In five weeks, President Donald Trump’s inauguration parade will roll past his new luxury hotel near the White House. But just over two weeks from now, Trump has to sit down with several lawyers and give a sworn deposition in a lawsuit involving the hotel.

What’s the lawsuit about?

Trump is suing two chefs who bailed out on the hotel after his declaration of candidacy in June 2015 — the speech in which he said Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Chefs Jose Andres and Geoffrey Zakarian, who had been building signature eateries in the historic Old Post Office building, cited the speech. Trump says they breached their contracts and is seeking $10 million from each of them.

What’s a deposition, and how important is it?

A deposition, unlike a trial, is seeking information, not determining truth. They serve as a basis for trial questions, often to see if a witness’s story changes. Witnesses at depositions have less leeway than trial witnesses in refusing to answer questions.

Veteran Washington lawyer William Taylor III said, “Depositions are taken by the other side for purposes of showing the person being deposed is either a liar or a crook.”

There’s usually no judge present at a deposition. Federal civil-trial rules, which apply in District of Columbia courts, allow depositions as long as seven hours. Trump’s attorneys asked that the upcoming deposition be just two hours; D.C. Superior Court Judge Jennifer Di Toro turned them down.

Trump has already been deposed in the Zakarian case. Trump’s attorneys asked the judge to prevent those questions from being repeated next month. She refused.

Doesn’t Trump have presidential work to attend to?

Clearly yes, but his lawyers didn’t convince Judge Di Toro that it warranted postponing the deposition. They said Trump “is extremely busy handling matters of very significant public importance.” She responded that the restaurant lawyers were working around his schedule, that Trump’s own statements are crucial to the case and, besides, his company Trump LLC had started the legal action.

Have other presidents-elect or presidents been deposed?

Sitting presidents who have been deposed are Ulysses Grant, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Only one of their depositions has major historical significance.

Clinton was deposed in 1998, in a sexual harassment suit by Paula Jones, a one-time government employee in Arkansas. It was the first time he was questioned about former White House intern Monica Lewinsky and their relationship. The deposition fueled investigations by independent counsel Kenneth Starr and House Republicans. In less than a year, House Republicans impeached Clinton. The Senate later voted to acquit him.

Will the deposition be videotaped?

Yes. Trump has been through many depositions, and video of the Zakarian session showed him to be a skilled witness, spare with his words and gestures. In other words, pretty much the opposite of his campaign persona. But whenever the video becomes public, his critics are certain to comb through it, examining both what he said and how he came across — looking for the kind of video moments that quickly flow into social media.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

During the Middle Ages, Christian pilgrims en route to Jerusalem had a problem. They needed to pay for food, transport and accommodation during their journey across Europe, which could take months. They also didn’t want to carry large amounts of precious coinage because they’d become a target for robbers. This became an obstacle to worship.

That’s where the Knights Templar stepped in. The Knights Templar were a bunch powerful monks who defended Christian pilgrims. They had a solution to this cash issue. Pilgrims could leave money safely protected with the Knights Templar in England and withdraw it in Jerusalem. No cash needed. Pilgrims could just carry a letter of credit. It was basically a private bank before there was anything else like it. This was a pretty modern idea.

Today on the show, we trace the evolution of banks from the Knights Templar to today. It’s the story of how a band of warrior monks working out of a very old church in London changed the way we think about money. There’s bloodshed, world domination, and lots of accounting.

This episode features an excerpt from the BBC World Service series and podcast, “50 Things That Made the Modern Economy,” hosted by Tim Harford. Listen and subscribe here.

Music: “Another Round” and “Deep Thinkers.” Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Providing new details about how it’s trying to counter the spread of fake news on its services, Facebook says it’s working with fact-checking groups to identify bogus stories — and to warn users if a story they’re trying to share has been reported as fake.

Facebook also says it will let users report a possible hoax by clicking the upper right hand corner of a post and choosing one of four reasons they want to flag it — from “It’s spam” to “It’s a fake news story.”

