sharply Monday, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average down by more than 450 points, as investors grappled with fresh worries about the spread of a new virus in China that threatens global economic growth.

The sell-off gave the Dow its first 5-day losing streak since early August and handed the S&P 500 its worst day since early October. Both indexes were off about 1.5%, giving up a significant portion of their gains this month.

The latest bout of selling on Wall Street came after China announced a sharp rise in cases of the virus.

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Airlines, resorts and other companies that rely on travel and tourism suffered steep losses. Gold prices rose as did bonds as traders sought refuge in safer holdings. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 1.60%, its lowest level since October. The market’s broad slide followed a sell-off in markets in Europe and Japan.

“Over the weekend you saw more cases,” said Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial. “That got investors and traders worried that this may be a longer event. The next question is, ‘What happens to global growth if this does continue and magnify?'”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 453.93 points, or 1.6%, to 28,535.80. The Dow had been down nearly 550 points. The S&P 500 index dropped 51.84 points, or 1.6%, to 3,243.63. The Nasdaq lost 175.60 points, or 1.9%, to 9,139.31. The Russell 2000 index of smaller company stocks gave up 18.09 points, or 1.1%, to 1,644.14.

Most markets in Asia were closed for the Lunar New Year holiday, but Japan’s Nikkei fell 2.03%, its biggest decline in five months. European markets also slumped. Germany’s DAX and France’s CAC 40 dove 2.7%.

Chinese health authorities have confirmed 2,750 cases of the virus along with 81 related deaths as authorities extended a week-long public holiday by an extra three days as a precaution against having the virus spread still further. The virus has spread to a dozen countries, including the U.S. Besides the threat to people’s lives and health, investors are worried about how much damage the virus will do to profits for companies around the world.

Even if they’re thousands of miles away from Wuhan, the interconnected global economy means U.S. companies have plenty of customers and suppliers in China. It’s the world’s second-largest economy, and it accounts for 6% of all revenue for S&P 500 companies over the last 12 months. That’s nearly double any other country besides the United States, according to FactSet.

“Markets hate uncertainty, and the coronavirus is the ultimate uncertainty in that no one knows how badly it will impact the global economy,” said Alec Young, managing director of global markets research at FTSE Russell.

Resort operators were among the biggest losers in the S&P 500. Wynn Resorts led all company’s in the index lower with an 8.1% tumble, while Las Vegas Sands dropped 6.7%. The companies get most of their revenue from the Chinese gambling haven of Macao. MGM Resorts fell 3.9%.

American Airlines lost 5.5% and Delta dropped 3.4% as part of a broad slide for airlines because of concerns international travel will decline amid the virus’ spread.

Booking companies and cruise-line operators also got hurt. Expedia Group fell 2.7% and Carnival slid 4.7%.

Chinese companies that trade shares in the U.S. also declined. Search engine operator Baidu fell 2.9% and e-commerce company JD.com dropped 4.8%.

The technology sector, the biggest in the S&P 500, also saw heavy selling. Apple, which relies on China for supplies and sales, fell 2.9%.

Financial stocks also took steep losses. Citigroup dropped 2.2%.

Energy stocks fell broadly as U.S. oil prices fell 1.9% on worries about reduced demand from China. Schlumberger skidded 5.1%.

Utilities, real estate stocks and household goods makers held up better than the rest of the market, though they still finished in the red. The sectors are viewed as less-risky and are not as affected by international issues and developments.

A few companies managed to climb against the sliding markets. Bleach and cleaning products maker Clorox rose 1.1%.

Small biotechnology companies and drug developers made some of the biggest gains. Cleveland BioLabs more than doubled, while NanoViricides and BioCryst also climbed sharply.

“If you look at this right now, investors and traders are looking at pockets of opportunity,” Krosby said. “It’s not a question of if, but when they start buying.”

Investors are also dealing with a heavy week of corporate earnings. Apple will report financial results on Tuesday. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and Starbucks will also report.

Boeing, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Amazon are also among some of the biggest names reporting earnings throughout the week that includes 147 S&P 500 companies.

Benchmark crude oil fell $1.05 to settle at $53.14 a barrel. Brent crude oil, the international standard, dropped $1.37 to close at $59.32 a barrel.

Wholesale gasoline slid 3 cents to $1.48 per gallon. Heating oil declined 5 cents to $1.70 per gallon. Natural gas inched 1 cent higher to $1.90 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Gold rose $5.50 to $1,577.40 per ounce, silver fell 6 cents to $18.06 per ounce and copper slid 9 cents to $2.60 per pound.

The dollar fell to 108.92 Japanese yen from 109.24 yen on Friday. The euro weakened to $1.1020 from $1.1029.

Establishment Democrats Are Terrified of a Sanders Win in Iowa

Bernie Sanders was off the campaign trail over the weekend, stuck in the Senate for impeachment hearings, but if polling is any indication, that didn’t stop his campaign’s momentum. A New York Times/Siena College poll of Iowa Democratic voters shows 25% of respondents would vote for Sanders in the Iowa caucus on Feb. 3. A poll from Boston’s Emerson College of Iowa Democrats and independents found 30% of respondents planning to vote for him.

Along with Sanders’ growth in the polls, however, comes a growth in backlash, primarily from centrist Democrats. As Politico reported Monday, they “fear a repeat of 2016 is in the making — when mainstream Republicans scoffed at the idea that Donald Trump could ever win the nomination, until he became unstoppable — only this time from the left.”

In interviews with multiple outlets, Democratic establishment figures are attacking Sanders on multiple levels. Last week, Hillary Clinton homed in on his relationship with fellow party members, telling The Hollywood Reporter, “Nobody likes [Sanders], nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done.”

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Rahm Emanuel, former mayor of Chicago and chief of staff to President Obama, expressed concern about Sanders’ ability to attract swing voters, telling Politico, “Swing states have a higher concentration of swing voters. We need a nominee who draws them to the Democratic column.”

Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller believes Sanders will be harmful to down-ballot Democratic candidates in swing districts. He told Politico, “I think there’s a concern among some, and I think it’s fairly widespread … that if Bernie is the nominee he may well lose and take other Democrats down with him.”

The New York Times on Monday focused on concerns about Sanders’ supporters, who have been accused of misogyny, racism and extreme online bullying. Bakari Sellers, a South Carolina state legislator, told the Times, “You have to be very cognizant when you say anything critical of Bernie online. You might have to put your phone down. There’s going to be a blowback, and it could be sexist, racist and vile.”

Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centrist group Third Way, believes Sanders has gotten off easy in the media. “They let him get away with murder,” he tells Politico. “They let him bluster past hard questions.”

When it comes to pushing back against Sanders’ campaign, many centrist Democrats say they are in a bind. According to Politico, “The Democratic establishment is caught in a catch-22: Attack Sanders and risk galvanizing his supporters and turning him into a martyr of the far-left. Or leave him alone and watch him continue to gather momentum.”

The Vile Message Democrats Are Sending With Impeachment

Of course President Donald Trump should be impeached. In fact, impeachment proceedings should have been initiated as soon as he took office and enacted the Muslim travel ban, or perhaps even before this, as he was in clear violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution. But what has been frustrating as news of Trump’s impeachment has taken over headlines is not just the fact that Democrats waited until the final year of his first—though perhaps not his last—term in office, or that they ignored calls to “impeach the motherfucker,” as advised by Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib.

