El Salvador refused to return US deporters
At a White House meeting with President Trump, Salvador President Naive Buquere said yesterday that he would not return the man who was mistakenly deported from the United States and sent to the infamous prison in El Salvador.
“Of course I'm not going to do that,” Buquel said he asked Kilmer Armando Abrego Garcia when he asked if the reporter would help him return the man. The deportation case is at the heart of the legal battle that took place in the Supreme Court. This is something else you need to know.
Buquel said returning Abrego Garcia was like smuggling “terrorists into America.” When President Salvador spoke in his oval office, Trump smiled with approval.
Background: The Trump administration said deportation was a “administrative error” and that the Supreme Court ordered Abrego Garcia to “promote” the return of Abrego Garcia. But Trump violated the order.
Quarble: “This meeting is one of the toughest examples of foreign leaders who steal and place Trump while visiting an oval office,” said Zoran Kanno Yongs, White House reporter for the Times.
Trade War details
Zuckerberg took the stand in the landmark meta antitrust exam
Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg took a witness position yesterday on the first day of a groundbreaking antitrust trial that could potentially dismantle his company.
The US government accused Meta of illegally creating the monopoly by getting Instagram and WhatsApp when they were small startups. The trial poses the most important threat ever to Zuckerberg's business empire.
In a packed courthouse in Washington, federal lawyers presented Zuckerberg with emails and internal communications regarding his acquisition strategy. Zuckerberg said in response to an email from 2012 that Instagram discussed maintaining the feature without adding it. He added, in fact, after getting the platform, “we ended up investing a tonne.”
What's next: Zuckerberg is scheduled to resume testimony today. In the eight-week trial, the government and Meta are expected to tell a competing version of Meta's 20-year growth story. If judges rule against meta, Zuckerberg could be forced to sell Instagram and WhatsApp, and could change the long pattern in Silicon Valley, a big tech company that snapped its younger rivals.
Chinese leaders courted Vietnam amid the trade war
Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Vietnam yesterday at the start of his tour of Southeast Asia. Chinese leaders are trying to gather other countries on Beijing's side as US tariffs threaten economic growth.
In an essay published just before its arrival, XI called on other countries to join China in stability, free trade and “an open and cooperative international environment.”
The Chinese leader is welcomed during his tour, but Vietnam and its neighbors are also trying to lower tariffs in an attempt to appease Trump.
More top news
Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Rocket launched singer Katy Perry, including her fiance, and five other women yesterday. Blue Origin pitched space tourism flights as a way to encourage more women to pursue careers in science.
One of our critics, Amanda Hess, writes that the effort may have been inadequate. “If the flight proves something, it means that women can freely enjoy the most decadent loot of capitalism along with the wealthiest men in the world,” she writes.
I remember Mario Vargas llosa
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Lurosa, who passed away on Sunday in 1989, was the last surviving member of the booming movement of socially conscious Latin American writers, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes, among other things.
He was the world's smartest and most skilled political novelist, written by our book critic Dwight Garner. Vargas Llosa's political novels are morally complicated and meticulously observed, but the absurdities of life creep up to them. Read Dwight's thanks here.