If a story is deemed false, it will be tagged with an alert message saying it’s been “disputed by 3rd party fact-checkers.”

The social media giant was sharply criticized after the Nov. 8 election, as false stories were blamed for adding confusion to a dynamic campaign season. Since then, fake news and conspiracy theories were also identified as a motivating factor in a man’s assault on a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C.

In the wake of that and other stories, some called for Facebook to hire editors to vet news stories; in today’s update from Facebook’s vice president in charge of its News Feed feature, Adam Mosseri, the company could be seen to be effectively outsourcing that job to third-party groups that it says have signed on to Poynter’s International Fact Checking Code of Principles.

The update to Facebook’s plan to cope with bogus information comes nearly one month after CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook had “much more work” to do in how it handles false stories.

Today’s news touches on four of the seven areas that Zuckerberg listed as part of his company’s fight against misinformation. It remains to be seen whether the moves will satisfy Facebook’s critics — both inside and outside the company’s ranks — who’ve faulted the way it deals with controversial, offensive and/or fake posts. As NPR’s Aarti Shahani reported in November, that effort has grown to include thousands of overseas subcontractors.

In a news release outlining how Facebook’s new reporting and flagging process will work, Mosseri said the company will rely on its users to report a story as potentially bogus, “along with other signals.” The story would then be sent to fact-checkers.

“If the fact-checking organizations identify a story as fake,” Mosseri said, “it will get flagged as disputed and there will be a link to the corresponding article explaining why. Stories that have been disputed may also appear lower in News Feed.”

Mosseri added, “It will still be possible to share these stories, but you will see a warning that the story has been disputed as you share.”

The flagged story will also be rejected if anyone tries to turn it into a promoted ad, Facebook says.

While fake news created a stir because of its intersection with U.S. politics, many of the people behind the sites say they’re mainly in it for the money.

Here’s how Craig Silverman of BuzzFeed News described what he found in researching the phenomenon, Wednesday’s Fresh Air:

“Facebook directly doesn’t really earn them a lot of money. But the key thing about Facebook — and this is true whether you’re running a politics site out of Macedonia or whether you run a very large website in the U.S. — Facebook is the biggest driver of traffic to, you know, news websites in the world now. You know, 1.8 billion people log into Facebook every month.”

Today, Facebook says it has “found that a lot of fake news is financially motivated” — and that it’s taking steps to remove some of that incentive.

“On the buying side we’ve eliminated the ability to spoof domains, which will reduce the prevalence of sites that pretend to be real publications,” Mosseri says. “On the publisher side, we are analyzing publisher sites to detect where policy enforcement actions might be necessary.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

It’s been a few weeks since President-elect Donald Trump celebrated the Carrier company’s decision to keep some factory jobs in Indiana instead of moving them to Mexico. The deal hinged on $7 million in state tax credits — some of which came from a rarely used fund for job retention. And now it has manufacturers wondering what the deal might mean for them.

Indiana doles out tens of millions of dollars in tax incentives to companies like Carrier every year — but usually those are for creating new jobs, not retaining existing ones.

The Indiana Economic Development Corporation caps its credits for job retention at $10 million a year — and it’s only actually awarded $15 million total since 2005. Compare that to the IEDC awarding $1.2 billion in job creation credits.

Andrew Berger, a lobbyist with the Indiana Manufacturers Association, says that’s because it’s easier to measure the economic benefit of a new job than one that was already there.

“The overall goal is to grow the income base, not just maintain it,” Berger says.

Berger says there won’t be much to stop companies, feeling emboldened by Carrier, from asking for more of that money — but with the spectacle around Carrier, and uncertainty around other reforms, most businesses seem cautious.

“My guess right now is that people are kind of in a wait-and-see mode, particularly if they haven’t committed to an investment overseas — whether that’s in Mexico or anyplace else,” Berger says.