What boggles the mind is not what the trial—which promises to be one of the most contentious and partisan in the history of the country—is, but what it is not: accountability for the vast array of crimes and offenses Trump has committed, especially against people of color. They have been noted from the very beginning: from his criminal neglect of Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria to his declaration of a fake national emergency to fund the border wall, his ramping up of drone strikes overseas, and aiding and abetting of Saudi Arabia’s murderous campaign in Yemen, there are no shortage of reasons to remove Trump from office.

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The Problem With Impeachment



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Democrats could not be faulted for an anything-goes approach. The criteria for a “high crime or misdemeanor” in Article II of the Constitution is so elastic as to include almost anything. Even things that do not resemble crimes or are peculiar to the office of the president fit the bill. For example, Andrew Johnson was booked on 11 charges, a list so colorful and multifarious as to famously include him uttering “with a loud voice, certain intemperate, inflammatory, and scandalous harangues.” Then there is the first of three articles of impeachment prepared against Richard Nixon, namely, making “false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States.” Despite the consternation and hand-wringing of scholars everywhere, in the past, an impeachable offense has effectively been whatever the House says it is.

Going after the president for the totality of crimes and offenses he has committed while in office has been done before.

The albeit-failed attempts to impeach George W. Bush are the most instructive. Dennis Kucinich and Robert Wexler introduced 35 articles in the House in June 2008. From the CIA torture program and the Valerie Plame affair to warrantless spying by the National Security Agency and Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina, the Kucinich-Wexler articles are as close to comprehensive as an inquiry into a sitting president can get. Fifteen articles are devoted to the Iraq War alone. So why do not Democrats do the same thing and throw in the lot against Trump?

Democrats have not been forthcoming with a satisfactory answer. According to Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, the idea behind the decision to restrict articles of impeachment against Trump to the Ukraine scandal—described as strategic—is that additional articles would be too complicated and confusing for the average citizen to follow, and that the articles that were ultimately adopted—abuse of power and obstruction of Congress—are sufficiently narrow for the American imagination—lest the whole ostensible goal of removal be thrown into jeopardy.

Democrats must think that average Americans are too unintelligent or too apathetic to weigh more than a few offenses in their minds at the same time. It is plausible that unless you are a lawyer or political scientist who has studied constitutional law and U.S. foreign policy you are perhaps going to have a hard time understanding such arcane Latin phrases as “quid pro quo” or the nuances of Russian military intervention in post-Euromaiden Ukraine. But everyone knows it is wrong for a sitting president to misuse charitable funds or award himself a lucrative contract to host a global economic forum. So not only are the ins and outs of the Ukraine scandal obscure, but a whole host of things Trump has done is just as easy to understand, if not easier.

What is more, everyone knows that removal is not going to happen. It is not as if there is a secret tape out there, waiting to be revealed, à la Nixon. The transcript of the phone call Trump had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is the secret tape, and nary a Republican has defected. Nor is it the case that Democratic and Republican senators have joined forces to ensure that Trump’s trial has at least has a veneer of impartiality—unlike former Majority Leader Trent Lott and Minority Leader Tom Daschle, who reached across party lines to “fulfill [their] constitutional responsibility in a respectable way” during Bill Clinton’s trial in the Senate 20 years ago.

In fact, it is the opposite. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared at the outset that any trial would be conducted under the auspices of the White House itself.

It is no small feat to initiate impeachment proceedings, and Democrats cannot be blamed for the fact that Republicans have been unyielding in their worship of Trump. But it does not follow that impeachment is pointless, or that it only has a point if it ends in a conviction. Impeachment is about holding accountable the president, who is largely ensconced in office until his term ends, even if he is not removed. By airing the various abuses and excesses of his administration in a public forum, Democrats would also sully Trump’s chances at the polls come November. Given that Democrats do not have the supermajority in the Senate required to convict, it behooved them to simultaneously pursue charges for most everything else Trump has done.

The decision to restrict articles of impeachment to the Ukraine scandal does not make sense. Withholding military aid from a foreign ally as a means to obtain damaging information about a political opponent might be an abuse of power. And refusing to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry may constitute obstruction of justice (or “Congress,” as the charge is written). But what about every other abuse of power Trump has committed in office? Obviously, abuse of power or obstruction of justice are not peculiar to foreign policy or electoral interference. It is thus unclear why Democrats have chosen to fixate on this abuse of power, or this obstruction of justice, given the myriad other opportunities they have had to charge Trump with more or less the same thing.

Whether Trump committed an abuse of power or obstructed justice also depends on his mental state, and whether he intended to withhold the military aid or refuse to cooperate with the House for the wrong reasons—and not just whether it was beneficial for him to do so. But generally speaking, Democrats have ignored Trump’s motives in the past.

As soon as he took office, Trump signed an executive order barring nationals from a number of Muslim-majority countries from entering the country, ostensibly because of terrorism concerns—despite the fact that the Department of Homeland Security admitted that nationals from the designated countries did not pose an increased security risk. What is more, not only had Trump sworn to ban Muslims on the campaign trail, his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, boasted on Fox News that Trump had previously asked him how to do it.

Yet Democrats ultimately embraced the rationale given by the Supreme Court that because the ban was imposed pursuant to the president’s broad powers to regulate immigration, nothing was wrong with it—even if the ban was, as a majority of justices implied—a pretext to openly discriminate against Muslims. But fast-forward to 2019, and all of the sudden it matters why Trump withheld the military aid—despite the fact that he also had a pretext for inquiring into Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden and his son’s activities in Ukraine: the United States’ years-long anti-corruption efforts in the region. Like immigration, foreign affairs are within the purview of the executive, who is known to withhold military aid. In fact, around the same time military aid to Ukraine was withheld in July, military aid to Lebanon was also withheld—and no reason was ever given. And yet it is Trump’s alleged motives—that it was all a ruse to gain an edge over Biden as he climbed in the polls—that have riled up Democrats at such a late hour in Trump’s presidency.

To give another example, while impeachment proceedings were underway, Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani on Iraqi soil. Not only did he not obtain prior authorization from Congress for what amounted to an extrajudicial killing, but the president has yet to offer a credible justification. All the White House has said is that the strike was in response to an imminent threat that Soleimani posed. But no evidence of an imminent attack on American forces has ever been furnished. It is hard to believe that Trump really intended to defend American forces, rather than divert attention from his own trial at home. Clinton did the same thing, ordering a spasm of violence in Iraq while he was under investigation. But again, because Trump had a pretext and the authority to otherwise carry out the attack, Democrats declined to inquire into his true motives.

Why restrict articles of impeachment to what is largely a political crime that only affects one of their own—Joe Biden—and is a long way from the everyday lives of people of color? By excluding most everything that people of color care about, Democrats confirm that not only does our pain not matter, but the whole affair is really a ruse to save face—because they failed to mount a concerted enough effort against Trump for the past three years.

Remember, Democratic leaders said over and over that impeachment was off the table and would not be pursued as a means to remove the president because it was too fractious and would “divide the country.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi maintained that “this president” was not worth it, even ruling impeachment out in advance of the Mueller report, no matter the outcome. The message was clear all along: People of color, who have had to bear the brunt of the abuses and excesses of the Trump administration, are not worth it, but a Democratic politician is.

