WASHINGTON — Within hours of opening an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in the summer of 2016, the F.B.I. dispatched a pair of agents to London on a mission so secretive that all but a handful of officials were kept in the dark. Their assignment, which has not been previously reported, was to meet the Australian ambassador, who had evidence that one of Donald J. Trump’s advisers knew in advance about Russian election meddling. After tense deliberations between Washington and Canberra, top Australian officials broke with diplomatic protocol and allowed the ambassador, Alexander Downer, to sit for an F.B.I. interview to describe his meeting with the campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos. Sign Up For the Morning Briefing Newsletter The agents summarized their highly unusual interview and sent word to Washington on Aug. 2, 2016, two days after the investigation was opened. Their report helped provide the foundation for a case that, a year ago Thursday, became the special counsel investigation. But at the time, a small group of F.B.I. officials knew it by its code name: Crossfire Hurricane. The name, a reference to the Rolling Stones lyric “I was born in a crossfire hurricane,” was an apt prediction of a political storm that continues to tear shingles off the bureau. Days after they closed their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, agents began scrutinizing the campaign of her Republican rival. The two cases have become inextricably linked in one of the most consequential periods in the history of the F.B.I. [Read our briefing on secret government code names] This month, the Justice Department inspector general is expected to release the findings of its lengthy review of the F.B.I.’s conduct in the Clinton case. The results are certain to renew debate over decisions by the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, to publicly chastise Mrs. Clinton in a news conference, and then announce the reopening of the investigation days before Election Day. Mrs. Clinton has said those actions buried her presidential hopes. Those decisions stand in contrast to the F.B.I.’s handling of Crossfire Hurricane. Not only did agents in that case fall back to their typical policy of silence, but interviews with a dozen current and former government officials and a review of documents show that the F.B.I. was even more circumspect in that case than has been previously known. Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly. Agents considered, then rejected, interviewing key Trump associates, which might have sped up the investigation but risked revealing the existence of the case. Top officials quickly became convinced that they would not solve the case before Election Day, which made them only more hesitant to act. When agents did take bold investigative steps, like interviewing the ambassador, they were shrouded in secrecy. Fearful of leaks, they kept details from political appointees across the street at the Justice Department. Peter Strzok, a senior F.B.I. agent, explained in a text that Justice Department officials would find it too “tasty” to resist sharing. “I’m not worried about our side,” he wrote. Only about five Justice Department officials knew the full scope of the case, officials said, not the dozen or more who might normally be briefed on a major national security case. The facts, had they surfaced, might have devastated the Trump campaign: Mr. Trump’s future national security adviser was under investigation, as was his campaign chairman. One adviser appeared to have Russian intelligence contacts. Another was suspected of being a Russian agent himself. In the Clinton case, Mr. Comey has said he erred on the side of transparency. But in the face of questions from Congress about the Trump campaign, the F.B.I. declined to tip its hand. And when The New York Times tried to assess the state of the investigation in October 2016, law enforcement officials cautioned against drawing any conclusions, resulting in a story that significantly played down the case. Mr. Comey has said it is unfair to compare the Clinton case, which was winding down in the summer of 2016, with the Russia case, which was in its earliest stages. He said he did not make political considerations about who would benefit from each decision. But underpinning both cases was one political calculation: that Mrs. Clinton would win and Mr. Trump would lose. Agents feared being seen as withholding information or going too easy on her. And they worried that any overt actions against Mr. Trump’s campaign would only reinforce his claims that the election was being rigged against him. The F.B.I. now faces those very criticisms and more. Mr. Trump says he is the victim of a politicized F.B.I. He says senior agents tried to rig the election by declining to prosecute Mrs. Clinton, then drummed up the Russia investigation to undermine his presidency. He has declared that a deeply rooted cabal — including his own appointees — is working against him. That argument is the heart of Mr. Trump’s grievances with the federal investigation. In the face of bipartisan support for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, Mr. Trump and his allies have made a priority of questioning how the investigation was conducted in late 2016 and trying to discredit it. “It’s a witch hunt,” Mr. Trump said last month on Fox News. “And they know that, and I’ve been able to message it.” Congressional Republicans, led by Representative Devin Nunes of California, have begun to dig into F.B.I. files, looking for evidence that could undermine the investigation. Much remains unknown and classified. But those who saw the investigation up close, and many of those who have reviewed case files in the past year, say that far from gunning for Mr. Trump, the F.B.I. could actually have done more in the final months of 2016 to scrutinize his campaign’s Russia ties. “I never saw anything that resembled a witch hunt or suggested that the bureau’s approach to the investigation was politically driven,” said Mary McCord, a 20-year Justice Department veteran and the top national security prosecutor during much of the investigation’s first nine months. Crossfire Hurricane spawned a case that has brought charges against former Trump campaign officials and more than a dozen Russians. But in the final months of 2016, agents faced great uncertainty — about the facts, and how to respond. Anxiety at the Bureau Crossfire Hurricane began exactly 100 days before the presidential election, but if agents were eager to investigate Mr. Trump’s campaign, as the president has suggested, the messages do not reveal it. “I cannot believe we are seriously looking at these allegations and the pervasive connections,” Mr. Strzok wrote soon after returning from London. The mood in early meetings was anxious, former officials recalled. Agents had just closed the Clinton investigation, and they braced for months of Republican-led hearings over why she was not charged. Crossfire Hurricane was built around the same core of agents and analysts who had investigated Mrs. Clinton. None was eager to re-enter presidential politics, former officials said, especially when agents did not know what would come of the Australian information. The question they confronted still persists: Was anyone in the Trump campaign tied to Russian efforts to undermine the election? The F.B.I. investigated four unidentified Trump campaign aides in those early months, congressional investigators revealed in February. The four men were Michael T. Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, current and former officials said. Each was scrutinized because of his obvious or suspected Russian ties. [Here are the key themes, dates and characters in the Russia investigation] Mr. Flynn, a top adviser, was paid $45,000 by the Russian government’s media arm for a 2015 speech and dined at the arm of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Manafort, the campaign chairman, had lobbied for pro-Russia interests in Ukraine and worked with an associate who has been identified as having connections to Russian intelligence. Mr. Page, a foreign policy adviser, was well known to the F.B.I. He had previously been recruited by Russian spies and was suspected of meeting one in Moscow during the campaign. Lastly, there was Mr. Papadopoulos, the young and inexperienced campaign aide whose wine-fueled conversation with the Australian ambassador set off the investigation. Before hacked Democratic emails appeared online, he had seemed to know that Russia had political dirt on Mrs. Clinton. But even if the F.B.I. had wanted to read his emails or intercept his calls, that evidence was not enough to allow it. Many months passed, former officials said, before the F.B.I. uncovered emails linking Mr. Papadopoulos to a Russian intelligence operation. Mr. Trump was not under investigation, but his actions perplexed the agents. Days after the stolen Democratic emails became public, he called on Russia to uncover more. Then news broke that Mr. Trump’s campaign had pushed to change the Republican platform’s stance on Ukraine in ways favorable to Russia. The F.B.I.’s thinking crystallized by mid-August, after the C.I.A. director at the time, John O. Brennan, shared intelligence with Mr. Comey showing that the Russian government was behind an attack on the 2016 presidential election. Intelligence agencies began collaborating to investigate that operation. The Crossfire Hurricane team was part of that group but largely operated independently, three officials said. Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said that after studying the investigation as a member the Senate Intelligence Committee, he saw no evidence of political motivation in the opening of the investigation. “There was a growing body of evidence that a foreign government was attempting to interfere in both the process and the debate surrounding our elections, and their job is to investigate counterintelligence,” he said in an interview. “That’s what they did.” Abounding Criticism Looking back, some inside the F.B.I. and the Justice Department say that Mr. Comey should have seen the political storm coming and better sheltered the bureau. They question why he consolidated the Clinton and Trump investigations at headquarters, rather than in a field office. And they say he should not have relied on the same team for both cases. That put a bull’s-eye on the heart of the F.B.I. Any misstep in either investigation made both cases, and the entire bureau, vulnerable to criticism. And there were missteps. Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy F.B.I. director, was cited by internal investigators for dishonesty about his conversations with reporters about Mrs. Clinton. That gave ammunition for Mr. Trump’s claims that the F.B.I. cannot be trusted. And Mr. Strzok and Lisa Page, an F.B.I. lawyer, exchanged texts criticizing Mr. Trump, allowing the president to point to evidence of bias when they became public. The messages were unsparing. They questioned Mr. Trump’s intelligence, believed he promoted intolerance and feared he would damage the bureau. The inspector general’s upcoming report is expected to criticize those messages for giving the appearance of bias. It is not clear, however, whether inspectors found evidence supporting Mr. Trump’s assertion that agents tried to protect Mrs. Clinton, a claim the F.B.I. has adamantly denied. Mr. Rubio, who has reviewed many of the texts and case files, said he saw no signs that the F.B.I. wanted to undermine Mr. Trump. “There might have been individual agents that had views that, in hindsight, have been problematic for those agents,” Mr. Rubio said. “But whether that was a systemic effort, I’ve seen no evidence of it.” Mr. Trump’s daily Twitter posts, though, offer sound-bite-sized accusations — witch hunt, hoax, deep state, rigged system — that fan the flames of conspiracy. Capitol Hill allies reliably echo those comments. “It’s like the deep state all got together to try to orchestrate a palace coup,” Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, said in January on Fox Business Network. Cautious Intelligence Gathering Counterintelligence investigations can take years, but if the Russian government had influence over the Trump campaign, the F.B.I. wanted to know quickly. One option was the most direct: interview the campaign officials about their Russian contacts. That was discussed but not acted on, two former officials said, because interviewing witnesses or subpoenaing documents might thrust the investigation into public view, exactly what F.B.I. officials were trying to avoid during the heat of the presidential race. “You do not take actions that will unnecessarily impact an election,” Sally Q. Yates, the former deputy attorney general, said in an interview. She would not discuss details, but added, “Folks were very careful to make sure that actions that were being taken in connection with that investigation did not become public.” Mr. Comey was briefed regularly on the Russia investigation, but one official said those briefings focused mostly on hacking and election interference. The Crossfire Hurricane team did not present many crucial decisions for Mr. Comey to make. Top officials became convinced that there was almost no chance they would answer the question of collusion before Election Day. And that made agents even more cautious. The F.B.I. obtained phone records and other documents using national security letters — a secret type of subpoena — officials said. And at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, current and former officials said. That has become a politically contentious point, with Mr. Trump’s allies questioning whether the F.B.I. was spying on the Trump campaign or trying to entrap campaign officials. Looking back, some at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. now believe that agents could have been more aggressive. They ultimately interviewed Mr. Papadopoulos in January 2017 and managed to keep it a secret, suggesting they could have done so much earlier. “There is always a high degree of caution before taking overt steps in a counterintelligence investigation,” said Ms. McCord, who would not discuss details of the case. “And that could have worked to the president’s benefit here.” Such tactical discussions are reflected in one of Mr. Strzok’s most controversial texts, sent on Aug. 15, 2016, after a meeting in Mr. McCabe’s office. “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way he gets elected,” Mr. Strzok wrote, “but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.” Mr. Trump says that message revealed a secret F.B.I. plan to respond to his election. “‘We’ll go to Phase 2 and we’ll get this guy out of office,’” he told The Wall Street Journal. “This is the F.B.I. we’re talking about — that is treason.” But officials have told the inspector general something quite different. They said Ms. Page and others advocated a slower, circumspect pace, especially because polls predicted Mr. Trump’s defeat. They said that anything the F.B.I. did publicly would only give fodder to Mr. Trump’s claims on the campaign trail that the election was rigged. Mr. Strzok countered that even if Mr. Trump’s chances of victory were low — like dying before 40 — the stakes were too high to justify inaction. Mr. Strzok had similarly argued for a more aggressive path during the Clinton investigation, according to four current and former officials. He opposed the Justice Department’s decision to offer Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers immunity and negotiate access to her hard drives, the officials said. Mr. Strzok favored using search warrants or subpoenas instead. In both cases, his argument lost. Policy and Tradition The F.B.I. bureaucracy did agents no favors. In July, a retired British spy named Christopher Steele approached a friend in the F.B.I. overseas and provided reports linking Trump campaign officials to Russia. But the documents meandered around the F.B.I. organizational chart, former officials said. Only in mid-September, congressional investigators say, did the records reach the Crossfire Hurricane team. Mr. Steele was gathering information about Mr. Trump as a private investigator for Fusion GPS, a firm paid by Democrats. But he was also considered highly credible, having helped agents unravel complicated cases. In October, agents flew to Europe to interview him. But Mr. Steele had become frustrated by the F.B.I.’s slow response. He began sharing his findings in September and October with journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, according to congressional testimony. So as agents tried to corroborate Mr. Steele’s information, reporters began calling the bureau, asking about his findings. If the F.B.I. was working against Mr. Trump, as he asserts, this was an opportunity to push embarrassing information into the news media shortly before the election. That did not happen. News organizations did not publish Mr. Steele’s reports or reveal the F.B.I.’s interest in them until after Election Day. Congress was also increasingly asking questions. Mr. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, had briefed top lawmakers that summer about Russian election interference and intelligence that Moscow supported the Trump campaign — a finding that would not become public for months. Lawmakers clamored for information from Mr. Comey, who refused to answer public questions. Many Democrats see rueful irony in this moment. Mr. Comey, after all, broke with policy and twice publicly discussed the Clinton investigation. Yet he refused repeated requests to discuss the Trump investigation. Mr. Comey has said he regrets his decision to chastise Mrs. Clinton as “extremely careless,” even as he announced that she should not be charged. But he stands by his decision to alert Congress, days before the election, that the F.B.I. was reopening the Clinton inquiry. The result, though, is that Mr. Comey broke with both policy and tradition in Mrs. Clinton’s case, but hewed closely to the rules for Mr. Trump. Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that alone proves Mr. Trump’s claims of unfairness to be “both deeply at odds with the facts, and damaging to our democracy.” Spying in Question Crossfire Hurricane began with a focus on four campaign officials. But by mid-fall 2016, Mr. Page’s inquiry had progressed the furthest. Agents had known Mr. Page for years. Russian spies tried to recruit him in 2013, and he was dismissive when agents warned him about it, a half-dozen current and former officials said. That warning even made its way back to Russian intelligence, leaving agents suspecting that Mr. Page had reported their efforts to Moscow. Relying on F.B.I. information and Mr. Steele’s, prosecutors obtained court approval to eavesdrop on Mr. Page, who was no longer with the Trump campaign. That warrant has become deeply contentious and is crucial to Republican arguments that intelligence agencies improperly used Democratic research to help justify spying on the Trump campaign. The inspector general is reviewing that claim. Ms. Yates, the deputy attorney general under President Barack Obama, signed the first warrant application. But subsequent filings were approved by members of Mr. Trump’s own administration: the acting attorney general, Dana J. Boente, and then Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general. “Folks are very, very careful and serious about that process,” Ms. Yates said. “I don’t know of anything that gives me any concerns.” After months of investigation, Mr. Papadopoulos remained largely a puzzle. And agents were nearly ready to close their investigation of Mr. Flynn, according to three current and former officials. (Mr. Flynn rekindled the F.B.I.’s interest in November 2016 by signing an op-ed article that appeared to be written on behalf of the Turkish government, and then making phone calls to the Russian ambassador that December.) In late October, in response to questions from The Times, law enforcement officials acknowledged the investigation but urged restraint. They said they had scrutinized some of Mr. Trump’s advisers but had found no proof of any involvement with Russian hacking. The resulting article, on Oct. 31, reflected that caution and said that agents had uncovered no “conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.” The key fact of the article — that the F.B.I. had opened a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign — was published in the 10th paragraph. A year and a half later, no public evidence has surfaced connecting Mr. Trump’s advisers to the hacking or linking Mr. Trump himself to the Russian government’s disruptive efforts. But the article’s tone and headline — “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia” — gave an air of finality to an investigation that was just beginning. Democrats say that article pre-emptively exonerated Mr. Trump, dousing chances to raise questions about the campaign’s Russian ties before Election Day. Just as the F.B.I. has been criticized for its handling of the Trump investigation, so too has The Times. For Mr. Steele, it dashed his confidence in American law enforcement. “He didn’t know what was happening inside the F.B.I.,” Glenn R. Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, testified this year. “And there was a concern that the F.B.I. was being manipulated for political ends by the Trump people.” Assurances Amid Doubt Two weeks before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, senior American intelligence officials briefed him at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Russian hacking and deception. They reported that Mr. Putin had tried to sow chaos in the election, undermine Mrs. Clinton and ultimately help Mr. Trump win. Then Mr. Comey met with Mr. Trump privately, revealing the Steele reports and warning that journalists had obtained them. Mr. Comey has said he feared making this conversation a “J. Edgar Hoover-type situation,” with the F.B.I. presenting embarrassing information to lord over a president-elect. In a contemporaneous memo, Mr. Comey wrote that he assured Mr. Trump that the F.B.I. intended to protect him on this point. “I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook,” Mr. Comey wrote of Mr. Steele’s documents. “I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the F.B.I. had the material.” Mr. Trump was not convinced — either by the Russia briefing or by Mr. Comey’s assurances. He made up his mind before Mr. Comey even walked in the door. Hours earlier, Mr. Trump told The Times that stories about Russian election interference were being pushed by his adversaries to distract from his victory. And he debuted what would quickly become a favorite phrase: “This is a political witch hunt.”

