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National

Attorney General Bill Barr has received the Mueller report, marking the end of the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible obstruction of justice by President Trump, The Washington Post reports.

The big picture: It remains to be seen what of the report will become public. Barr told lawmakers earlier this year that he would release as much information from the final Mueller report as is legally possible.

Note that Barr is supposed to notify Congress if anyone at DOJ overruled a request from Mueller — Barr said today that "there were no such instances during the special counsel's investigation."

What's next: Barr told the House and Senate Judiciary chairs in a letter that he may be able to advise on the details of Mueller's conclusions as soon as this weekend.

Mueller will not be recommending more indictments as a result of the investigation, per the AP. 

Mueller will conclude his special counsel service in the coming days as well.

The White House was informed at approximately 4:35 pm on Friday that the Department of Justice had the Mueller report, per CNN.

At 5 pm staffers from Capitol Hill met at the Department of Justice, per Fox News.

Around 7:20 pm, Democratic chairs of 6 House committees submitted a letter demanding that the Justice Department release "without delay" the complete report, and that Barr turn over all evidence Mueller discovered. The Democrats — including Jerrold Nadler (Judiciary) and Eliot Engel (Foreign Affairs); Elijah Cummings (Oversight and Reform); Adam Schiff (Intelligence), Maxine Waters (Financial Services) Richard Neal (Ways and Means) — say since the Justice Department asserts a sitting president can't be indicted, Barr's failure to release evidence of criminal or other misconduct by Trump "would raise serious questions about whether the Department of Justice policy is being used as a pretext for a cover-up of misconduct."

Bill Barr, in a letter to House and Senate Judiciary committee leadership: "I remain committed to as much transparency as possible, and I will keep you informed as to the status of my review."

Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow: "We’re pleased that the Office of Special Counsel has delivered its report to the Attorney General pursuant to the regulations. Attorney General Barr will determine the appropriate next steps."

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders: "The next steps are up to Attorney General Barr, and we look forward to the process taking its course. The White House has not received or been briefed on the Special Counsel’s report."

Read Bill Barr's notice letter to Congress:

Go deeper: Timeline: Every big move in the Mueller investigation

Robert Mueller submits long-awaited report on Russia investigation

Barr has said he will work to make as much public as is legally possible.

Politics

Mueller investigation

Flooding's national security risk

It's certain to get more challenging as the climate continues to warm, seas rise, and stronger storms strike.

extreme weather

U.S. News

Extreme weather

News and analysis of the scientific advances fueling AI and quantum computing, revolutionizing biology and medicine, and tackling climate change. Science is changing the world and colliding with the global politics that shape it.

Science

Breaking climate science and policy coverage as extreme weather events reshape communities. Keep tabs on the race to a low carbon economy, which may be bumpy as governments, climate tech startups and major oil and gas companies race to find their niche amid the changing energy landscape.

Energy & Climate

Pro Rata

Axios Pro Rata

Media Trends

Axios Media Trends

Pinterest, the social bookmarking platform, on Friday filed for an IPO that should result in its shares being traded next month on the New York Stock Exchange.

Big picture: Pinterest is one of several 2019 IPO hopefuls that have remained private longer than have past generations of tech startups, thanks largely to a ready flow of investor capital. The San Francisco-based company was founded over a decade ago, and has raised nearly $1.5 billion (most recently at a $12.3 billion valuation).

Pinterest reports a $63 million net loss on $756 million in revenue for 2018, compared to a $130 million net loss on $473 million in revenue for 2017.

It plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker PINS, with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Allen & Co. as lead underwriters.

The San Francisco-based company claims 250 million monthly active users, two-thirds of whom are female.

Top shareholders include Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital, Fidelity and Valiant Capital Partners.

"Pinterest can go after every segment, everything from retail to even financial services," eMarketer analyst Andrew Lipsman tells Axios. "People actually engage in personal finance sharing on Pinterest, so it's actually relevant to a lot of companies, which means its advertising application potential is really strong." 

History as a guide: Pinterest will be going public just after Instagram introduced an in-app e-commerce feature. This doesn't go at the heart of Pinterest's business, which is more about promoted pins than its "shop the look" pins, but it is a bit reminiscent of how Instagram introduced its Stories feature as Snap was gearing up for its own IPO.

Data: eMarketer; Chart: Andrew Witherspoon/Axios

Pinterest files for its IPO

Social "pinning" network plans to hit the New York Stock Exchange next month.

Illustration of a Pinterest login page with a highlighted option to invest.

Business

Pinterest

Technology

Top stories & latest news on the Federal Reserve, real-time data, plus the biggest shifts happening in the U.S. and global economy.

Economy

After a record economic expansion, the coronavirus pandemic sent the U.S. economy into a recession as unemployment soared to staggering heights. The country now faces urgent questions about how much stimulus is needed for reeling consumers and businesses, and what a recovery might look like.

Economy & Business

President Trump raised eyebrows on Friday with a tweet declaring that he would be withdrawing "additional large scale Sanctions" on North Korea, which he said had been announced earlier in the day by the Treasury Department. 

Between the lines: It's unclear what exactly Trump is talking about, though Treasury did announce sanctions yesterday on 2 shipping companies it said had attempted to evade North Korea sanctions. Per Fox News' John Roberts, the sanctions Trump said he is withdrawing are not in reference to the 2 shipping companies, but instead are referencing "new large-scale sanctions that were about to be announced by Treasury." White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters the decision was made because "President Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesn’t think these sanctions will be necessary." 

Editor's note: This post has been updated with a Fox News report.

Trump says he's withdrawing just-announced North Korea sanctions

It wasn't immediately clear what the president was talking about.

President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Image

World

North Korea

Conflicts, policies and powers are intersecting and shaping the world. Breaking news and analysis of national security, foreign policy and global crises.