Democrats have been remarkably cavalier about the disproportionate cost of their intransigence on people of color in the face of the president’s near daily outrages.

So of course it is easy for members of Congress, the vast majority of whom are white men with millions of dollars in global assets, to have insisted that the time was not ripe, or that impeachment would throw the country into disarray, while people of color labored under the conditions imposed on them by Trump.

Not only is it unintelligible why it is this abuse of power, or this obstruction of justice, that has awakened Democrats from their slumber and skepticism of more potent means of “resistance” on a par with removal, but it is disingenuous.

Just look at what then-House Minority Leader Pelosi said in 2006, and then again, in 2007. She balked at attempts to impeach Bush for the invasion of Iraq, going so far as to doubt whether one of the most heinous wars ever waged—which, to date, is estimated to have killed upward of a million men, women and children, displaced hundreds of thousands more and mired the whole region in death and destruction for years to come, all on the basis of outright lies and the private grievances of the Bush family—even constituted an impeachable offense in the first place, despite the fact that Pelosi knew full well that the rationale that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was made up.

Perhaps given this, it should come as no surprise that Trump taking a leaf out of Bill Clinton’s book and bombing a foreign country amid impeachment proceedings, or announcing that he will yet again expand the Muslim ban to encompass even more countries, seems inconsequential to Democrats in power.

Despite having finally initiated impeachment proceedings against Trump, Democrats have struggled to put their best legal foot forward. From refusing to litigate the very subpoenas that would have provided them with the evidence they seek to refusing to give up Biden’s son in exchange for John Bolton’s key testimony, Democrats have only half-heartedly prosecuted their case. Why else hold off on holding a formal vote in the House, or transmitting the articles of impeachment to the Senate? To the extent to which it is a strategic decision, or Democrats are wary of their chances, it is because they are fearful of putting Democrats who are up for reelection in key districts at risk, and impairing Biden’s chances at the polls come November—not because they really care about taking Trump to task. It is as if, by restricting the impeachment inquiry to the Ukraine scandal and adopting a cautious or timid approach, Democrats are deliberately sabotaging their own efforts to save themselves from the embarrassment of losing.

Democrats have finally taken the extraordinary step of initiating impeachment proceedings against Trump because it had become politically untenable not to. For the better part of three years, Democrats have consistently failed to mount a rigorous enough defense against Trump, squandered their time with charades like the Russia probe, and acquiesced to or even actively assisted him with his policies. Let’s not forget that the vast majority of Democrats agreed to increase Trump’s military budget by another $20 billion a year and offered to fund his border wall. And despite California Rep. Adam Schiff’s impassioned plea during the prosecution’s opening arguments that “she’s worth it,” the average American is utterly disinterested in the United States’ proxy war with Russia.

Democrats have seemingly purposefully impaired the chances of succeeding at Trump’s trial in the Senate by excluding everything else that the president has done, especially given that removal is highly unlikely. But by restricting the articles of impeachment to the Ukraine scandal, they are sending the clear message that whatever harm Trump has done to the least privileged and most beleaguered of us, it is negligible at best.

Trump’s EPA Poses Huge Cancer Risks

Earlier this month, President Trump claimed credit for new figures from the American Cancer Society showing  “the sharpest one-year drop in cancer death rate ever recorded” between 2016 and 2017.

The society politely pointed out that the Trump administration had nothing to do with this encouraging decline. The new numbers, chief Gary Reedy explained, “reflect prevention, early detection, and treatment advances that occurred in prior years.”

Media outlets rushed to relate this latest Trump Twitter flap. But this story doesn’t deserve to end there. Something is shaking on the cancer front that needs our full attention.

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The Trump administration, investigative journalist Sharon Lerner detailed a few days later, “is executing an old tobacco industry scheme to dismantle the federal government’s ability to protect the public from cancer.”

The Trump White House has packed the Environmental Protection Agency’s top echelons with free-market fundamentalists who’ve set about “freeing” chemical companies from regulations designed to limit the presence of cancer-causing chemicals in our nation’s air, water, and soil.

These appointees, Lerner’s reporting documents, are working hand in glove with chemical manufacturers, which have spent $1.4 billion on lobbying over the past dozen years.

Those lobbying dollars paid off. Chemical companies now have their pals running the regulatory show — and more Americans, as a result, will find themselves fighting cancer.

Americans like Angela Ramirez, a mother in Illinois who traces her personal cancer to a carcinogen known as ethylene oxide. Two years ago, EPA scientists tagged ethylene oxide a clear and present danger and, writes Lerner, proposed a new safety threshold “30 times more sensitive than previous estimates.”

Dow Chemical — a huge ethylene oxide producer — pushed back. Now, the Trump EPA’s political appointees are abandoning the standards their own scientists are seeking.

This is “only one of the changes made under the Trump administration,” notes Lerner, “that promise to weaken protections for Americans’ health, many of which were intended specifically to stave off cancers.”

Any hands-off approach to fighting carcinogens, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) notes, will particularly devastate the poor communities that already face “disproportionately high rates of air and water pollution.”

“If you really want to see what doing nothing truly looks like, come to my district,” adds Tlaib. “Rows and rows and rows of homes have these little white crosses in front of them, representing cancer, survivors of cancer.”

Meanwhile, chemical executives are raking it in.

In 2017, the industry’s two biggest companies, Dow and Dupont, merged in a deal that nearly tripled the compensation of CEO Andrew Liveris to $65.7 million. In 2018, Stephen Angel — CEO of Linde PLC, the nation’s fourth-largest chemical company — pulled down $66.1 million.

The enrichment of these executives — at the same time their companies are battling attempts to regulate their toxic products — represents a far greater scandal than any vain and empty boasting out of the White House. Yet the deregulatory collusion between the chemical industry and the Trump administration continues to go largely unnoticed.

Also largely unnoticed: a counter trend, the emerging efforts to limit the mammoth CEO pay rewards that give top executives — in the chemical industry and beyond — an ongoing incentive to play fast and loose with America’s health.

One of those efforts just took a significant stride forward in California, where state senators moved a step closer to hiking the tax rate on corporations that pay their CEOs over 50 times what they pay their most typical workers.

Last May, the United Steelworkers union noted that the newly merged DowDupont was paying its CEO 249 times more than the company’s median worker.

Average Americans pay a deadly price for the excessive corporate pay packages that incentivize profit-making by any means necessary. If the California legislation becomes law, America’s corporations may finally begin paying a price for continuing that excess.

The Two Phenomena Transforming the Climate Conversation

Let me betray my age for a moment. Some of you, I know, will be shocked, but I still read an actual newspaper. Words on real paper every day. I’m talking about the New York Times, and something stuck with me from the January 9th edition of that “paper” paper. Of course, in the world of the Internet, that’s already ancient history — medieval times — but (as a reminder) it came only a few days after Donald Trump’s drone assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani.

So you won’t be surprised to learn that its front page was essentially all Iran and The Donald. Atop it, there was a large photo of the president heading for a podium with his generals and officials lined up on either side of him. Its caption read: “‘The United States is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it,’ President Trump said Wednesday at the White House.” Beside it, the lead story was headlined “U.S. and Iranians Lower Tensions, at Least for Now.” Below were three more Iran-related pieces, taking up much of the rest of the page. (“A President’s Mixed Messages Unsettle More Than Reassure,” etc.)

