The verdict comes on the eve of Trump’s town hall in New Hampshire moderated by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, a 31-year-old anchor and correspondent who gained a reputation for challenging Trump while she covered the White House.
Trump signaled that he would take a combative approach to any questions around the case, writing on Truth Social immediately after the verdict that he had “ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA” who Carroll was, and that the “VERDICT IS A DISGRACE – A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!” He had spent part of the day recording policy videos.
Trump advisers had been negotiating for weeks with CNN, which approached them earlier this year about the idea of doing a sit-down. Trump’s decision to agree to the town hall was seen as an implicit jab at Fox News, which he has clashed with in recent months, and at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has eschewed interviews with mainstream media outlets in favor of friendly conservative ones.
The verdict immediately split Republicans on Capitol Hill with some saying it should give voters pause and others arguing that it was a continuation of biased prosecution against the former president. That schism quickly became evident among Republicans on the campaign trail as well.
Vivek Ramaswamy, who quickly defended Trump after news broke of his criminal indictment a month ago, on Tuesday did the same.
“I wasn’t one of the jurors and I’m not privy to all of the facts that they have, but I’ll say what everyone else is privately thinking,” Ramaswamy said in a statement to POLITICO. “If the defendant weren’t named Donald Trump, would there even be a lawsuit?”
Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who called for Trump to drop out of the race after his indictment, said the jury’s verdict should be taken seriously “and is another example of the indefensible behavior of Donald Trump.”
“Over the course of my over 25 years of experience in the courtroom, I have seen firsthand how a cavalier and arrogant contempt for the rule of law can backfire,” Hutchinson said in a statement.
Mike Pence, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott didn’t speak to the verdict.
Trump’s support and fundraising have only strengthened in the aftermath of past legal flashpoints, including his indictment over his alleged involvement in a hush money payment scheme to a porn star.
Sarah Longwell, a political strategist and founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, said she conducted a focus group last week in which two-time Trump voters were asked about the Carroll lawsuit. Just one of the seven voters, a woman, had heard of it — “and she didn’t believe her,” Longwell said.
Throughout other recent focus groups with Republican voters, Longwell and her staff have remarked internally about how Trump’s support is “the fiercest” among women who have already supported him twice.
“I wish things were different, but I can’t see this changing anything in a Republican primary,” Longwell said of the sexual abuse verdict Tuesday. “The things that are going to change anything in a Republican primary are if the field — his opponents for 2024 — show some political backbone and political talent and ability to capture some of the oxygen that he is sucking up.”
A recent NBC News poll found that two thirds of Republican voters believe the investigations are “politically motivated attempt to stop Trump.” But some party strategists are convinced it could hamper his prospects in a general election where he would have to reach beyond his loyal base.
RNC chair Ronna McDaniel was pressed by Fox News’ Martha McCallum over whether or not the Carroll ruling or the hush money scheme verdict could have a negative impact on suburban and women voters. McDaniel deflected, and said that women are more focused on President Joe Biden’s disappointing administration.
“I think we have a long way until the primary process begins, we have debates in August,” McDaniel said. “I think a lot of women are incredibly disappointed with the Biden administration so they’ll be looking at the Republican nominee, whoever that is, to put forward an opposing vision and one that will help suburban moms and kids and families across the country.”
But the question, which McCallum repeated again with other guests, underscores how that cohort of female and suburban women voters could potentially impact Trump. While Trump did better with women in 2020 than in 2016, Biden led among women in the last election by 11 points.
How Trump will handle discussing the lawsuit at the CNN town hall is hardly a mystery, said Dave Carney, a New Hampshire-based Republican strategist.
“He will spin it, and we could write that script right now,” Carney said soon after the verdict was issued. “‘Judge who hates me, a lady made this up, and blah, blah, blah.’ He will definitely have something to say about it.”
And he did, following that script almost exactly in posts he made on his social media website throughout the evening Tuesday.
But for a candidate who won the 2016 election mere weeks after a recording was published of him bragging about being able to sexually assault women, “none of this is new,” Carney said, and it’s unlikely voters are still trying to make up their mind about Trump’s character.
“Do I think any different eyeball is going to watch this show that wasn’t going to watch it beforehand? No,” Carney said of the Wednesday town hall. “Do I think any undecided voter was thinking ‘I don’t know about that Trump guy, I’m going to tune into CNN and see what he has to say?’”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“We would never advocate for a false or politically determined limit on abortion,” said Pamela Merritt, the Missouri-based executive director of Medical Students for Choice. “Viability is an arbitrary line. It’s a legacy of Roe that we don’t need to resurrect. And we know the language of viability can be manipulated by state legislatures, just as they are already trying to redefine what a child is or what rape is.”
The rift among progressives threatens to fracture the abortion-rights movement as it readies for costly ballot initiative fights that are likely to play central roles in coming state and federal elections.
In Missouri, the local Planned Parenthood affiliate recently quit the ballot effort because most of the nearly dozen versions activists submitted to state officials propose only protecting abortion access before the fetus is viable or until 24 weeks of pregnancy, while other versions would impose other restrictions, such as parental consent requirements.
