IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.
UP NEXT
Blinken reiterates support for the Philippines amid tensions with China
01:16
U.S., Japan conduct joint military exercises amid high tensions with China
01:49
Taiwan joins China in search and rescue mission after fishing boat capsizes
00:43
Deadly explosion at fried chicken shop in China caught on camera
01:08
China’s parliament ends with endorsing President Xi Jinping’s agenda
00:36
U.S. continues to hold ‘incorrect perceptions’ of China, foreign minister says
01:52
Philippines blames China’s coast guard for South China Sea collision
00:50
China scraps premier’s annual news conference for first time in 30 years
03:23
Growing security concern over Chinese-made smart cars
01:35
Eyewitness video shows 100-car pile-up on Chinese expressway
00:40
Video shows partial bridge collapse after ship collision in China
00:38
Lessons learned about Ukraine need to be applied to Taiwan, Rep. Gallagher says
01:10
Freezing weather hampers China’s Lunar New Year getaway
00:40
FBI director: US cannot ‘sleep’ on Chinese cyberattack danger
00:28
U.S., China hold talks on limiting fentanyl flow to U.S.
01:44
China cites U.S. demand as a top concern ahead of talks on fentanyl smuggling
03:23
U.S. and Chinese officials to resume talks on stopping the fentanyl crisis
03:38
U.S. government warns against sending genetic testing data to China
04:55
Video shows a huge scar on mountainside after a landslide hits a village in China
00:37
China reveals big drop in birth rate
00:49
NBC News’ Janis Mackey Frayer reports from Beijing, where a number of U.S. business leaders, including the CEOs of Blackstone, Qualcomm, Bloomberg, Chubb and FedEx, met with the Chinese presidentMarch 27, 2024
UP NEXT
Blinken reiterates support for the Philippines amid tensions with China
01:16
U.S., Japan conduct joint military exercises amid high tensions with China
01:49
Taiwan joins China in search and rescue mission after fishing boat capsizes
00:43
Deadly explosion at fried chicken shop in China caught on camera
01:08
China’s parliament ends with endorsing President Xi Jinping’s agenda
00:36
U.S. continues to hold ‘incorrect perceptions’ of China, foreign minister says
Eye on America: Small business tries four-day work week – CBS News
Watch CBS News
In Louisiana, we learn how a devastating drought has greatly diminished the area’s crawfish supply. Then in Ohio, we tour a small business that’s seeing promising results from a four-day work week model. Watch these stories and more on Eye on America with host Michelle Miller.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
The green finance craze is part of the same hollow crusade. Over the weekend, it emerged that Barclays has been using the “sustainable finance” badge to provide major funding to Shell. Laughably, the bank has classified a $10bn (£7.8bn) revolving credit facility it provided to Shell as “social and environmental financing”.
Barclays counted its share of the loan towards a target to deliver $150bn in social and environmental financing, according to analysis of the bank’s loan classification framework by this newspaper. It will do little to counter growing concern among regulators and ministers about corporate “greenwashing”. Our energy needs must be funded, but such mislabelling can only erode trust in the financial system.
It’s time to ask whether the ESG movement is little more than a con, and a potentially dangerous one at that.
Even now, 18 months after Moscow’s tanks rolled over the Ukrainian border, and with an estimated 40,000 Ukrainian civilians and around 20,000 Ukrainian military personnel dead, the ESG mavens continue to search for their moral compasses.
When the war erupted, it was widely accepted that the West had a duty to help defend a European neighbour in the face of an unjust and unprovoked act of aggression at the hands of a more powerful and menacing neighbour.
European states and the US scrambled to provide vital military aid. Berlin was quick to send 1,000 anti-tank grenade launchers and 500 Stinger missiles to Kyiv, in a major about-turn from a long-standing policy of refusing to export weapons to conflict zones.
Similarly, for the first time in its history, the European Union agreed to provide military help to a country under attack. Russia’s actions prompted some hurried soul-searching among western leaders.
This is an updated version of a story first published on Nov. 20, 2022. The original video can be viewed here.
Before Argentina won the World Cup last fall, before all manner of “Oles” and “Allezs” broke out across Qatar’s stadiums, the soundtrack for soccer’s premier event went like this: got, got, need. It wasn’t scalpers hawking tickets, it was the refrain of fans sifting through packs of World Cup stickers. Think soccer’s answer to baseball cards. Leading up to the 1970 World Cup, four brothers in Italy, the Paninis, began printing collectables featuring images of players from every country in the competition. More than 50 years later, fans from all over the globe scour for that obscure Serbian goalkeeper or elusive Lionel Messi – hoping to complete their albums. As we first reported in November, the panini sticker phenomenon has become a booming, international business and a central part of the World Cup experience.
