Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is defending Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference of the 2016 presidential election calling it "appropriate and independent" in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
Why it matters: Rosenstein's assessment of the investigation runs opposite to how President Trump describes it, consistently calling it a "witch hunt." Rosenstein, who is overseeing the investigation, said people can be frustrated but "the public will have confidence that the cases we brought were warranted by the evidence."
Patriarch Bartholomew I, the Istanbul-based leader of more than 300 million Eastern Orthodox believers, last week moved to grant the Ukrainian church independence from Russia for the first time in 300 years. That led to the biggest split in the church in centuries.
Why it matters: This is a spiritual matter with distinctly worldly implications — after all, just four years ago Russia annexed Crimea and backed an insurgency that continues to grind on in Ukraine’s east. Many Ukrainians view the independence of the Ukrainian church through the lens of their country’s ongoing struggle against Russian influence.
A big reason for President Trump's accommodating stance toward Saudi rulers in the apparent killing of Jamal Khashoggi is rooted in a simple dynamic: Trump needs them.
The big picture: Rice University energy scholar Jim Krane has a helpful Forbes commentary on the "crude realpolitik" behind Trump's openness to the kingdom's denials of responsibility. It stems from the president's need for more Saudi barrels on the market to offset the effects of his Iran sanctions.
As the debate over whether Amazon is monopolizing retail presses on, we pointed to a lurking data question for the e-commerce behemoth: Will regulators question the mountain of behavioral data Amazon has about its hundreds of millions of customers' shopping habits?
But on the other side of the world, China's homegrown e-commerce king is getting ahead of that question. Alibaba actually offers its data to the companies that sell on its platform, so they can tweak their products to better entice Chinese shoppers.