“We have long said that Roe was never enough, especially for marginalized communities shouldering the hardest impact of abortion bans,” said Vanessa Wellbery, the vice president of policy and advocacy for Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri. “We are deeply committed to rebuilding a system that ensures all people can access abortion and all providers can provide it without political or legislative interference.”
The ballot measures in Ohio and Nevada also only protect abortion until viability, while South Dakota’s would legalize the procedure through the second trimester.
Groups defending the viability limit argue that it is widely supported by voters and has the best chance of passing in conservative and swing states.
“Yes, Roe was always the floor. But right now Missouri is in the basement,” said Mallory Schwarz, executive director of Pro-Choice Missouri. “It’s not the end game. It’s the first step in a long term effort and process.”
They also note that the more moderate language is similar to what voters approved in Michigan in November, and protects the right to an abortion even after the fetus is viable if the pregnancy endangers the pregnant person’s life or their physical or mental health.
“People have asked, does this allow abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy for any reason? That answer is, no. It doesn’t,” said Kellie Copeland, an executive committee member of Ohioans for Reproductive Freedom, the statewide coalition supporting the ballot measure. “But it does allow for people to be able to get the care that they need.”
These divisions within the abortion-rights movement mirror those on the anti-abortion side as heated battles erupt in several states argue over whether to allow exceptions to abortion bans or hold firm to the view that abortion should be illegal no matter the circumstances that led to the pregnancy. On both sides, those pushing a compromise point to polling showing that voters overwhelmingly oppose complete bans on the procedure but support some limits — especially in conservative-leaning states.
“You’ve got to meet voters where they’re at,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. “Look, we’re going to go for the most expansive, most broad access that we can get from these constitutional amendment efforts.”
‘A literal codification of Roe’
Interest in launching abortion-rights ballot initiatives exploded in the wake of the 2022 midterms, which saw progressives win each of the six state constitutional amendment fights related to abortion that went before voters that year — in California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont.
In Ohio and South Dakota, advocates are gathering signatures to restore Roe’s protections for abortion prior to viability. In Missouri, the secretary of state’s office is reviewing 11 versions of the proposed ballot measure and will release summaries of each before canvassing can begin. In Nevada, lawmakers just launched an effort to get the measure on the ballot in 2026; it must twice pass the biennial legislature before going to a popular vote.
Democratic officials in Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland and Washington state also proposed legislation this year to put abortion rights constitutional amendments before voters, but only Maryland’s legislature has approved the measure, teeing up a statewide popular vote in 2024.
Most involved in the efforts agree that eliminating all restrictions on abortion would be preferable, but cite in-state polling and research to argue that measures with the viability standard have the best chance of passing.
“We’re pushing a literal codification of Roe because that is what we think is palatable to the majority of citizens in South Dakota,” explained Adam Weiland, co-founder of Dakotans for Health, which is collecting signatures to make the procedure legal again. “Even if people in our state have more progressive views than expected when it comes to abortion, it’s still a conservative state and we need to be respectful of that. Most people are pretty comfortable with no government interference in the first trimester. But that support becomes more unstable the further along you get.”
A 2022 Pew Research poll of more than 10,000 people found that support for abortion waned as the pregnancy went along: Americans are twice as likely to support abortion than say it should be illegal at six weeks, roughly split on whether it should be legal at 14 weeks and about twice as likely to say it should be illegal than legal after 24 weeks.
Backers of the viability strategy also argue that a constitutional amendment with more specific language could make it harder for anti-abortion lawmakers to find a loophole in the future.
And because over 90 percent of U.S. abortions happen during the first trimester, they also argue that protecting abortions prior to viability — the standard held up for decades by Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey — would provide broad relief from the near-total bans in place now in South Dakota, Missouri and elsewhere.
“We don’t want medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion, and maybe it’s not surprising that medical groups have to draw a line there. But as advocates, as grassroots organizers, we feel an urgency,” Schwarz said.
‘We have momentum on our side’
Adopting a viability limit, however, would mean agreeing that abortion can’t always be a unfettered choice between a patient and physician, a concession that is too much for some local and national groups, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Ultraviolet and Medical Students for Choice. These groups warn the ballot measures as written will permanently lock in limitations they consider dangerous — and they’re threatening to withhold their support unless changes are made.
“It cannot be left to any politician to decide when an obstetrician-gynecologist must stop providing evidence-based care, to determine when a doctor can save the life of a patient, or which patient has a greater need for abortion than any other,” said Jennifer Villavicencio, an OB-GYN and leader of American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
Other abortion-rights organizations dispute the premise that a measure that goes beyond Roe would not pass in a red or purple state — pointing to polling showing high support for abortion rights and opposition to restrictions.
“We need to start from the most expansive and expansionist place possible and not go in with preconceived notions about what people will or will not support,” said Sonja Spoo, the director of political affairs for the abortion rights group UltraViolet. “The people putting forward these restrictions, they’re not doing it because of mal-intent. It’s based on their feeling of what they think can come to fruition. But we see that we have momentum on our side and that this is an opportunity for education and a culture shift rather than codifying bans.”
