New York Times

Donald Trump said that he hoped Russia had hacked Hillary Clinton’s e-mail, essentially encouraging an adversarial foreign power to cyberspy on a secretary of state’s correspondence. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing,” Trump said, staring directly into the cameras during a news conference. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Trump’s call was an extraordinary moment at a time when Russia is being accused of meddling in the United States’ presidential election. His comments came amid questions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers, which American intelligence agencies have told the White House they have “high confidence” was the work of the Russian government. Later in the news conference, when asked if he was really urging a foreign nation to hack into the private e-mail server of Clinton, or at least meddle in the nation’s elections, he dismissed the question. “That’s up to the president,” Trump said, before finally saying “be quiet” to the female questioner. “Let the president talk to them.” The Clinton campaign immediately accused Trump of both encouraging Russian espionage against the United States and meddling in domestic politics.

[Commentary] Yes, we’re having a national election right now. Yes, there are two parties running. But no, they are not the two parties that you think. It’s not “Democrats” versus “Republicans.” This election is really between “Wall People” and “Web People.”

The primary focus of Wall People is finding a president who will turn off the fan — the violent winds of change that are now buffeting every family — in their workplace, where machines are threatening white-collar and blue-collar jobs; in their neighborhoods, where so many more immigrants of different religions, races and cultures are moving in; and globally, where super-empowered angry people are now killing innocents with disturbing regularity. They want a wall to stop it all.

Web People instinctively understand that Democrats and Republicans both built their platforms largely in response to the Industrial Revolution, the New Deal and the Cold War, but that today, a 21st-century party needs to build its platform in response to the accelerations in technology, globalization and climate change, which are the forces transforming the workplace, geopolitics and the very planet. As such, the instinct of Web People is to embrace the change in the pace of change and focus on empowering more people to be able to compete and collaborate in a world without walls. In particular, Web People understand that in times of rapid change, open systems are always more flexible, resilient and propulsive; they offer the chance to feel and respond first to change. So Web People favor more trade expansion, along the lines of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and more managed immigration that attracts the most energetic and smartest minds, and more vehicles for lifelong learning.

If America is to thrive in the 21st century, we desperately need a coalition that can govern smartly in this era of rapid change. Clinton has a chance to break not only the glass ceiling for women, but also the rigid walls that have divided our two parties. If she can pull that off, it will make being the first woman president the second most important thing she does.

For some publishers unsettled by a fast-changing online advertising business, sponsored content has provided much-needed relief. In recent years, publications large and small have invested in teams to make sponsored content — written stories, videos or podcasts that look and feel like journalistic content — hoping to make up for declines in conventional advertising. To varying degrees, they have succeeded. Younger companies like Vice and BuzzFeed have built whole businesses around the concept. But as the relationship between publishers and social platforms like Facebook grows closer — and as more straightforward forms of advertising are devalued by ad-blocking and industry automation, the role, and definition, of sponsored content has shifted.

Now, publishers, social media companies and advertisers are negotiating new relationships. Audiences have migrated away from news websites and toward Facebook and other social media destinations, which for a competitive price can provide advertisers access to larger and more finely targeted groups of people, challenging the value of a publisher’s own channels. With a weaker claim over audiences, publishers have been left to compete for advertising on different terms, leaning less on the size or demographics of their readerships, and more on the sorts of campaigns they can engineer for advertisers — campaigns that are then used across the Internet.

China has ordered several of the country’s most popular Internet portals to halt much of their original news reporting, in a move that could confine an even larger share of the journalism in the country to Communist-controlled mouthpieces ahead of an important party meeting in 2017. The profit-driven portals, several of which are listed on United States stock exchanges, have in recent years expanded their investigative teams to increase readership among China’s more than 600 million Internet users by scooping the staid state-owned news media on stories about subjects including industrial pollution, tainted milk powder and even police brutality.

But on July 25, several news organizations reported that the Beijing office of China’s Internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, ordered the websites of a number of the companies, including Sina, Sohu, NetEase and Phoenix, to shut down or “clean up” several of their most popular online news features. The announcement came within weeks of the surprise departure of the Cyberspace Administration’s director, Lu Wei, and his replacement by an official who had served under President Xi Jinping in a previous position. Under Mr. Xi, media controls have tightened as the Communist Party has tried to squelch news that might put its governance in an unfavorable light.

Big City is watching you. It will do it with camera-equipped drones that inspect municipal power lines and robotic cars that know where people go. Sensor-laden streetlights will change brightness based on danger levels. Technologists and urban planners are working on a major transformation of urban landscapes over the next few decades. Much of it involves the close monitoring of things and people, thanks to digital technology.

To the extent that this makes people’s lives easier, the planners say, they will probably like it. But troubling and knotty questions of privacy and control remain. A White House report published in February identified advances in transportation, energy and manufacturing, among other developments, that will bring on what it termed “a new era of change.” Much of the change will also come from the private sector, which is moving faster to reach city dwellers, and is more skilled in collecting and responding to data. That is leading cities everywhere to work more closely than ever with private companies, which may have different priorities than the government.

