Trumps Exult Following Reports Of No Phone Contact Ahead Of 2016 Russia Meeting - NPR

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Donald Trump Jr. spoke at a campaign rally for Sen. Martha McSally in 2018. He and President Trump welcomed reports Thursday that they didn't talk on the phone ahead of a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians. Matt York/AP hide caption

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Updated at 12:44 p.m. ET

President Trump wrote that new information about Donald Trump Jr.'s phone records in 2016 vindicates him and his eldest son in an important aspect of the Russia investigation.

Trump cited news reports that Senate investigators have established that Trump Jr. did not phone his father as he arranged the much-discussed Trump Tower meeting at which he expected to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Democrats and others have focused on calls that Trump Jr. made to a blocked number at the time he was arranging the meeting. Trump Jr. told members of Congress he didn't remember whom he called. The elder Trump used a blocked number.

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If investigators could establish that Trump Jr.'s calls had been to his father, that might suggest they'd discussed the meeting and that Trump therefore knew about Russia's offer of help to his campaign, the theory ran.

But CNN, then ABC and The New York Times, reported on Thursday that Senate investigators have established Trump Jr. did not call his father. Trump Sr. appeared to confirm as much in a tweet on Thursday night.

Members of Congress so far have not confirmed precisely what information has been gathered. The chairman and vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee have not commented on the press reports.

Trump has said he was not aware about Russia's outreach to his campaign in 2016 nor of the "active measures" it was waging against the West; he goes back and forth about what he acknowledges about Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election where he emerged victorious.

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House intelligence committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif. — who told NPR that the Trump Jr. phone records were going to be a focus of his investigation this year — said he couldn't confirm the reporting and that whatever Senate investigators have learned, it isn't conclusive.

"Those conversations could have taken place over the phone or they could have taken place by Don Jr. walking down the hall to talk to Dad," Schiff said. "But it's key to understanding the president's involvement in all of this, and if we look at what we already know ... the president and his son misled the country about meetings the campaign was having with Russians."

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Schiff's comment referred to the evolving explanations given by the president and Trump Jr. about the 2016 meeting, which they initially said was largely about "adoption," and since have acknowledged was to seek out compromising material to use against Clinton.

Others, including former Trump campaign boss Steve Bannon, have theorized that Trump Jr. might have talked with Trump about the meeting in person or even introduced the Trump Tower guests but the facts of what took place are still unclear.

According to accounts given by people who participated in the meeting, what the Russian delegation actually gave Trump Jr. and his colleagues was a tip about Democratic investors who might have been moving money improperly out of Russia.

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Trump Jr. said nothing came of the meeting and he didn't pursue the lead given by attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Trump Jr. and the president deny they or the campaign had any involvement with Russia's interference in 2016, which is the subject of an ongoing investigation by Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller.

Trump Jr. welcomed what he called the death of another false narrative about him.

Trump Jr. also took aim at Schiff, who talked up the phone records question as he took over the chairmanship of the House intelligence committee and vowed to re-energize its Russia investigation.

The panel, under then-Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., concluded last year that there had been no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian interference and that contacts between people in the Trump camp and Russians were, at worst, "ill-advised."

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Trump has argued that convening a meeting to get dirt on an opponent is a standard play in politics and that no one did anything wrong.

Schiff and others have pointed to the revolving explanations about the meeting and questioned whether Trump Jr. may have broken campaign finance law by soliciting help from a foreigner.

There are also a number of unresolved questions about the wider Russia investigation, including about the Trump campaign's contact, via intermediaries, with WikiLeaks, and meetings that its former campaign chairman had with a business associate who's been linked to Russia's military intelligence agency.

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Aboard Russia's Propaganda Train Of 'Syrian War Trophies' - RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty

KURSK, Russia -- When a trainload of tanks, guns, and other military hardware supposedly seized from the Syrian battlefields pulled up at Kursk railway station on a cloudy afternoon this week, a jubilant crowd was there to greet it.

An orchestra belted out Soviet war songs. A state-funded paramilitary youth movement performed a dance for world peace. A World War II veteran in battered shoes lauded Russia's armed forces. And officials in slick suits delivered the obligatory praise for the president and commander in chief, Vladimir Putin.

"The next generation must understand that the enemy is not far away," said Acting Regional Governor Roman Starovoit. "It must be liquidated on the threshold of our motherland's borders."

Kursk, a city of 450,000 people five hours by train from Moscow, was the third stop on a nationwide, 28,000-kilometer propaganda tour launched by Russia's Defense Ministry to showcase the achievements of its military campaign in Syria. Putin launched the campaign in September 2015 with the promise of air support for his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad's fight against the extremist Islamic State group (IS) and against rebel forces backed by the West.

The travelling exhibition, titled Syrian Breakthrough, is meant to raise support for the armed forces among a Russian population increasingly weary of the country's military campaigns in Ukraine and the Middle East, and increasingly pre-occupied with problems at home amid stagnating incomes and falling real wages.

The train left Moscow on February 23, a Russian holiday named Defenders of the Fatherland Day, and will stop at 61 cities on its route to the far eastern port of Vladivostok. On its rolling platforms stand Russian T-55 tanks and American Humvees used by IS and apparently captured by the Russian Army, as well as various four-wheel drives the terrorist group customized for military operations or suicide-bombing missions.

Toy Tanks And T-Shirts

Inside its 20 boxcar carriages are displays of IS weaponry and equipment, photo galleries glorifying the Russian military and a souvenir shop selling toy tanks and Putin T-shirts. Posted throughout are Russian servicemen fresh from tours of duty in Syria, who for 72 days will traverse this vast country sharing tales of their exploits before returning to Moscow on the eve of World War II Victory Day on May 9.

"This exhibition is important for people to see what aggression is coming from terrorist organizations, and how strong they are today," said Andrei Selivanov, a military adviser who has served in Syria since the start of the Russian campaign. "All of this shows the scale of that aggression and what tragedy could occur in the future if all of this isn't stopped and suppressed." He did not elaborate on how the items on show came into the possession of the Russian Army, which officially has no boots on the ground in Syria.

It's not just about issuing a warning, though. From its first weeks, Russia's intervention has been accompanied by a turbo-charged campaign on state TV, with video-game style reports showing fighter jets lifting off from Russia's air base in Syria's Hmeimim and to-the-minute coverage of the targets struck. Presenters praised the might of a Russian Army revived under Putin's rule.

Parked in front of the Kursk train station was a mobile recruitment center for the armed forces. Above the door, a scrolling text listed the Russian military's claimed achievements in Syria: 1.3 million Syrian refugees returned to their homes; 1,024 towns liberated; 67,000 square kilometers of IS territory cleared. Inside, two servicemen handed out leaflets and advice to boys looking to enlist.

Much of Russia's media campaign and its official rhetoric has sought to hammer home the point that chemical attacks, which have killed hundreds of civilians in Syria, have been the work of rebel forces armed and supported by the U.S.-led coalition, and not, as the United States and United Nations claim, the Syrian government of Assad.