For millions of soccer fans, the World Cup unofficially begins weeks in advance, when the Panini stickers for this quadrennial event shoot onto the market.
In a classroom in the town of Sudbury, England, in the thrumming cities of Sao Paulo and Mexico City, fans of all stripes embarked on a common treasure hunt: collecting 670 stickers depicting the players and teams from this World Cup.
All so they can complete their album.
Francesco Furnari: Listen. If you have gold or Panini sticker today, people will go for the sticker and not the gold.
Jon Wertheim: Panini sticker’s more valuable than gold you’re saying?
Francesco Furnari: Today, yes.
Francesco Furnari is the biggest official Panini distributor in the United States. An Italian Venezuelan American, he is the ultimate Panini sticker evangelist.
Francesco Furnari
He’s completed every sticker album since 1974, including the 2022 vintage, many times over.
Francesco Furnari: I have already seven.
Jon Wertheim: You’ve- you’re a man in your 50s. You have seven albums completed?
Francesco Furnari: And still counting.
A pack costs a $1.20, and Furnari predicts sticker sales from 2022 will reach 100 million packets in the U.S. alone, nearly a billion worldwide.
Jon Wertheim: We’re talking about a little piece of paper with some adhesive on it. What makes this so special?
Francesco Furnari: Jon, you gotta understand that you have all your legends. You have all your best players at a distance of, you know, your hand. You can touch them, you can talk to them It’s fantastic.
How coveted are these things? When Argentina ran out of stickers in September, its secretary of commerce called an emergency meeting to solve this national crisis.
Jon Wertheim: We live in a digital world. How are these paper stickers still this popular?
Francesco Furnari: This sensation, Jon, to get a pack, to rip it out, to smell it, to open it, and to find the players right here, there is no way you can replicate it in an electronic way.
Jon Wertheim: So you even have a method for how you’re ripping that packet open—
Francesco Furnari: Every single pack has to be done (LAUGH) in the same way. By the way, I’ve opened at least—
Jon Wertheim: You’ve done this before.
Francesco Furnari: –probably 2,000 packs up until now. Oh my God. Germany
Jon Wertheim: This was a good one? Good pack…
Francesco Furnari: That was a good pull. I love it.
Panini stickers
We went to Modena, Italy, to Panini’s headquarters. The equivalent of Willy Wonka’s factory.
Paninis rolled off the press 21 hours a day, 11 million packets a day, each containing five stickers. The headliners: Mbappe, Messi, Modric. And the coming stars, players with four names, and there’s Fred.
Fred
The phenomenon started here, next to the cathedral, at a newspaper kiosk in the center of town. After World War II, Olga Panini, a widow, ran the newsstand with her four sons. Not unlike a soccer team, each had a special skill. The oldest son, Giuseppe, was the dreamer with the big plans.
We met Giuseppe’s son, Antonio, and Giuseppe’s nieces, Laura and Lucia Panini in Modena.
Laura Panini: He was like a volcano. He had many, many ideas.
Jon Wertheim: A volcano?
Laura Panini: A volcano, yes.
Giuseppe’s initial idea was to sell cards depicting flowers.
Antonio Panini: And was a disaster (laugh). But they realized that the formula was okay, not the subject.
Laura and Antonio Panini
Short of lire, Giuseppe had, as it were, one last shot on goal. It was 1961 and he turned to a new subject: Italian soccer. It was a hit, especially with the kids.
Even if production was rudimentary.
Lucia Panini: All the stickers were printed and then were cut. And they were mixing with a shovel at the beginning.
Jon Wertheim: To make sure there were no duplicates (laugh) they mixed with a shovel.
Lucia Panini: Then they replaced a shovel with a churn, the one they use normally for making butter or cheese..
Jon Wertheim: With a butter churn?
Lucia Panini: Yes, yes. (laugh) And they had a handle, and they were moving this handle and it was working.
Lucia Panini
Giuseppe’s brother Umberto, the family engineer, invented machinery that mixed stickers to prevent dreaded duplicates in each pack, his contraptions were so successful, the designs are still in use today, 60 years later.
And they enabled the brothers to scale up their ambitions. Before the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, they paid a thousand dollars cash to soccer’s governing body to buy the rights to produce stickers of the players, not least the great Pele.
Suddenly “Panini” became chiefly associated not with a sandwich but with a worldwide pastime. The growth of the stickers mirroring the growth of soccer.