U.S. Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller has issued two subpoenas to a social media expert who worked for longtime Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone during the 2016 presidential election campaign. The subpoenas were delivered late last week to lawyers representing Jason Sullivan, a social media and Twitter specialist Stone hired to work for an independent political action committee he set up to support Trump, Knut Johnson, a lawyer for Sullivan, told Reuters on Tuesday. The subpoenas suggest that Mueller, who is probing Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, is focusing in part on Stone and whether he might have had advance knowledge of material allegedly hacked by Russian intelligence and sent to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who published it. Stone appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee last September and denied allegations of collusion between the president's associates and Russia during the election. "I am aware of no evidence whatsoever of collusion by the Russian state or anyone in the Trump campaign," Stone told reporters at the time. According to sources familiar with the ongoing investigation, Mueller also has been probing whether anyone associated with the Trump campaign may have helped Assange or the Russians time or target the release of hacked emails and other social media promoting Trump or critical of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. A spokesman for Mueller declined to comment. Russia has denied interfering in the election. President Trump has repeatedly denied his campaign colluded with Russia. Sullivan told Reuters that he heads Cyphoon.com, a social media firm, and "worked on the Trump campaign serving as Chief Strategist directly to Roger J. Stone Jr." "Welcome To The Age of Weaponized Social Media," said a strategy document Sullivan prepared for Stone and seen by Reuters. He described a "system" he devised for creating Twitter "swarms" as "an army of sophisticated, hyper-targeted direct tweet automation systems driven by outcomes-based strategies derived from REAL-TIME actionable insights." For example, at 6:43 a.m. local time on Election Day in 2016, Trump tweeted, "TODAY WE MAKE AMERICAN GREAT AGAIN." Trump's message soon was retweeted more than 343,000 times, and in an interview last year, Sullivan told Reuters that the swarm helped overcome a surge in pro-Clinton social media postings and boost voter turnout for Trump. Stone on Tuesday repeated his public denials that he had an inside track to WikiLeaks or others who hacked or published Democratic Party and Clinton-related emails and said no one from Mueller's team has tried to contact him. One of the two subpoenas delivered last week requests that Sullivan appear before a grand jury on May 18 at the Federal Courthouse in Washington, D.C. The other orders Sullivan to bring documents, objects and electronically stored information.