Russian military adviser Andrei Selivanov in Kursk with military hardware that Moscow says it seized from Islamic State in Syria.

Selivanov, the military adviser, said that was not the point of the Syrian Breakthrough exhibition. "We're not here to accuse anyone -- not the West, not anyone," he said. "The exhibition is aimed not at placing blame, but to show the scale of the tragedy that may happen."

But inside one of the train's carriages, one exhibit appeared to paint a different picture. Two mannequins with gas masks stand around dummy equipment for chemical-weapons production. A serviceman posted to the installation rattled off lines he'd memorized from a script in his right hand, while he pointed to the relevant objects with a pointer he held in his left.

"With the help of this installation and chemical reagents made abroad, the rebels produced poisonous gas and used various methods of delivering it to the target," the serviceman said, indicating the control board, the chemical reactor, and the electric motor that powered the set-up. The equipment had been found in the basement of a bombed-out building in Douma, a city close to the Syrian capital Damascus, in April 2018, he said. That month, a chemical-weapons attack the West blamed on Assad's government, which Russia called a Western provocation, claimed at least 70 civilian lives.

"With the help of such munitions the rebels fired on the Syrian Army and used them for shelling of civilians as a form of provocation," the serviceman continued. He then pointed to the gas mask worn by one of the mannequins, with the words "Made in Finland" emblazoned on it. "As we see, foreign production," he said.

The message was not lost on the crowd. Valentin Pinaev, a 63-year-old Kursk native who had come with his wife, turned to a Western reporter.

"You see, your equipment is here, too. You helped those mujahedin," he said, using a term for Islamist guerrilla fighters who fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War. "Who cultivated IS? Do you know who? We know -- but they don't talk about it over there in the West." He then raced off with his wife to glimpse the military vehicles before the train departed.

Between June 1943 and October 1948, over 7.5 million Soviet citizens visited an open-air exhibition of Nazi war trophies captured by the Soviet Union during World War II, and the current exhibition riffs directly off that. In one of the carriages, an entire wall is devoted to a photo gallery of that event.

Series Of Stunts

But the initiative is also part of a series of similar stunts launched in recent weeks by the Russian Defense Ministry, whose Main Political Directorate is tasked with promoting patriotism and military values. In January, a train carrying 30 World War II-era T-34 tanks, which enjoy cult status in Russia for their role in repelling the Nazi invasion, left Vladivostok for Moscow. The train was greeted with crowds, fanfare, and TV cameras in every city it passed. The agitpoyezd, or propaganda train, is a legacy of the Soviet Union, which staged regular public events aimed at instilling loyalty to the state.

In recent months, Russia has escalated its rhetoric in the ongoing confrontation with the West. In his state-of-the-nation address on February 21, Putin, in a veiled reference to the United States, said that "Russia will be forced to create and deploy types of weapons that can be used not only in respect of those territories from which the direct threat to us originates, but also in respect of those territories where the centers of decision-making are located."

It was not an isolated threat. During his flagship evening news show three days later, the content of which is almost certainly aired only with Kremlin approval, TV host Dmitry Kiselyov raised the tension once again. Sweeping his hand over a map of the mainland United States, he showed viewers the locations of those "centers of decision-making": the Pentagon, the Jim Creek naval station, and the Camp David presidential retreat, among others.

"For now, we're not threatening anyone, but if such a deployment takes place, our response will be instant," Kiselyov said.

'Militarist Hysteria'

Aleksandr Golts, an independent military analyst, believes Russia's military campaigns in Syria and Ukraine have fueled a militarist streak that is sweeping parts of the population, aided by an active effort on the government's part.

"A militarist hysteria is being assiduously and determinedly pumped into society," he said in a telephone interview. "But this has not been successful. People are tired of it, and they've begun to feel fear."

A public opinion poll conducted last April by the independent Levada Center found that 57 percent of Russians fear that Russia's stand-off with the West could escalate into World War III. Eighteen months earlier, that figure stood at 48 percent.

"The louder the TV shouts about how Russia's regained its status as a great power, about how everyone respects us because they fear us, the more the subconscious fear grows that this can escalate into World War III," Levada's director Lev Gudkov told RFE/RL. "It's noticeable in the focus groups we hold."

Still, Gudkov attributes far greater influence to TV propaganda than individual initiatives like Syrian Breakthrough. The Syrian war feels far away to Russians and has not yet become a damaging political issue for Putin's government.

Svetlana Sryvkova came to the exhibition with her son and daughter. She viewed the event primarily as a nice outing for the family.

In the same 2018 poll by Levada, 55 percent of respondents said they follow that military campaign only superficially, while just under one-third pay close attention.

"People don't really understand why the Russian Army is there, or what the motive is. Initially there was some public pushback, but when propaganda convinced people that this will be a short operation without ground forces, the population calmed down and began supporting it," said Gudkov. "There's no major resistance."

For Svetlana Sryvkova, who'd come to view the exhibition with her son Danilo and her daughter Ania, watching her children scale a captured tank or examine a German rifle is first and foremost a fun day out for the family. She said she follows the campaign in Syria, and while she hopes it ends soon, she feels she understands the motives behind Russia's involvement.

"We are patriots of our country! I'm proud of our army. Our guys fight for peace there, not for war. Right?" she said. "That, I support."

A Helpful Explainer of the Alien War at the Heart of ‘Captain Marvel’ - The Ringer

While it seems like the Marvel Cinematic Universe has covered every inch of its expansive comic lore over the course of 20 movies (and counting), there are still important story lines that have yet to be addressed. And with Captain Marvel coming on Friday, we'll finally get the MCU's take on the Kree and the Skrulls. While "Kree" and "Skrull" sound like the names of two grunge bands, they're actually two warring alien races who are key to the MCU's main story line. Seriously.

Whether all this Kree-Skrull stuff sounds appealing to you, or whether you're just hoping to see how Captain Marvel plays into the plot of Avengers: Endgame, these combative alien races are a big part of the movie and require a bit of context beyond this broad, one-minute explainer Marvel provided in February. So here's a helpful primer on the Kree, the Skrulls, their centuries-long war, and how it all fits into the MCU at large. (Very light spoilers for Captain Marvel ahead. If you want to stay completely in the dark before seeing the movie, maybe stop reading. If you want to better understand what's happening in the movie, though, keep going.)

Who Are the Kree?

The Kree are a militaristic alien race from the planet Hala, who are led by something called the Supreme Intelligence. In the comics, the Supreme Intelligence is, essentially, a giant floating head in a tank that was formed from the essence of the race's greatest thinkers before their death. (Imagine if Socrates and his best smart boys fused together, and then became a giant head in a big jar.) In Captain Marvel, the Supreme Intelligence appears before a person in the form of someone they know; for Brie Larson's Carol Danvers, that is a character played by Annette Bening. Because any time you can go with a four-time Oscar nominee instead of a giant CGI head floating in a jar, you gotta do it.