Antonio Allegra, Panini’s marketing director, told us how collecting the World Cup albums over the decades became a rite of passage; also a way to mark time.
Antonio Allegra: Wow. It’s the first appearance for Diego Armando Maradona in the World Cup.
Jon Wertheim: This is Maradona’s first World Cup?
Antonio Allegra: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Antonio Allegra: This one is Germany 2006. And here we have a very, very young Messi.
Jon Wertheim: This, this teenager right here.
Antonio Allegra: Yeah, yeah, yeah, he is 19.
Antonio Allegra
There are countries that have fallen off the map and hairstyles that have fallen out of fashion.
Jon Wertheim: He looks like the drummer.
Today, Panini sticker photo shoots are the World Cup equivalent of school picture day.
Back in Italy, Marcella Mannori is Panini’s project manager overseeing image control.
Marcella Mannori: Sometimes these pictures are not perfect. Might be too dark, maybe there’s a pimple on someone’s face. And we’re asked to remove it.
Jon Wertheim: Little Photoshop?
Marcella Mannori: Correct.
Marcella Mannori
Jon Wertheim: Heard one story of a federation once getting in touch and saying, ‘This guy’s really ugly. Can you do something about that?’
Marcella Mannori: Yes. It’s the truth.
Jon Wertheim: Should we name names?
Marcella Mannori: No, I’m still working with these people. (laugh)
Jon Wertheim: So what do you do when you get that call…
Marcella Mannori: We…First reply is of course, ‘No, no worry. I mean, we’re gonna change the picture.” Second time, third time, fourth time. The fourth time I will say, ‘Listen, this is his face (laugh) it’s his face, I’m sorry. I mean we did all we co-could.
What do players think of sticker madness? We asked Gigi Buffon, who literally saved Italy during its run to the World Cup trophy in 2006.
One of the greatest ever goalkeepers, at age 44, he’s not only still playing, but, let’s keep this between us, he’s still collecting stickers, a hobby since childhood.
Gigi Buffon
Jon Wertheim: When you still collect, where are you getting your stickers?
Gigi Buffon (Translation): Now and again I like the ritual of going to the kiosk to buy say 10 packets of stickers. It’s a little embarrassing, but now I can say to the kiosk owner the stickers are for my kids, and he believes me.
Buffon let us in on another secret.
Jon Wertheim: Do the players swap stickers in the locker room?
Gigi Buffon (Translation): Yes, I think if we were really to investigate all the players in the locker room, I think 60 to 70 percent filled the album.
Buffon appeared in four World Cup albums, aging before our eyes, and his.
Jon Wertheim: We have visual aids…
Gigi Buffon: Ooh!
His favorite sticker was for the 2006 album, the last time Italy triumphed at the World Cup.
Jon Wertheim: You’ve had your picture taken thousands of times, but you understood this is for generations
Gigi Buffon (Translation): Yes, for sure. For me it was a solemn moment, because there was a kind of respect that I had to show towards Gigi the child and to the dreams of Gigi the child.
Part of Gianni Bellini’s Panini card collection
An hour from Buffon’s practice field in Parma, we met another child at heart, Gianni Bellini. Considered the most prolific Panini collector in the world.
The debut edition, Mexico 1970, is the holy grail of World Cup sticker albums. This guy has five of them. And he ain’t sellin’.
He lives in what is less a home than a sticker repository. You might have baseball cards in your attic, he has half a million stickers spilling out of every drawer. Bellini even has whole sheets of them hidden under a tablecloth, no one is allowed to eat on the table because it’s too sacred.
Lucky for Gianni, his long-suffering wife, Giovanna, has a sense of humor.
Jon Wertheim: Heaven forbid there were a fire tonight, you had to go back into your house, what would you rescue first?
Gianni Bellini (Translation): Obviously the stickers, if there is a fire my wife would run away with her own legs.
Jon Wertheim: Your wife can fend for herself, but the stickers can’t.
Gianni Bellini: Exactly.
Correspondent Jon Wertheim with Giovanna and Gianni Bellini
Saturday nights are all right for sticking at the Bellini household. While Giovanna watches a movie, Gianni fills his album, and never forgets a face.
Jon Wertheim: You remember 50 years later what the last player was you needed to complete the album?
Gianni Bellini (Translation): I also remember the first sticker that I got in a pack which was Sergio Carantini, a defender from Vicenza.
Jon Wertheim: It’s like your first girlfriend.
Gianni Bellini (Translation): Her I don’t remember.
