New York Times

This week, Sen Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, will push for new answers. Executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter are set to testify at congressional hearings on Oct 31 and Nov 1 about the election and the power of their platforms Lawmakers are increasingly taking a critical tone with Silicon Valley, with Sen Warner among the harshest. He has already pushed a bill requiring the companies to disclose who paid for digital political ads, the biggest legislative effort so far to regulate the companies. Sen Warner’s position is a sharp reversal.

Roger J. Stone Jr., an ally of President Donald Trump and a self-proclaimed political “dirty trickster,” has been kicked off Twitter.

In a series of tweets on Oct 27, Stone insulted several CNN news anchors and contributors. The messages appeared to be in response to reports that a federal grand jury had approved charges in the continuing investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russia.

[Commentary] In this age of “new” censorship and blunt manipulation of political speech, where is the First Amendment? Americans like to think of it as the great protector of the press and of public debate. Yet it seems to have become a bit player, confined to a narrow and often irrelevant role. It is time to ask: Is the First Amendment obsolete? If so, what can be done? These questions arise because the jurisprudence of the First Amendment was written for a different set of problems in a very different world.

While India produces some of the world’s best coders and computer engineers, vast multitudes of its people are entering the virtual world with little sense of what lies within it, or how it could be of use to them. Those who work in development tend to speak of this moment as a civilizational breakthrough, of particular significance in a country aching to educate its children. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has made expanding internet use a central goal, shifting government services onto digital platforms. When Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, toured India in 2014, he told audiences that for every 10 people who get online, “one person gets lifted out of poverty and one new job gets created.” Young men use the internet in Taradand. Bollywood films. Older people view it as a conduit for pornography and other wastes of time. Women are not allowed access even to simple mobile phones, for fear they will engage in illicit relationships; the internet is out of the question. Illiterate people — almost everyone over 40 — dismiss the internet as not intended for them.

Before Donald Trump rode the anger of forgotten (white) America to an “America First” presidency, before Breitbart News became a “platform for the alt-right” and before there were “alternative facts” and dueling versions of reality, Roger Ailes saw a divided country but an undivided news media. And he set out to change it.

Roger E Ailes, who shaped the images that helped elect three Republican presidents and then became a dominant, often-intimidating force in American conservative politics at the helm of Fox News until he was forced out in a sexual predation scandal, died on May 18. He was 77. No cause of death or other details were given in an announcement by Ailes’s wife, Elizabeth. Ailes was a hemophiliac long plagued by obesity and arthritis.

During a private meeting in February with former-FBI Director James Comey, President Donald Trump floated a proposal that, even by the standards of a leader who routinely advertises his disdain for the news media, brought editors and reporters up short. You should consider, President Trump told Comey, jailing journalists who publish classified information. Presidents are rarely afraid to wrangle and bully reporters, and Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, was pilloried by news organizations for aggressively prosecuting leakers. But Trump’s suggestion breached new territory for political reporters who already consider their profession under siege. “Suggesting that the government should prosecute journalists for the publication of classified information is very menacing, and I think that’s exactly what they intend,” said Martin Baron, The Washington Post’s executive editor. “It’s an act of intimidation.” While Trump’s proposal to Comey could be construed as a private fit of pique, journalists and press freedom groups said that they were alarmed by the possibility that he considered, even casually, enlisting the Justice Department to quash reporting he disliked.

The Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller III, a former FBI director, as special counsel to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials, dramatically raising the legal and political stakes in an affair that has threatened to engulf Trump’s four-month-old presidency.

The decision by the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, came after a cascade of damaging developments for President Trump in recent days, including his abrupt dismissal of FBI Director James Comey and the subsequent disclosure that President Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation of his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Rosenstein had been under escalating pressure from Democrats, and even some Republicans, to appoint a special counsel after he wrote a memo that the White House initially cited as the rationale for Comey’s dismissal. By appointing Mueller, a former federal prosecutor with an unblemished reputation, Rosenstein could alleviate uncertainty about the government’s ability to investigate the questions surrounding the Trump campaign and the Russians. Rosenstein said that he concluded that “it is in the public interest for me to exercise my authorities and appoint a special counsel to assume responsibility for this matter.”

Apparently, Michael Flynn told President Trump’s transition team weeks before the inauguration that he was under federal investigation for secretly working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey during the campaign. Despite this warning, which came about a month after the Justice Department notified Flynn of the inquiry, President Trump made Flynn his national security adviser. The job gave Flynn access to the president and nearly every secret held by American intelligence agencies. Flynn’s disclosure, on Jan. 4, was first made to the transition team’s chief lawyer, Donald F. McGahn II, who is now the White House counsel. That conversation, and another one two days later between Flynn’s lawyer and transition lawyers, shows that the Trump team knew about the investigation of Flynn far earlier than has been previously reported. After Flynn’s dismissal, Trump tried to get James Comey, the FBI director, to drop the investigation — an act that some legal experts say is grounds for an investigation of President Trump for possible obstruction of justice. He fired Comey on May 9.