At the bottom left, there was a fifth Iran-related article. Inside that 24-page section of the paper, there were seven more full pages of coverage on the subject. Only one other piece of hot news could be squeezed (with photo) onto the bottom right of the front page. And whether you still read actual papers or now live only in the world of the Internet, I doubt you’ll be shocked to learn that it focused on Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, already involved in a crisis among the British Royals that was almost Iranian in its intensity. The headline: “In Stunning Step, Duke and Duchess Seek New Title: Part-Timers.”

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Had you then followed the “continued on page A5” below that piece, you would have found the rest of the story about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (including a second photo of them and an ad for Bloomingdales, the department store) taking up almost all of that inside page. If, however, you had been in a particularly attentive mood, you might also have noticed, squeezed in at the very bottom left of page 5, an 11-paragraph story by Henry Fountain. It had been granted so little space that the year 2019 had to be abbreviated as ’19 in its headline, which read in full: “’19 Was the 2nd-Hottest Year, And July Hottest Month Yet.”

Of course, that literally qualified as the hottest story of the day, but you never would have known it. It began this way:

“The evidence mounted all year. Temperature records were broken in France, Germany and elsewhere; the Greenland ice sheet experienced exceptional melting; and, as 2019 came to a close, broiling temperatures contributed to devastating wildfires that continue in Australia. Now European scientists have confirmed what had been suspected: 2019 was a very hot year, with global average temperatures the second highest on record. Only 2016 was hotter, and not by much — less than one-tenth of a degree Fahrenheit.”

As Fountain pointed out, however briefly, among the records broken in 2019, “The past five years have been the five warmest on record” (as had the last decade).

In another world, either that line or the actual headline should reasonably have been atop that Times front page in blazing letters. After all, that’s the news that someday could do us all in, whatever happens in Iran or to the British royal family. In my own dreamscape, that piece, headlined atop the front page, would have been continued on the obituary page. After all, the climate crisis could someday deliver an obituary for humanity and so many other living things on this planet, or at least for the way of life we humans have known throughout our history.

If you live online and were looking hard, you could have stumbled on the same news, thanks, say, to a similar CNN report on the subject, but it wasn’t the equivalent of headlines there either. Just another hot year… bleh. Who’s going to pay real attention when war with Iran lurks just beneath the surface and Harry and Meghan are heading for Canada?

To give credit where it’s due, however, a week later when that climate news was confirmed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it did finally hit the front page of the January 16th edition of the paper Times. Of course, I wouldn’t be writing this if it had been the day’s blazing headline, but that honor went to impeachment proceedings and a photo of the solemn walk of the seven House impeachment managers, as well as the clerk and sergeant-at-arms, delivering those articles to the Senate.

That photo and two stories about impeachment dominated the top of the page. Trump’s “phase 1” trade deal with China got the mid-page area and various other stories (“Warren Confronts the Skeptics Who Fear Her Plans Go Too Far”) were at page bottom. Stuck between the impeachment headliners and the Warren story was, however, a little insert. You might think of it as the news equivalent of a footnote. It had a tiny chart of global temperatures, 1880 to 2019, a micro-headline (“Warmer and Warmer”), and a note that read: “In the latest sign of global warming’s grip on the planet, the past decade was the hottest on record, researchers said. Page A8.” And, indeed, on that page was Henry Fountain’s latest story on the subject.

As it happened, between the 9th and 16th of January, yet more news about our heating planet had come out that, in a sense, was even grimmer. A new analysis found that the oceans, sinkholes for the heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, had also experienced their hottest five years on record (ditto for the last decade). In their case, however, 2019 was the very hottest, not the second hottest, year so far. And that, too, was a Times story, but only online.

Two Kinds of Time

Now, I don’t want you to misunderstand me here. The New York Times is anything but a climate change-denying newspaper. It has some superb environmental and global-warming coverage (including of Australia recently) by top-of-the-line journalists like Somini Sengupta. It’s in no way like Fox News or the rest of Rupert Murdoch’s fervently climate-denying media organization that happens to control more than 70% of newspaper circulation in burning Australia.

The situation I’ve been describing is, I suspect, far more basic and human than that and — my guess — it has to do with time. The time all of us are generally plunged into is, naturally enough, human time, which has a certain obvious immediacy for us — the immediacy, you might say, of everyday life. In human time, for instance, an autocratic-minded showman like Donald Trump can rise to the presidency, be impeached, and fall, or be impeached, stay in office, and pass on his “legacy” to his children until something new comes along to make its mark, fail or end in its own fashion, and go the way of… well, of all of us. That’s human history, again and again.

And then there’s the time-scape of global warming, which exists on a scale hard for us mortals to truly take in. After all, whatever Donald Trump might do won’t last long, not really — with two possible exceptions: the use of nuclear weapons in an apocalyptic fashion or the help he’s offering fossil-fuel companies in putting yet more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, while working to limit the development of alternative energy, both of which will only make the climate crisis to come yet more severe.

Otherwise, his time is all too human. With our normally far less than century-long life spans, we are, in the end, such immediate creatures. Climate change, even though human-caused, works on another scale entirely. Once its effects are locked in, we’re not just talking about 2100 or 2150, dates hard enough for us to get our brains (no less our policy-making) around, but hundreds of years, even millennia. Though we’ve known about climate change for many decades now, we’re dealing with a time scale that our brains simply aren’t prepared to fully take in.

When weighing an Iranian drone assassination or a presidential impeachment or the latest development in election 2020 against news of the long-term transformation of this planet, no matter how disastrous, the immediate tends to win out, whether you’re a New York Times editor or just about anyone else.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that it’s been so difficult to truly grasp the import of the warming of this planet, because its effects have, until now, generally been relatively subtle or challenging to grasp. When The Donald is in the White House or Harry and Meghan cause a stir or an Iranian major general is assassinated, that’s riveting, graspable, headlines. Those heating waters, those warming temperatures, the bleaching of coral reefs, the melting of ice shields in Greenland, the Arctic, and the Antarctic leading to rising sea levels that could one day drown coastal cities, maybe not so much, not deep down, not where it truly counts.

The Burning

The real question is: When will climate change truly enter human time — when, that is, will the two time scales intersect in a way that clicks? Perhaps (but just perhaps) we’re finally seeing the beginning of an answer to that question for which you would, I suspect, have to thank two phenomena: Greta Thunberg and Australia’s fires.

In August 2018, all alone, the 15-year-old Thunberg began a Friday school strike in front of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm to make a point: that however all-encompassing the present human moment might seem, she understood in a way that mattered how her future and that of her peers was being stolen by the adults in charge of this planet and the climate crisis they were continuing to feed. The movement of the young she sparked, one that’s still sparking, was a living, breathing version of those two times intersecting. In other words, she somehow grasped and transmitted in a compelling way how a future crisis of staggering proportions was being nailed in place in human time, right at that very moment.