Panini’s missing sticker service helps World Cup collectors complete their albums | 60 Minutes
04:46
He’s not alone in his soccer nostalgia, those kids who grew up in the 70s collecting stickers are now grandparents and parents, passing down the tradition – like Francesco Furnari in Florida.
Francesco Furnari: Think about this. There is no way you can find a product that you can have different generations doing at the same time. It’s fantastic. (big smile)
Here’s what else makes it exceptional, almost everyone that completes their album does so not through purchase power, but through old fashioned, face-to-face trading. Around the world, there are Panini sticker swapping sessions that are organized; others that are impromptu.
At World Cups past, present and future, one country lifts the trophy, but millions feel their personal version of World Cup glory.
Jon Wertheim: You’ve seen people complete their albums. What is that feeling like when you get that very last sticker?
Francesco Furnari: Let me put it this way. Whenever you play soccer and you score a goal in the final of the tournament, that’s kind of the feeling you have whenever you complete an album.
It’s an old-timey, analog hobby, no screen required. It relies on the humanity of touch and the value is largely sentimental. But in these tribal, polarized times, leave it to stickers to take people, and countries, and bind them together.
Produced by Draggan Mihailovich. Associate producer, Emily Cameron. Broadcast associate, Elizabeth Germino. Edited by Sean Kelly.
WASHINGTON, Aug 4 (Reuters) – The incoming hereditary ruler of Cambodia, a country Washington is keen to pull out of Beijing’s orbit, could meet CEOs of U.S. firms interested in investing there in New York next month, the head of the U.S. business lobby for Southeast Asia told Reuters.
Cambodia’s long-ruling Prime Minister Hun Sen has said he will hand power to his Western-educated son, Hun Manet, 45, this month, after the incumbent Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) swept a July general election in which it was virtually unopposed.
“We hope to host (Hun Manet). We hope to see if there’s a way to start a new chapter” between the Washington and Phnom Penh, Ted Osius, president of the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council said on Thursday.
“It’s not an entirely new chapter (but) he’s not his dad, he’s a different person. So maybe there’s some opportunities here.”
Talks were underway for a hotel reception around the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) meetings held in September, said Osius, a former career diplomat who served as America’s ambassador to Cambodia’s neighbor Vietnam.
“(We’ll) bring in CEOs, high-level execs who are interested in Cambodia and might want to get a view of the new guy. And I think he would welcome that.”
Washington, which has over the years denounced Hun Sen’s authoritarian and anti-democratic moves, has said the elections were “neither free nor fair.”
Hun Manet, educated at Western institutions including the West Point military academy in the United States, would not want to be “owned lock stock and barrel” by another country, Osius said, a reference to Cambodia’s close ties to U.S. rival China.
Cambodia’s decision to allow China’s navy to develop its naval base at Ream has upset Washington and neighbors worried it will give Beijing a new outpost near the contested South China Sea.
Osius said the U.S. approach to Cambodia had been “punitive” and Washington should look for opportunities for dialogue.
“Better for (Hun Manet) if there if he’s got some strategic options, and that could mean improving ties with us,” he said.
A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department said it had no specific comment on Hun Manet’s future leadership, but the formation of a new government was an opportunity for the CPP to improve Cambodia’s international standing.
Ways it could do this included “restoring genuine multi-party democracy, ending politically motivated trials, reversing convictions of government critics, and allowing independent media outlets to reopen and function without interference.”
Asked if Hun Manet and U.S. officials could meet on the sidelines of UNGA, the spokesperson added: “We are still determining schedules for U.S. principals and do not have any further information to share.”
Cambodia’s Washington embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (Reporting by Simon Lewis and David Brunnstrom Editing by Marguerita Choy)
Yum! Brands, the parent company of KFC, sold its Russian KFC business to Smart Service, a Russian company led by Konstantin Yurievich Kotov and Audrey Eduardovich Oskolkov.
It is now rebranding the restaurants as Rostik’s. “The dishes we make are completely the same as KFC,” Kotov told RBC news.
Rostik’s branding is also red, black and white, in the same style as KFC. An opening event at one outlet featured a giant cake in the shape of a popcorn chicken bucket.
There is a surreal parallel with the mass privatisation of state assets in the 1990s following the demise of the Soviet Union.
Just as the new oligarchs accumulated wealth by taking over state property, Russian businessmen are now rapidly acquiring Western assets, supply chains, customer bases and business networks at cheap prices.
Russians have acquired assets from 110 Western companies which have left the country.