The Kree's physiology resembles human physiology, with the exception of their blue skin, which means Marvel can just slap some blue paint on actors. However, not all Kree have blue skin: In the comics, the bluer the skin, the more "purebred" a Kree is, but the MCU seems to eschew that rule, if only because the studio didn't want to cover Jude Law, who plays the Kree soldier Yon-Rogg, in blue paint for an entire movie. In part because of their hatred for the Skrulls (more on that later), the Kree were responsible for creating Inhumans—humans who were experimented on by Kree scientists, gained superpowers of their own, and lived on the moon. The Inhumans were the subject of their own eponymous television series on ABC, but lasted just a season due to poor ratings and critical derision.

In the MCU, we've actually met a couple of Kree on the big screen pre-Captain Marvel. Ronan the Accuser (played by Lee Pace), the main villain in Guardians of the Galaxy, was a radical Kree, along with Korath the Pursuer (Djimon Hounsou), one of Ronan's subordinates. (It's also worth mentioning that while Michael Rooker's Yondu has blue skin, he is not a Kree, but a Centaurian—and neither is Karen Gillan's Nebula, who is a Luphomoid. There are multiple blue-skinned alien species; Marvel contains multitudes.) Ronan and Korath also appear in Captain Marvel, since it's a prequel.

As for Captain Marvel herself, Carol Danvers is a mix of Kree and human. We're introduced to her when she's a member of Starforce—basically, the Kree version of an elite black ops team, led by Yon-Rogg—and the crux of the movie is the character grappling with both sides of her identity and how she can be a hero for the people who most need saving. To reveal much more than that would spoil the surprise, and I'm not a monster. (I also don't want Marvel to hunt me down like an angry Lee Pace in blue paint.)

Who Are the Skrulls?

The Skrulls have historically served as the main antagonists for the Kree, and while they have green skin and pointy, Spock-like ears, their coolest feature is the ability to shapeshift into any biological form. For MCU fans who weren't previously aware of the Skrulls' shapeshifting acumen, this moment from the first Captain Marvel trailer—in which Brie Larson absolutely decks a sweet-looking old lady on the subway—might've been very confusing. But don't worry, she was punching a Skrull.

Since Skrulls aren't as powerful as the Kree, shapeshifting is a huge advantage for evading and deceiving their enemies—and it's pretty tricky to know who could be a secret Skrull. As Carol explains in the movie, one way to tell if you're dealing with a Skrull impersonating someone you know is to ask them questions about their background. For whatever reason, the Skrull can only acquire recent memories of the people they morph into. It's certainly a smarter, less dramatic tactic than just punching every senior citizen. The Skrulls introduced in Captain Marvel are led by Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), who vacillates between an American accent when he's posing as a Ben Mendelsohn–looking human and the actor's natural Aussie accent when he's in his base Skrull form. (This didn't seem completely necessary, but if Ben Mendelsohn wants to mess around with multiple accents, you gotta let him.)

Because the Skrulls can transform into anyone, they've been subject to some conspiracy-laden comics story lines such as 2008's "Secret Invasion" series, in which it's revealed that gradually several Marvel heroes have been replaced by Skrulls. It's the kind of fun, tinfoil-hat stuff that made Captain America: The Winter Soldier and its "Nazis have secretly overtaken S.H.I.E.L.D. and the late Garry Shandling is saying shit like 'Hail Hydra' in public" plot feel like a paranoiac, conspiracy-thriller throwback. Suffice it to say that the Skrulls will be impersonating people in Captain Marvel, which only adds to the intrigue.

So What About This Kree-Skrull War?

There are technically two Kree-Skrull wars—the first of which was introduced in 1971 in Marvel's initial run of Avengers comics. The Kree-Skrull war was thrust into a narrative that also involved the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, as well as the powerful Kree warrior Mar-Vell. (Mar-Vell was the original Captain Marvel, while Carol Danvers was his partner, though she'd eventually take the Captain Marvel mantle for herself.) In this war, the Skrulls even impersonated humans in strong positions of power in government—including a senator who was overseeing an "Alien Activities Commission"—to sway public opinion against the Kree, and aliens in general. This is how Mar-Vell was exposed as a Kree to the world, and partly why Ronan the Accuser wanted Earth to serve as the setting for a Kree-Skrull battle.

It was a fun story line that was met with plenty of acclaim. And because of that, the Kree-Skrull mythology was expanded in the following years, detailing how the alien races' conflict spanned thousands of years and directly affected Marvel's world. The TL;DR version is: the Skrulls were traveling across galaxies introducing advanced technology to other alien lifeforms. When they arrived on Hala, the planet had two species: the Kree and the Cotati. The Skrulls decided to hold a competition between the two species to see which would earn the right to their fancy technology—when the Kree "lost," they wiped out the Cotati in retaliation and swore vengeance against the Skrulls.

Captain Marvel hews closer to the Kree-Skrull mythology from post-1971 Marvel comics, probably because it's easier to explain in vague expository dialogue for audiences who don't know much about these alien races, and also because the initial Kree-Skrull conflict from the Avengers comics doesn't exactly fit into how the MCU slowly introduced Earth's mightiest heroes. (Not to mention the fact the Fantastic Four are not yet part of the MCU.) Rest assured, there are some specifics from this conflict in the film—including the first meeting between the races, and how they became mortal enemies, which differs from the set mythology around the aliens—but these details are, obviously, not worth spoiling.

Is There Anything Else I Should Know?

Captain Marvel is a superhero origin story much more than an alien war history lesson, but it is important to know that Captain Marvel will introduce audiences to a third alien species. Goose, Carol's pet cat, is not, in fact, a cat. Goose is a Flerken, an alien species that just to happens to look like a normal domestic cat. You will immediately fall in love with Goose—and that's all you need to know.

Otherwise, while the minutiae of the Kree-Skrull conflict might not be translated to the big screen—the nitty-gritty details of Marvel comics rarely are—the Kree, the Skrulls, and Captain Marvel will likely factor into Endgame and the MCU's "Phase 4" plans. If Captain Marvel is going to be part of the Avengers and save Earth from threats across the world and the galaxy, surely the Kree-Skrull conflict will come into play once again. And though this alien mythology might seem esoteric and unnecessary now, it may become more crucial as we move forward. Aside from the Thor, Doctor Strange, and Guardians franchises, Marvel has managed to keep things rather grounded so far, but now that blue-colored, Spartan-like alien warriors and shapeshifting, Spock-looking cosplayers have been formally introduced, the studio has the opportunity to expand the MCU's scale even further, and get a little more cosmic and a lot weirder.

Opera Browser on Android to soon get built-in VPN feature - Digit

Published Date

09 - Feb - 2019

| Last Updated

09 - Feb - 2019

Highlights:

  • Opera integrates VPN directly in its Android browser.
  • The feature is currently in beta testing.
  • The option will enable users to browse the web more securely.


Opera shut down its standalone VPN app last year but it has announced plans of reviving the privacy-centric feature for its Android browser. The company announced that it is working on integrating the feature in the Opera for Android browser and has just started testing it. Beta users of the app will be the first ones who get to use the new free feature that will come built-in into the browser. Those who have beta access to the feature can enable it by enabling it from the 'Settings' option of the browser. The company explains how the feature works in a blog post. Once VPN is enabled, the feature replaces the user's IP address with a virtual one that makes it difficult for websites to keep track of user's location, identify the device being used and target ads.