In case you somehow missed the legitimately insane drama, it was recently revealed that A) Meghan Markle's brother wrote an open letter asking Prince Harry to call off the royal wedding, B) Meghan Markle's dad staged paparazzi photos, and c) Meghan's Markle's dad was so upset by A and B that he canceled his plans to come to the wedding and is now reportedly in hospital for heart surgery. So how does The Queen feel about this turn of events? HRH is reportedly "very angry" with Thomas Markle Sr. for selling staged photos of himself, and honestly having The Queen any level of "angry" with you doesn't sound ideal. "Lord Chamberlain, Her Majesty and the Duke are very angry with Meghan’s father," a source told British paper The Daily Express, adding that they had intended to address "the royal protocol" with Markle upon his arrival in Britain. What's more, the Queen & Co. are "worried" about Meghan's dad. This news comes on the heels of reports that Prince Harry is taking the blame for what happened. "Harry feels guilty that this has happened to someone he loves because they are in a relationship with him," a source told The Daily Mail. "He is devastated. He feels like this is another thing in the wake of him... the problems he causes. He feels that anyone who gets associated with his life – this is the price they have to pay."

NEW YORK — Residents in the Northeast cleaned up Wednesday, a day after powerful storms pounded the region with torrential rain and marble-sized hail, leaving at least four people dead and more than 200,000 homes and businesses without power. Connecticut officials said two people in New Fairfield and Danbury were killed Tuesday in separate accidents when trees fell on their trucks, including a woman whose 3-year-old child escaped injury. In New York, falling trees in Newburgh claimed the lives of an 11-year-old girl in a parked car and a woman who was driving. More than 157,000 utility customers in New York were without power midday Wednesday. In Connecticut, the state's two major utilities reported 88,500 customers without electricity Wednesday afternoon, down from a high of 120,000 outages. Gov. Dannel Malloy said damage was being assessed across the state for possible disaster declarations, with the most hard-hit areas being in southwestern Connecticut. "There is a tremendous amount of damage," he said. "I think there are going to be a lot of people without power for days." The National Weather Service said the strong thunderstorms created a small weather-generated tsunami off the New Jersey coast. Known as a meteotsnuami, it resulted in fluctuating water levels for several hours. But there were no reports of damage from the abnormally high tides reported in areas from Perth Amboy in New Jersey to Delaware's Fenwick Island. Roads in many towns were impassible and some schools canceled classes on Wednesday due to the damage. Airlines also canceled and delayed flights in and out of the region. In New York City on Tuesday evening, thousands of commuters were stranded in Grand Central Terminal after rail lines were temporarily suspended due to downed trees on the tracks. Concourses were packed with passengers waiting for service to resume.

Crude settled at the highest since 2014 as shrinking U.S. oil, gasoline and diesel stockpiles signaled tightening global supplies. Futures ended Wednesday’s session 0.3 percent higher in New York after fluctuating between gains and losses. An International Energy Agency forecast for less robust energy demand overshadowed a U.S. government tally showing record overseas demand for American crude and declining domestic stockpiles of oil and fuels. “People are starting to wonder if we are going to see a very tight market during the summer when the driving season really hits” in North America, said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research in Winchester, Massachusetts. Crude this month climbed to levels not seen in more than three years as global markets tightened and geopolitical tensions in the Middle East heightened supply concerns. Despite surging U.S. crude production, surpluses stored in terminals and tankers have been shrinking. “Another week of draws across the board is certainly positive for current prices,” said Matthew Beck, managing director of an $8 billion oil and natural gas portfolio at John Hancock Financial Services Inc. in Boston. The continued withdrawals “reflect a fairly tight market.” West Texas Intermediate crude for June delivery edged up 18 cents to settle at $71.49 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent for July settlement rose 85 cents to end the session at $79.28 on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. The global benchmark crude traded at a $7.72 premium to WTI for July, the largest for the front-month spread since 2015. The U.S. Energy Information Administration said crude stockpiles fell by 1.4 million barrels last week. At the same time, gasoline stockpiles shrank by 3.79 million and distillates fell by 92,000. Helping to contribute to the crude draw was a 689,000 barrel-a-day jump in exports. Aside from lowering its demand outlook, the Paris-based IEA said production outside OPEC will grow by 1.87 million barrels a day this year, or 85,000 a day more than previously thought. “We saw some expectations for demand actually come down a little bit. That’s just due to higher crude oil prices and the thought that that might curb gasoline demand a little bit globally,” said Brian Kessens, who helps manage $16 billion in energy assets at Tortoise.

Dez Bryant may no longer be a member of the Dallas Cowboys, but he still has Ezekiel Elliott in his corner. Bryant was on Twitter Tuesday sparring with followers over reports and talks about his future. He said the media was “betraying” him and called them a “joke.” Elliott took a break from tweeting about the Eastern Conference Finals to express his support for Dez. “Doubt 88 all you want. He gone ball regardless,” Elliott said of Bryant. Not a ton of Cowboys talked about Bryant after the Cowboys released him in the offseason, perhaps because they were told not to. But Elliott has supported him all along, calling the move “tough” last month. Bryant remains a free agent following his release by the Cowboys and seems to indicate that is by intention. His former teammate Jason Witten thinks Dez will end up signing with one NFC North team.

PGA golfer Lucas Glover was involved in a domestic violence incident last week in which it was determined that his wife was the aggressor, and he clearly agreed with the way he described her in a phone call to police. According to police reports, Glover was attacked by his wife Krista following the third round of The Players Championship on Saturday. Police were actually called to the home by Krista, who claimed it was Lucas’ mother who had attacked her. During her 911 call, which was obtained by TMZ, Lucas took the phone and said his wife has “gone crazy.” “She’s trying to blame it on my mother which is not the case at all,” Lucas said … “My wife has gone crazy. … She’s telling lies and none of it’s true.” The police report stated that Glover told police his wife often berates him after bad rounds and “proceeds to start an altercation with him and telling him how he is a loser and a p----, how he needs to fire everyone, and how he’d better win or her and the kids would leave him and he would never see the kids again.” Police saw no visible injuries on Glover’s wife despite her claim that she had been attacked by her mother-in-law. When it was determined that she was the aggressor and she was placed under arrest, police said Krista began “blocking herself from sitting down” and attempted to flee. She also berated and cursed at the officers. We have heard of golfers berating their caddies when things go wrong on the course, but this is a first. It sounds like the Glovers may need some counseling.

Pope Francis’ cryptic comment Tuesday that he's thinking about when it's time to “take my leave” is raising speculation Francis could follow in the footsteps of his predecessor in retiring from the papacy. Francis made the remarks during his morning homily Tuesday, and, as is the norm, the Vatican didn't release the full text but only selected excerpts, the Associated Press reported. Francis was reflecting on a biblical passage of St. Paul discerning when it was time to leave his flock in the care of others, a decision Francis said all bishops must make at some point. "When I read this, I think about myself, because I'm a bishop and I'll have to take my leave," the excerpts quoted Francis as saying. The pope added that bishops shouldn't consider their vocation as "climbing in an ecclesiastic career." Rather, he reminded them they are shepherds caring for a flock, and that at a certain point the time will come to turn the flock over to someone else. "I think about the bishops, of all the bishops. May the Lord give the grace to all of us to be able to take our leave this way, with this spirit and strength," he said. Francis previously has said his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, "opened a door" to future popes to retire when he resigned in 2013. While the 81-year-old Francis has said he didn't envisage a long papacy, he hasn't said explicitly if he'd follow in Benedict's footsteps and retire. Francis may have also been referring to Chilean bishops implicated in a sex abuse cover-up scandal, according to the Associated Press. Francis opened three days of an emergency summit with the 34 Chilean bishops Tuesday, and there is widespread expectation that at least some of them will offer to resign by the end of it. The Vatican has said that during their first meeting, Francis gave the bishops a list of themes to meditate on, and that the time between now and their next meeting Wednesday would be devoted "exclusively to meditation and prayer." It appeared that Francis was guiding the bishops through a Jesuit-style examination of conscience. This internalized self-critique has been on display in recent years. Francis issued a brutal public dressing down of the Vatican bureaucracy during Christmas.

