Thousands of university students flooded the streets of India’s capital yesterday, while a southern state government led a march and demonstrators held a silent protest in the north-east, to protest against a new law giving citizenship to non-Muslims who entered India illegally to flee religious persecution in several neighbouring countries.

The protests in New Delhi followed a night of violent clashes between the police and demonstrators at Jamia Millia Islamia University. People who student organisers said were not students set three buses on fire and the police stormed the university library, firing tear gas at students crouched under desks.

Members of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party said opposition parties were using the students as pawns.

At Jamia Millia Islamia University yesterday, thousands stood outside the locked-down campus. Inside, hundreds of students took part in a peaceful sit-in, holding placards denouncing the injuries of dozens of students the night before.

Mr Mujeeb Ahmad, a 21-year-old Arabic major, returned to campus yesterday to join the sit-in and retrieve the book bag he had lost fleeing the library, where he had been studying for exams.

“We thought we were safe in the library,” he said, adding that he and others had locked the library doors from the inside. Policemen broke them down, and at least one officer fired tear gas, he said, holding up an empty canister he said he had picked up from the library floor.

Mr Modi’s government says the Citizenship Amendment Bill, which was approved by Parliament last week, will make India a safe haven for Hindus and other religious minorities in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

But critics say the legislation, which for the first time conditions Indian citizenship on religion, violates the secular Constitution of the world’s largest democracy.

The law’s passage has set off protests across India, but Assam state, the centre of a decades-old movement against illegal immigrants, has seen the highest toll.

Assam police officials said officers have fatally shot five protesters in state capital Guwahati while attempting to restore order to a city engulfed in demonstrations since last week. About 1,500 people have been arrested for violence including arson and vandalism, police spokesman G.P. Singh said, adding that the authorities were reviewing surveillance videos and anticipated making more arrests.

Schools will remain closed until Sunday, the government has blocked Internet service statewide and a curfew has been imposed from 9pm to 6am.

Municipal workers were clearing the city of debris yesterday and some businesses reopened, as the All Assam Students Union, which has spearheaded Assam’s anti-immigration movement for decades, led a silent protest. The group and its followers fear that an influx of migrants will dilute native Assamese culture and political sway.

The citizenship law follows a contentious citizenship registry process in Assam intended to weed out people who immigrated illegally.

The letter’s release comes two days before the House is expected to vote on two articles of impeachment.

“President Trump’s lawless obstruction of the House of Representatives, which is rightly seeking documents and witness testimony in pursuit of its constitutionally-mandated oversight role, has demonstrated brazen contempt for representative government,” the scholars write in the letter, which was published online by the nonprofit advocacy group Protect Democracy.

“So have his attempts to justify that obstruction on the grounds that the executive enjoys absolute immunity, a fictitious doctrine that, if tolerated, would turn the president into an elected monarch above the law,” they add.

Protect Democracy also released a letter earlier this month from more than 500 law professors asserting that Trump had committed “impeachable conduct.”

Among the notable signatories of the latest letter are award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns, biographer Robert Caro and historians Ron Chernow, John Meacham and Douglas Brinkley.

In the letter, the scholars criticize Trump’s “numerous and flagrant abuses of power” and state that his actions “urgently and justly require his impeachment.”

“As Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist, impeachment was designed to deal with ‘the misconduct of public men’ which involves ‘the abuse or violation of some public trust,’ ” they wrote.

“Collectively, the President’s offenses, including his dereliction in protecting the integrity of the 2020 election from Russian disinformation and renewed interference, arouse once again the Framers’ most profound fears that powerful members of government would become, in Hamilton’s words, ‘the mercenary instruments of foreign corruption,’ ” they add. “It is our considered judgment that if President Trump’s misconduct does not rise to the level of impeachment, then virtually nothing does.”