Additionally, Opera's VPN is said to be a no-log service that doesn't collect any information that is sent using the feature. Like a full-fledged VPN app, the in-built option will enable users to set location as America, Asia or Europe. If the location is not selected, it will automatically select the best connection. One can also turn the VPN on when browsing the internet in Private mode. "The tests for the built-in VPN will continue for some time with a gradual rollout to our beta users. We suggest for you to keep an eye on the news about Opera for more information about it," Opera says. 

February 5 was Safer Internet Day and same as Opera, Google also announced some new tools to help users stay safe on the internet. The company has announced its Password Checkup Chrome extension that works just like HaveIBeenPwned. It basically matches your login credentials with its database of breached usernames and passwords and alerts you if it finds that your credentials were ever a part of a data leak. In case your credentials are a match, the extension will trigger an automatic warning and suggest that you change your password.

Google also announced new encryption called Adiantum, which is aimed at less powerful devices like entry-level smartphones and other smart devices like TVs and smartwatches. The new method is said to be designed such that there is no need to use specialised hardware for efficient encryption of locally stored data. 

Source, Via

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China’s Communist Party Runs This U.S. TV Station. How Independent Can It Be? - The New York Times

It broadcasts forced confessions to American audiences. It avoids subjects that displease Beijing. It cuts away when wind musses the hair of Xi Jinping, the Chinese president.

China Global Television Network America, which reaches 30 million households in the United States, is an arm of China's propaganda machine. It is controlled by the Communist Party and serves as part of what Mr. Xi has called Beijing's "publicity front."

But when the American authorities asked about those ties, CGTN America argued that the Chinese government doesn't tell it what to broadcast.

That contention, made last month in a filing with the United States Department of Justice, may not get a warm reception in Washington. In the wake of Russian influence in the 2016 election, American officials are trying to get a clearer picture of efforts by China and other countries to build influence in the United States. The claim by CGTN America, an overtly state-owned organization, represents a direct challenge to that effort.

"They have put the Department of Justice into a position of looking utterly ridiculous and toothless if it simply walks away from this type of false claim," said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University.

"This is right up there with Pravda claiming to be a health magazine," he added, referring to the onetime official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. "On its face, it doesn't hold."

CGTN America, based in Washington, is part of the international arm of China Central Television, Beijing's main domestic propaganda organ. It runs a typical newsroom except when it comes to stories about China, said four current and former employees, who asked for anonymity to protect their careers. Some stories, like the 2012 escape from China of the activist lawyer Chen Guangcheng or 2014 protests in Hong Kong calling for freer elections, were covered only briefly days after the news broke, three of them said.

Employees were rebuked when a report mentioned Falun Gong, the religious group that Beijing considers a cult, they said. Images of the flag of Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims, are banned from broadcasts.

CGTN made the filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, at the urging of the Justice Department. FARA requires those doing publicity work for foreign-controlled groups to submit government disclosures.

American officials have stepped up their requests that foreign-controlled groups make FARA filings in response to Russian interference in the 2016 election. Two years ago RT America, a Russian-backed broadcaster, made a similar filing at the urging of the Justice Department.

Chinese companies and organizations in general have come under greater scrutiny as the trade war has intensified, including the deals they strike to buy up American firms and technology. Some American officials contend the companies can pose a security risk.

As part of its demands that CGTN America make a filing under FARA, the Justice Department in a December letter to the broadcaster said it put Mr. Xi in a positive light and had attempted to influence the American public during the recent trade dispute.

"Reporting China's policy positions and presenting them in a positive light are primary reasons for CGTN's existence," the letter said.

CGTN America did not respond to emailed requests for comment. American officials sometimes challenge filings, requiring registrants to disclose more data about their relationships with foreign governments.

Unlike the Russian influence campaign, which is designed to split Americans, the Chinese propaganda effort tends toward the sunny side. Recent broadcasts on CGTN America extolled traditional Chinese medicine and China's economic rise, while its website offers a link to its panda coverage.

China's influence push may be ham-handed compared with Russia's, but it is well funded. Official Chinese media spend heavily to advertise on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter that are banned within China. China Daily, an English-language, state-controlled newspaper, buys advertising inserts in American newspapers, including The New York Times.

Based in a glassy office building four blocks from the White House, CGTN America employs about 180 journalists — many of them Americans — devoted to covering the United States. It broadcasts seven hours of programming a day through cable and satellite providers like AT&T and Comcast. Its employees cover a wide variety of topics, from news to features to business, and occasionally win awards for their coverage.

Ma Jing, CGTN America's director general, said the broadcaster "enjoys editorial independence from any state direction or control."

"CGTN America is not engaged in 'political activities,' as that term is defined for purposes of FARA, and has elected to file this registration statement out of an abundance of caution and in the spirit of cooperation with U.S. authorities," Ms. Ma wrote in the filing with the Justice Department's National Security Division.

Current and former CGTN employees say CCTV editors in Beijing often dictated plans for covering China. American employees sometimes pushed back, they said, and Ms. Ma allowed some flexibility when Beijing's orders didn't specifically forbid or dictate content. But three people interviewed said they had little choice but to air propaganda clips when Beijing said so.

For instance, in November CGTN America was told to broadcast a piece that played down China's imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of members of the Uighur ethnic minority group. The Times and others have reported that the mostly Muslim Uighurs are held against their will, often in dismal conditions, and subject to an indoctrination program designed to discourage Islam.

The piece that aired portrayed the camps as successful vocational training and antiterrorism centers and Uighurs as grateful. CGTN America employees packaged the clips with context citing international criticism, but the video nonetheless ran, at times without their framing.

Other times there was less recourse. CGTN has broadcast the televised confessions of people accused of a wide variety of crimes in China, with those confessions sometimes touted internally as "exclusives" by editors, one former employee said. Human rights groups say China forces people to make false, televised confessions to serve its own propaganda needs.

CGTN broadcast the confession of Peter Humphrey, a British private investigator who was imprisoned in China in 2013 and accused of illegally obtaining and selling Chinese citizens' data.

Mr. Humphrey, who has since been released, said he had been drugged, chained to a chair, locked in a cage and then made to read out a statement written by the police in front of the cameras. The anchor who presented the footage, James Chau, is now a goodwill ambassador with the World Health Organization. He declined to comment.

Peter Humphrey, a British private investigator who was once jailed in China. His confession, which he said had been forced, was broadcast by CGTN's forerunner.CreditFrank Augstein/Associated Press

The news organization "collaborates with the security and police organs to extract forced confessions from prisoners under extreme conditions of duress," Mr. Humphrey said, adding that the confession was packaged to "distort reality, intrude on privacy and fairness, and humiliate me."

Chinese leaders get different treatment, said three current or former employees. During a 2014 visit by Mr. Xi to Greece, a clip that showed him getting off the plane with unruly hair was eradicated from broadcasts, one current employee said.