WASHINGTON — Brian Cashman says he didn’t have any knowledge that Robinson Cano was doping during his days as a Yankee. When asked “Did you have any inkling that there was any doping going on when he was with you guys?” the GM did seem to suggest that he had his suspicions. “I would have no knowledge, and if I did have knowledge I would be compelled to tell baseball about it or I’d risk a million dollar or more fine,” Cashman said Tuesday following the announcement that Cano had been suspended 80 games for violating baseball’s joint drug agreement. “So part of the program and part of Major League Baseball’s initiatives is if I have any knowledge of anybody past or present I’m obligated to convey that knowledge to Major League Baseball, and I take that seriously. “And so knowledge is one thing, suspicion is another.” Later, when asked to clarify what he meant by suspicion, Cashman backtracked a bit saying he was speaking in generalities. “I never suggested I had suspicions of Cano,” he said. Cano played nine seasons for the Yankees before leaving the Bronx and a 7-year $175M offer for Seattle and a 10-year $240M contract. Asked for his reaction overall, Cashman initially responded: “It’s not something I feel comfortable commenting on, given the fact that he’s a Seattle Mariner. Robbie was an impactful player here, he was always a great guy. We enjoyed our time with Robbie and the person he was when he was with us.” Adding to the suspicion is Cano’s two best Bronx buddies, Alex Rodriguez and Melky Cabrera, both served doping suspensions. Cano was banned for using Furosemide, a diuretic that can mask PED usage. He had appealed the suspension, but dropped the appeal. Cano will also be ineligible for the postseason as a result. And while the news of Cano’s drug bust shocked some former teammates like Dellin Betances, at least one, CC Sabathia, says nothing surprises him now when it comes to players caught cheating the game. “It’s disappointing, but just waiting to see what comes out I guess,” Sabathia said. “I don’t have an opinion either way. It is what it is. It’s surprising because I know Robbie. But after the Ryan Braun thing, nothing is surprising for me.” Braun ultimately admitted to doping and received a 65-game ban when he was exposed in the Biogenesis scandal of 2013. But in 2011, a Braun urine sample tested positive for an elevated level of testosterone, so high in fact a source told the Daily News back then the sample was “twice the level of the highest test ever taken.” Braun was subsequently slapped with a 50-game ban that was overturned on appeal after he raised chain of custody concerns over his sample. Of Cano, Betances said, “It’s a shock for me. “I really couldn’t believe it,” said Betances, who heard the news while he was eating lunch. “I still can’t believe it.” Cano had once taken Betances under his wing when the eight-time All-Star second baseman was rehabbing a hamstring injury in 2006 in Tampa. “He’d take me out to eat everyday,” said Betances, who was in rookie ball at the time. “He was the first guy I kind of got to hang out with in the major leagues. He was good to my parents and my family in general. We’ve always talked throughout the years. He’s a good friend of mine.” Betances had just exchanged texts with Cano, who had recently suffered a broken hand when he was hit by a pitch. Betances didn’t want to reach out to Cano again, with everyone blowing up his phone. “It doesn’t change my mind of him as a player because he’s a talented player at the end of the day,” said Betances, who had yet to find out all the details. “You can’t take that away from him. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what’s happened with other players, but it doesn’t change the way I look at him.”

Over the past thousand years or so, the royal family have developed a pretty awesome events department. When it come to putting on awe-inspiring coronations, terrifying executions and joyous weddings, the royal family have perfected controlling every aspect of these showpieces, from the souvenir china to the exact second the music starts. And then along came Thomas Markle, and the wedding of the year between his daughter Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, and the saga of whether he was attending the event, or not. This week will live long in the memories—and nightmares—of royal courtiers as the time when they completely lost control of the narrative of Meghan and Harry’s wedding, and a painstakingly choreographed display of pomp and circumstance, their best opportunity to sell the royal family to a whole new generation of subscribers, turned into a gigantic reality TV show with just one theme—will he or won’t he? © Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast While the star of this soap opera may have been Thomas Markle, there’s no doubt who the showrunners were. Enter the world’s brashest, loudest and most un-royal website, TMZ, and its star reporter, editor and producer, Sean Mandell, who ran rings around the palace with a series of exclusive interviews with Markle in which he first copped to faking the photos, then declared he was so embarrassed he wouldn’t come to the wedding and walk his daughter down the aisle, then said he wanted to, then said he couldn’t because he is having heart surgery…Wednesday. Just to clarify, for those Daily Beast readers who got lost in that TMZ-like swirl of fact and counter fact, the latest is, he’s not coming. As of right now, Thomas Markle is a no-show. Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, will likely do the honors on the aisle-walking duty. The story has spun completely out of Kensington Palace’s grasp. They have had absolutely no idea what has been going on. Like the rest of us, they have been finding out from TMZ. The failings of the Kensington Palace press office are often a subject of conversation among the royal press pack, and this occasion was no different. First, although the palace was in the middle of a huge, international story of interest to people in every time zone, they did not staff up the press office after 6 p.m. local time (1 p.m. in New York)—all press inquiries after office hours were routed to a beleaguered duty press officer’s mobile phone. The statement, when it came, late on Monday evening, was extraordinarily odd. It said: “This is a deeply personal moment for Ms. Markle in the days before her wedding. She and Prince Harry ask again for understanding and respect to be extended to Mr. Markle in this difficult situation.” What did that even mean? The palace had been asked one very simple question: “Is her dad coming?” and answered by saying, “Look, Meghan’s really sad about her dad right now. Stop asking questions please.” In the old days, when there was some trust between the palace and the reporters, the Queen’s former press secretary Dickie Arbiter would have hit the phones and called a few key journalists and told them the truth, which was pretty simple: “Er, look chaps, we don’t know.” But relations are so bad between the palace and the press now that those kinds of informal contacts are a distant fantasy. This reporter was so confused by the statement that he had to ring the press office and ask if the message had been accidentally truncated. After TMZ published what appears to be its final update in the Tom Markle saga of the night—which said that Markle wouldn’t be making the wedding after all because he has to have heart surgery at 7:30 a.m. Wednesday—Mandell replied to messages from The Daily Beast but said he was not able to comment, as he was about to get on a plane to London. TMZ reps were also not able to provide a spokesperson for The Daily Beast; however, insiders told The Daily Beast that the past few days had been “surreal.” In the end, the biggest question for the palace is: why TMZ? Why did Thomas Markle choose to talk the shoutiest gossip site on the web instead of the courtiers at Kensington? In a piece to camera on the site, the site’s founder Harvey Levin and Mandell said they had not paid Markle any money for his cooperation. Levin said, “We didn’t pay him anything, he didn’t ask for anything. Sean started texting him and eventually he talked to both of us. He was offered $100,000 to do an interview, turned it down.” Maybe it is in the end as simple as that—human contact. Markle clearly trusted TMZ to tell the truth and to get his side of the story out there more than he did the palace. One can hardly blame him—the palace appear to have done absolutely nothing to protect him from the media they knew would descend on him. And here’s a sobering thought for those courtiers to reflect on over the next few days: Maybe if the palace had made the same efforts to engage Thomas Markle that TMZ did, he might have told them about his plans first.

The U.S.-based International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC) has a small list of missing children statistics from countries around the world. The organization points out that one of the reasons the list is small, is the lack of a common definition of a missing child and a common response to the issue. ICMEC hopes to change that, especially as cases of missing children often cross borders and extend through continents. According to ICMEC: “In many countries, statistics on missing children are not even available; and, unfortunately, even available statistics may be inaccurate due to: under-reporting/under-recognition; inflation; incorrect database entry of case information; and deletion of records once a case is closed. “The lack of numbers, and the discrepancy in the numbers that do exist, is one of the key reasons why ICMEC developed and advocates for the Model Missing Child Framework, which assists countries with building strong, well-rounded national responses, and facilitates more efficient investigations, management, and resolution of missing children cases.”

Do you love your Tesla so much that you want to sleep in it? Maybe you're a camping enthusiast, or perhaps you're on a road trip that doesn't have fast chargers on part of the route. Do you put the front seats back, and prepare to wake up with a sore… well, everything? Nah, my dudes, not anymore because the Dreamcase exists! The Dreamcase is a bed-in-a-box system designed to fit easily into your Tesla's trunk (only taking up, like, half of it) and then unfold when you want to catch some ZZZs. Inside, it contains a folding memory foam mattress, a duvet and pillows, or you can step up, be a baller, and get the one that comes with sheets. The Dreamcase is available for Model S, Model X and Model 3 coming soon and prices start at $779 for the basic Model S unit. If you've got a Model 3, it's less expensive; ditto for Model X. The fancy Marko cotton satin sheets and pillowcases are, of course, extra. Who is this wildly expensive and deeply silly product for, exactly? Are there that many Tesla owners trying to sleep in their cars so often that they'd pay upward of $800 for a built-to-purpose solution? Are they homeless-by-choice millennial Silicon Beach brogrammers living in their Model Xs by the beach because #vanlife? We're just as confused as you probably are, dear reader. Still, this is a way better idea than the Autopilot Buddy, so at least there's that.

