| THE BIG STORY
The former US ambassador to Ukraine told impeachment investigators she felt threatened by Trump’s criticism
After weeks of closed-door impeachment hearings, Democrats are beginning to mount their public show ahead of the promised public hearings.
The beginning of this show came yesterday — House Democrats began releasing transcripts of the dozens of hearings they’ve held. The first two transcripts to be made public are interviews with former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who was ousted by President Donald Trump, and former senior State Department adviser Michael McKinley.
Yovanovitch testified that she was told by a senior Ukrainian official around February that Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer working for Trump, was working to try to replace her as ambassador to Ukraine. She was recalled from her post in May.
Meanwhile, McKinley said he had resigned both because of the administration's request for dirt on political opponents and because Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the State Department weren't doing enough to support employees named in the Ukraine investigation.
👉 The big picture: As Miriam Elder explores here, the released testimony paints an image of how the US bureaucracy lives in fear of Trump’s Twitter account.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / Getty Images Impeachment Today, our daily impeachment podcast Dust the Mueller report off the shelf. Remember April? Of course you don't. That's when the Mueller report came out. Well, now it's back and could play a role in the impeachment saga. Listen and subscribe. STAYING ON TOP OF THIS A white supremacist was arrested for allegedly planning to blow up a synagogue
Authorities said Richard Holzer, who was arrested Friday, plotted to blow up Temple Emanuel Synagogue in Pueblo, Colorado with Molotov cocktails or pipe bombs. They said he told undercover FBI agents that he had previously paid a cleaner at the temple to put arsenic in the water to poison the congregation.
The 27-year-old white supremacist has been arrested and charged with a federal hate crime. According to an affidavit filed in federal court, Holzer said he wanted to get the 100-year-old temple “off the map.”
The FBI and Pueblo police said they were able to thwart Holzer’s plan thanks to a tip.
SNAPSHOTS Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party campaign launch was straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook. Whipping up the crowds, pumping music, jabs at the media, slick camerawork — it was all about the people versus the establishment.
Three Chinese companies are building Xinjiang’s surveillance state. You can buy their cameras on Amazon. These companies helped build a security state in China’s Xinjiang region to repress millions of Uighur Muslims. Amazon, eBay, Apple, and Google are still selling their products and distributing their apps.
Facebook’s rebrand to FACEBOOK is about the FTC, not a fancy new font. After being fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for “deceptive disclosures,” the social media giant is moving to add a “BY FACEBOOK” tag to its separate products, like Instagram and WhatsApp.
John Legend got wine drunk and sang his own song to a crowd at Universal Studios and it’s iconic. John Legend wore a onesie that said “I ❤️John Legend” and sang “All of Me” and it makes me instantly want to be his friend.
POISON IN THE PIPES A city investigation showed that New Orleans had botched its lead testing for years. Then the report was buried.
In 2016, about 11% of the kids under 6 in New Orleans tested for blood lead showed concentrations at or above 5 micrograms per deciliter.
For context, that’s far higher than the national figure — 2.5% of kids between 1 and 5 — and double the rate in Flint during the water crisis there, when 5% of kids tested had blood lead levels that high. The CDC maintains that no level of blood lead is safe for children.
New Orleans has failed to do urgently needed lead testing — claiming the water was safe even after losing track of where the city's many lead pipes are — and then buried a report that would have alerted the public to the lapse.
Experts say the failures could have unknowingly exposed tens of thousands of people to the neurotoxin.
"SPARKLING GEEK" A woman delivered a speech to students at NASA wearing a sequined dress because girls wanted to see a “sparkly” scientist
Rita J. King, a futurist and executive vice president for business development and codirector of Science House, tweeted about wearing a sparkly dress while delivering a speech, and it’s inspiring women online.
King tweeted about delivering a TEDx Youth NASA speech in 2011. The day before her talk, an organizer reached out with an interesting request: “A group of girls had written a letter requesting that I wear something sparkly for the event because they wanted to believe that scientists could be sparkly. They wanted to see a 'sparkling geek.’”
She happily obliged: “I found the sparkliest dress I could. I wanted to show them I heard them.”
King’s tweet about this received an overwhelming amount of responses, with many saying she inspired them. Here’s a sample:
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