And then, of course, there was — there is — Australia. But one more thing before I get to the devastation of that country. I began writing this piece in New York City on a weekend in January when the temperature hit a record-breaking 65-69 degrees, depending on where in the metropolitan area you were measuring. (A couple of hundred miles north in Boston, it hit 74 degrees!) It was glorious, spring-like, idyllic, everything a human being in “winter” could want — if, that is, you hadn’t made it past Meghan and Harry or Suleimani and Trump, and so didn’t have a sense of what such records might mean on a planet threatening to heat to the boiling point in the coming century. We’re talking, of course, about a world in which Donald Trump and crew were responding to climate change by attempting to open the taps on every kind of fossil fuel and the greenhouse gas emissions that go with their burning. Meanwhile, despite the news that, by 2100, parts of the North China plain with its hundreds of millions of inhabitants could be too hot for habitation, China’s leaders were still pushing a global Belt and Road Initiative that involves the building of at least 63 new coal-fired power plants in 23 countries. Huzzah! And remember that China and the United States are already the top two emitters of greenhouses gases.

Of course, tell that to the Australians whose country, by the way, is the world’s third largest exporter of fossil fuels. For the last month or more, it’s also been a climate-change disaster area of a previously unimaginable sort. Even if you haven’t taken in the acreage that fire has already destroyed (estimated to be the size of South Korea or the state of Virginia) — fire that, by the way, is making its own weather — you’ve certainly seen the coverage of the dead or hurt koalas and roos, right? Maybe you’ve even seen the estimate by one scientist — no way to confirm it yet — that a billion creatures (yes, 1,000,000,000) might already have died in those fires and it’s still not the height of the Australian summer or fire season.

In some fashion, as a climate-change disaster, Australia seems to have broken through. (It probably doesn’t hurt that it has all those cute, endangered animals.) Looking back, we earthlings may someday conclude that, with Greta and with Australia burning, the climate crisis finally began breaking into human time. Yes, there was that less than Edenic November of 2018 in Paradise, California, and there have been other weather disasters, including hurricanes Maria and Dorian, that undoubtedly were heightened by climate-change, but Australia may be the first time that the climate-change time-scape and human history have intersected in a way that truly mattered.

And although, in the midst of winter, this country isn’t burning, we do have something else in common with those Australians: a nation being run by arsonists, by genuine pyromaniacs. After all, earlier in his coal-fired career, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison brought a literal lump of coal into that country’s parliament, soothingly reassuring the other members that “this is coal. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared.”

In the election he won in 2019 (against a Labor Party promoting action on climate change), he was in big coal’s back pocket. And like our president, his government has been messing with international attempts to deal with the climate crisis ever since. Again like our president, he’s also been an open denier of the very reality of climate change and so one of a crew of right-wing global leaders seemingly intent on setting this planet afire.

Climate-Change Previews?

Years ago, in my apartment building, someone dozed off while smoking in bed, starting a fire a couple of floors below me. I noticed only when the smoke began filtering under my door. Opening it, I found the hall filled with smoke. Heading downstairs wasn’t an option. In fact, a couple who had tried to do so were trapped on my floor and I quickly took them in. I barely had time to panic, however, before I heard the sirens of the first fire engines. Not long after, the doorbell rang and two firemen were there, instructing me to open all the windows and stuff towels at the bottom of the door to keep the smoke out. I’m sure I’ve never been so happy to greet someone at my door.

That fire was, in the end, contained inside the apartment where it started and I was in no danger, but peering into that smoke-filled hallway I would never have known it. The memory of that long-lost afternoon came back to me in the context of burning Australia, a country where fire fighters had been desperately at work for weeks without being able to douse the hundreds of blazes across that drought-stricken land, which has also recently experienced record high temperatures. It’s been the definition of a living nightmare.

And here’s what I began to wonder on this newest version of planet Earth: Are we all in some sense Australians, whether we know it or not? I don’t mean that as an empathetic statement of solidarity with the suffering people of that land (though I do feel for them). I mean it as a statement of grim fact. Admittedly, it won’t be fire for all of us. For some, it will be rising sea levels, flooding of a never-before-experienced sort, storms or heat waves of a previously unimagined ferocity, and so on.

Still, right now, Australia is our petri dish and unless we get rid of the arsonists who are running too many countries and figure out a way to come together in human time, we’re likely to enter a world where there will be no fire fighters to save us (or our children and grandchildren). Climate change, after all, looks to be nature’s slo-mo version of nuclear war.

In movie terms, think of Australia as the previews. For most of us, the main feature is still to come. The problem is that the schedule for that feature may not be found in your local paper.

The Ugly Jingoism Marring Trump’s Impeachment

This piece originally appeared on

Remembering My Hero, Howard Zinn

The renowned historian Howard Zinn died on January 27, 2010. On the occasion of the 10 year anniversary of his passing, we are revisiting the following piece by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg about his close friend and “the best human being [he’s] ever known,” originally published on January 28, 2010. 

I just learned that my friend Howard Zinn died today. Earlier this morning, I was being interviewed by the Boston Phoenix, in connection with the February release of a documentary in which he is featured prominently. The interviewer asked me who my own heroes were, and I had no hesitation in answering, first, “Howard Zinn.”

Just weeks ago, after watching the film, I woke up thinking that I had never told him how much he meant to me. For once in my life, I acted on that thought in a timely way. I sent him an e-mail in which I said, among other things, what I had often told others: that he was, “in my opinion, the best human being I’ve ever known. The best example of what a human can be, and can do with their life.”

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Our first meeting was at Faneuil Hall in Boston in early 1971, where we both spoke against the indictments of Eqbal Ahmad and Phil Berrigan for “conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger.” We marched with the rest of the crowd to make citizens’ arrests at the Boston office of the FBI. Later that spring, we went with our affinity group (including Noam Chomsky, Cindy Fredericks, Marilyn Young, Mark Ptashne, Zelda Gamson, Fred Branfman and Mitch Goodman), to the May Day actions blocking traffic in Washington (“If they won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government”). Howard tells that story in the film, and I tell it at greater length in my memoir, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.” But for reasons of space, I had to cut out the next section in which Howard — who had been arrested in D.C. after most of the rest of us had gone elsewhere — came back to Boston for a rally and a blockade of the Federal Building. I’ve never published that story, so here it is, an outtake from my manuscript:

A day later, Howard Zinn was the last speaker at a large rally in Boston Common. I was at the back of a huge crowd, listening to him over loudspeakers. Twenty-seven years later, I can remember some of what he said. “On May Day in Washington, thousands of us were arrested for disturbing the peace. But there is no peace. We were really arrested because we were disturbing the war.”

He said, “If Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had been walking the streets of Georgetown yesterday, they would have been arrested. Arrested for being young.”

At the end of his comments, he said: “I want to speak now to some of the members of this audience, the plainclothes policemen among us, the military intelligence agents who are assigned to do surveillance. You are taking the part of secret police, spying on your fellow Americans. You should not be doing what you are doing. You should rethink it, and stop. You do not have to carry out orders that go against the grain of what it means to be an American.”

Those last weren’t his exact words, but that was the spirit of them. He was to pay for that comment the next day, when we were sitting side by side in a blockade of the Federal Building in Boston. We had a circle of people all the way around the building, shoulder to shoulder, so no one could get in or out except by stepping over us. Behind us were crowds of people with posters who were supporting us but who hadn’t chosen to risk arrest. In front of us, keeping us from getting any closer to the main entrance to the building, was a line of policemen, with a large formation of police behind them. All the police had large plastic masks tilted back on their heads and they were carrying long black clubs, about four feet long, like large baseball bats. Later the lawyers told us that city police regulations outlawed the use of batons that long.