We've heard a lot about the upcoming Ford Mustang Shelby GT500's engine, but so far we've only heard unsubstantiated rumors about its transmission. The video below doesn't solve that mystery, although it does appear to be proof the GT500 will change gears automatically. Whether that's through a dual-clutch or traditional torque converter automatic is up for debate. The video, posted this week by the folks at enthusiast forum Mustang6G, shows a camouflaged Mustang testing on the street. The wingless prototype looks a lot like the one we spotted last month, but in this video, we can hear it running. The shooter captured the car taking off from a stop several times, and each time the transmission upshifts through second and third gear very quickly—too quick to be a manual. The gearbox's rush to get into a higher gear reminds us of the 10-speed automatic currently offered on the regular Ford Mustang. Chevrolet already uses a version of that transmission in the 650-hp Camaro ZL1, so we know it can handle track duty. Using the 10-speed on the GT500 would also probably reduce Ford's development costs, but the rumor we've heard for the past several months has been that Ford will use a seven-speed dual-clutch like the Getrag unit found in the Ford GT. Either transmission would be capable of the quick shifts we hear in this video, so it's difficult to tell which one it is. Research the Ford Mustang on MSN Autos But while the GT500's transmission remains a mystery, we know more about the rest of the car. Thanks to a couple of leaks, it's probably a safe bet that the GT500 will pack a supercharged variant of the GT350's flat-plane-crank 5.2-liter V-8. And thanks to Ford, we know the car will pump out more than 700 hp. The GT500 will make its official debut in 2019, so there's plenty of time for more info to trickle out. In the meantime, check out the video below and draw your own conclusions on the Shelby GT500's quick-shifting transmission.

A music promoter who promised Donald Trump Jr. over email that a Russian lawyer would provide dirt about Hillary Clinton in June 2016 made the offer because he had been assured the Moscow attorney was “well connected” and had “damaging material,” the promoter testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Subscribe to the Post Most newsletter: Today’s most popular stories on The Washington Post Rob Goldstone told the committee that his client, the Russian pop star and developer Emin Agalarov, had insisted he help set up the meeting between President Trump’s son and the lawyer during the campaign to pass along material on Clinton, overriding Goldstone’s own warnings that the meeting would be a bad idea. “He said, ‘it doesn’t matter. You just have to get the meeting,” Goldstone, a British citizen, testified. The intensity with which Agalorov and his father, the billionaire Aras Agalarov, sought the Trump Tower meeting, which has become a key point of scrutiny for Congressional inquiries and Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, was revealed in more than 2,500 pages of Congressional testimony and exhibits that were released by the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday morning. Committee Democrats circulated some excerpts from the testimony in advance of their formal release at 9 a.m. The excerpted testimony shows that attendees at the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting largely agreed with Trump Jr.’s long-standing contention that the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, did not transmit dirt about Clinton. She has denied she was acting on behalf of the Russian government. But the new information helps explain why Goldstone had written the candidate’s son before the meeting that Veselnitskaya would bring “very high level and sensitive information” that was part of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” — and why Trump Jr. responded, “if it is what you say, then I love it.” The excerpts also shed light on the anxiety that rippled through President Trump’s orbit a year later, as news of the meeting became public and his aides and lawyers tried to manage the story. The testimony also includes new details about Trump’s long interest in building business ties to Russia and a relationship with President Vladi­mir Putin. An Agalarov employee testified to the committee that the Russian mogul tried to get Trump a meeting with Putin when the Miss Universe pageant, which Trump owned, was held in Moscow in 2013. The employee told the committee that Agalarov “secretly requested” the meeting through a Russian government official. Putin agreed to attend a pageant rehearsal, but canceled at the last minute. Though Trump periodically claimed during the campaign that he knew Putin, there is no evidence the two men met until after Trump took office. Much of the testimony released Wednesday revolves around the Trump Tower meeting when Trump Jr. accepted the sit-down with Veselnitskaya and invited his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and top campaign aide Paul Manafort to attend as well. Goldstone testified that he, like Trump Jr., attended the meeting expecting Veselnitskaya would deliver a “smoking gun” to help Trump’s campaign. He testified that he was embarrassed and apologetic when she instead used the session to press her view that the sanctions imposed on Russia for human rights abuses, known as the Magnitsky Act, should be lifted. The president’s son acknowledged he too was disappointed that the Russian lawyer did not provide more information that could be used in the campaign: “All else being equal, I wouldn’t have wanted to waste 20 minutes hearing about something that I wasn’t supposed to be meeting about,” he told the committee. Though panel Republicans conferred with their Democratic counterparts on point-by-point issues during the preparation of the transcripts, their release is expected to touch off a new wave of partisan bickering. Months have gone by since committee chairman Republican Sen. Charles R. Grassley (R-Iowa) first promised that the committee would release transcripts of the interviews committee conducted with some of the participants in the Trump Tower meeting. Veselnitskaya only agreed to provide written answers from Russia to the panel’s questions. Neither Kushner, now a top White House aide, nor Manafort, who has been charged with a series of financial crimes related to his work before joining the campaign, sat for interviews. But the committee interviewed the five other men who took part in the session, including a Russian American lobbyist who once served in an Soviet counterintelligence unit. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has said that she supports the release of the interview transcripts, but panel Democrats contend Republicans did not push witnesses to answer all key questions and are preparing to end their inquiry prematurely. Across the Capitol, the Russia probes have been winding down. Last month, the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released the final report of their year-long investigation of Russian interference in the election and the Kremlin’s alleged collusion with the Trump administration, concluding over the protestations of panel Democrats that the Trump campaign did not cooperate with Moscow. The Senate Intelligence Committee, which continues to press ahead with its investigation, is soon expected to release the second of four interim reports, with its final report expected in the fall.” President Trump has repeatedly insisted that his campaign did not collude with Russian efforts to interfere in the election, including through the hacking and distribution of Democratic emails. “I appreciate the opportunity to have assisted the Judiciary Committee in its inquiry,” Trump Jr., said in a prepared statement. “The public can now see that for over five hours I answered every question asked and was candid and forthright with the Committee.” Shortly after his election, President Trump’s spokeswoman had said that no campaign officials had dealings with Russians during the campaign. Excerpts from the newly released testimony show that the president’s lawyers and associates were anxious about any reports on Trump Jr.’s meeting, which contradicted that claim. “[Trump’s lawyers are] concerned because it links Don Jr. to officials from Russia, which he has always denied meeting,” Goldstone wrote in an email to Emin Agalarov on June 26, 2017, a few weeks before the New York Times first reported on the meeting. Ultimately, lawyers working for the Trump Organization crafted statements they asked other participants in the meeting to distribute, a move that could draw scrutiny from Mueller if it involved communicating with witnesses or otherwise hiding the true purpose of the meeting from investigators. . Trump himself contributed to an initial statement about the meeting and released by his son, Trump Jr. told the committee. It misleadingly stated said the meeting had been “primarily” about the adoption of Russian children by Americans. The Kremlin halted adoptions in retaliation for the Magnitsky Act, the policy issue that appeared to be at the heart of Veselnitskaya’s presentation. After Goldstone was interviewed by The Washington Post for the first time about his participation in the meeting in July 2017, the promoter tried to assure two Trump organization lawyers that he too had offered a similar account. “I said only that the meeting appeared to have been about adoption issues and was quickly terminated,” he wrote in an email at the time. Meanwhile, Goldstone secretly fretted about the scrutiny he predicted would follow. “I hope this favor was worth it for your dad,” he wrote to Emin Agalarov. “It could blow up.”