Employees are waiting, too. At Rexnord’s Indianapolis factory, which Trump also has criticized for plans to shift jobs to Mexico, production worker Tim Mathis has his hopes up.

“We’re tickled to death that President-elect Trump was potentially able to save Carrier’s jobs,” Mathis says. “But we also want our jobs, and all the other jobs that are being sent out of this country.”

As the shift changes at a ZF TRW factory in Lafayette, Ind., most workers are already inside for their 5:30 p.m. start time. They’re going to be making commercial steering equipment for big-rig trucks until about 3 a.m. There are two TRW factories in Lafayette, but the other one is going to be closing in just a few weeks. Some of the workers will come here, and some of them are going to be laid off.

Larry DeBoer, an economist at Purdue University, says companies like ZF TRW don’t really face penalties for offshoring jobs. The company wouldn’t comment on the role its overseas businesses played in the 65 layoffs it’s planning in Lafayette, but workers did get a federal certification saying the jobs were impacted by global trade as positions move to China.

DeBoer says the company could have asked the state for retention money, or for incentives to expand its factories or teach workers new skills instead of firing them — all breaks Carrier got. He says companies need more than just incentives to keep jobs here — they’re watching to see if Trump will impose the kinds of offshoring penalties he campaigned on.

“Eventually there’s got to be some nationwide policy — passed by Congress, presumably — that addresses this problem,” DeBoer says. “But you can’t possibly have the president occupy himself, business by business by business, every time there’s a report that somebody’s going to move offshore.”

Expectations like DeBoer’s haven’t seemed to limit the president-elect so far, and he has pledged to make some big trade and regulatory reforms in his first 100 days in office.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

In the hours before it sank, crew members of the cargo ship El Faro struggled to find a safe course around an increasingly serious storm, according to a transcripts from the ship’s data recorder released Tuesday.

All 33 crew members died when the freighter sank near the Bahamas on Oct. 1, 2015, after sailing into the middle of Category 3 Hurricane Joaquin.

The National Transportation Safety Board is still investigating the disaster, but on Tuesday the agency released a 510-page transcript of data recorded on the bridge of the ship, where decisions about its course were made.

The recording covers the final 26 hours of the voyage. It includes audio of crew members talking, as well as information about the weather and the ship’s location.

In many cases, NTSB investigators said the voices of various crew members were difficult to understand because the room was metal and sounds echoed. In some cases, the transcript report notes, voices were unintelligible.

Still, the transcript provides a window into the final night aboard El Faro, and some of what her crew talked about, particularly the ship’s captain, Michael Davidson.

As NPR’s Greg Allen has reported, Davidson was an experienced captain:

When he left port on Tuesday in the El Faro, Joaquin was a tropical storm, not a significant concern. On early Thursday when he made the radio call to the company, Davidson said the ship was listing to one side, had lost its propulsion, was taking on water.”

The ship’s chief mate, second mate and third mate all spent significant amounts of time on the ship’s bridge during the crisis, sometimes for hours on end without the captain during shifts when Davidson was scheduled to sleep.

Beginning before midnight, the transcript shows crew members, all of whose names were redacted from the transcript, were aware the instrument on the ship measuring wind speed was not providing accurate information.

At a press conference announcing the release of the transcript, officials from the NTSB declined to comment on who or what ultimately cause the ship to sink, citing the ongoing investigation.

The following is a partial timeline of the last night aboard El Faro, beginning the evening of Sept. 30 and ending when the recording ends the morning of Oct. 1.

Partial Timeline Of The Last Night Aboard El Faro

7:57 p.m. Capt. Davidson and the Chief Mate have a “brief unintelligible conversation.” The captain’s voice “was not detected again on the bridge until 4:09 a.m.

8:21 p.m. Third mate discusses his concern about the ship’s overnight route taking it so close to where he understood the storm to be with a junior crew member. “Maybe I’m just being a chicken little. I don’t know,” says the third mate.