Lawmakers from Germany’s 16 states reached preliminary agreement over the weekend to more than double a new tax on carbon dioxide emissions from transport and heating, according to a document seen by Bloomberg News. Consumers in Europe’s biggest economy will now face a 25 euros ($27.85) a ton surcharge rather than the 10 euros a ton initially proposed. The pollution premium will rise to 55 euros by 2025, a jump of almost three-fifths from the original proposal.

Policy makers joined the BDEW utilities lobby and World Wildlife Fund in demanding the cost of polluting be set closer to market prices, where carbon permits under the European Union’s emissions-trading system currently trade at about 24 euros a ton. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government had initially shied away from introducing the higher fee because of the risk of a political backlash from consumers facing higher gas and heating costs.

Two of Germany’s most powerful lobbies — the BDI industry group and the BDEW utilities federation — said Monday they were against the plan to raise emissions costs. The move would “drastically damage the competitiveness of the economy,” BDI said in a statement.

The so-called upstream charges for pollution certificates will be paid by sellers of oil and gas, who can pass the extra costs on to customers. Merkel said the levy was the “centerpiece” of her government’s move to get Germany back on track to cut emissions. Pollution from transport and heating accounts for about a third of all German emissions and have barely declined this decade.

The government will use additional revenue from the updated charges to cut the cost of retail power that has swelled because of clean-energy surcharges, according to the document. Germany will also cut the value-added tax on rail travel from 2020 and increase tax rebates for commuters living long distances from their workplace.

The Finance Ministry originally calculated revenue of 3.6 billion euros in 2021, a figure that could more than double under the new price.

The higher levies, instituted to speed the adoption of more efficient and ecological transport and heating technologies, could still carry political risks. The “Yellow Vest” protests in France were ignited by increased taxes. The rising popularity of the Alternative for Germany party, which opposed the charges, influenced Berlin’s initial cautious approach.

Germany’s subsidized Energiewende, or energy transition, that kicked off two decades ago marked one of the biggest shifts in wealth since World War II, Brandenburg’s state governor Dietmar Woidke has said. Homeowners who invested in solar and wind energy received state support while many of the millions of Germans renting homes see themselves left out.

Revenue from sales of emissions permits from both Europe’s ETS platform and from the national CO2 permit program is expected to finance as much as two-thirds of Germany’s sweeping 54 billion-euro Climate Protection Program 2030 unveiled in September.

Now, with a few weeks still left in 2019, the president already has more than doubled the total number of false or misleading claims in just a single year.

As of Dec. 10, his 1,055th day in office, Trump had made 15,413 false or misleading claims, according to the Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement he has uttered. That’s an average of more than 32 claims a day since our last update 62 days ago.

In fact, October and November of this year rank as the second- and third-biggest months for Trumpian claims. They are exceeded only by October 2018, when Trump barnstormed the country in a desperate – and unsuccessful – effort to thwart a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives. Both Octobers had more than 1,100 claims, with an average of nearly 40 claims a day.

A key reason for this year’s jump: the uproar over Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s president on July 25 – in which he urged an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden, a potential 2020 election rival – and the ensuing House impeachment inquiry. Nearly 600 of the false or misleading claims made by the president in the past two months relate just to the Ukraine investigation.

The president apparently believes he can weather an impeachment trial through sheer repetition of easily disproven falsehoods.

For instance, more than 60 times he has claimed that the whistleblower complaint about the call was inaccurate. The report accurately captured the content of Trump’s call and many other details have been confirmed. Eighty times, Trump has claimed his phone call with the Ukrainian president was “perfect,” even though it so alarmed other White House officials that several immediately raised private objections. This is a talking point that even Trump’s Republican defenders have trouble repeating.

Three claims about the Ukraine investigation have now made it on our list of Bottomless Pinocchios. (It takes 20 repeats of a Three or Four Pinocchio claim to merit a Bottomless Pinocchio, and there are now 30 entries.) Besides the claim about the whistleblower, the two other claims on the Bottomless Pinocchio list are that Biden forced the resignation of a Ukrainian prosecutor because he was investigating his son Hunter and that Hunter Biden scored $1.5 billion in China after hitching a ride on Air Force Two with his father.