One CGTN America show, "The Heat," is occasionally edited if it is too critical of China, two of the people said.

"CGTN wouldn't exist or have any significant funding if it weren't for the Chinese government," said Sarah Cook, a senior analyst for East Asia at Freedom House, a pro-democracy research group in the United States. "And of course that comes with editorial strings attached."

The Chinese government's power over CGTN was underscored by a 2016 event at state media facilities in Beijing in which Mr. Xi said official media and publicity broadly were "crucial for the party's path."

A group of CGTN employees in Washington attended via video conference. They had been kept after midnight several days in advance to prepare, without being told why, according to two of the people. When Mr. Xi greeted them, the group waved and, in a rehearsed moment, called out in unison, "Good morning, President Xi." The moment became a source of tension internally, these people said.

"Media analysts say this is very much about cultivating a more robust image for the Chinese leader," the CGTN America anchor Roee Ruttenberg said in the channel's coverage of Mr. Xi's appearance, "through all of the different outlets that in theory fall under his control."

Russia sent its most advanced anti-aircraft missile to China last year, but Mother Nature got in the way - Business Insider

China became the first foreign buyer of Russia's S-400 in 2014, but the delivery of the air-defense system, considered one of the most advanced the world, was marred whn a ship carrying it encountered a storm in early 2018.

According to the CEO of Russian defense firm Rostec, the components damaged were more important than first known.

Read more: The US Navy's best sub-hunting aircraft is facing some nagging problems

At the IDEX defense conference in the United Arab Emirates this month, Sergey Chemezov said that the gear damaged in the storm included the 40N6E, which is the export version of S-400's 40N6 missile, according to Stephen Trimble, defense editor at Aviation Week.

The 40N6 is the longest-range interceptor of the S-400's three missiles. The export version of the missile can reach just under 400 kilometers, or roughly 250 miles. The system also comes with a command-and-control system, a radar system, and a launcher.

Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile systems in the Victory Day parade at Red Square in Moscow, May 9, 2015.
Reuters

While the delivery of the S-400 to China had previously been confirmed, whether the 40N6E was included was not known for sure, which led Trimble to ask Chemezov about it, expecting to get a standard "no comment," he said on the most recent episode of Aviation Week's Check 6 podcast.

"He not only confirmed it. He also told us this sort of bizarre story about the fate that befell [the missile] on its way ... to China," Trimble said.

Read more: The US Navy's newest fleet is bulking up for 'leaner, agile' operations to counter Russia in the Atlantic and the Arctic

Chemezov made clear that the missiles "were on a ship, and the ship got hit by a bad storm, and ... ultimately all the missiles were lost. He didn't explain exactly how they were lost, but he said that they all have to be replaced and that they are now building the replacements for the missile, because of either damage sustained in the storm, or they were just destroyed in the storm somehow."

Reports of the damage emerged not long after the delivery started in early January 2018.

An S-400 radar unit.
Russian Ministry of Defense

Maritime trackers monitoring ships' automatic identification systems did notice a vessel that left St. Petersburg with an AIS code indicating it had explosives aboard, Trimble said. That ship hit a storm in the English Channel and returned to port.

Russian state media outlet Tass said in January 2019 that "part of the equipment included in the first shipment" to China had been "damaged by a storm and returned to Russia."

Around the same time, Russian news agency RIA quoted the spokeswoman for Russia's military and technical cooperation service as saying parts of the S-400 systems on their way to China were damaged in a storm at sea. The spokeswoman described the components as "secondary" without giving any details.

Read more: A Chinese admiral said his country should 'attack' US supercarriers with new weapons, but the US Navy is already scrambling to counter the threat

But the S-400's missiles are an essential component — the 40N6 even more so.

The revelation "was a very surprising development in this story of this export and completely unexpected," Trimble said. "I can't really think of something like this ever happening before, because it's not just any missile. This is probably one of the most important, strategically, weapon systems in the world right now, and this is the most powerful effector, or missile, within that system."

"Those missiles now may be at the bottom of the English Channel, which is just an incredible twist in the whole story," Trimble added.

Russian President Putin with Sergey Chemezov, CEO of Rostec, in Moscow.
Thomson Reuters

In May 2018, China received its first regimental set of the S-400 when the third and final ship arrived with "the equipment not damaged during a December storm in the English Channel and the damaged equipment after repairs," a diplomatic source told Tass at the time.

An S-400 regiment consists of two battalions. Each battalion has two batteries. A standard battery has four transporter erector launchers, each with four launch tubes, as well as fire-control radar systems and a command module. Reports about how many regimental sets China was to get vary from two to six.

Read more: The Navy's top officer in Europe says the US' new strategy has already duped the Russians

The South China Morning Post said in the final days of December that the People's Liberation Army Rocket Force tested the S-400 in November, shooting down a "simulated ballistic target" moving at the supersonic speed of nearly 2 miles a second at a range of nearly 150 miles.

The S-400 and Russia's efforts to sell it abroad have become a point of contention with the US.

In September, the US hit China with sanctions under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, or CAATSA, which is meant to punish Russia over its interventions abroad and interference in the 2016 US election.

Russian servicemen drive S-400 air-defense missile systems through Red Square during the Victory Day parade, marking the 73rd anniversary of the victory over Germany in World War II, May 9, 2018.
REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin

But other US allies have expressed interest in the S-400, complicating matters for Washington. Despite warnings that the US would rescind F-35 deliveries and that the system wouldn't work with NATO weapons, Turkey has forged ahead with an S-400 buy, saying this week that the purchase was a done deal.

India has also agreed to buy the S-400, though Chemezov said New Delhi has yet to make an advance payment, which "was a bit of a surprise," Trimble said. Buying the S-400 could open India to US sanctions, though there is a wavier process in the CAATSA legislation that could be applied to Delhi.

Read more: The Coast Guard turned down a request for an Arctic exercise out of concern the US's only heavy icebreaker would break down and Russia would have to rescue it

And despite the Trump administration's wooing of Saudi Arabia — which includes White House senior adviser Jared Kushner personally negotiating a discount with the Lockheed Martin CEO for the firm's Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system — the Kingdom is reportedly still interested in the S-400.

"Chemezov refused to talk about the S-400 and Saudi Arabia, and he was very blunt about why," Trimble said. "He said that if we talk about these kinds of deals, that gets our potential customers in a lot of trouble with the US government, so what we're doing is negotiating silently, which isn't a very silent way of negotiating, but that was how he put it."

Disney-Fox deal: Marvel finally has the X-Men back. But making an X-Men movie will be complicated. - Vox.com

The X-Men are finally coming home.

No, not home to the X-Mansion, but to Marvel Studios, the movie-making arm of the comic book juggernaut that created these characters in the first place. Disney's $71.3 billion acquisition of 20th Century Fox means, among other things, that Marvel will now own the rights to the characters from the X-Men, as well as the Fantastic Four series — rights Marvel sold in the late '90s to avoid bankruptcy.