Supporters of the ballot measures argue that the proposals’ fetal viability language is broad enough to allow abortions in a range of different circumstances later in pregnancy and leaves the decision up to doctors. Under the proposals, for example, providers would be responsible for deciding whether a fetus is viable based on the facts of the case and whether there is a “significant likelihood” of the survival of the fetus without extraordinary medical measures.
“It’s sticky to talk about, but it’s also something that we know gives voters assurance that what we’re talking about here is something they can understand and appreciate,” said Caroline Mello Roberson, southwest regional director for NARAL.
Yet some medical and abortion-rights advocacy groups argue the built-in flexibility is a mirage that would leave patients and providers vulnerable to prosecution.
“When you are practicing under an elected body that is so aggressive and the potential consequences for providers are a felony, time in jail, loss of license, etcetera, those ‘protections’ on paper don’t play out in reality,” said Colleen McNicholas, the head of ACOG’s Missouri chapter and the chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region. “We already know that now. We have physicians right now who are afraid to provide completely legal care like miscarriage management or emergency contraction or ectopic care.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Gilsinan: Have you have you spoken to any of these kids or their parents individually? What are you hearing from them?
Razer: What I really hear from the kids, because some of them play sports. You know, they’re 11. It’s just that fear of, why are these adults are doing this to us? Why is this happening? And it’s hard to explain that to them.
Gilsinan: Well, how do you explain that to them?
Razer: First of all, I’ll make sure that they know I’m gay. I’m the only gay one in the Senate. And then I’m not an advocate or an ally, I’m family. And, you know, people are afraid of things that are different. If we’re honest, we’re all different. I like boys. They thought I was going to like girls. You are a girl. They thought you were a boy, you know? Then we’ll laugh. This is a reaction to people being afraid of what’s different.
And then I try to not bore them with a little bit of LGBT history and just say very quickly, they’ve been coming after us since the ’50s, banning us from federal jobs. The ’60s, the ’70s, we were passing nondiscrimination laws in municipalities, with [singer and anti-gay rights activist] Anita Bryant coming in behind to put it on the ballot and take them away. You know, we died in the ’80s and they laughed at us in the ’90s. It’s military, it’s marriage, all those things. They’ve run out of ways to attack me as a gay, white man. I’ve won. But they still have to have a boogeyman. They still have to be able to divide the population. They can’t attack me anymore. So now they’re coming after kids. I’m tired of having to hug crying 11-year-olds after committee hearings. I’m glad I’m there to do it. But I’m tired of it.
Gilsinan: When you when you say “they,” you’re talking about colleagues of yours, Republican colleagues, and you have good relationships across the aisle. What are they saying about their reasoning? And what’s it like to come to work now, given this debate?
Razer: To the degree that some of them would just not like to have to deal with the issue at all, they just try to avoid the issue with me. You know, just, let’s talk about anything but the elephant in the room. I’ve been dealing with that, though, it’s my seventh year in the General Assembly. Did four in the House and now my third year in the Senate. And I quickly made friends on the other side of the aisle, especially the rural guys, being from rural Missouri myself.
And then I would introduce MONA, the Missouri Nondiscrimination Act, as an amendment — this is the bill that would make it illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity in housing, employment and public accommodations. So I’m friends with these people, and then I would watch them all very loudly vote an amendment down, that just says, “Greg gets to have a roof over his head.” And last year on the Senate floor, somebody had asked me, like, “Greg, if this comes up, don’t take our votes personally.” And I said on the Senate floor, “Somebody said that to me. And yes, I do take it personally.” I very much take it personally, because it’s personal.
I was told by many people, “Greg, politics is a game. You just got to play the game.” Politics shouldn’t be a game. There’s going to be gamesmanship to it, when you gotta maneuver around somebody to get something passed. But what we do there in and of itself isn’t a game.
Gilsinan: You’ve talked about having been suicidal when you were growing up. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Razer: I grew up in a town of 450 people — outside of that town, actually, in the middle of thousands of acres of cotton. Literally grew up in the middle of the cotton field, down in extreme south Missouri.
Gilsinan: The famous Cooter, Missouri.
Razer: Cooter, yes. Cooter Wildcats. But I grew up in an evangelical church, with very country friends and neighbors. And it’s not exactly a great place for a young, closeted kid to grow up in the ’80s and ’90s. And so, by my senior year of high school, just various things put me into a depression. And on those worst nights it would be, “I’ll never be able to come out. I’ll never know what it’s like to fall in love or to have my heart broken or to be excited about a first date. So what’s the point of moving on?” The couple of times that I came very close, that was kind of what put me over the edge. And who would’ve thought, 25 years later, here I am.
Gilsinan: What stopped you when you were thinking about that?
Razer: I don’t know. I guess just enough of a cool head in the moment. I honestly have never thought of that. I don’t remember giving up on the idea that night. I don’t remember getting up and walking out of that room. Huh.
Gilsinan: So when did you come out and what was it like for you?