Trump crossed the 10,000 mark on April 26. From the start of his presidency, he has averaged nearly 15 such claims a day.

About one in five of these claims are about the economy or jobs.

As he approaches a tough reelection campaign, Trump’s most repeated claim – 242 times – is that the U.S. economy today is the best in history. He began making this claim in June 2018, and it quickly became one of his favorites. The president can certainly brag about the state of the economy, but he runs into trouble when he repeatedly makes a play for the history books. By just about any important measure, the economy today is not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson or Bill Clinton – or Ulysses S. Grant. Moreover, the economy is beginning to hit the head winds caused by Trump’s trade wars, with the manufacturing sector in an apparent recession.

About one in six of Trump’s claims are about immigration, his signature issue – a percentage that increased earlier in the year when the government was partially shut down over funding for his promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, his second-most repeated claim – 235 times – is that his border wall is being built. Congress balked at funding the concrete barrier he envisioned, so he has tried to pitch bollard fencing and mostly repairs of existing barriers as “a wall.” He tried to redirect funds from other projects but run into trouble with the courts. The Washington Post has reported that the bollard fencing is easily breached, with smugglers sawing through it, despite Trump’s claims that it is impossible to get past. As of October, the Trump administration had acquired just 16 percent of the private land in Texas it needs to build the president’s border barrier, with less than four miles completed.

Trump has falsely said 181 times that he passed the biggest tax cut in history. Even before his tax cut was crafted, he promised it would be the biggest in U.S. history – bigger than Ronald Reagan’s in 1981. Reagan’s tax cut amounted to 2.9 percent of the gross domestic product, and none of the proposals under consideration came close to that level. Yet Trump persisted in this fiction even when the tax cut was eventually crafted to be the equivalent of 0.9 percent of GDP, making it the eighth-largest tax cut in 100 years. This continues to be an all-purpose applause line at the president’s rallies.

On 175 occasions, Trump has claimed the United States has “lost” money on trade deficits. This reflects a basic misunderstanding of economics. Countries do not “lose” money on trade deficits. A trade deficit simply means people in one country are buying more goods from another country than people in the second country are buying from the first country. Trade deficits are also affected by macroeconomic factors, such as currencies, economic growth, and savings and investment rates.

The president frequently offers inflated estimates for trade deficits with various countries and insists they are being reduced on his watch, even though they are climbing.

The president’s constant Twitter barrage also adds to his totals. Nearly 20 percent of the false and misleading statements stemmed from his itchy Twitter finger.

Trump’s penchant for repeating false claims is demonstrated by the fact that the Fact Checker database has recorded nearly 400 instances in which he has repeated a variation of the same claim at least three times.

Even as Trump’s fact-free statements proliferate, there is evidence that his approach is failing.

Fewer than 3 in 10 Americans believe many of his most-common false statements, according to a Washington Post Fact Checker poll published in 2018. Only among a pool of strong Trump approvers – about 1 in 6 adults in the survey – did large majorities accept several, although not all, of his falsehoods as true.

The award-winning database website, created by graphics reporter Leslie Shapiro, has an extremely fast search engine that will quickly locate suspect statements the president has made. We encourage readers to explore it in detail. We recently added a new feature that provides a URL for every claim that is fact-checked, allowing readers to post the link on social media.

Note: The Fact Checker welcomes academic research of the Trump claims database. Recent examples include work done by Erasmus University , University College London and the University of California at Santa Barbara . You can request our data files with an explanation of your research plans by contacting us at factchecker@washpost.com .

With regulatory approval for the jet’s return increasingly likely to slip beyond January, Boeing’s board is considering whether to slow already-pared output of its best-selling jet, a person familiar with the matter said. Some executives are convinced, however, that a full pause instead would be less disruptive, said the person, who asked not to be identified as the discussions were confidential.

