Cohen Filings Implicate Trump | UN Envoy, Attorney General Named

While special counsel Robert Mueller’s sentencing memo for President Donald Trump’s ex-attorney, Michael Cohen, revealed he was offered “political synergy” with the Kremlin in 2015, federal prosecutors in New York directly implicated the chief executive in a crime. Their separate Cohen sentencing recommendation says the candidate directed hush money payments to two women alleging affairs with Trump, violating campaign finance law. Mueller’s memo urges leniency, but the New York filing seeks as much as five years imprisonment when Cohen is sentenced Wednesday. Trump’s reaction was concise: “Totally clears the President. Thank you!”

President Trump on Friday named State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert to fill departing Nikki Haley’s U.N. seat. Nauert’s been a co-host of “Fox and Friends,” known to influence the president’s agenda. To replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions, forced out just after midterm elections, the president tapped William Barr, who occupied the same post under President George H.W. Bush in 1991 and 1992. Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayres, may also get a call, as he’s reportedly handling presidential appointments normally fielded by Chief of Staff John Kelly, who’s expected to leave.

He was the Greatest Generation’s last leader. The 41st president’s funeral train arrived in Texas, where he was buried Thursday at his presidential library in College Station. In death, Bush brought President Trump together with four predecessors, including George W. Bush, the 43rd commander in chief, who delivered a tearful eulogy at his father’s Washington funeral on Wednesday. Not laid to rest was Bush’s legacy: foreign policy triumphs, domestic failures and his willingness to serve, as a Navy pilot and as a leader during a tumultuous era.

For three AFP journalists, the leaderless Paris riots have proved difficult to cover. The violence erupted unexpectedly, punctuated with the din of tear gas canisters whistling and rubber Flash-Balls booming from police gun barrels. Seeing how dispersed and spontaneous it was, one journalist observed, “This looks like a revolution.” Both ordinary people and experienced demonstrators erected barricades and attacked police en masse. Some set fires and flipped cars, while others urged restraint. The mayhem was enough to exact a reversal of an environmentally minded fuel tax, with new clashes already erupting this morning.

The Week Ahead: Nobel Prizes are to be given to laureates at ceremonies Monday in Stockholm and Oslo. British Prime Minister Theresa May faces a hostile Parliament Tuesday, when she’s planning to submit her Brexit plan for a vote. And that day Google CEO Sundar Pichai is to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on the search giant’s handling of user data.

Know This: Panicked patrons stampeded out of a nightclub, killing six people in Italy early today. A Charlottesville, Virginia, jury has convicted white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. of first-degree murder for fatally running down Heather Heyer amid counterdemonstrations during the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in the city. And a federal court has blocked the Trump administration’s move to refuse asylum applications from immigrants entering the country illegally.

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After one 8-year-old had no one to play with at his school in Cork, Ireland, his mother nudged administrators to get a “buddy bench.” The benches serve as spots where children can find each other during lonely lunchtimes and talk about what may be bothering them, say the people who make the benches. Such personal talk is awkward in many societies, and a safe space to share can help, even for adults. Ireland’s “men’s sheds” provide places to build stuff while chatting about divorce, bereavement and other deeply personal troubles.

In 1996, the search engine fit on a computer in co-founder Larry Page’s dorm room. Four years later, no terrestrial supercomputer could run it. Google’s inadequate hardware required unique code that tolerated glitches and kept running. The authors of these robust combos of 0s and 1s, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, put in some 90 hours a week, plugging holes and correcting weaknesses in the already unparalleled search engine. Nearly 20 years later, the friendship endures, with the two still working out bugs at the same keyboard.

It sounds like something out of Arrival or Star Trek IV, but it could be humankind’s best stab at turning science fiction into reality. Using Zipf’s law, which compares the frequency of both common and uncommon sounds in a language, researchers have proved the complexity of whale and dolphin communications. That’s a big step on its own, but it could also come in handy if we ever make contact with alien life. With so many unknowns about extraterrestrial communication, decoding humpback whales’ songs could be the planet’s best bet for cracking an otherworldly language barrier.

Janine di Giovanni knows what it means to be a woman on the front lines of war reporting, and what her friend and colleague Marie Colvin faced until being killed by Syrian artillery in 2012. Apart from the Hollywood hero worship, stock characters and inaccuracies, di Giovanni respects the effort in director Matt Heineman’s film about Colvin, A Private War. It does justice, she writes, to Colvin’s courage and accomplishments, but to appreciate her personal struggles one needs to look elsewhere, like Barbara Kopple’s 2005 documentary about female war correspondents, Bearing Witness.

The San Antonio Spurs are in the market for a superstar since shipping Kawhi Leonard to Toronto. Nineteen-year-old rookie Lonnie Walker might just fit the bill. His NBA debut, similar to his college play, has shown moments of potential. But while those periods are impressive, they lack duration and frequency. Head coach Gregg Popovich is known to bring out players’ abilities, so fans will be watching to see why their team made the shooting guard its first-round draft pick.