Razer: I came out on Feb. 26, 1999. I’d just been dealing with whether or not to come out. I slowly can feel myself inching that way. And my friends laughed that I didn’t come out of the closet, I exploded out. Once I’ve had enough, it was like, enough. Everybody, I’m gay, let’s get the party going again. You know, I was just tired of hiding. I was in Columbia [at the University of Missouri]. I’m a junior in college at this point, 20 years old. I had the greatest group of friends. They were incredibly supportive. Overboard supportive, actually. Quite a few months later, I show up at a little house party that one of my friends is throwing, and they said, “Greg, you’re here with us every weekend. You haven’t brought a boy over yet. Have you been to a gay bar?” And I was like, “No, I haven’t.” They’re like, “All right, we’re taking you to the gay bar tonight.” So all my straight friends made me go to my first gay bar.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
BERLIN — In an earlier life as a reporter in Moscow, I once knocked on the door of an apartment listed as the home address of the boss of company that, our year-long investigation showed, was involved in an elaborate scheme to siphon billions of dollars out of Russia’s state railways through rigged tenders.
To my surprise, the man who opened the door wore only his underwear. He confirmed that his identity had been used to register the shell company. But he wasn’t a businessman; he was a chauffeur. The real owner, he told us, was his boss, one of the bankers we suspected of masterminding the scam. “Mr. Underpants,” as we called him, was amazed that it had taken so long for anyone to take an interest.
Mr. Underpants leapt immediately to mind when, nearly a decade on, I learned that a sulfurous academic dispute had erupted over whether foreign companies really are bailing out of Russia in response to President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent international sanctions.
Attempting to verify corporate activity in Russia — a land that would give the murkiest offshore haven a run for its money — struck me as a fool’s errand. Company operations are habitually hidden in clouds of lies, false paperwork and bureaucratic errors. What a company says it does in Russia can bear precious little resemblance to reality.
So, who are the rival university camps trying to determine whether there really is a corporate exodus from Russia?
In the green corner (under the olive banner of the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland) we have economist Simon Evenett and Niccolò Pisani of the IMD business school in Lausanne. On January 13, they released a working paper which found that less than 9 percent of Western companies (only 120 firms all told) had divested from Russia. Styling themselves as cutting through the hype of corporate self-congratulation, the Swiss-based duo said their “findings challenge the narrative that there is a vast exodus of Western firms leaving the market.”
Nearly 4,000 miles away in New Haven, Connecticut, the Swiss statement triggered uproar in Yale (the blue corner). Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, from the university’s school of management, took the St. Gallen/IMD findings as an affront to his team’s efforts. After all, the headline figure from a list compiled by Yale of corporate retreat from Russia is that 1,300 multinationals have either quit or are doing so. In a series of attacks, most of which can’t be repeated here, Sonnenfeld accused Evenett and Pisani of misrepresenting and fabricating data.
Responding, the deans of IMD and St. Gallen issued a statement on January 20 saying they were “appalled” at the way Sonnenfeld had called the rigor and veracity of their colleagues’ work into question. “We reject this unfounded and slanderous allegation in the strongest possible terms,” they wrote.
Sonnenfeld doubled down, saying the Swiss team was dangerously fueling “Putin’s false narrative” that companies had never left and Russia’s economy was resilient.
That led the Swiss universities again to protest against Sonnenfeld’s criticism and deny political bias, saying that Evenett and Pisani have “had to defend themselves against unsubstantiated attacks and intimidation attempts by Jeff Sonnenfeld following the publication of their recent study.”
How the hell did it all get so acrimonious?
Let’s go back a year.
The good fight
Within weeks of the February 24 invasion, Sonnenfeld was attracting fulsome coverage in the U.S. press over a campaign he had launched to urge big business to pull out of Russia. His team at Yale had, by mid-March, compiled a list of 300 firms saying they would leave that, the Washington Post reported, had gone “viral.”
Making the case for ethical business leadership has been Sonnenfeld’s stock in trade for over 40 years. To give his full job titles, he’s the Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Studies & Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management at the Yale School of Management, as well as founder and president of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute, a nonprofit focused on CEO leadership and corporate governance.
And, judging by his own comments, Sonnenfeld is convinced of the importance of his campaign in persuading international business leaders to leave Russia: “So many CEOs wanted to be seen as doing the right thing,” Sonnenfeld told the Post. “It was a rare unity of patriotic mission, personal values, genuine concern for world peace, and corporate self-interest.”
Fast forward to November, and Sonnenfeld is basking in the glow of being declared an enemy of the Russian state, having been added to a list of 25 U.S. policymakers and academics barred from the country. First Lady Jill Biden topped the list, but Sonnenfeld was named in sixth place which, as he told Bloomberg, put him “higher than [Senate minority leader] Mitch McConnell.”
Apparently less impressed, the Swiss team had by then drafted a first working paper, dated October 18, challenging Sonnenfeld’s claims of a “corporate exodus” from Russia. This paper, which was not published, was circulated by the authors for review. After receiving a copy (which was uploaded to a Yale server), Sonnenfeld went on the attack.