Their total value, as defined by their net assets at the end of 2022, was around €35bn (£30bn), according to analysis by Novaya Gazeta Europe – the long-established Russian opposition newspaper which closed in Moscow in March 2022 and relaunched in Latvia.
These purchases have typically taken place at large discounts. In some cases, factory assets have been sold for the symbolic price of €1. According to Novaya-Europe, Vladimir Potanin, Russia’s richest businessman, who is sanctioned by the UK and the US, has acquired assets worth around €16bn.
But even if brands have not sold their assets, companies are moving in to fill the gap they have left behind.
“Shops are realising that companies may have pulled out, but people still want (their goods). Capitalism is the winner. It’s just someone else taking a cut in the middle,” says Tickle.
Adverts for Mamba, a Russian dating app, can be seen at bus stops in the wake of Tinder’s exit. “That’s been around forever but it’s not cool. Nobody used it after Tinder rocked up. I guess now they are trying to make it cool,” says Tickle.
The Swedish furniture shop Ikea has left Russia for good, but Russians can now buy flatpack furniture from Belarussian company Swed House, which brands itself in the iconic yellow and blue.
An Ikea spokesman said: “IKEA has nothing to do with ‘Swed House’. What we can see is that they are trying to leap in and serve IKEA customers, and that they are clearly inspired by IKEA.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Focusing on the Bidens rather than Donald Trump’s federal court appearance, House Republicans released a transcript Thursday of their interview with Hunter Biden’s former business associate detailing overseas financial dealings by the president’s son.
The more than five-hour closed-door interview with Devon Archer by the House Oversight Committee, released hours before Trump’s appearance to face a third list of charges, provides fresh insight into how President Joe Biden’s youngest son used his relationship with his father, who was then vice president, to court foreign investors. Archer said Hunter Biden was using the “illusion of access” in Washington.
Republicans on the panel hope to use their work to prod impeachment proceedings against the president. However, though pressed repeatedly, Archer offered no tangible evidence that Joe Biden’s role in his son’s work was more than saying hello during their daily family calls.
“You know, Hunter spoke to his dad every day, right?” Archer said to committee members and staff on Monday. “And so in certain circumstances, when you’re in — you know, if his dad calls him at dinner and he picks up the phone, then there’s a conversation.”
He added, “And the, you know, the conversation is generally about the weather and, you know, what it’s like in Norway or Paris or wherever he may be.”
Release of the more than 140-page transcript is the start of what is expected to be a long and tangled Republican-led probe into Hunter Biden’s business dealings as he hopscotched the globe using what Democrats call the illusion of proximity to power to fund a lavash lifestyle for himself and his associates. Three committees are looking at Hunter Biden so far, and Republicans are pushing ahead on several lines of inquiry.
Archer testified that over the span of their decade-long business relationship, Hunter Biden put his father on the phone around 20 times while in the company of associates but “never once spoke about any business dealings.”
At one point, Archer was asked point blank: “Are you aware of any wrongdoing by Vice President Biden?”
He responded, “No, I’m not aware of any.”
Overall, the transcript portrays the president’s son as capitalizing on his father’s name, but not necessarily promising or delivering any influence that would rise to a questionable level or approach wrongdoing.
Still, Republicans have long seen Archer, who served with Hunter Biden on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, as a key witness in their search to directly connect the president to his son’s various international business transactions.
Rep. James Comer, Republican chair of Oversight Committee, issued a subpoena to Archer in June, saying he “played a significant role in the Biden family’s business deals abroad, including but not limited to China, Russia, and Ukraine.” He said Archer’s testimony would be critical to the committee’s investigation.
And while there was no evidence directly tying Hunter Biden’s financial dealings to his father, Archer’s testimony raised new questions raised about the ways in which the 53-year-old used the “Biden brand” to build his multimillion dollar international businesses.
“He was getting paid a lot of money, and I think, you know, he wanted to show value,” Archer testified, adding the younger Biden was not “overt” about his relationship with his father.
“But I think he would — you know, given the brand, I think he would look to, you know, to get the leverage from it,” Archer said, adding, “I think it’s more defensive, you know, defensive leverage that, that the value is there in his work.”
Asked what value he brought to Burisma, Archer replied, “The value that Hunter Biden brought to it was having — you know, there was — the theoretical was corporate governance, but obviously, given the brand, that was a large part of the value. I don’t think it was the sole value, but I do think that was a key component of the value.”