Yahoo’s board has agreed to sell the company’s core internet operations and land holdings to Verizon Communications for $4.8 billion.

After the sale, Yahoo shareholders will be left with about $41 billion in investments in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, as well as Yahoo Japan and a small portfolio of patents. That compares with Yahoo’s peak value of more than $125 billion, reached in January 2000. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, is not expected to join Verizon, but she is due to receive a severance payout worth about $57 million, according to Equilar, a compensation research firm.

For Verizon, the deal simply adds another piece to the digital media and advertising business it is trying to build. Verizon is building a portfolio of online content and aiming to monetize it via advertising. Its current assets include Huffington Post and TechCrunch, which it acquired in last year’s AOL deal, and its own mobile video app, called go90. Acquiring Yahoo will bring in millions more viewers from Yahoo sites like Finance, Sports and News. Verizon also hopes to plug data derived from smartphones into AOL, and now Yahoo’s, digital advertising systems, and it is aiming to build a competitor to online advertising giants Facebook and Google. But a combined Yahoo and AOL would be far outpaced by its now far-larger rivals.

The companies said the deal is subject to customary closing conditions, including approval by Yahoo’s shareholders, and is expected to close in early 2017. Until the closing, the companies said, Yahoo will continue to operate independently.

China has ordered several of the country’s most popular internet portals to halt much of their original news reporting, in a move that could confine an even larger share of the journalism in the country to Communist-controlled mouthpieces ahead of an important party meeting in 2017.

The profit-driven portals, several of which are listed on United States stock exchanges, have in recent years expanded their investigative teams to increase readership among China’s more than 600 million internet users by scooping the staid state-owned news media on stories about subjects including industrial pollution, tainted milk powder and even police brutality. But on July 25, several news organizations reported that the Beijing office of China’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, ordered the websites of a number of the companies, including Sina, Sohu, NetEase and Phoenix, to shut down or “clean up” several of their most popular online news features.

William Gaines, an investigative reporter for The Chicago Tribune who shared two Pulitzer Prizes for exposing corruption in Chicago and was a finalist for a third, died on July 20 in Munster (IN) He was 82. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his daughter, Michelle Gaines, said.

Gaines, who joined The Tribune in 1963 and uncovered malfeasance for most of his tenure, until he retired in 2001, won his first Pulitzer in 1976 for local investigative specialized reporting on a newspaper team that exposed mortgage abuse in federal housing programs and horrific conditions at two private hospitals — including one where, while working undercover as a janitor, he was enlisted to assist during surgery. “The experience was frightening to me; it was depressing,” he wrote in a Tribune column in 1975, “for I knew that it was not just a fluke that I, a janitor, had been called on to do the work of trained orderlies and nurses’ aides.” He shared his second Pulitzer in 1988, for investigative reporting, with Dean Baquet, now the executive editor of The New York Times, and Ann Marie Lipinski, now the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The prize recognized a series of articles that uncovered waste and self-dealing in the Chicago City Council. The Pulitzer board called the series “a model of municipal reporting.”

Roger Ailes stepped down July 21 as chairman and chief executive of Fox News, ending a 20-year reign as head of the cable network he built into a ratings juggernaut and an influential platform for Republican politics. Rupert Murdoch, the 85-year-old media mogul who started Fox News with Ailes, will assume the role of chairman and will be an interim chief executive of Fox News channel and Fox Business Network until a permanent replacement for Ailes is found.

Ailes will receive about $40 million as part of a settlement agreement, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. As part of the agreement, Ailes cannot start a competitor to Fox News. He will continue to make himself available as an adviser to Murdoch on an interim basis, the person said, though he will not be directly involved with Fox News or its owner, 21st Century Fox. In a statement, Murdoch praised Ailes, 76, and his “remarkable contribution” to the company, without making mention of the sexual harassment scandal that felled him.

The Republican convention erupted into tumult July 20 as the bitter primary battle between Donald J. Trump and Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) reignited unexpectedly, crushing hopes that the party could project unity. In the most electric moment of the convention, boos and jeers broke out as it became clear that Sen Cruz — in a prime-time address from center stage — was not going to endorse Trump. It was a pointed snub on the eve of Trump’s formal acceptance speech. As hundreds of delegates chanted “Vote for Trump!” and “Say it!” Sen Cruz tried to dismiss the outburst as “enthusiasm of the New York delegation” — only to have Trump himself suddenly appear in the back of the convention hall.

Virtually every head in the room seemed to turn from Sen Cruz to Trump, who was stone-faced and clearly angry as he egged on delegates by pumping his fist. Sen Cruz was all but drowned out as he asked for God’s blessing on the country and left the stage, while security personnel escorted his wife, Heidi, out of the hall. One delegate yelled “Goldman Sachs!” at her — a reference to the company that has employed her, a job that Trump attacked during the primaries. A short while later, Sen Cruz faced insults as he made his way down a corridor — one woman yelled “Traitor!” When he tried to enter the convention suite of the Las Vegas (NV) casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, he was turned away.