Apples and oranges
Before we dive in, let’s take a step back and look at what the Yale and Swiss teams are trying to do.
Sonnenfeld is working with the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), which launched a collaborative effort to track whether companies are leaving Russia by monitoring open sources, such as regulatory filings and news reports, supported where possible through independent confirmation.
Kyiv keeps score on its Leave Russia site, which at the time of writing said that, of 3,096 companies reviewed, 196 had already exited and a further 1,163 had suspended operations.
Evenett and Pisani are setting a far higher bar, seeking an answer to the binary question of whether a company has actually ditched its equity. It’s not enough to announce you are suspending operations, you have to fully divest your subsidiary and assets such as factories or stores. This is, of course, tough. Can you find a buyer? Will the Russians block your sale?
The duo focuses only on companies based in the G7 or the European Union that own subsidiaries in Russia. Just doing business in Russia doesn’t count; control is necessary. To verify this, they used a business database called ORBIS, which contains records of 400 million companies worldwide.
The first thought to hold onto here, then, is that the scope and methodology of the Yale and Swiss projects are quite different — arguably they are talking about apples and oranges. Yale’s apple cart comprises foreign companies doing business in Russia, regardless of whether they have a subsidiary there. The Swiss orange tree is made up of fewer than half as many foreign companies that own Russian subsidiaries, and are themselves headquartered in countries that have imposed sanctions against the Kremlin.
So, while IKEA gets an ‘A’ grade on the Yale list for shutting its furniture stores and letting 10,000 Russian staff go, it hasn’t made the clean equity break needed to get on the St. Gallen/IMD leavers’ list. The company says “the process of scaling down the business is ongoing.” If you simply have to have those self-assembly bookshelves, they and other IKEA furnishings are available online.
The second thing to keep in mind is that ORBIS aggregates records in Russia, a country where people are willing to serve as nominee directors in return for a cash handout — even a bottle of vodka. Names are often mistranslated when local companies are established — transliteration from Russian to English is very much a matter of opinion — but this can also be a deliberate ruse to throw due diligence sleuths off the trail.
Which takes us back to the top of this story: I’ve done in-depth Russian corporate investigations and still have the indelible memory of those underpants (they were navy blue briefs) to show for it.
Stacking up the evidence
The most obvious issue with the Yale method is that it places a lot of emphasis on what foreign companies say about whether they are pulling out of Russia.
There is an important moral suasion element at play here. Yale’s list is an effective way to name and shame those companies like Unilever and Mondelez — all that Milka chocolate — that admit they are staying in Russia.
But what the supposed good kids — who say they are pulling out — are really up to is a murkier business. Even if a company is an A-grade performer on the Yale list, that does not mean that Russia’s economy is starved of those goods during wartime. There can be many reasons for this. Some companies will rush out a pledge to leave, then dawdle. Others will redirect goods to Russia through middlemen in, say, Turkey, Dubai or China. Some goods will be illegally smuggled. Some companies will have stocks that last a long time. Others might hire my old friend Mr. Underpants to create an invisible corporate structure.
A stroll through downtown Moscow reveals the challenges. Many luxury brands have conspicuously shut up shop but goods from several companies on the Yale A list and B list (companies that have suspended activities in Russia) were still easy to find on one, totally random, shopping trip. The latest Samsung laptops, TVs and phones were readily available, and the shop reported no supply problems. Swatch watches, Jägermeister liquor and Dr. Oetker foods were all also on sale in downtown Moscow, including at the historic GUM emporium across Red Square from the Kremlin.
Swatch watches, Jägermeister liquor and Dr. Oetker foods can all be bought in downtown Moscow, including at the historic GUM emporium across Red Square from the Kremlin | POLITICO
All the companies involved insisted they had ended business in Russia, but acknowledged the difficulties of continued sales. Swatch said the watches available would have to be from old stocks or “a retailer over which the company has no control.” Dr. Oetker said: “To what extent individual trading companies are still selling stocks of our products there is beyond our knowledge.” Jägermeister said: “Unfortunately we cannot prevent our products being purchased by third parties and sold on in Russia without our consent or permission.” Samsung Electronics said it had suspended Russia sales but continued “to actively monitor this complex situation to determine our next steps.”
The larger problem emerging is that sanctions are turning neighboring countries into “trading hubs” that allow key foreign goods to continue to reach the Russian market, cushioning the economic impact.
Full departure can also be ultra slow for Yale’s A-listers. Heineken announced in March 2022 it was leaving Russia but it is still running while it is “working hard to transfer our business to a viable buyer in very challenging circumstances.” It was also easy to find a Black & Decker power drill for sale online from a Russian site. The U.S. company said: “We plan to cease commerce by the end of Q2 of this year following the liquidation of our excess and obsolete inventory in Russia. We will maintain a legal entity to conduct any remaining administrative activities associated with the wind down.”
And those are just consumer goods that are easy to find! Western and Ukrainian security services are naturally more preoccupied about engineering components for Putin’s war machine still being available through tight-lipped foreign companies. Good luck trying to track their continued sales …
Who’s for real?