For fans of the superheroes, the X-Men and Fantastic Four new home under Marvel's cinematic supervision likely sounds great, considering how well Marvel makes movies — and how extremely bad some of the X-Men and Fantastic Four films have been. (X-Men: The Last Stand, Wolverine Origins, and the 2015's Fantastic Four are the unholy trinity of bad Fox's bad Marvel superhero flicks, if you're keeping track.)

But while the merger seems like a better home for the X-Men and Fantastic Four, and perhaps some better movies on the horizon, there are still some big problems — time, continuity, and fitting these characters into Marvel's cinematic formula— that Marvel will have to deal with.

The timelines don't exactly add up, especially for Magneto

The Marvel Cinematic Universe doesn't have a hard set of rules that it abides by. Scarlet Witch's powers have changed since her first cinematic appearance, when she had some kind of psychic mind control stuff in Avengers: Age of Ultron. The limits of Thor's survivability are unknown, as we last saw him drifting in space in Infinity War. And there's not much explanation for the "jumps" that connect the Guardians of the Galaxy to places like Xandar, Ego, and Sakaar.

But the MCU does make a concerted effort to stick to its established timeline.

Events that happened in the 1940s-set Captain America: First Avenger, including Steve Rogers's conflict of being a man from a different time, Red Skull's disappearance, the power of and Howard Stark's research into the Tesseract, have come back to factor in future movies like Captain Marvel, which is set in 1995. And events in Captain Marvel, like Carol Danvers meeting Nick Fury and then going off into space, led to the Avengers Initiative, which is set into motion in other MCU movies, taking place years later, in the present day.

This adherence to chronology would make it difficult to incorporate the X-Men characters. Mutants' existence within the MCU would bring new continuity questions: How did they operate without SHIELD noticing all these years? Further, what were mutants doing during the major Marvel events, like the Chitauri invasion, Ultron's assault on Sokovia, and Thanos's snap? Marvel could write around that, but it would have to ostensibly create chronological alibis for each of the characters.

But the major difficulty is when a character's origin story and real history are intertwined — as is the case with Magneto.

Magneto, in the comics and now multiple movies, lived through the Holocaust as a young, Jewish boy, and the loss he experienced shapes his worldview. If the MCU wanted to keep Magneto's origin story in line with its current chronology, it would then mean Magneto would be an old man in the current MCU; while the same is true for Captain America and Bucky, they are only still alive are because of government experiments. Their peers are either very old or have already died. (Peggy Carter dies in Captain America: Civil War, which takes place in/around 2016.)

The latest X-Men movie, 2016's X-Men: Apocalypse takes place in the '80s and Magneto, played by Michael Fassbender, is supposed to be in his 40s, possibly in his 50s. In a movie set in 2018, he would conceivably be around 80 or 90 years old assuming he is 13 or so in the 1940s during WWII (mutants, according to the X-Men comic books, begin manifesting powers during puberty or adolescence).

Marvel Studios is left to face the dilemma of introducing a Magneto that may be too old to be a central villain or a Magneto that doesn't possess his crucial origin story.

There are still a lot of other Marvel movies to be made

One of the most mysterious things when it comes to Marvel, besides what will happen in Endgame next month, is what its film schedule will look like following this phase of the MCU. Spider-Man: Far From Home, a joint project between Sony and Marvel, will be released in July and will be the last Marvel project to arrive in theaters this year.

Marvel hasn't said what its schedule for 2020 releases and beyond will look like.

We do know that there's an Eternals movie happening, as well as a Black Widow solo movie. We also know that there's a Black Panther sequel in development, as well as a Doctor Strange follow-up; and the third Guardians of the Galaxy movie is now a go with director James Gunn back at the helm. Earlier this month, Marvel named a director, Daniel Cretton, for Shang-Chi. And you have to take into account that Captain Marvel will most likely have a sequel, considering it's on the verge of making $1 billion at the worldwide box office.

That's seven movies in the next few years. For good measure, throw in another unannounced team-up movie or two. Add to that the reported TV project featuring Vision and Scarlet Witch, and a different series featuring Falcon and Bucky, and Marvel still has a lot on its plate.

That's a jam-packed schedule. And if the X-Men and Fantastic Four are incorporated, they will have to be folded into the universe in a way that doesn't disrupt the current story that Marvel wants to tell in the upcoming Phase 4.

Another thing to keep in mind is reports that Deadpool will be the only property to continue in its Fox-owned form post-merger, signaling that Fox's X-Men: Dark Phoenix, which is set for June, and New Mutants, tentatively scheduled for August (reports say that New Mutants might me be pulled if it doesn't impress Disney execs) will be the last go for the franchise's current cast. If that is the case, and especially depending on how Dark Phoenix is received, Marvel might see fit to wait a few years before resetting and rebooting the X-Men franchise.

The more plausible scenario is Marvel using villains from former Fox-owned properties, like Galactus and Doctor Doom, in an upcoming movie sooner than the beloved superheroes themselves.

Marvel movies are great, but they're not all that different

The initial division of Marvel character film rights made Marvel Studios better creatively. Fox's ownership of some of the biggest series in the comic canon forced Marvel Studios to take a lesser-known hero like Iron Man and build a universe around him.

Throughout the '80s and '90s, the X-Men, Spider-Man, and, to some extent, the Fantastic Four were the faces of Marvel comics — hence the reason why Marvel sold the film rights of these heroes to movie studios back when it didn't have one itself.

Because Marvel didn't have the rights to Spider-Man or the X-Men once it entered Hollywood, it had to think outside of the box about which characters to promote on film. In Iron Man, the studio found a different hero (sardonic, tech-savvy, arrogant, damaged, etc.) than ones we were used to seeing.

It also led to the strategy of interlocking films. Marvel pitched a bigger picture of myriad superheroes who, by themselves, did not have the same kind of fervent audience interest the X-Men did, combining to form a superhero team. And it resulted in success: Marvel's first team-up movie, The Avengers, made more than $1.5 billion for the studio.

However, that strategy resulted in Marvel movies seeming more concerned with setting the table for future installments (see: Marvel seeding its films with Infinity Stones in the lead-up to Infinity War) than telling evocative and ambitious stories. The result is locking its movies into a holding pattern.

A recent example is Captain Marvel, which was deliberately set in the '90s as to not disrupt the current story at hand. Even then, it's hard to picture a Marvel movie that doesn't feel connected in one way or another to the others.

The formerly Fox-owned heroes aren't locked into that system, nor have they starred in anything like it. X-Men: First Class's stylish Cold War superhero team-up movie is nothing like X-Men: Days of Future Past's dystopian time-travel adventure. Deadpool is a raunchy comedy full of butts, murder, and jokes about chimichangas, while 2017's apocalyptic Logan is a bloody Western that received rave reviews.

Tonally, there's no mistaking Deadpool for Logan or any other X-Men film. There's no interchanging the Logan (a.k.a. Wolverine) in Logan with the Logan from the X-Men movies. And there's such a stark difference between Days of Future Past and First Class, a difference that's hard to find when you compare two Marvel movies (e.g. Thor Ragnarok and Black Panther, though seemingly disparate in terms of style and setting, contain many of the same beats and themes — fathers' secrets, loyalty to a land, outsiders threatening that land).