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department and the F.B.I. are investigating Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct political data firm, and have sought to question former employees and banks that handled its business, according to an American official and other people familiar with the inquiry. Prosecutors have questioned potential witnesses in recent weeks, telling them that there is an open investigation into Cambridge Analytica — which worked on President Trump’s election and other Republican campaigns in 2016 — and “associated U.S. persons.” But the prosecutors provided few other details, and the inquiry appears to be in its early stages, with investigators seeking an overview of the company and its business practices. The investigation compounds the woes of a firm that has come under intense scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators in the United States and Britain since The New York Times and Observer in London reported in March that it had harvested private data from more than 50 million Facebook profiles, and that it may have violated American election laws. This month, Cambridge Analytica announced that it would shut down and declare bankruptcy, saying that negative press and cascading federal and state investigations had driven away customers and made it impossible for the firm to remain in business. The company, whose principal owner is the wealthy Republican donor Robert Mercer, offered tools that it claimed could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. Its so-called psychographic modeling techniques, which were built in part with the data harvested from Facebook, underpinned Cambridge’s work for the Trump campaign in 2016. But the firm found itself at the center of a trans-Atlantic furor after the Times and Observer articles appeared. It was then dealt another blow when a British news channel broadcast undercover video in which Alexander Nix, the company’s suspended chief executive, suggested that the company had used seduction and bribery to entrap politicians and influence foreign elections. The federal investigation in the United States appears to focus on the company’s financial dealings — investigators have reached out to the company’s banks, for instance — and how it acquired and used personal data pulled from Facebook and other sources, according to the American official, who was briefed on the inquiry, and other people familiar with it. In addition, the investigators have contacted Facebook, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation. The official would not provide any other details, and Facebook declined to comment. In a sign of the inquiry’s scope, one of the prosecutors involved is the assistant chief of the Justice Department’s securities and financial fraud division, Brian Kidd. The effort is being assisted by at least one agent who investigates cybercrime for the F.B.I., those people said. Mr. Kidd traveled to London this month with another Justice Department prosecutor and an F.B.I. agent to interview Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee who has emerged as one of the firm’s fiercest critics. “I can confirm that I’ve been contacted by the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice, and answered preliminary questions,” Mr. Wylie said in a brief interview. “We plan to meet again to provide substantive answers to the investigators.” It was not clear whether the investigation is tied to the inquiry being led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, who is examining whether Mr. Trump or any of his associates aided Russia’s effort to interfere in the presidential election. Prosecutors from Mr. Mueller’s team questioned at least two Cambridge executives last December in Washington, according to one company official. The employee, who asked to remain anonymous to describe confidential internal matters, added that the inquiry appeared to be perfunctory. There have been no other concrete signs from Mr. Mueller’s team that Cambridge is a focus of their efforts. The Justice Department’s investigation is running parallel to a separate investigation by the National Crime Agency of Britain. There, investigators are examining a range of allegations, including whether Cambridge Analytica employees sought to bribe foreign officials, destroyed evidence, hacked computers and violated Britain’s Data Protection Act. Mr. Wylie said he had been cooperating with the National Crime Agency. He has also provided testimony and internal Cambridge Analytica documents to Parliament. “There is an international investigation being coordinated by the National Crime Agency in Britain, and I intend to be as helpful and cooperative as I can,” he said. Cambridge Analytica has denied using Facebook data on the 2016 campaign. An internal audit commissioned by Cambridge described Mr. Nix’s statements in the video as an exaggeration. Cambridge Analytica grew out of the SCL Group, a well-established British company that specialized in psychological research for defense and intelligence agencies but also worked on election campaigns, chiefly in developing countries. In 2014, SCL executives persuaded Mr. Mercer to bankroll a new United States-based firm, Cambridge Analytica, that would break into the growing political data market with a promising new product: psychological profiles of millions of American voters. The new company was overseen by Mr. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, and then adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, both of whom went on to enjoy influential positions in Mr. Trump’s circle before the president’s break with Mr. Bannon this year. Also in 2014, a contractor for the new firm used quiz apps and other programs to gather private profile information from as many as 87 million Facebook users, data former Cambridge employees said provided the critical basis for the new company’s voter profiles. The Times also reported in March that the company had sent personnel from Canada and Europe to work on various campaigns in the 2014 midterm elections and in 2016 campaigns, raising questions about Cambridge’s compliance with federal election law, which limits the involvement of noncitizens in election campaigns. Over the past year, Cambridge’s efforts to break into commercial data and marketing work had suffered from the company’s association with Mr. Trump, according to former employees. And in the months before shutting down, Mr. Nix, the Mercer family and SCL’s owners had considered new ventures together. One new firm, a British holding company called Emerdata, was formed in part to bring in new investors, according to a former employee. Emerdata’s directors, according to public records, came to include Johnson Ko Chun Shun, a Hong Kong financier and business partner of Erik Prince, founder of the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater. Mr. Ko and Mr. Prince have links to the Chinese government: Citic, a state-owned Chinese financial conglomerate that for decades has employed the sons and daughters of the Communist Party’s elite families, is a major investor in Frontier Services Group, Mr. Ko and Mr. Prince’s Africa-focused logistics company.

Nuns should communicate more with God and less with social media, the Vatican has said. The Holy See has told the Catholic Church’s 38,000 cloistered nuns that too much tweeting and downloading news intrudes on a life of prayer and contemplation. The document titled 'Cor Orans’, Latin for ‘Praying Heart,’ gives instructions to nuns on how to apply Pope Francis’s Apostolic Constitution, which was issued in 2016. It offers guidelines on all aspects of life in monasteries including legal, administrative and spiritual matters. It did not forbid social media but said that it should be used in moderation. In a chapter titled ‘Separation from the World,’ it describes how the Church’s rules on the use of “social communication” aimed to preserve “recollection and silence.” The document warns that “it is possible to empty contemplative silence when the cloister is filled with noises, news, and words.” It also advises that social media must be used “with sobriety and discretion...that they may be at the service of formation for the contemplative life and necessary communication, and do not become occasions for wasting time or escaping from the demands of fraternal life in community. “Nor should they prove harmful for your vocation, or become an obstacle to your life wholly dedicated to contemplation”, it added. The 34-page document was presented during a press conference on Tuesday by Catholic Archbishop José Rodriguez Carballo, the Vatican News reported. He said it aims to “clarify the provisions of the law, developing and determining the procedures for its execution.” It follows consultation with nuns in monasteries who were asked what they needed to better live out their vocation and is intended to replace a document released in 1999. Carballo said: “We copied what arrived from the nuns,” adding that the document’s aim was to bring together “a desire for renovation with the protection and safeguarding of the pillars of contemplative life."

A music promoter who promised Donald Trump Jr. over email that a Russian lawyer would provide dirt about Hillary Clinton in June 2016 made the offer because he had been assured the Moscow attorney was “well connected” and had “damaging material,” the promoter testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Subscribe to the Post Most newsletter: Today’s most popular stories on The Washington Post Rob Goldstone told the committee that his client, the Russian pop star and developer Emin Agalarov, had insisted he help set up the meeting between President Trump’s son and the lawyer during the campaign to pass along material on Clinton, overriding Goldstone’s own warnings that the meeting would be a bad idea. “He said, ‘it doesn’t matter. You just have to get the meeting,” Goldstone, a British citizen, testified. The intensity with which Agalorov and his father, the billionaire Aras Agalarov, sought the Trump Tower meeting, which has become a key point of scrutiny for Congressional inquiries and Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, was revealed in more than 2,500 pages of Congressional testimony and exhibits that were released by the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday morning. Committee Democrats circulated some excerpts from the testimony in advance of their formal release at 9 a.m. The excerpted testimony shows that attendees at the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting largely agreed with Trump Jr.’s long-standing contention that the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, did not transmit dirt about Clinton. She has denied she was acting on behalf of the Russian government. But the new information helps explain why Goldstone had written the candidate’s son before the meeting that Veselnitskaya would bring “very high level and sensitive information” that was part of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” — and why Trump Jr. responded, “if it is what you say, then I love it.” The excerpts also shed light on the anxiety that rippled through President Trump’s orbit a year later, as news of the meeting became public and his aides and lawyers tried to manage the story. The testimony also includes new details about Trump’s long interest in building business ties to Russia and a relationship with President Vladi­mir Putin. An Agalarov employee testified to the committee that the Russian mogul tried to get Trump a meeting with Putin when the Miss Universe pageant, which Trump owned, was held in Moscow in 2013. The employee told the committee that Agalarov “secretly requested” the meeting through a Russian government official. Putin agreed to attend a pageant rehearsal, but canceled at the last minute. Though Trump periodically claimed during the campaign that he knew Putin, there is no evidence the two men met until after Trump took office. Much of the testimony released Wednesday revolves around the Trump Tower meeting when Trump Jr. accepted the sit-down with Veselnitskaya and invited his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and top campaign aide Paul Manafort to attend as well. Goldstone testified that he, like Trump Jr., attended the meeting expecting Veselnitskaya would deliver a “smoking gun” to help Trump’s campaign. He testified that he was embarrassed and apologetic when she instead used the session to press her view that the sanctions imposed on Russia for human rights abuses, known as the Magnitsky Act, should be lifted. The president’s son acknowledged he too was disappointed that the Russian lawyer did not provide more information that could be used in the campaign: “All else being equal, I wouldn’t have wanted to waste 20 minutes hearing about something that I wasn’t supposed to be meeting about,” he told the committee. Though panel Republicans conferred with their Democratic counterparts on point-by-point issues during the preparation of the transcripts, their release is expected to touch off a new wave of partisan bickering. Months have gone by since committee chairman Republican Sen. Charles R. Grassley (R-Iowa) first promised that the committee would release transcripts of the interviews committee conducted with some of the participants in the Trump Tower meeting. Veselnitskaya only agreed to provide written answers from Russia to the panel’s questions. Neither Kushner, now a top White House aide, nor Manafort, who has been charged with a series of financial crimes related to his work before joining the campaign, sat for interviews. But the committee interviewed the five other men who took part in the session, including a Russian American lobbyist who once served in an Soviet counterintelligence unit. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has said that she supports the release of the interview transcripts, but panel Democrats contend Republicans did not push witnesses to answer all key questions and are preparing to end their inquiry prematurely. Across the Capitol, the Russia probes have been winding down. Last month, the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released the final report of their year-long investigation of Russian interference in the election and the Kremlin’s alleged collusion with the Trump administration, concluding over the protestations of panel Democrats that the Trump campaign did not cooperate with Moscow. The Senate Intelligence Committee, which continues to press ahead with its investigation, is soon expected to release the second of four interim reports, with its final report expected in the fall.” President Trump has repeatedly insisted that his campaign did not collude with Russian efforts to interfere in the election, including through the hacking and distribution of Democratic emails. “I appreciate the opportunity to have assisted the Judiciary Committee in its inquiry,” Trump Jr., said in a prepared statement. “The public can now see that for over five hours I answered every question asked and was candid and forthright with the Committee.” Shortly after his election, President Trump’s spokeswoman had said that no campaign officials had dealings with Russians during the campaign. Excerpts from the newly released testimony show that the president’s lawyers and associates were anxious about any reports on Trump Jr.’s meeting, which contradicted that claim. “[Trump’s lawyers are] concerned because it links Don Jr. to officials from Russia, which he has always denied meeting,” Goldstone wrote in an email to Emin Agalarov on June 26, 2017, a few weeks before the New York Times first reported on the meeting. Ultimately, lawyers working for the Trump Organization crafted statements they asked other participants in the meeting to distribute, a move that could draw scrutiny from Mueller if it involved communicating with witnesses or otherwise hiding the true purpose of the meeting from investigators. . Trump himself contributed to an initial statement about the meeting and released by his son, Trump Jr. told the committee. It misleadingly stated said the meeting had been “primarily” about the adoption of Russian children by Americans. The Kremlin halted adoptions in retaliation for the Magnitsky Act, the policy issue that appeared to be at the heart of Veselnitskaya’s presentation. After Goldstone was interviewed by The Washington Post for the first time about his participation in the meeting in July 2017, the promoter tried to assure two Trump organization lawyers that he too had offered a similar account. “I said only that the meeting appeared to have been about adoption issues and was quickly terminated,” he wrote in an email at the time. Meanwhile, Goldstone secretly fretted about the scrutiny he predicted would follow. “I hope this favor was worth it for your dad,” he wrote to Emin Agalarov. “It could blow up.”