11:05 p.m. Third mate calls Capt. Davidson, who has left the bridge, to suggest he look at the latest forecast, and tells the captain it shows the hurricane with 100 mph winds “advancing toward our trackline – and uhh– puts us real close to it” by 4 a.m. The captain’s side of the conversation was not on the recording.

11:13 p.m. Third mate calls Capt. Davidson and says at 4 a.m. the ship will be 22 miles from the center of the storm, which will have wind gusts up to 120 mph, and provides an possible alternative route that involves turning south at 2 a.m.

12:43 a.m. Second mate expresses frustration that “every time we come further south the storm keeps trying to follow us,” indicating that at least one adjustment had been made to the ship’s course in reaction to the hurricane.

1:15 a.m. Satellite radio news bulletin announces Hurricane Jaoquin has been upgraded to a Category 3 storm. Second mate says “Oh, my God.”

1:20 a.m. Second mate calls Capt. Davidson with updated hurricane forecast information. Davidson says to stay on the current course.

2:00 a.m. National Hurricane Center “predicted seas of 30 feet with sustained winds of 74 mph, increasing to 121 mph,” according to the NTSB.

2:48 a.m. Second mate and junior crewmember have the following exchange:

Second mate: “That was a doozy. That was not a good one.”

Junior crewmember: “Yeah that was a big wave.”

Second mate: “[We] won’t be able to take more of those.”

4:10 a.m. Capt. Davidson arrives on bridge, refers to the weather as “a typical winter day in Alaska.”

5:54 a.m. Chief Mate tells the captain one of the ship’s holds is flooded.

6:13 a.m. Capt. Davidson says he thinks the ship has lost propulsion and that the ship is listing to one side.

6:31 a.m. Capt. Davidson says he wants “everybody up.”

6:38 a.m. Capt. Davidson and second mate discuss email addresses for the U.S. Coast Guard and “the company,” referring apparently to the ship’s owner.

6:54 a.m. Capt. Davidson says it is “miserable right now” and that “we’re gonna stay with the ship. We are in dire straits right now.”

7:01 a.m. Capt. Davidson calls the ship’s owner and says:

“This is a marine emergency. … we had a hull breach, a scuttle blew open during a storm. We have water down in three hold. We have a heavy list. We’ve lost the main propulsion unit. The engineers can not get it going.

“No one’s panicking.”

7:17 a.m. U.S. Coast Guard receives an electronic distress signal from El Faro

7:27 a.m. General alarm sounded.

7:29 a.m. Someone yells there are shipping containers in the water.

7:29 a.m. Capt. Davidson orders the crew to abandon ship.

7:39 a.m. Recording ends with Capt. Davidson still on the bridge of the ship.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Donald Trump has canceled a planned news conference for Thursday intended to address potential business conflicts he may face as president.

“The announcement will be in January,” Trump transition adviser Sean Spicer told NPR.

As Bloomberg News, which broke the story, reports:

“Trump had planned to make the announcement Dec. 15 but wants more time because he’s been occupied with filling out his cabinet and top administration posts, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. He’s preparing to reveal his choice for secretary of state as soon as Tuesday, they said.

“The president-elect has consulted various legal specialists as well as Don McGahn, his pick for White House counsel, about how to deal with his organization, the officials said. A new date for the announcement hasn’t been set, but it will be before his inauguration on Jan. 20, they said.

“Trump has about $3.6 billion of assets and $630 million of debt held in more than 500 companies, according to a July analysis by Bloomberg. His golf developments, tenant rosters, loans and licensing arrangements tie him to businesses and governments in 20 countries. Those ties risk hobbling his presidency with questions about motives for his policy and may raise constitutional issues.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Among his campaign promises, President-elect Donald Trump vowed to increase domestic energy production and roll back President Obama’s efforts to combat climate change. A lengthy questionnaire recently sent to the Department of Energy suggests that effort may dig deep.