Rep. Andy Biggs, a Republican member of the Oversight Committee who attended the interview, portrayed the testimony about the “Biden brand” as implicating the the president directly. “I think we should do an impeachment inquiry,” the Arizona lawmaker told reporters as he exited the interview Monday.
Comer agreed, saying in a statement Thursday that Archer’s testimony confirmed, “Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ that his son sold around the world to enrich the Biden family.” When pushed on it later, Archer clarified that “the brand” that brought Hunter Biden value with international clients was the broader, Washington access, which included his previous lobbying work.
“D.C. was the brand,” he testified to a line of questioning by Biggs.
Nonetheless, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy recently said Republicans may need to launch an impeachment inquir y to dig deeper.
But the top Democrat on the Oversight panel, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, said the transcript proves “once again” that Republicans cannot produce any evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden.
He called the effort a “desperate effort to distract from Donald Trump’s third indictment and the overwhelming evidence of his persistent efforts to undermine American democracy.”
Washington — The GOP-led House Oversight and Accountability Committee released the 141 page transcript of its interview earlier this week with Devon Archer, a former business partner of Hunter Biden, who testified about his business dealings with President Biden’s son. Archer testified that Hunter Biden was selling “the brand,” and it was the elder Biden who “brought the most value to the brand,” according to the transcript.
Archer told the committee staff and lawmakers, “I think Burisma would have gone out of business if it didn’t have the brand attached to it.” Then, Rep. Dan Goldman, Democrat of New York, asked Archer if he had any knowledge that Joe Biden had any direct involvement with Burisma, and Archer replied, “No.”
In response to questions from Congressman Goldman about the brand’s alleged impact, Archer said that it appeared to shield Burisma “because people would be intimidated to mess with them.”
In a separate line of questioning by Republican congressman Andy Biggs, of Arizona, Archer was asked whether the brand was about “Dr. Jill or anybody else. You’re talking about Joe Biden, Is that fair to say?”
“Yeah, that’s fair to say,” Archer replied.
Archer served alongside Hunter Biden on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, beginning in 2014, while the elder Biden was vice president and deeply involved in Ukraine policy. Archer is widely believed to have facilitated Hunter Biden’s entry onto Burisma’s board.
Republicans on the committee asked Archer about two dinners, one in 2014 and another in 2015 at a restaurant in Washington, D.C., with Hunter Biden’s foreign business associates, both of which the then-vice president attended.
“I recall that he had dinner. It was a regular — not a long dinner, but dinner,” Archer said of the spring 2014 dinner. Russian billionaire businesswoman Yelena Baturina was there, as well as an executive from Burisma.
Archer testified that in April 2014 there was an incoming wire for $142,300 which he said was used by Hunter Biden to buy a sports car, “I believe it was a Fisker first and then a Porsche…For an expensive car, yes.”
Archer, according to the transcript, also testified that the elder Biden was put on speaker phone with business contacts, potential business associates including foreign national “maybe 20 times” during the course of Archer’s and Hunter Biden’s business relationship. Joe Biden was put on the phone to sell “the brand,” Archer said.
“Part of what was delivered is the brand,” he said. “I mean, it’s like anything, you know, if you’re Jamie Dimon’s son or any CEO. You know, I think that’s what we’re talking about, is that there was brand being delivered along with other capabilities and reach.”
Asked what the Bidens talked about when Joe Biden was on speaker phone, Archer responded, “Say, where are you, how’s the weather, how’s the fishing, how’s the — whatever — but, you know, it was very, you know, casual conversations.”
Archer was also asked if then-Vice President Biden regularly “checked in on his son, who’s admitted he’s had issues with drugs.”
“Every day,” Archer replied. But asked whether he had ever heard them discuss the “substance of Hunter Biden’s business,” he responded, “No.”
While the speakerphone calls were described as casual conversations, Archer also testified he believed there may be more involved. “I think that the calls were — that’s what it was. They were calls to talk about the weather, and that was signal enough to be powerful.”
After Archer was interviewed Monday, and before the transcript was available for independent review, Goldman said Archer testified Hunter Biden was selling the “illusion of access” to his father.
“His exact testimony was that Hunter Biden possessed actual experience and contacts in Washington, D.C., in the political sphere, in the lobbying sphere, in the executive branch, and that that is ultimately what he was providing to Burisma,” Goldman said. “But in return for pressure from Burisma, he had to give the illusion — he used that term, the illusion — of access to his father, and he tried to get credit for things that he, that Mr. Archer testified Hunter had nothing to do with, such as when Vice President Biden went to Ukraine on his own.”
The transcript shows Goldman used the term “illusion of access” in his line of questioning, and Archer’s answers were more nuanced.