A decision could come as soon as Monday as directors review manufacturing plans for the 737 program, the company’s biggest source of cash, as part of a regularly scheduled December board meeting. The board typically sets the company’s dividend for the coming year at such sessions and decides on its share repurchases, which have been suspended amid the crisis prompted by the unprecedented grounding.

Boeing dropped 2.9% to $331.89 at 9:40 a.m. in New York after tumbling 4.5%, the most intraday since Oct. 21. Through last week, Boeing had declined 19% since a March crash in Ethiopia sparked a global grounding of the Max, the biggest drop on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that the production plans have become more urgent as the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration signaled it wouldn’t certify the revamped Max this year.

“We continue to work closely with the FAA and global regulators towards certification and the safe return to service of the Max,” Boeing said in an email. “We will continue to assess production decisions based on the timing and conditions of return to service, which will be based on regulatory approvals and may vary by jurisdiction.”

The Chicago-based planemaker has drafted contingency plans for a variety of scenarios as the Max’s global grounding stretches to more than nine months following two fatal crashes that killed 346 people.

Boeing slashed 737 production by 19% in the weeks following the March tragedy. Meanwhile, inventory costs have ballooned to record levels as the company’s factory in Renton, Washington, continued to churn out 42 of the jets a month.

Since the company isn’t allowed to deliver the aircraft while the flying ban remains in place, Boeing has placed more than 380 newly built planes in storage, according to a tally by 737 production blogger Chris Edwards. The build-up would continue if production were slowed rather than halted.

“They are doing the sensible thing by halting or putting a pause on the production line,” said Shukor Yusof, founder of aviation consulting firm Endau Analytics. “Cash burn has been bad.”

Boeing’s board is meeting after a bruising week for the aerospace giant. In a sign of growing rancor between the company and its regulator, FAA Administrator Steve Dickson chastised Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg in a Dec. 12 meeting for pursuing an unrealistic schedule for the Max’s return to service.

The FAA said it was worried by a perception that Boeing was pressuring regulators to take action. In a message to the U.S. Congress, the FAA said it had used the meeting to exhort the company to focus on the “quality and timeliness of data submittals for FAA review.”

The rare public admonishment came a day after Dickson was grilled for hours by the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee over the FAA’s decision to allow the 737 Max to continue flying after the initial fatal Max crash off the coast of Indonesia on Oct. 29, 2018.

With the FAA having signaled that the Max wouldn’t be cleared to fly until next year, American Airlines Group Inc. further delayed a return of the planes to its schedule until early April. Southwest Airlines Co., the largest operator of the single-aisle plane, said it was considering a similar move.

The Max was grounded after the second crash, of an Ethiopian Airlines flight, on March 10. The disasters prompted the longest flying ban for a U.S. airliner in the jet age.

The production decision isn’t easy for Boeing amid the tightest job market in a half century.

The largest U.S. industrial company by market value wants to avoid a potential unraveling of manufacturing expertise across a broad swath of North America as it recovers from the Max crisis. That’s the risk if large numbers of highly skilled workers from the 600 mostly U.S. companies building components for the jet were to move on to other jobs at a time of historically low unemployment.

The company has been studying whether to pause Max manufacturing for a short, clearly defined period of time, Bloomberg reported in August. Executives figure that that approach would conserve cash and be less likely to trigger widespread layoffs than imposing another factory slowdown.

Boeing officials won’t discuss the finer points of how they would manage through a shutdown, including details like worker pay. But the idea is that coveted employees would prefer the certainty of a surgical shutdown to an open-ended period of slower production that could lead tolayoffs.

The 400,000 parts that go into each Max arrive in a tightly choreographed sequence timed, in some cases, down to the hour. But suppliers do regularly navigate stoppages telegraphed in advance, such as strikes, and Boeing’s traditional year-end factory closing — which could be extended this year into the longer pause.