But at first the relations with the police were almost friendly. We sat down impudently at the very feet of the policemen who were guarding the entrance, filling in the line that disappeared around the sides until someone came from the rear of the building and announced over a bullhorn, “The blockade is complete. We’ve surrounded the building!” There was a cheer from the crowd behind us, and more people joined us in sitting until the circle was two or three deep.

We expected them to start arresting us, but for a while the police did nothing. They could have manhandled a passage through the line and kept it open for employees to go in or out, but for some reason they didn’t. We thought maybe they really sympathized with our protest, and this was their way of joining in. As the morning wore on, people took apples and crackers and bottles of water out of their pockets and packs and shared them around, and they always offered some to the police standing in front of us. The police always refused, but they seemed to appreciate the offer.

Then one of the officers came over to Howard and said, “You’re Professor Zinn, aren’t you?” Howard said yes, and the officer reached down and shook his hand enthusiastically. He said, “I heard you lecture at the Police Academy. A lot of us here did. That was a wonderful lecture.” Howard had been asked to speak to them about the role of dissent and civil disobedience in American history. Several other policemen came over to pay their respects to Howard and thank him for his lecture. The mood seemed quite a bit different from Washington. Then a line of employees emerged from the building, wearing coats and ties or dresses. Their arms were raised and they were holding cards in their raised hands. As they circled past us, they held out the cards so we could see what they were: ID cards, showing they were federal employees. They were making the peace sign with their other hands, they were circling around the building to show solidarity with what we were doing. Their spokesman said over a bullhorn, “We want this war to be over, too! Thank you for what you are doing! Keep it up.” Photographers, including police, were scrambling to take pictures of them, and some of them held up their ID cards so they would get in the picture. It was the high point of the day.

A little while after the employees had gone back inside the building, there was a sudden shift in the mood of the police. An order had been passed. The bloc of police in the center of the square got into tight formation and lowered their plastic helmets. The police standing right in front of us, over us, straightened up, adjusted their uniforms and lowered their masks. Apparently the time had come to start arrests. The supporters who didn’t want to be arrested fell back.

But there was no arrest warning. There was a whistle, and the line of police began inching forward, black batons raised upright. They were going to walk through us or over us, push us back. The man in front of us, who had been talking to Howard about his lecture a little earlier, muttered to us under his breath, “Leave! Now! Quick, get up.” He was warning, not menacing us.

Howard and I looked at each other. We’d come expecting to get arrested. It didn’t seem right to just get up and move because someone told us to, without arresting us. We stayed where we were. No one else left either. Boots were touching our shoes. The voice over our heads whispered intensely, “Move! Please. For God’s sake, move!” Knees in uniform pressed our knees. I saw a club coming down. I put my hands over my head, fists clenched, and a four-foot baton hit my wrist, hard. Another one hit my shoulder.

I rolled over, keeping my arms over my head, got up and moved back a few yards. Howard was being hauled off by several policemen. One had Howard’s arms pinned behind him, another had jerked his head back by the hair. Someone had ripped his shirt in two, there was blood on his bare chest. A moment before he had been sitting next to me, and I waited for someone to do the same to me, but no one did. I didn’t see anyone else getting arrested. But no one was sitting anymore, the line had been broken, disintegrated. Those who had been sitting hadn’t moved very far, they were standing like me a few yards back, looking around, holding themselves where they’d been clubbed. The police had stopped moving. They stood in a line, helmets still down, slapping their batons against their hands. Their adrenaline was still up, but they were standing in place.

Blood was running down my hand, covering the back of my hand. I was wearing a heavy watch, and it had taken the force of the blow. The baton had smashed the crystal and driven pieces of glass into my wrist. Blood was dripping off my fingers. Someone gave me a handkerchief to wrap around my wrist and told me to raise my arm. The handkerchief got soaked quickly and blood was running down my arm while I looked for a first-aid station that was supposed to be at the back of the crowd, in a corner of the square. I finally found it, and someone picked the glass out of my arm and put a thick bandage around it.

I went back to the protest. My shoulder was aching. The police were standing where they had stopped, and the blockade had reformed, people were sitting 10 yards back from where they had been before. There seemed to be more people sitting, not fewer. Many of the supporters had joined in. But it was quiet. No one was speaking loudly, no laughing. People were waiting for the police to move forward again. They weren’t expecting any longer to get arrested.

Only three or four people had been picked out of the line to be arrested before. The police had made a decision (it turned out) to arrest only the “leaders,” not to give us the publicity of arrests and trials. Howard hadn’t been an organizer of this action, he was just participating like the rest of us, but from the way they treated him when they pulled him out of the line, his comments directly to the police in the rally the day before must have rubbed someone the wrong way.I found Roz Zinn, Howard’s wife, sitting in the line on the side at right angles to where Howard and I had been before. I sat down between her and their housemate, a woman her age. They had been in support before until they had seen what happened to Howard.

Looking at the police in formation, with their uniforms and clubs, guns on their hips, I felt naked. I knew that it was an illusion in combat to think you were protected because you were carrying a weapon, but it was an illusion that worked. For the first time, I was very conscious of being unarmed. At last, in my own country, I understood what a Vietnamese villager must have felt at what the Marines called a “county fair,” when the Marines rounded up everyone they could find in a hamlet — all women, children and old people never draft- or VC-age young men — to be questioned one at a time in a tent, meanwhile passing out candy to the kids and giving vaccinations. Winning hearts and minds, trying to recruit informers. No one among the villagers knowing what the soldiers, in their combat gear, would do next, or which of them might be detained.

We sat and talked and waited for the police to come again. They lowered their helmets and formed up. The two women I was with were both older than I was. I moved my body in front of them, to take the first blows. I felt a hand on my elbow. “Excuse me, I was sitting there,” the woman who shared the Zinns’ house said to me, with a cold look. She hadn’t come there that day and sat down, she told me later, to be protected by me. I apologized and scrambled back, behind them.

No one moved. The police didn’t move, either. They stood in formation facing us, plastic masks over their faces, for quite a while. But they didn’t come forward again. They had kept open a passage in front for the employees inside to leave after 5, and eventually the police left, and we left.

* * *

There was a happier story to tell, slightly more than one month later. On Saturday night, June 12, 1971, we had a date with Howard and Roz to see “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” in Harvard Square. But that morning I learned from someone at The New York Times that — without having alerted me — The Times was about to start publishing the top secret documents I had given them that evening. That meant I might get a visit from the FBI at any moment; and for once, I had copies of the papers in my apartment, because I planned to send them to Sen. Mike Gravel for his filibuster against the draft.

From “Secrets” (p. 386):

“I had to get the documents out of our apartment. I called the Zinns, who had been planning to come by our apartment later to join us for the movie, and asked if we could come by their place in Newton [Mass.] instead. I took the papers in a box in the trunk of our car. They weren’t the ideal people to avoid attracting the attention of the FBI. Howard had been in charge of managing antiwar activist Daniel Berrigan’s movements underground while he was eluding the FBI for months (so from that practical point of view he was an ideal person to hide something from them), and it could be assumed that his phone was tapped, even if he wasn’t under regular surveillance. However, I didn’t know whom else to turn to that Saturday afternoon. Anyway, I had given Howard a large section of the study already, to read as a historian; he’d kept it in his office at Boston University. As I expected, they said yes immediately. Howard helped me bring up the box from the car.