He asked Archer, “Is it fair to say that Hunter Biden was selling the illusion of access to his father?”
Archer replied, “Yes.”
Goldman followed up, “So, when you talk about selling the brand, it’s not about selling access to his father. It’s about selling the illusion of access to his father. Is that fair?”
Archer replied, “Is that fair? I mean, yeah, that is — I think that’s — that’s almost fair.”
“Because there are touch points and contact points that I can’t deny that happened, but nothing of material was discussed,” Archer said.
Archer’s interview was the latest development in the GOP’s investigations into Hunter Biden as Republicans seek to tie his controversial business dealings to the president.
The White House has repeatedly denied that the president had any involvement in his son’s business ventures. White House spokesperson Ian Sams said in a statement after Archer testified that House Republicans’ “own witnesses appear to be debunking their allegations.”
“It appears that the House Republicans’ own much-hyped witness today testified that he never heard of President Biden discussing business with his son or his son’s associates, or doing anything wrong,” he said last week.
Hunter Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell said earlier this week Archer’s testimony confirmed that he “did not involve his father in, nor did his father assist him in, his business” and that any interaction between Hunter Biden’s father and business associates “was simply to exchange small talk.”
The Oversight Committee has sought information on any possible involvement from the president in his son’s foreign business deals for months. In a letter to Archer’s attorney in June, Oversight Committee chairman James Comer said Archer “played a significant role in the Biden family’s business deals abroad, including but not limited to China, Russia, and Ukraine.”
Archer was convicted in 2018 of securities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud for his role in a scheme to defraud a Native American tribe and multiple pension funds. His conviction was overturned later that year, and U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abram wrote in her decision she was “left with an unwavering concern that Archer is innocent of the crimes charged.”
The conviction was later reinstated by a federal appeals court. Archer lost an appeal of that decision. He has not yet been sentenced.
— Ellis Kim and Michael Kaplan contributed reporting.
Catherine Herridge
Catherine Herridge is a senior investigative correspondent for CBS News covering national security and intelligence based in Washington, D.C.
WASHINGTON — Hunter Biden’s business associate, Devon Archer, testified before the House Oversight Committee that he has no knowledge that then-Vice President Joe Biden changed U.S. foreign policy to help his son and that he’s not aware of any wrongdoing by the elder Biden, according to transcripts of his testimony released Thursday.
“I have no basis to know if he altered policy to benefit his son. … I have no knowledge,” Archer testified in the closed-door hearing earlier this week.
One of the GOP’s key witnesses in its investigation into the Bidens, Archer told lawmakers that Hunter Biden repeatedly used the Joe Biden “brand” to protect Burisma “so people wouldn’t mess with them” legally and politically. But he also said that he did not disagree with the conclusion that Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Ukrainian energy firm Bursma had no effect on U.S. foreign policy. And Archer testified that he had no knowledge of any wrongdoing by Joe Biden as it related to his son’s business dealings.
“No, I’m not aware of any,” Archer said.
The witness also described multiple phone calls in which Hunter Biden would put his father on speakerphone in the presence of business associates, but he said that the brief conversations focused on pleasantries like the weather or fishing, not official business.
But Archer testified that those mundane phone calls were meant to convey access and power. Without Hunter Biden, Burisma might not have survived, Archer said.
“I think Burisma would have gone out of business if it didn’t have the brand attached to it. That’s my, like, only honest opinion,” Archer said.
The witness also described two dinners — a birthday dinnerand another on the World Food Programme — attended by Hunter and Joe Biden in 2014 and 2015 at Washington’s Cafe Milano. Some foreign business executives and politicians were present, but Archer said Joe Biden didn’t discuss business.
Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., released Archer’s 141-page transcript on the same day former President Donald Trump is set to be arraigned at a federal courthouse in Washington for charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The testimony hands Republicans descriptive details about Hunter Biden and more ammunition as they accuse the Justice Department of aggressively prosecuting Trump for multiple crimes while going easy on Hunter Biden on federal tax and other charges.
But the transcripts appear to back up Democrats, including Reps. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., who have argued that Comer’s investigation into the Bidens has revealed no direct evidence that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s business dealings, was influenced by them or broke the law.
“Once again, Committee Republicans’ priority investigation into President Biden has failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden. On Monday, Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business associate, confirmed in a transcribed interview that President Biden was never involved in Hunter’s business dealings, never profited from such dealings, and never took official action in relation to these business dealings,” Raskin, the top Democrat on the Oversight panel, said in a statement.