To be clear, that freedom has resulted in some clunkers, like 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the completely dismal 2015 Fantastic Four remake.

But it's also resulted in superhero films that take risks, delve into different genres, and play around with different modes of storytelling. The results haven't been consistent, but breakout movies like Logan and Deadpool are proof that risks can pay off — and it'd be a shame if Marvel regaining control of the X-Men and Fantastic Four on film means those risks aren't taken.

Reality Bites: ‘Captain Marvel’ and the Lie of the ’90s - The Ringer

For filmmakers reckoning with their past, distance can be a magnifying glass and a kaleidoscope. George Lucas was more than a decade removed from the early-'60s Modesto, California, high-schoolers coming of age in his 1973 feature American Graffiti. Two decades later, Richard Linklater put 17 years between the 1976 Austin teens and his 1993 classic Dazed and Confused. The mundanity of youth seems both more innocent and more dramatic in these movies. Period pieces made from within a filmmaker's lifespan are bound by their own notions of authenticity and defined by the quest to capture the moment while also rendering it timeless. And there is no era more consumed by the idea of the authentic than the 1990s.

Captain Marvel is an intergalactic story built on a time-fractured structure with a jigsaw origin story, but it's set largely in the '90s. And as the first stand-alone female Marvel superhero movie, it's acting in service of a machine that obsesses over authenticity. The Clinton years serve as a torch and a crutch for Marvel's 21st feature film, which is notable not just for spotlighting its first female protagonist but for being made by its first female director, Anna Boden, who along with her codirector, Ryan Fleck, have made a different sort of comic book movie than we've seen lately. Not that that's necessarily a good thing.

The past 18 months of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has achieved feats that would have been unimaginable in the '90s, when comic book movies like Batman Forever fused schlock and bad faith with a fumbling ineptitude. Black Panther earned an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse reset our expectations of what heroism can look like. Avengers: Infinity War dragged its load-bearing, concussive story into the top five at the box office among all releases in movie history. These movies did so with a canny combination of brand-based Stockholm syndrome and managed creative risk. Their producers—most notably chief Marvel executive Kevin Feige—gave broader rein to directors like Taika Waititi and Ryan Coogler to deliver a vision that was compromised by corporate continuity but not tone, humor, or even intent. For years, we heard director BS about the paranoid '70s thrillers that influenced Captain America sequels. But Thor: Ragnarok—a deeply goofy movie that featured rock monsters, Led Zeppelin, and Jeff Goldblum in eyeliner—conferred a new level of oddity and color and wonder to comic book fare. Marvel movies are easy to dismiss as the bane of film's future, the highly profitable death knell of a withering medium. But recent installments have found inventive and sometimes even profound new ways of telling familiar stories.

Captain Marvel carries with it an unreasonable burden, and so it is going to be judged in unreasonable circumstances. Too important to be outright dismissed and too cleverly designed to fail, it exists in a fascinating stasis of uncritical goo. The MCU is evolving, while its movies travel back in time. This isn't a regression, exactly. It's more like someone putting down a copy of The Lord of the Rings to watch the third Hobbit movie. That's what happens when you reboot the cosmos this deep into a story. Boden and Fleck's movie is not as moving or considered as Black Panther. It has none of the architectural technocracy that made Infinity War such a sweeping populist event. It doesn't even have the happy-to-be-here verve of Ant-Man and the Wasp. It's an origin story and a message movie, with all of the hokeyness that implies. Girl power is a theme rendered quite literally in this movie, but specifically in opposition to the male forces holding back our star. And because its lead figure, played by Brie Larson (purposefully blank, I think), is experiencing an amnesia of sorts, the movie needs to rely on narrative tricks and signifiers to tell its story.

When we meet Larson's Vers, she is seen almost immediately in a flashback fight, blown to the ground by an explosion, teal alien blood oozing from her nose. This is a false memory, the first of many. Quickly, we learn, she is a Kree spy training with her mentor Yon-Rogg (Jude Law, a hot dad) to do battle with the villainous, shape-shifting Skrull race. Captain Marvel uses all kinds of sliced fragments to confuse us, only to later smash those ill-fitting pieces together. These images are jerry-rigged with hyperkinetic editing and triumphal messaging; when they flash together, they resemble one long Nike ad. Inspiring, but you'll never forget they're corporate product. Later in the movie, we see Vers training as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force, striding out onto the tarmac à la Top Gun. We see her as a young girl racing in a go-kart, battling the boys on the tracks. And we see her singing karaoke in a dive bar while wearing a Guns N' Roses T-shirt. The sight of the shirt, I'd argue, is the turning point of the movie. G-N-R were essentially past their sell-by date in 1992, but this is the first sign that we are watching a movie not just about a superpowered refugee warrior, but about a rebel girl from the '90s. Marvel has positioned Vers—who is actually the fighter pilot Carol Danvers—as Kate Moss's Grunge Period with a dash of Bruckheimer Action Star. It's a curious choice.

In the midst of an escape from her alien rivals and also a pair of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents played by a digitally de-aged Samuel L. Jackson and Clark Gregg, Vers realizes she needs to change out of her super-suit and blend in with the earthbound plebs. So she grabs a leather jacket and a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt off a mannequin outside a local boutique, steals a motorcycle, and rides off into the great plains of Somewhere, U.S.A., in search of answers to her past. There is no clearer metaphor for the superficiality of Captain Marvel's '90s shtick than its star swiping an industrial hard-rock band's T-shirt off of a lifeless piece of polycarbonate. Seeking cultural authenticity in a piece of pop entertainment is a fool's errand. I'm not going to attempt to explain the true meaning of the '90s in a review of a superhero movie, despite Captain Marvel's loose assemblage of signifiers. A decade means many things to many people, but there's never an indicator of what it means to Carol or the other characters in the movie either. It's just kind of swingin' on the flippity-flop. When I picture the '90s, I see Blockbuster aisles (which appear here); slow-loading ISP connections on rickety desktop computers (ditto); and Winona Ryder, Giovanni Ribisi, and John C. Reilly cosplaying as the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion on an episode of MTV's 120 Minutes (sadly absent).

What can I say, it was a weird time. But the shortest path to a period—as Linklater and Lucas knew—is music. So the movie is chockablock with noisy needle drops. A security guard listens to Salt-N-Pepa's "Whatta Man" in his car. A perfunctory chase scene is set to Elastica's "Connection." That motorcycle ride is soundtracked with Garbage's "Only Happy When It Rains." And the movie's climactic fight scene is cheekily scored by No Doubt's "Just a Girl." They could have called this movie Alternative Alien Nation.