Among the transition’s inquiries, NPR’s Jennifer Ludden reports:

“It wants to know who at the Department of Energy attended domestic and international climate talks. It wants emails about those conferences. It also asks about money spent on loan-guarantee programs for renewable energy. … The Trump team questionnaire also asks about the Energy Department’s role in the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump has called ‘stupid.’ And it asks for the 20 highest paid employees at the department’s national laboratories.”

The full list of the transition’s questions for DOE is available here.

The questionnaire brought immediate negative reaction from Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups, including a letter to Trump from Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts:

“This request suggests that your administration may intend to retaliate against career employees who faithfully executed their responsibilities. … If any of this information is used to demote, sideline, terminate or otherwise discriminate against federal civil servants whose only ‘crime’ was to execute the lawful policy directives of their supervisors, then your administration would violate U.S. law that protects employees against such wrongful acts of retaliation.”

Energy secretary is one of the few posts for which Trump has not yet announced a nominee, but earlier this week he made Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a steady opponent of federal environmental regulation, his pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Washington Post notes a recent history of clashes between Republican administrations and federal environmental scientists:

“In [Ronald] Reagan’s first term, Anne Gorsuch was appointed to head the Environmental Protection Agency amid a major push for regulatory rollback. But after Gorsuch resigned amid controversy in 1983, Congress opened investigations into supposed “hit lists” at the agency used to track the views of members of scientific advisory boards, according to contemporary news reports.

“During the George W. Bush administration, there were complaints that scientific documents had been edited to raise doubts about the science of climate change and that researchers had been prevented from speaking openly to the media and sharing their expertise.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

China’s top court has handed basketball legend Michael Jordan a victory in a long-running trademark dispute over the use of his name by a Chinese company.

“Nothing is more important than protecting your own name, and today’s decision shows the importance of that principle,” Jordan said in a statement after the ruling. Here’s more from Jordan:

“Over the past three decades, I have built my reputation and name into a globally recognized brand. From my earliest playing days in the NBA, through my trip to China last fall, millions of Chinese fans and consumers have always known me by my Chinese name, ‘Qiaodan.’ Today’s decision ensures that my Chinese fans and all Chinese consumers know that Qiaodan Sports and its products have no connection to me.”

The ruling by Supreme People’s Court overturns a previous ruling from a lower court that favored Qiaodan Sports Co., which makes sportswear and shoes and had registered the name as its trademark. The company has no relationship to the Nike Air Jordan brand.

Jordan is widely known as Qiaodan in China, and he initially filed a lawsuit against the company in 2012.

The court “approved Jordan’s appeal that the trademark of his name’s translation in Chinese characters infringed on his right to own his name and violated the country’s trademark law,” according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

This company is not subtle; according to Xinhua, it also used “Jordan’s old jersey number 23, basketball player logo and even names of his children.” As NPR’s Becky Sullivan has reported, the company does hundreds of millions of dollars of business annually, with some 6,000 locations in China.

After the ruling, Qiaodan “defended its actions but said it would respect the court’s decision,” The Associated Press reported.

The court’s chief judge Tao Kaiyuan “said there was an established link between Jordan and the Chinese characters for ‘Qiaodan,’ which are commonly used by the public when referring to the former basketball player, meaning that Jordan was entitled to protection under the Trademark Law,” according to the wire service.

However, it’s not a completely clear-cut victory: Xinhua added that court also “ruled that the former Chicago Bulls star does not own the right of name for Qiaodan, Chinese pinyin transcription of his surname Jordan.”

That means the company can use the word “Qiaodan” in Roman letters, but not in Chinese characters. The court said “there was not sufficient evidence to show that Chinese consumers associated” this version with Jordan, according to The New York Times.

The case could have broad implications; the Times calls it a “landmark decision that lays out ground rules for protecting personal names in trademark cases.”

In a country where foreign companies regularly come up against trademark disputes, lawyers tell the Times that this “establishes the scope of protection for personal names in trademark cases, indicating that foreign celebrities can successfully challenge third parties that use the Chinese characters of their names in China.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)