Faced with this gray zone, St. Gallen/IMD sought to draw up a more black-and-white methodology.
To reach their conclusions, Evenett and Pisani downloaded a list of 36,000 Russian companies from ORBIS that reported at least $1 million in sales in one of the last five years. Filtering out locally owned businesses and duplicate entries whittled down the number of owners of the Russian companies that are themselves headquartered in the G7 or EU to a master list of 1,404 entities. As of the end of November, the authors conclude, 120 companies — or 8.5 percent of the total — had left.
The Swiss team was slow, however, to release its list of 1,404 companies and, once Sonnenfeld gained access to it, he had a field day. He immediately pointed out that it was peppered with names of Russian businesses and businessmen, whom ORBIS identified as being formally domiciled in an EU or G7 country. Sonnenfeld fulminated that St. Gallen/IMD were producing a list of how few Russian companies were quitting Russia, rather than how few Western companies were doing so.
“That hundreds of Russian oligarchs and Russian companies constitute THEIR dataset of ‘1,404 western companies’ is egregious data misrepresentation,” Sonnenfeld wrote in one of several emails to POLITICO challenging the Swiss findings.
Fair criticism? Well, Sonnenfeld’s example of Yandex, the Russian Google, on the list of 1,404 is a good one. Naturally, that’s a big Russian company that isn’t going to leave Russia.
On the other hand, its presence on the list is explicable as it is based in the Netherlands, and is reported to be seeking Putin’s approval to sell its Russian units. “Of course, a large share of Yandex customers and staff are Russian or based in Russia. However, the company has offices in seven countries, including Switzerland, Israel, the U.S., China, and others. What criteria should we use to decide if it is Russian or not for the purpose of our analysis?” St. Gallen/IMD said in a statement.
Answering Sonnenfeld’s specific criticism that its list was skewed by the inclusion of Russian-owned companies, the Swiss team noted that it had modified its criteria to exclude companies based in Cyprus, a favored location for Russian entrepreneurs thanks to its status as an EU member country and its business-friendly tax and legal environment. Yet even after doing so, its conclusions remained similar.
Double knockout
Sonnenfeld, in his campaign to discredit the Swiss findings, has demanded that media, including POLITICO, retract their coverage of Evenett and Pisani’s work. He took to Fortune magazine to call their publication “a fake pro-Putin list of Western companies still doing business in Russia.”
Although he believes Evenett and Pisani’s “less than 9 percent” figure for corporates divesting equity is not credible, he bluntly declined, when asked, to provide a figure of his own.
Instead, he has concentrated on marshaling an old boys’ network — including the odd ex-ambassador — to bolster his cause. Richard Edelman, head of the eponymous public relations outfit, weighed in with an email to POLITICO: “This is pretty bad[.] Obvious Russian disinformation[.] Would you consider a retraction?” he wrote in punctuation-free English. “I know Sonnenfeld well,” he said, adding the two had been classmates in college and business school.
Who you were at school with hardly gets to the heart of what companies are doing in Russia, and what the net effect is on the Russian economy.
The greater pity is that this clash, which falls miles short of the most basic standards of civil academic discourse, does a disservice to the just cause of pressuring big business into dissociating itself from Putin’s murderous regime.
And, at the end of the day, estimates of the number of companies that have fully left Russia are in the same ballpark: The Kyiv School of Economics puts it at less than 200; the Swiss team at 120.
To a neutral outsider, it would look like Sonnenfeld and his mortal enemies are actually pulling in the same direction, trying to work out whether companies are really quitting. Yet both methodologies are problematic. What companies and databases say offers an imprecise answer to the strategic question: What foreign goods and services are available to Russians? Does a year of war mean no Samsung phones? No. Does it mean Heineken has sold out? Not yet, no.
This has now been submerged in a battle royal between Sonnenfeld and the Swiss researchers.
Appalled at his attacks on their work, St. Gallen and IMD finally sent a cease-and-desist letter to Sonnenfeld.
Yale Provost Scott Strobel is trying to calm the waters. In a letter dated February 6 and seen by POLITICO, he argued that academic freedom protected the speech of its faculty members. “The advancement of knowledge is best served when scholars engage in an open and robust dialogue as they seek accurate data and its best interpretation,” Strobel wrote. “This dialogue should be carried out in a respectful manner that is free from ad hominem attacks.”
With reporting by Sarah Anne Aarup, Nicolas Camut, Wilhelmine Preussenand Charlie Duxbury.
Douglas Busvine is Trade and Agriculture Editor at POLITICO Europe. He was posted with Reuters to Moscow from 2004-08 and from 2011-14.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
What do you do with a storyline requiring two US states with different marriage laws, reachable in a single journey without resort to roads? The obvious answer, for a writer as versatile as Rebecca Miller, would be to work it into a novel or short story. But no, it was a film she wanted to make. “I realised that I needed two states on a river where they had different laws. It was like a crazy puzzle that I was trying to figure out,” she says. Her solution was a tugboat which could chug between New York and Delaware. This led to a riot of further possibilities: what if one of the characters was an eccentric female tugboat captain suffering from erotomania, who fixates on a creatively blocked opera composer with a therapist wife who would really rather be a nun?