“We drove back to Harvard Square for the movie. The Zinns had never seen ‘Butch Cassidy’ before. It held up for all of us. Afterward we bought ice-cream cones at Brigham’s and went back to our apartment. Finally Howard and Roz went home before it was time for the early edition of the Sunday New York Times to arrive at the subway kiosk below the square. Around midnight Patricia and I went over to the square and bought a couple of copies. We came up the stairs into Harvard Square reading the front page, with the three-column story about the secret archive, feeling very good.”

Daniel Ellsberg is a lecturer, writer and activist and the former American military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who, in 1971, released the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times.

Bolton Book Ups Pressure on GOP to Allow Witnesses

WASHINGTON (AP) — Pressure is increasing on senators to call John Bolton to testify at President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial after the revelation that a draft of a book by the former national security adviser undercuts a key defense argument — that Trump never tied withholding military aid to Ukraine to his demand the country help investigate political rival Joe Biden.

Bolton writes in the forthcoming book that Trump told him he wanted to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in security aid from Ukraine until it helped him with investigations into Biden. Trump’s legal team has repeatedly insisted otherwise, and Trump tweeted on Monday that he never told Bolton such a thing.

Republican senators faced a pivotal moment as they arrived on Capitol Hill to resume Trump’s trial, where the president’s defense lawyers picked up their defense. One, Jay Sekulow, appeared off the bat Monday to take a veiled swipe at the relevancy of the allegations from Bolton in the book draft.

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“We deal with transcript evidence, we deal with publicly available information,” Sekulow said. “We do not deal with speculation, allegations that are not based on evidentiary standards at all.”

Democrats are demanding sworn testimony from Bolton and other key witnesses, and pressure is mounting on at least four Republicans to buck GOP leaders and form a bipartisan majority to force the issue.

“John Bolton’s relevance to our decision has become increasingly clear,” GOP Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah told reporters. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said she has always wanted “the opportunity for witnesses” and the report about Bolton’s book “strengthens the case.”

But several GOP senators who met privately with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said nothing had changed. McConnell declined comment.

“Really, there’s nothing new here,” said Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican. He dismissed the new information as an “effort to sell books.”

Before any vote on witnesses, Trump’s legal team was to make its case in depth on Monday, turning to several high-profile attorneys to argue against impeachment.

The team laid out the broad outlines of its defense in a rare Saturday session, at which they accused House Democrats of using the impeachment case to try to undo the results of the last presidential election and drive Trump from office.

The White House has had Bolton’s manuscript for about a month, and has challenged his use of certain material it considers classified, according to a letter from Bolton’s attorney.

Democrats are saying that Trump’s refusal to allow administration officials to testify in the impeachment proceeding only reinforces that the White House is hiding evidence.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said: “We’re all staring a White House cover-up in the face.”

Schumer drew on polls that show the public wants to hear from witnesses. “We want the truth,” he said. “So do the American people.”

Rep. Adam Schiff, who is leading the House prosecution team, called Bolton’s account a test for the senators sitting as jurors.

“I don’t know how you can explain that you wanted a search for the truth in this trial and say you don’t want to hear from a witness who had a direct conversation about the central allegation in the articles of impeachment,” Schiff said on CNN.

Four Republicans would have to break ranks to join Democrats to call any witnesses, which would extend the trial, which has been expected to conclude fairly rapidly. The Republicans hold a 53-47 Senate majority.

Bolton’s account was first reported by The New York Times and was confirmed to The Associated Press by a person familiar with the manuscript on the condition of anonymity. “The Room Where It Happened; A White House Memoir” is to be released March 17.

John Ullyot, a spokesman for the National Security Council that Bolton used to lead, said the manuscript was submitted to the NSC for “pre-publication review” and had been under initial review.

“No White House personnel outside NSC have reviewed the manuscript,” he said.

When the Times report went online Sunday night, the seven House Democratic managers immediately called on all senators to insist that Bolton be called as a witness and provide his notes and other relevant documents. Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s top Democrat, issued the same call.

Trump denied the claims in a series of tweets early Monday.

“I NEVER told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens,” Trump said. “If John Bolton said this, it was only to sell a book.”

Trump said people could look at transcripts of his call with Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelinskiy to see there was no pressure for such investigations to get the aid. In that call, Trump asked Zelinskiy to “do us a favor” with the investigations as he was withholding nearly $400 million in military aid to the U.S. ally at war with Russia.

Trump falsely claimed Monday that the Democrat-controlled House “never even asked John Bolton to testify.” Democrats did ask Bolton to testify, but he didn’t show up for his deposition. They later declined to subpoena Bolton, as they had others, because he threatened to sue, which could lead to a prolonged court battle.

Schiff said Bolton — known to be a copious notetaker — should also provide documents.

Bolton, who sent this book manuscript to the White House for review, is now enmeshed in a legal dispute with the White House over the manuscript’s use of direct quotes and other material from meetings and foreign leader discussions. That’s according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person wasn’t authorized to speak on the record.

The White House has requested that Bolton remove material it considers classified, the person said, which has the book behind schedule.

Bolton acrimoniously left the White House a day before Trump ultimately released the Ukraine aid on Sept. 11. He has already told lawmakers that he is willing to testify, despite the president’s order barring aides from cooperating in the probe.

Eventual acquittal is likely in a Senate where a two-thirds majority vote would be needed for conviction. Still, the White House sees its Senate presentation this week as an opportunity to counter the allegations, defend the powers of the presidency and prevent Trump from being weakened politically ahead of November’s election.

Trump faces two articles of impeachment. One accuses him of abusing his power by asking Ukraine to investigate while withholding military aid. The other alleges that Trump obstructed Congress by directing aides to not cooperate with the impeachment inquiry.

Monday’s presentation was expected to include appearances by Alan Dershowitz, who will argue that impeachable offenses require criminal-like conduct, and Ken Starr, the independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi is also expected to make arguments.

Democrats argued their side of the impeachment case for three days last week, warning that Trump will persist in abusing his power and endangering American democracy unless Congress intervenes to remove him before the 2020 election.

Once Trump’s team concludes, senators will have 16 hours to ask questions of both the House impeachment prosecutors and the president’s legal team. Their questions must be in writing, and Chief Justice John Roberts, who has been presiding over the trial, will read them aloud.

Arizona, California Cases Push U.S. Tally of New Virus From China to 5

LOS ANGELES — The U.S. has five confirmed cases of the new virus from China, all among people who traveled to the city at the center of the outbreak, health officials said Sunday.

Two new cases were reported Sunday — one in Los Angeles County in California and the other in Maricopa County, Arizona. The latter case was someone with ties to Arizona State University who did not live in school housing, state health officials said.

Officials with the Arizona Department of Health Service didn’t immediately release the gender or age of the Maricopa County patient, but said the person wasn’t severely ill and was in isolation to keep the illness from spreading.

The three previously reported cases were a patient in Orange County, California; a man in his 30s in Washington state; and a woman in her 60s from Chicago.

The virus can cause fever, coughing, wheezing and pneumonia. It is a member of the coronavirus family that’s a close cousin to the deadly SARS and MERS viruses that have caused outbreaks in the past.