Mere days after President Trump's biting tweets about the closure of an Ohio General Motors factory, the auto company announced $300 million plans to add 400 jobs and manufacture a new electric vehicle at its Detroit-area plant, AP reports.

The backdrop: Last weekend Trump demanded that GM reopen or sell the plant, chastising the local union leader and expressing dissatisfaction with CEO Mary Barra.  GM spokesman Dan Flores denies the growth announcements were in response to the president's tweets, adding the investments had been weeks in the making, per the AP.

Details: A battery-powered Chevrolet Bolt will be produced at the company's Orion Township plant, though GM has not yet revealed when production or sales will commence. Questions also remain around the schedule for hiring and whether the new workers will be among those who were laid-off at 4 U.S. factories that closed in January. GM announced on Friday an additional $1.4 billion investment in U.S. factories, with a potential 300 more hires, but did not provide any further details, according to AP. 

General Motors to add jobs, new electric vehicle post-Trump tweets

General Motors announced $300 million plans to add 400 jobs and a brand new electric vehicle to its fleet.

General Motors announcement in the GM Orion Assembly Plant. Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

General Motors

Whats Next

Axios What's Next

Self-driving test vehicles can’t possibly log enough real-world miles to ensure they are safe under every circumstance, but new tools allow manufacturers to test more of the rare but still possible scenarios they might encounter.

Why it matters: Extensive simulation is critical if autonomous vehicles are to be ready any time soon. Real-world testing on public roads is slow and limited — AVs could drive around for decades waiting for challenging conditions or interesting anomalies that would help train them to handle those so-called edge cases.

What’s happening: Nvidia this week released its new Drive Constellation simulation platform, which allows developers to play with variables like the angle of the sun, types of street lights, weather, road conditions, traffic and pedestrian behaviors.

Rather than having a fleet of 50 or 100 AVs on the road, developers can test thousands on a virtual proving ground at the same time.

Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development is the first customer. It plans to simulate the equivalent of billions of miles of driving in challenging scenarios. 

How it works: The cloud-based platform contains two servers operating side-by-side — one simulates sensor output from the car and the other receives that data, makes decisions, and then sends commands back to the simulated vehicle.

Developers can create all kinds of scenarios — for example, an AV reacting to another car cutting into its lane in heavy traffic during a foggy night on wet roads.

They can run the same test under other conditions simultaneously, completing months or years of testing in a fraction of the time.

During a demonstration at this week's Nvidia GTC conference, I joked with a company engineer that he was playing God each time he hit a switch to change the driving conditions. 

Waymo has driven more miles than anyone — 10 million on real roads and 7 billion on virtual roads, using its own simulation technology — but even that's not enough, based on research by the Rand Corporation, a policy think tank.

AVs would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries, per Rand.

Under even aggressive testing assumptions, it would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles with existing fleets. 

Developers "cannot simply drive their way to safety," the report found.

I heard a lot about simulation this week in Silicon Valley from all the major AV companies. 

"You have to lean into simulation to create these scenarios you never saw in the real world — but you might have," Sterling Anderson, co-founder of Aurora Innovation, told me. 

Simulation also gives developers the confidence to tackle edge cases that are too dangerous to test in the real world.  

The catch: The simulation has to be a faithful representation of what would have happened in the actual vehicle. If the timing is off by even a micro-second, it can change the outcome, Anderson said. 

The bottom line: Real-world testing still matters, as I learned riding around San Francisco and Silicon Valley this week in a variety of test AVs. Every on-road encounter unlocks new scenarios for developers to manipulate virtually in search of the perfect driver. 

Playing God (virtually) with self-driving vehicles

AV developers can test rarest scenarios in virtual world.

Illustration of a car half in the real world and half in the virtual one 

Transportation

Autonomous vehicles

From the Valley to D.C., Big Tech players like Facebook, Google and Amazon are under more scrutiny than ever as new technology develops and privacy and antitrust concerns grow in lockstep with companies’ ambitions.

Barring a last-minute deal, millions of DirecTV customers will lose access to roughly two dozen Viacom channels like Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and VH1 at midnight Friday night because of a distribution dispute between DirecTV's parent company AT&T and Viacom.

Why it matters: Disputes like this one, driven by a shrinking traditional TV market, are leading to more programming blackouts for consumers, and could force some smaller, niche cable channels out of business altogether.

Driving the news: AT&T and Viacom are struggling to reach a deal over how much AT&T should have to pay for Viacom's channels. Their current deal expires at midnight Friday. Viacom is also charging that AT&T is unfairly favoring the channels it owns.

The details: Viacom argues that AT&T is using its newfound market dominance, which resulted from its multi-billion merger with Time Warner last summer, as leverage to drive consumers to the content it owns.

"Having recently acquired Time Warner, AT&T appears intent on using its new market power to prioritize its own content," Viacom CEO Bob Bakish wrote to staff. 

AT&T said it's "on the side of customer choice" and that it "want(s) to keep Viacom’s channels in our customers' lineups."

In AT&T and Viacom spat, cable customers lose out

AT&T plans to black out Viacom channels on DirecTV tonight.

Axios

Friday's top stories

Robert Mueller submits long-awaited report on Russia investigation

Flooding's national security risk

Pinterest files for its IPO

Trump says he's withdrawing just-announced North Korea sanctions

General Motors to add jobs, new electric vehicle post-Trump tweets

Playing God (virtually) with self-driving vehicles

In AT&T and Viacom spat, cable customers lose out

Carbon removal tech is having a moment

How electric vehicles force automakers to play nice

The dollar is likely to reap the benefit of the West's uncertainty

Under Trump, America increasingly loses its global lead

Tough times in farm country

AI's uneasy coming of age