The result, She Came to Me, which premieres in Berlin on 16 February, is one of the wackiest romcoms ever to lay claim on the genre: an intergenerational story of love overcoming every obstacle that modern domestic life can throw in its path. “When I read it I thought it was a creatively risky, golden-hearted script full of incredibly drawn, nuanced characters – a somewhat rare find. I felt very clearly how much I wanted the film to exist,” says Anne Hathaway, who plays the cleanfreak therapist.
Though its characters are all one-offs, the film itself is firmly anchored in the social realities of the stepfamily – which is a set-up with personal resonance for Miller herself. Her marriage to the actor Daniel Day-Lewis made her stepmother to his son, Gabriel-Kane, from an earlier relationship with the French actress Isabelle Adjani. “Not only do I have a stepfamily, but I’m surrounded by others who have them,” she says, “so I can look at my own experience, and then other people’s, and synthesise all of that.”
Miller and Day-Lewis have two more sons, one of whom – the artist Ronan Day-Lewis – helped out with styling of the film. They have homes in the US and Ireland, and she’s speaking from her office in New York, where the wall behind her is crowded with period postcards. It’s for a future film, set in the 18th century, but don’t assume it’s coming any time soon. She is very visual and the postcards are about creating a palette, she says. She’s a believer in what the theatre director Peter Brook once described as “the formless hunch”. “It might be based on something that really happened,” explains Miller, “or it could be that some mother of a child I knew 20 years ago said something that never leaves you, and you build a whole character on that person. You get an instinct, and then the best thing is to leave it in the unconscious for a long time, so that you don’t pounce on it and ruin it.”
‘He never hits a false note’ … Peter Dinklage as Steven in She Came to Me. Photograph: 2022 AI Film Productions Inc
Sometimes the instincts are weird, she admits. When she was making her 2009 film The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, she was simultaneously reading a book about the Marquis de Sade, “and I was just mesmerised by that world of 18th-century Paris.” The result was Jacob’s Folly, a novel about an 18th-century French rake who is reincarnated as a housefly in modern-day New York.
She Came to Me did in fact grow out of a short story, published in her most recent collection, Total, which was a jeu d’esprit set in an Irish bar. One of the formless hunches that inspired it came from an outing with a friend 30 years ago to a Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting. “I don’t remember why she decided to take me, but I was listening and it was just like, ‘I’m doing really well. I haven’t rented a little place for six months, I’m not watching any movies …’” It all fed directly into the character of tugboat captain Katrina (Marisa Tomei), who propositions the tortured composer Steven in a pub, after he has been sent out by his wife to take the dog for a walk and find himself a random adventure-cum-cure for his depression on the streets outside their home.
Steven is played by Peter Dinklage, who brings with him the celebrity of the roistering Tyrion Lannister, one of the few lovable characters in Game of Thrones. The camera in Miller’s film doesn’t shy away from his short stature, looking dizzily upwards at the obsequious faces of those congratulating him at one of his opera premieres, and making comic capital out of his relationship with a small French bulldog. When I suggest that She Came to Me would be a very different film without him, Miller says, “Yeah, that’s very true. I really felt that Peter made the film, because he never hits a false note as an actor. It’s almost like watching a cat: cats can never look fake. Plus, he carries with him a sense of history, and maybe even suffering, as a character.”
‘A somewhat rare find’ … Anne Hathaway filming She Came to Me. Photograph: Steve Sands/NewYorkNewswire/Bauer-Griffin/REX/Shutterstock
Although, as the daughter of the playwright Arthur Miller and the photographer Inge Morath, Miller herself had what appears to have been a privileged early life, listening in to the dinner-party banter of her parents’ starry friends from a perch beneath their dining-table, she has somehow emerged uncowed and unspoiled. “Rebecca is brilliant, kind, enchanting, creative, incredibly determined – I could go on and on,” says Hathaway. “She’s full of iron but has a butterfly touch. She’s endlessly compassionate. I adore her.”
Her career seems to have been on fast-forward ever since her first film, Angela, in 1995. Has she ever suffered from writer’s block? Yes she has, she says. “It was just after I got married. I think I was just happy. I don’t know what happened but I couldn’t write. I was in Dublin. And it was really terrifying, because my husband was working, and I was home with the kids.” She ended up volunteering in a local women’s shelter – “not thinking I’m going to get material, just thinking ‘I need to do something.’” Out of it came one of the stories in Personal Velocity, an award-winning collection of prose portraits of women which then became an award-winning film.
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She Came to Him’s characters cover a wide social and political spectrum. One of the advantages of living in New York, says Miller, is that “it’s such a layer cake of different people constantly crossing paths. It’s not like other kinds of cities where people drive a lot; New York is so compact that we see each other in the subway, on the bus or on the street all the time, and are always having encounters with unlikely people.”