For the first time since the 2008 East Semifinals, LeBron James trails 0–2 in an intraconference playoff series. The Celtics remained undefeated at home in the postseason with a 107–94 win over the Cavaliers on Tuesday. Boston has won both games in the series by double digits, and Cleveland appears to be in very serious danger of missing the finals for the first time since James’s homecoming. Can the Cavs recover as the series shifts back to Ohio? Here are some thoughts on Game 2… • LeBron alone is not enough. James had another classic playoff performance Tuesday night, posting a triple-double with 42 points, 10 rebounds and 12 assists. The burden on James’s shoulders is clearly too much. James carries such an absurd load offensively that it would be unfair to expect him to be able to give the same level of effort on the defensive end. LeBron would have played over 40 minutes if the game wasn’t out of hand late in the fourth, and the intensity of those minutes is catching up to him against a team like Boston. The Celtics are too deep for James to steal rest during the game, and their energy in general seems to be an issue for an old Cavs roster. Most people expected a memorable night from James in Game 2. In the past, a 40-point triple-double was usually enough for LeBron to lead his team to victory. It won’t be enough against a talented, disciplined and fearless team like Boston. • Jaylen Brown is relentless. The second-year player led Boston in scoring in Game 2. Brown’s motor is clearly an issue for Cleveland, which doesn’t have the athleticism on the wing to keep up. Brown was adept at getting to the rim Tuesday, mercilessly attacking the Cavs off the dribble. He also hit three of his eight threes en route to 23 points. As much as Jayson Tatum starred against the Celtics, Brown has shown off what he’s capable of in the East Finals. LeBron can’t be expected to shut down Brown while also throwing up 40-point triple-doubles. • I actually liked the decision by Ty Lue to start Tristan Thompson. His presence on the court made Kevin Love’s life easier, he brought some oomph when setting screens, and he generally competed well on the defensive end, though Boston’s wings did hit some tough shots over him on switches. (Speaking of switches, Thompson’s insertion into the starting lineup also forced the Cavs to switch more discriminately, and their defense in the first half was actually solid.) But Cleveland’s commitment to defense waned as the game wore on. The Cavs’ wings still struggle to fight over picks, and don’t have the will to do so for a full 48 minutes. Rotations are blown too often, and the team seems to content to try to make up deficits on offense instead of locking in defensively. Boston’s offensive rating was 114.8 on Tuesday, another high mark for a team that was average on that end during the regular season. Even with Thompson giving the team a brief boost, as presently constructed it looks like Lue has no great options to fix his broken defense. And as long as the Cavs play this poorly trying to slow down the Celtics, this will be a short series. • The Cavs are living and dying by the three. Cleveland shot poorly from outside in Game 1, and in Game 2, started hot from downtown, connecting on seven of its first 14 threes. The Cavs would hit only three of their 17 three-point attempts in the second half, which arguably contributed as much to the loss as the poor defense. Kyle Korver had a couple good looks rim out, while LeBron—who finished 5-of-11 from beyond the arc—hit only one of his last four attempts. In general, Cleveland’s role players have been a mess. Jordan Clarkson was dumped from the rotation. Rodney Hood scored two points in 11 minutes and was a minus-7. J.R. Smith shot 0-for-7. Jeff Green was a team-worst minus-17. There is just no help for LeBron outside of Love and Korver. Those were the only three players to score in double figures for the Cavs. Most everyone else is bricking shots and playing terrible defense. If Cleveland has any hope in this series, James’s supporting cast will have to play leagues better moving forward. • Boston’s activity on defense is incredible. The Cavs had 15 turnovers Tuesday, thanks in large part to the Celtics jumping into passing lanes or creating takeaways with active hands. Boston had eight steals in Game 2, and those plays seemed to be particularly demoralizing for a Cleveland team that often loves to play right on the edge of collapse. • At this point, it’s clear Boston is a deeper team than Cleveland. The Celtics’ youth has been an advantage so far in this series, as the Cavs have looked a step slow in both games. It’s not necessarily time to panic yet. Cleveland still has the ultimate trump card in James, and—as you’ll hear a thousand times before Saturday—a playoff series doesn’t start until a home team loses. The Celtics have won only one game on the road this postseason—the OT thriller in Philadelphia that arguably came down to a couple bounces. The Cavs aren’t cooked yet. But huge improvements will be needed from Cleveland to make this series competitive.

It’s not a stretch to imagine that Cardi B’s hit song “Drip” was actually inspired by ice (bling) queen Jennifer Lopez. J.Lo comes through drippin’ at essentially every event—her blinding accessories competing for attention against her daring couture gowns. To put it simply: Ms. Lopez always comes to play. Of course, Monday evening was no different. Lopez and beau Alex Rodriguez attended an N.Y.C. benefit for the Robin Hood Foundation (which aptly aids the city’s poor), and all eyes fell to the singer. To be fair, there was a bit of optical trickery at play—in reality, Lopez’s slit starts at the very top of her thigh, but a lengthy stretch of beige fabric gives the illusion that her torso is on display as well. Regardless of the amount of skin actually peeking out from beneath the dress’s slit, the gown itself is no doubt sexy and bold (two of Lopez’s most beloved sartorial devices). Paired with black platform pumps, diamond drop earrings, and blinged-out rings galore, Jen’s look truly sparkled. Jen and Alex weren’t the only A-list couple to step out for a good cause. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas attended as well, members of an exclusive crowd that included Oprah Winfrey, Leslie Jones, and Jerry Seinfeld.

Google is partially and temporarily rolling back a recent Chrome change that blocked autoplaying audio, after web developers complained that it had broken countless games and apps. The update rolled out with Chrome version 66 in early May, and it was intended to quiet annoying ads and videos that would drive users toward ad-blocking software. But it also ended up completely removing the audio from interactive web projects that relied on specific commands, which created problems for artists — and doomed any abandoned projects to silence. “The team here is working hard to improve things for users and developers, but in this case we didn’t do a good job of communicating the impact of the new autoplay policy to developers,” writes Google product manager John Pallett. This doesn’t fully remove the autoplay-blocking elements of Chrome 66. Instead, Google is rolling back limits on the Web Audio API system used by app developers, while leaving the limits on general audio and video autoplay intact. It’s also not a permanent measure. Pallett says that the limits will return in Chrome’s version 70 release in October, and he’s still urging developers to change their code following Google’s guidelines. Developer Benji Kay, who created several online audio tools that were affected by this change, responded critically to Pallett’s post. “Simply delaying the enacting of this policy doesn’t solve any of the major concerns” with its contents, says Kay. Another developer, Ashley Gullen, previously laid out a proposal to fix the problem — but Pallett says it’s a “non-trivial user interface challenge” that Google is still examining. “We are still exploring options to enable great audio experiences for users, and we will post more detailed thoughts on that topic here later,” he writes. This isn’t an unmitigated win for developers, since Google isn’t making any promises about addressing their core problems with the update. But by pushing the changes back to October, it takes some pressure off gamemakers and the Chrome team alike.