“The transcript released today shows the extent to which Congressional Republicans are willing to distort, twist, and manipulate the facts presented by their own witness just to keep fueling the far-right media’s obsession with fabricating wrongdoing by President Biden in a desperate effort to distract from Donald Trump’s third indictment and the overwhelming evidence of his persistent efforts to undermine American democracy.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Scott Wong
Scott Wong is a senior congressional reporter for NBC News.
Rebecca Kaplan
Rebecca is a producer and off-air reporter covering Congress for NBC News, managing coverage of the House.
Kyle Stewart, Kate Santaliz and Julie Tsirkin contributed.
The glittering towers of the Moscow City business district dominate the skyline of the Russian capital. The sleek glass-and-steel buildings — designed to attract investment amid an economic boom in the early 2000s – are a dramatic, modern contrast to the rest of the more than 800-year-old city.
Now they are a sign of its vulnerability, following a series of drone attacks that rattled some Muscovites and brought the war in Ukraine home to the seat of Russian power.
The attacks on Sunday and Tuesday aren’t the first to hit Moscow — a drone even struck the Kremlin harmlessly in May. But these latest blasts, which caused no casualties but blew out part of a section of windows on a high-rise building and sent glass cascading to the streets, seemed particularly unsettling.
“It’s very frightening because you wake up at night hearing explosions,” said a woman who identified herself only as Ulfiya as she walked her dog, adding that she lived in a nearby building. Like other Muscovites interviewed by The Associated Press, she did not identify herself further out of fear of retribution or for her personal safety.
Another resident, who gave her name as Ekaterina, said Tuesday’s blast “sounded like thunder.”
“I think for the first time, I got really scared,” she said. “I don’t understand how people in a war zone can live like this every day and not go mad.”
The Russian Defense Ministry said it shot down two Ukrainian drones outside Moscow and had electronically jammed another, sending it crashing into the IQ-Quarter skyscraper that houses government offices like the Ministry of Economic Development, the Ministry of Digital Development and Communications, and the Ministry of Industry and Trade — the same building that was hit Sunday.
A cordon went up around the building and personnel from the fire department and the Russian Investigative Committee were at the scene. Hours later, residents strolled through the district along the Moscow River or sat on benches in the sunshine. By about 1 p.m. Tuesday, workers were already starting to replace damaged windows.
The business district, a 10-minute subway ride west of the Kremlin, is home to some of Moscow’s flashiest restaurants, offering far-reaching views of the capital and a menu of upscale fare like three types of caviar, shellfish from Russia’s Far East and French cuisine.
But there was no escaping the grim news.
While Russian state television has largely played down the strikes, one channel sandwiched a segment on how Moscow’s air defenses successfully intercepted the drones in between reports highlighting Russian attacks on Ukraine.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said in Ukraine that Moscow “is rapidly getting used to a full-fledged war,” without confirming or denying Kyiv’s involvement in the drone attacks that in recent days have struck from the capital to the Crimean Peninsula.
After Sunday’s strike, the Kremlin said security would be ramped up.
Still, the size of the drone that hit the Moscow City district led analysts to question the effectiveness of the capital’s air defenses, suggesting it could have been launched from Ukraine.
“If this is the case, this would be rather embarrassing for Russia’s air defenses. If a drone has been in Russian airspace for hours, air defenses should have picked it up earlier and shot it down earlier,” said Ulrike Franke, an expert in drones and military technology at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
While they haven’t caused much physical damage, bringing the drone campaign to Moscow “blows holes in Russia’s narrative that the war on Ukraine is successful and that it is being prosecuted far away from any consequences for the Russian people themselves,” said Keir Giles, a Russia expert at the Chatham House think tank in London.
“That is something which is going to be harder and harder for Russia’s propaganda machine to explain away,” he said.
A Muscovite who identified himself to the AP only as Eldar summed up the strikes this way: “We attack them, they attack us. And it’s obvious that they will succeed somewhere, and we will succeed somewhere. We should try to strengthen the defense.”
In Odintsovo, where some of the drones were downed about 30 kilometers (18 miles) southwest of the capital, some residents discussed the events on their local Telegram channel.
One woman talked about hearing noises that turned out to be a car or improperly closed trash containers, and seeing what she thought were drones but actually were a flock of birds, a plane and a wind-blown plastic bag.
“How is it possible to live like this?” she asked the group.
“Stop creating panic,” one member admonished her.
“If you hear a noise, be happy because it hasn’t hit you,” added another.
___
Burrows reported from Tallinn, Estonia.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