‘Full of iron but with a butterfly touch’ … Miller on set. Photograph: Matt Infante/ 2022 AI Film Productions Inc
Miller’s level-headedness keeps the film real, preventing it from veering into glib caricature – even when it’s portraying a bullying patriarchal stenographer who spends his free time dressing as a Confederate in civil war reconstructions, and could so easily have become a representative of the culture wars of today. Trey’s backstory is that he has adopted the daughter of his wife, a single mother of precarious immigration status. Though he explodes when he sees this daughter holding hands with a mixed-race boyfriend, an earlier scene shows him hosting one of her black friends. “Well she goes to public school in New York City, so of course she’s going to have friends of different races,” says Miller. “It’s not like he’s wandering around with Confederate flag tattoos, but there’s something that he can’t get past.” She consulted a dramaturg, “who said: ‘He’s one of those people who isn’t racist until he is.’ I thought that was a really cool way of putting it.”
Parents don’t have it easy in the film. “I mean, that’s something any parent would recognise, isn’t it?” says Miller. “That feeling of trying desperately to communicate with them when they don’t want anything to do with you because they’re going into a different place? It’s a struggle, and you just have to go quiet and realise that they’re speaking a different language. There’s an abyss between you and your kids, though hopefully you can maintain the bridge.” In her film, the tugboat sails blithely through the middle of it all.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Could office emails go the way of the fax machine and the rolodex? They have not joined those workplace dinosaurs yet, but there were signs of evolutionary change at the annual gathering of business leaders in Davos this week, where tech bosses said emails were becoming outdated.
The chief executive of the IT firm Wipro, which employs 260,000 people worldwide, said about 10% of his staff “don’t even check one email per month” and that he used Instagram and LinkedIn to talk to staff.
“They’re 25, they don’t care. They don’t go on their emails, they go on Snapchat, they go on all these things,” said Thierry Delaporte. Anjali Sud, the chief executive of video platform Vimeo, said at the summit emails were “outdated”.
Delaporte’s comments, reported by the Daily Telegraph, referred to Gen Z professionals – typically people born after 1997 – but according to one UK business owner, it cuts across all generations.
“If I want something done quickly, I rarely rely on email myself,” says Farhad Divecha, owner and managing director of London-based digital marketing agency Accuracast. “I tend to send a [Microsoft] Teams message, or even WhatsApp if it’s really urgent. I might send an email with details, but over the past three to five years I’ve learned that email’s just not good enough if you want something done quickly.”
He adds that some clients with Gen Z employees preferred to bypass email, using alternatives such as the messaging service Slack. “It’s not uncommon to have clients with more Gen Z employees tell us: ‘let’s take the discussion on Slack because we tend not to use email much’,” he says.
Email has many rivals that offer messaging services. Instagram is used by more than 2 billion people a month, LinkedIn has 875 million members, Snapchat has more than 360 million daily users and 2 billion people are on WhatsApp. Microsoft’s Teams platform is also popular, with more than 270 million users.
But email is not going away and its use continues to grow. The total number of business and consumer emails sent and received each day will exceed 333bn in 2022, says the tech research firm Radicati, which represents a 4% increase on the previous year – and will grow to more than 390bn by 2026. More than half the world’s population, 4.2 billion, uses email, according to Radicati.
“We don’t feel email is dying,” says the research firm’s CEO, Sara Radicati. One major source of growth in email use comes from the consumer sphere, such as emails related to online purchases. Also, an email account is needed for all sorts of online activity, such as setting up social media accounts and buying goods.
Radicati acknowledges, nonetheless, that in the world of work, social media and instant messaging are playing a role alongside email. “Email tends to be used for official communications, while more interpersonal, casual communication is finding its way through social media and instant messaging”, she says.
Professionals who spoke to the Guardian described a mixed approach to email use. Jordan, 28, a project manager in the construction industry from Bristol, says there was a split between formal and informal communications at work: “I use emails purely to talk about formal things that need to be written down. That’s in terms of agreements or anything like that. But for anything that is remotely informal, I move straight over on to Teams.”
Tracy, 29, a scientific researcher from London, says she often checks her personal email “for keeping track of things like theatre tickets or other purchases”. At work, she has a separate email address “which I draft out and use very formally” but also uses instant messaging on Teams for quick checkups with colleagues. She adds that she “never” uses text or social media to contact colleagues in the workplace.
Gen Z workers who contacted the Guardian also said they used work emails regularly. “I generally check personal emails once a day and work emails regularly between 9 and 6,” says Matthew, 23, a human rights paralegal based in London. Meanwhile, Owen, 25, a programmer from Aberdeen, says: “Like any professional environment, my workplace uses email. Were I asked to check something like Instagram at work, I would expect some kind of wrongdoing was taking place.”
For one expert, the Davos comments reflect a constant of professional life: relentless technological and cultural change. Emails were frowned upon by the “telephone and letter” generation, says Thomas Robinson, senior lecturer at Bayes Business School in London. But a shift happened anyway.
“We can partner up with younger generations and add our experience to that, partner up with that community, or we can make enemies of the future. But thinking you can hold back techno-cultural change is for the birds,” he says.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