TOKYO — North Korea has a message for U.S. President Donald Trump ahead of next month's summit: Don't listen to your new hard-line national security adviser, John Bolton. After announcing early Wednesday that it was pulling out of high-level talks with Seoul because of a new round of U.S.-South Korean military exercises, the North took aim at Bolton and said it might have to reconsider whether to proceed with the summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un because it doubts how seriously Washington actually wants peaceful dialogue. The moves give the clearest indication yet of North Korea's mindset heading into the summit, scheduled for June 12 in Singapore. Though North Korea has been for the most part silent about its intentions for the meeting, the announcements underscore two of its biggest concerns — the future of the nearly 30,000 U.S. troops in South Korea and claims coming out of Washington lately that sanctions and Trump's "maximum pressure" policy are what drove Kim to the negotiating table. But defanging Bolton, the most militant of Trump's advisers, is now also apparently a major priority. "We do not hide our feeling of repugnance toward him," North Korea said of Bolton in a statement attributed by state-run media to senior Foreign Ministry official Kim Kye Gwan. A hard-liner's hard-liner, Bolton was a key adviser to President George W. Bush when the U.S. tore up a nuclear agreement with North Korea in 2002. The North conducted its first nuclear test four years later. In August, Bolton defended the idea of a preventive military strike against the North, and last month suggested negotiations in 2004 that led to the shipping of nuclear components to the U.S. from Libya under Moammar Gadhafi would be a good model for North Korea as well. Not surprisingly, North Korea bristles at the mention of Libya. Gadhafi, who agreed to abandon his fledgling nuclear program, was later deposed after a 42-year reign and was killed in 2011 — the year Kim assumed power in North Korea — while his country spiraled into chaos. North Korea's statement Wednesday did not directly criticize Trump, or Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has made two trips to the North to lay the groundwork for the summit. Instead, it stressed that North Korea welcomes Trump's position for ending the deep-rooted hostilities between their countries and concluded that if the Trump administration approaches the summit with a sincere desire to improve relations, the result will be positive. It warned, however, of a "ridiculous comedy" if Trump listens to Bolton and "quasi-patriots" who insist on "abandoning nuclear weapons first, compensating afterward." "But now, the U.S. is miscalculating the magnanimity and broad-minded initiatives of the DPRK as signs of weakness and trying to embellish and advertise as if these are the product of its sanctions and pressure," it added. North Korea's dual moves Wednesday can be seen as an attempt by Kim to fortify his position. In an announcement issued hours before the anti-Bolton statement, North Korea said it was pulling out of talks in the Demilitarized Zone that were supposed to be held later Wednesday with senior South Korean officials because of the military maneuvers that began earlier this week. Annual military drills between Washington and Seoul have long been a major source of contention between the Koreas, but the current exercises, called "Max Thunder," are particularly sensitive from North Korea's perspective because they reportedly involve nuclear capable B-52 bombers and F-22 stealth fighters. The North fears the aircraft could be used to carry out a pre-emptive nuclear attack or a precision strike that would target Kim and his top lieutenants — the kind of thing Bolton advocated publicly before taking his current office. But Kim has already won one round of bargaining on the military front. At South Korean President Moon Jae-in's request, Washington agreed to delay the much larger "Foal Eagle/Key Resolve" drills in the spring because of the North-South diplomacy surrounding February's Winter Olympics in South Korea. Kim told visiting South Korean officials in March that he understood the drills would take place but expressed hope that they would be modified once the situation on the Korean Peninsula had stabilized, according to South Korea's government. North Korea's announcement regarding the talks on Wednesday was in keeping with that position. And by playing the doves against the hawks in Seoul and Washington, it, too, might have been made with Bolton in mind.

LOS ANGELES - More Californians were diagnosed with chlamydia, gonorrhea or syphilis in 2017 than ever before, marking the third year in a row that the state's STD cases hit a record high, officials said. The trend is mirrored nationwide, where STDs have been rising for five years. Experts blame the increases on falling condom use, fewer public health clinics and people having more sexual partners linked to dating apps. "STDs are preventable by consistently using condoms, and many STDs can be cured with antibiotics," California Department of Public Health Director Dr. Karen Smith said in a statement. "Regular testing and treatment are very important for people who are sexually active, even for people who have no symptoms. Most people infected with an STD do not know it." More than 300,000 people in the state were diagnosed with syphilis, gonorrhea or chlamydia last year, a 45 percent increase compared to five years ago, state officials said. Officials said they were especially concerned that as the number of women with syphilis has jumped, so has the number of babies born with syphilis passed from their mothers. Congenital syphilis, as it is known, can cause stillbirths or permanent disabilities. Since 2013, the number of babies in California born with congenital syphilis has more than quadrupled - to 278 last year. There were more babies born with congenital syphilis in California in 2017 than there have been since 1995, according to state data.

There have been many reactions to Seattle Mariners second baseman Robinson Cano being suspended 80 games for violating MLB’s drug policy. Those reactions have been all over the spectrum, as many want to believe Cano’s explanation (that he didn’t take PEDs and unknowingly took a banned diuretic), while others are much more skeptical about his motives. It’s safe to say that Houston Astros pitcher Justin Verlander, an old rival of Cano’s, can be counted among the latter. When the news broke about Cano’s suspension, Verlander, who doesn’t tweet all that often, took an apparent shot at Cano on Twitter. Based on the fact that Cano’s explanation doesn’t really add up when you put all the pieces together, it seems Verlander was on the mark.

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are less than a week away from their royal wedding, and while this should be a happy time, a source tells ET that the couple have "mixed emotions right now" amid a report that Meghan's father, Thomas Markle, is having some health issues. On Tuesday, Thomas told TMZ that he would not be attending his daughter's nuptials because he has to have surgery on Wednesday morning after suffering a heart attack a week ago. "[The doctors] will go in and clear blockage, repair damage and put a stent where it is needed," he said after telling the website earlier that day that he was looking forward to attending the wedding and walking Meghan down the aisle. "This is a serious situation. Meghan and Harry are very concerned,” the source tells ET. “Thomas’ health is a private matter and therefore no comments or statements will be made [by the Palace]." Meanwhile, Meghan's mother, Doria Ragland, was seen heading to the airport in Los Angeles on Tuesday. The source says that Doria is still scheduled to meet Harry's grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, as well as other members of the royal family. The source also notes that Meghan, 36, is leaning on her best friend, Jessica Mulroney, for support during this time. On Wednesday, Mulroney was spotted at London's Heathrow Airport with her family. Earlier this week, Meghan's father made headlines after a Mail on Sunday report featured CCTV footage of what appeared to be Thomas arranging to take paparazzi images with a photographer. "This is a deeply personal moment for Ms. Markle in the days before her wedding," Kensington Palace said in a statement to ET on Monday following the photo scandal. "She and Prince Harry ask again for understanding and respect to be extended to Mr. Markle in this difficult situation." Royal expert Katie Nicholl also told ET on Tuesday that she's hearing that Meghan has been in "eleventh-hour talks" with her dad. "I was told by sources close to Meghan last night that she was utterly heartbroken, that she couldn't believe that this was happening just days before her wedding," Nicholl said. "That she is close to her father, they always had a special relationship, and that she feels that what he did in terms of staging those photographs were never meant with a cruel intention, it was actually meant to present himself in a more positive light. He didn't ever have any understanding or any suspicions that this could have backfired on him as badly as it has done."

FAIRFIELD, Calif. — Prosecutors will file nine counts of felony child abuse against the California mother of 10 children who investigators said suffered long-term abuse in a filthy home, authorities said. Ina Rogers, who's scheduled to appear in court Wednesday, told reporters earlier this week that the allegations against her and her husband are false. It's still unclear whether any California government agencies had an opportunity to intervene in the years authorities claim the children were abused inside their home in suburban Fairfield, about 46 miles (74 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco. Their mother claimed social services interviewed the kids three years ago but nothing came of the visit. Rogers, 31, told reporters that she had one prior interaction with child welfare officials when her mother "had mentioned something" that prompted a home visit. Officials took pictures of the children and interviewed them individually, she said. "Nothing was founded, my kids were placed back with me," she said. Solano County's Child Welfare Services department officials did not immediately respond to requests Tuesday for details about the visit, or information about other interactions they may have had with members of the household. Sheriff's and prosecutors say the children were rescued from a filthy house in March and had suffered puncture wounds, burns, bruising and injuries consistent with being shot with a pellet gun. Sharon Henry, the county's chief deputy district attorney, said they were tortured "for sadistic purposes." Their father, Jonathan Allen, 29, was arrested Friday and is in Solano County Jail on seven counts of torture and nine counts of felony child abuse. He has pleaded not guilty and bail was set at $5.2 million. Allen denied the allegations in an interview with KCRA-TV on Tuesday, declaring "I am not an animal." "The truth is that it is a functioning household," he said. "Everyone helped everyone. It was a complete circle — the older ones helped the little ones." Questions remain as to how the children and the alleged abuse went undetected for years until March 31, when police responding to a missing juvenile report entered the house. They found a home filled with rotted food and human and animal waste, said Fairfield Lt. Greg Hurlbut. Police removed the children, ages 4 months to 12 years, and arrested Rogers on suspicion of neglect. She was released after posting $10,000 bail. Rogers says she home-schooled the children, but the Fairfield home was not registered as a private school and neither were three prior addresses in Fairfield and Vallejo, according to the California Department of Education. California law requires children to be enrolled in public school unless they meet specific exemptions, such as documented attendance at a private school. Parents who teach their own children can register as a private school but the state does not approve, monitor or inspect them. Some home-based instruction is also offered through self-directed programs at public or charter schools. Rogers said she previously enrolled her two oldest children in school but decided to teach them herself because she didn't think they were getting enough attention. She said her daughter failed to get on the school bus on her first day of kindergarten and was later found talking to a stranger and his dog at the school, she said. "They were bullied and the teachers weren't helping me with their education," Rogers said. "So I said, 'OK how am I going to do this with all these kids? I can't do that.' So I was like, 'I'm the only one who cares enough' so I started to homeschool them." At least one person suspected abuse: The children's maternal grandmother. She called Allen a monster. "He would take the baby and slap it in the face and put duct tape on the baby's mouth to make it shut up," Wanda Rogers told KNTV in San Francisco. Rogers said the children slept in one bedroom because they were close. The home's other rooms were used as a master bedroom, playroom and meditation room. Rogers said she works as an EKG technician at a heart monitoring company and her husband is a tattoo artist. Neighbor Larry Magnaye said he had no idea there were 10 children living in the house across the street. The parents waved from the driveway, but he never saw the children in the yard or heard them playing in the backyard pool. "It's a pretty big house," Magnaye said. "But I don't know how you can keep it quiet when you have 10 kids. I can't keep it quiet with one, two, you know?"