Dozens of people have died from the virus in China, which has issued massive travel bans in hard-hit sections of that country to try to stem spread of the virus. The U.S. consulate in Wuhan announced Sunday that it would evacuate its personnel and some private citizens aboard a charter flight.

The U.S. patients generally have been reported to be in good condition and were hospitalized in isolation for monitoring.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects many more Americans to be diagnosed with the newly discovered virus, which is believed to have an incubation period of about two weeks, as worldwide the number of confirmed cases nears 2,000. The CDC is screening passengers on direct and connecting flights from Wuhan at five major airports in Atlanta, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

CDC officials noted Sunday that more than two dozen people who had been suspected of having the illness ended up testing negative.

Guidance from the CDC advises that people who have had casual contact with the patient are at “minimal risk” for developing infection.

Kobe Bryant, His Daughter and 7 Others Die in Helicopter Crash

CALABASAS, Calif. — NBA legend Kobe Bryant, his daughter and seven others were killed Sunday when their helicopter plunged into a steep hillside in dense morning fog in Southern California, his sudden death at age 41 touching off an outpouring of grief for a star whose celebrity transcended basketball.

The chopper went down in Calabasas, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Authorities said nine people were aboard and presumed dead. Bryant, an all-time basketball great who spent his entire 20-year career with the Los Angeles Lakers, was among the victims, a person familiar with the situation told The Associated Press.

Bryant’s 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, also was killed, a different person familiar with the case said.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva would not confirm the identities of the victims Sunday pending official word from the coroner.

“God bless their souls,” Villanueva said at a news conference.

The cause of the crash was unknown.

News of the charismatic superstar’s death rocketed around the sports and entertainment worlds, with many taking to Twitter to register their shock, disbelief and anguish.

“Words can’t describe the pain I am feeling. I loved Kobe — he was like a little brother to me,” retired NBA great Michael Jordan said. “We used to talk often, and I will miss those conversations very much. He was a fierce competitor, one of the greats of the game and a creative force.”

NBA players were in tears during pregame warm-ups as crowds chanted “Kobe! Kobe!” Tiger Woods was unaware of the news during his final round at Torrey Pines in San Diego when he started hearing the gallery yell “Do it for Mamba,” referring to Bryant by his nickname.

The medical examiner’s office said specialists were working at the scene to recover the bodies, and investigators were trying to confirm identities. Federal transportation safety investigators were en route.

Bryant’s helicopter left Santa Ana shortly after 9 a.m. and circled for a time just east of Interstate 5, near Glendale. Air traffic controllers noted poor visibility around Burbank, just to the north, and Van Nuys, to the northwest.

After holding up the helicopter for other aircraft, they cleared the Sikorsky S-76 to proceed north along Interstate 5 through Burbank before turning west to follow U.S Route 101, the Ventura Highway.

Shortly after 9:40 a.m., the helicopter turned again, toward the southeast, and climbed to more than 2,000 feet above sea level. It then descended and crashed into the hillside at about 1,400 feet, according to data from Flightradar24.

When it struck the ground, the helicopter was flying at about 160 knots (184 mph) and descending at a rate of more than 4,000 feet per minute, the Flightradar24 data showed.

At the time of the crash, the Los Angles County Sheriff’s Department had grounded its own helicopters because of the poor weather conditions. The impact scattered debris over an area about the size of a football field, Villanueva said.

Among other things, investigators will look at the pilot’s history, the chopper’s maintenance history, and the records of its owner and operator, NTSB board member Jennifer Homendy said at a news conference.

Justin Green, an aviation attorney in New York who flew helicopters in the Marine Corps, said weather may have contributed to the crash. Pilots can become disoriented in low visibility, losing track of which direction is up. Green said a pilot flying an S-76 would be instrument-rated, meaning they could fly the helicopter without relying on visual cues from outside.

All around the world, people were glued to their phones and TV screens as news of the crash spread and networks broke into programming with live coverage. A visibly shaken LeBron James wiped his eyes with tissues and walked away alone from the Lakers plane that had just landed in Southern California.

Thousands of people gathered to mourn Bryant outside the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. Mourners in No. 24 jerseys mixed with those in fancy dress arriving at the downtown arena for Sunday evening’s Grammy Awards.

People carried flowers and chanted “Kobe!” and “MVP!” under giant video screens showing Bryant’s smiling face.

“This is where we needed to be,” said Naveen Cheerath, 31.

Bryant retired in 2016 as the third-leading scorer in NBA history, finishing two decades with the Lakers as a prolific shot-maker with a sublime all-around game and a relentless competitive ethic. He held that spot in the league scoring ranks until Saturday night, when the Lakers’ James passed him for third place during a game in Philadelphia, Bryant’s hometown.

“Continuing to move the game forward (at)KingJames,” Bryant wrote in his last tweet. “Much respect my brother.”

Bryant had one of the greatest careers in recent NBA history and became one of the game’s most popular players as the face of the 16-time NBA champion Lakers franchise. He was the league MVP in 2008 and a two-time NBA scoring champion, and he earned 12 selections to the NBA’s All-Defensive teams.

He teamed with O’Neal in a combustible partnership to lead the Lakers to consecutive NBA titles in 2000, 2001 and 2002.

His Lakers tenure was marred by scandal, when in 2003, Bryant was accused of raping a 19-year-old employee at a Colorado resort. He said the two had consensual sex, and prosecutors later dropped the felony sexual assault charge at the request of the accuser. The woman later filed a civil suit against Bryant that was settled out of court.

Bryant went on to win two more titles in 2009 and 2010, and retired in 2016 after scoring 60 points in his final NBA game.

After leaving the game, Bryant had more time to play coach to daughter Gianna, who had a budding basketball career of her own and, her father said, wanted to one day play in the WNBA. They were seen sitting courtside at a Brooklyn Nets game late last year, Bryant clearly passing along his wisdom to his daughter. He regularly showcased her talents on the court on social media.

Bryant’s death was felt particularly painfully in Los Angeles, where he was unquestionably the most popular athlete and one of the city’s most beloved public figures. Hundreds of fans — many in Bryant jerseys and Lakers gear — spontaneously gathered at Staples Center and in the surrounding LA Live entertainment complex, weeping and staring at video boards with Bryant’s image.

Among those killed were John Altobelli, head coach of Southern California’s Orange Coast College baseball team, his wife, Keri, and daughter, Alyssa, who played on the same team as Bryant’s daughter, said his brother, Tony, who is the sports information director at the school.

The National Transportation Safety Board typically issues a preliminary report within about 10 days that will give a rough summary of what investigators have learned. A ruling on the cause can take a year or more.

Colin Storm was in his living room in Calabasas when he heard what sounded to him like a low-flying airplane or helicopter.

“Ït was very foggy so we couldn’t see anything,” he said. “But then we heard some sputtering and then a boom.”

The fog cleared a bit, and Storm could see smoke rising from the hillside in front of his home.

Firefighters hiked in with medical equipment and hoses, and medical personnel rappelled to the site from a helicopter, but found no survivors, Los Angeles County Fire Chief Daryl Osby said.

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Associated Press writers Christopher Weber in Los Angeles, David Koenig in Dallas, Mark J. Terrill and John Antczak in Calabasas, Tim Reynolds in Miami and Michael Rubinkam in northeastern Pennsylvania contributed to this report.