In recent years, smaller indie films like Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird and Jonah Hill's Mid90s have made earnest efforts at re-creating significant details, objects, and sensations native to this period. The skateboard deck, the Dave Matthews song, the pitiless ennui of teen boredom. The children of that time—my time, really—are coming of age and acquiring a level of creative might in their industries. And like every generation before them, they're using it to reprocess their influences and obsessions. Boden and Fleck, both 42, are doing the same, in a way. They're filmmakers with deep indie pedigree, having made earnest character studies like Half Nelson and Sugar, movies forged in the tradition of ceaselessly independent movies you might have seen … in the '90s.

My personal favorite from Boden and Fleck is the modern-day riverboat gambler's ode, Mississippi Grind. At one point in that film, Ryan Reynolds (a clever actor also subsumed by comic book arcana) says to his new gambling buddy, "I don't care about winning." That pal is played by the indispensable empathy machine Ben Mendelsohn, one of the best things about Captain Marvel, here playing a face-painted shape-shifting alien named Talos. Winning is a thorny theme for '90s survivors. Selling out was once tantamount to soul death. That concept seems absurd now, though like many weathered late Gen Xers, Boden and Fleck have "graduated" to a bigger assignment, with a high degree of difficulty and an unreal level of scrutiny. Sometimes that's what comes with the big job and the bigger salary and the head-smacking reality of the back half of your life. Don't have a cow, man.

The emotional catharsis of Captain Marvel is set, almost comically, to Nirvana's "Come As You Are," a song so obvious and familiar to me that the words have become a collection of meaningless syllables. Its bridge is more haunting than I'd remembered: "Take a rest as a friend / As an old … memory." Captain Marvel is an old memory of a fondly remembered period, brightened by lost time and movie magic. It isn't real, or even close to reality, but it's a reminder about what we take with us—and what we use to tell the next generation what we stood for. In Dazed and Confused, it was beer bongs and bell-bottoms and gnarly bashes. In Captain Marvel, it's a Right Stuff VHS cassette and a Des'ree song and a guileless tale of a fearless woman. It made me realize that the movies and music of my life are not those hallowed '90s chestnuts or those signifiers. It's the movies and music of right now, those to which we've committed emotional capital in our professional and personal lives. We await Marvel movies not simply because they're all we have left, but because we are the ones we have been waiting for. Here we are now, entertain us.

12 Best Free Microsoft Store apps for Windows 10 – 2019 - TWCN Tech News

Microsoft Store has some excellent apps. While most of us still use desktop software, we have curated a list of best free Microsoft Store apps for Windows 10. These apps range from learning category to editing images to the media server and so on. We selected these apps based on their uniqueness and best ratings from the consumers. If you use something which we can add to the list, do share in the comments.

Category: Learning

1] Duolingo – Learn Languages for Free

Best free Microsoft Store apps for Windows 10

Want to learn a new language? You can use Duolingo to learn Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Irish, Dutch, Danish, and English. All this without paying any money, and the design makes it fun.

You can start with ten words a day, and then it teaches you with some necessary words, and then words related to greetings, people, travel, family and so on. You can hear each word, and then type to confirm that you understand. You can download it here.

2] TED

TED

Are you looking for inspiration? This nonprofit organization brings talk shows from the world's most impressive, successful, education radicals, tech geniuses, medical mavericks, business gurus, and music legends. It includes both videos and audios which you can keep watching without any cost.

The app is also available on other platforms, and you can seamlessly switch between them, so you don't miss it, especially on the move. You can download it here.

Category: Image Editing

3] Adobe Photoshop Express

adobe Photoshop express

Photoshop express is one app that doesn't require any introduction.  Photoshop express offers you:

  • Creative Looks feature lets you add black and white, portrait, nature, pop color, duo, and more to photos.
  • 30+ borders
  • Control and set contrast, clarity, saturation, vibrancy, de-haze and more.
  • Change exposure, highlights, shadows, blacks, and whites.
  • Temperature & Tint.
  • Other tools include an option to sharpen, reduce Luminance noise, and color noise.

Apart from these, there is a lot more you can do it. You can download it here.

4] Fused

Fused Image

Want to mix two images or two videos? Then this app allows you to blend videos, photos, or a combination of both. You can also make color adjustments, use their Artists Collections to make it look it even better. You can download it here.

5] 3D Viewer

3D viewer Best Microsoft Windows App

If you want to view 3D models, and animations in real time, this is the best app. It is possible to see 3D models with lighting controls, check on different sharing modes, and also inspect model data. When in Mixed Reality mode, combine the digital and physical.

You can download it here.

Category: Media Server

6] Plex

Plex Media Server

Do you keep all your videos in one place? Do you want to watch them even when you are out of range? Plex is your best bet. Not only its available on all the platforms, but it can also organize all of your video, music, and photo collections, and gives you instant access to them on all of your devices. It offers

  • Unlimited playback of on-device video and photos.
  • Stream photos and videos from Plex to other devices like Roku, Android TV, Fire TV, Xbox One, and other apps.

You can download it here.

Category: Gaming

7] Asphalt 9 Legends

Asphalt 9 Legends

Asphalt 9 Legends is one of the best car racing game available not just on Windows but on any platform. You can ride the best cars from Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini and W Motors. The game uses HDR techniques and stunning visual and particle effects which makes gaming realistic.

It is probably my favorite all the best Free Microsoft Store apps for Windows 10, apart from Plex. You can download it here.

Category: Password manager

8] Keeper (Best Rated)

Password Manager

There are tons of password manager on the internet, but we selected this because we wanted to pick something different, and it's also the best rated.

Apart from the fact that you get a vault on your computer, it also offers extensions for the browser, can secure your file, available across devices and more. You can choose to share individual passwords, use inbuilt keeper chat and so on. You can download it here.

Category: Task Manager

9] Microsoft Todo (Best Rated)

Microsoft Todo App

To-Do is another best-rated app from Microsoft which lets you manage all your daily tasks. If you are using Wunderlist or Todoist apps, you can import all your work into this. Read more in our full review of Microsoft Todo. You can download it here.

Category: Utility

10] HEIC Converter

HIEAC App

HEIC or High-Efficiency Image File Format is a new image container format from the developers of MPEG. It is being used at many platforms because it can save a lot of space, and still keep the same quality. If you cannot open any of the HEIC formats, this convert can help you open that. It can convert HEIC to jpg, jpeg, png entirely offline. Also, check out details on how you can open it in the Windows 10 Photos App.

You can download it here.

11] Total PC Cleaner

Total PC Cleaner

If you need a Microsoft store based PC cleaner, this is your best bet. It checks on System, Application, Mail and other caches where the files are temporarily stored. You can download it here.

Category: Torrent

13] Torrex (Best Rated)

Torrex App

While uTorrent is the most popular client to download torrent files, you need to check Torrex. It's the best torrent app you can try from the Microsoft Store. It offers all the functionality of any torrent downloader including streaming, background download, time jump, option to share data with others, stop seeding upon completing a download, play MKV formatted video files and more.

Last but not least, it comes with an impressive user interface. You can download it here.

We finally conclude our list of best free Microsoft Store apps you can install on your Windows 10 computer. Though I am going, to be honest, there are lot more out there, if you read The Windows Club daily, make sure to drop in the comments with your best app you will use through the year!

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