After opening statements Wednesday night from the panel’s members, amendments to the articles are being considered Thursday in a session that is expected to stretch several hours.

Shortly afterward Thursday’s 9 a.m. hearing convened, Madeline Strasser, the Judiciary Committee’s chief clerk, read in full the nine-page resolution that includes the two articles of impeachment.

It concludes that Trump “has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to the Constitution if allowed to remain in office, and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law.”

“President Trump thus warrants impeachment and trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States,” the resolution says.

Soon after, Republicans on the committee launched their first procedural attack at the impeachment markup by protesting Chairman Jerrold Nadler’s refusal to respond to a request for a minority hearing day on impeachment.

Rep. Douglas Collins, R-Ga., asked the majority on Dec. 4 to schedule a hearing for them to call their own witnesses on behalf of Trump, citing House rules allowing for the minority to have such events on major issues.

“The House rule does not require me to schedule a hearing on a particular day,” Nadler, D-N.Y. said at Thursday’s hearing. “Nor does it require me to schedule the hearing as a condition precedent to taking any specific legislative action. Otherwise, the minority would have the ability to delay or block majority legislative action, which is clearly not the purpose of the rule.”

Collins blasted Democrats for trampling minority rights: “Minority rights are dead in this committee.”

Democrats are confident they have the votes to approve both articles, setting up votes by the full House next week before the holiday break.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said a trial would begin in his chamber in early January. Senate Republicans are coalescing around a strategy of holding a short impeachment trial early next year that would include no witnesses.

Trump is just the fourth president in U.S. history to face the prospect of impeachment for alleged misconduct in office. A

Congress has impeached only two presidents: Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 before the House could vote on articles of impeachment in the Watergate scandal. Lawmakers drafted three articles against Nixon, including charges of “high crimes and misdemeanors” that mirror the abuse-of-power and obstruction allegations Trump now faces.

At the heart of the Democrats’ case is the allegation that Trump tried to leverage a White House meeting and military aid, sought by Ukraine to combat Russian military aggression, to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as a probe of an unfounded theory that Kyiv conspired with Democrats to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump returned to Twitter early Thursday morning to push back on Democratic efforts to impeach him. In one tweet, he said that new polls show most Americans oppose impeachment, attributing that information to the Fox News show “Fox & Friends.”

Some polls in recent days have showed a slim majority opposed to removing Trump from office, but others have showed slightly more Americans in favor of removing than keeping him.

In a Monmouth University poll released this week, 45% of Americans said they think that Trump should be impeached and removed from office, while 50% disagreed.

Meanwhile, an Economist-YouGov poll showed that 44% of Americans support the Senate removing Trump if he is impeached by the House, while 40% were opposed.

The president and first lady Melania Trump are scheduled to host an annual congressional ball at the White House on Thursday night. The event, listed on Trump’s public schedule at 7 p.m., could provide an incentive for Republican lawmakers to wind down their efforts at the House Judiciary Committee by then.

It was the second time in a row the exit poll — more reliable than normal surveys because it’s based on asking people how they actually voted — had confounded expert opinion. Two years earlier, it told the nation David Cameron had a chance of winning an overall majority, when everyone expected knife-edge result.

Sitting in Labour headquarters that night in 2015, Tom Hamilton had been in charge of briefing the politicians who would go on air to respond to the exit poll. “We had three different scripts,” he said. “The one scenario we didn’t have a script for was the Tories getting an overall majority.”

As soon as he saw the poll that night, he knew in his heart it was right. Nevertheless, he said, he was persuaded to send out a briefing line that Labour was doubtful about the poll’s reliability. “I don’t think we were,” he said. “But there wasn’t very much else to say.”

At that point, the hope the poll might prove to be wrong when the results come in is all a party can cling to. In 2017, Conservatives told each other it had been wrong before. Those with long memories recalled 1992, when two exit polls predicted Tory Prime Minister John Major would lose his majority. Then, as results flowed in overnight, it became clear he had won.

Experiences like 1992 are also burned into the consciousness of Rob Ford, professor of politics at Manchester University, but for a different reason. He’s one of the team of 10 specialists who will put the poll together.

The team was scheduled to assemble around midday Thursday in a basement at the BBC — even the location is supposed to be a secret — where a security guard has instructions to admit no one whose name isn’t on the list.

Lunch will be sandwiches from Pret-A-Manger. Dinner, if they’re lucky, will be pizza. But the treat, for academics who’ve devoted their lives to elections, is they get the first insights into how people have actually voted.

In 2017, Ford said, “we knew that something could be happening from pretty much the first data drop.”

Since dawn, interviewers working for Ipsos-MORI will have been waiting at 144 carefully chosen polling stations around the country. They count the people who have voted, and stop a fixed proportion to ask them which party they backed.

Their reports start to arrive with the number crunchers around lunchtime.

In 2017, a total of 20,000 voters were interviewed. By using historical data from previous elections, the poll aims to measure shifts in voting patterns across the country. Those are then combined to predict the results in different seats.

The team is led by John Curtice, a wild-haired 66-year-old professor of politics from Strathclyde University, who has become a fixture on TV screens as the BBC’s polling guru.

Psephology — which comes from the Greek for pebbles, which were used for voting in antiquity — involves science, math and ultimately a judgment call on how to interpret it all. For Curtice, it’s also an art form and a lifelong passion.

Part of the art of the poll is identifying how different parts of the electorate are shifting. This election, like the last one, involved the Tories trying to persuade people who’ve never backed them before to support the prime minister in order to deliver Brexit. Equally, Labour have been trying to hold on to those voters with pledges to tax the rich and end austerity.

If the result is tight, things become especially difficult. Curtice points out that an exit poll putting the Conservatives on 322 seats could be within five seats of two radically different outcomes: If Boris Johnson were in fact to get 327, he’d be leading a majority government and taking the U.K. out of the European Union. If he won 317, he could be on his way out of office.

Three broadcasters — the BBC, Sky and ITV — jointly fund the poll, but very few of their staff are allowed to know what it says. Even those in on the secret are told only at the last possible moment. Because they need time to prepare visuals, the first people told are graphics staff, even before senior correspondents.

But in 2017 there was a leak. The BBC’s Andrew Marr called May’s chief of staff, Fiona Hill, to get reaction before the poll was released, according to two books about the campaign. At this election, Marr is on the early morning shift, so won’t get advance sight of the findings.

For the exit-poll team, 10 p.m. is barely halfway through what Curtice describes as “the long march.” Their next data points are the actual results. As these come in, starting at about 11 p.m., they offer solid information on how the vote is shifting, and the model increasingly relies on this as the prediction is refined.

It doesn’t matter that the early declarations in U.K. elections tend to be from Labour-supporting seats in places like Sunderland, in northeast England. Curtice and his team are looking for the change in votes, not just the headline result.

“Once 50 results have come in, that’s what’s driving things,” Ford said. “You’ll see that the projections do change as the results come in. That’s because the model is learning.”

The exit poll has now been right for six elections running. By Friday morning, Curtice will know if his streak has got to seven.

Mr Cook, who was on his first trip to Singapore since taking over the helm at the tech giant in 2011, also met iOS developers and secondary school students apart from calling on Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

This was no coincidence.

Growing the Apple developer ecosystem is a key agenda of Mr Cook’s two-day visit to Singapore, and he wanted to reach out to a potential army of coders while they are still in school.

During The Straits Times’ 20-minute interview with him on Wednesday (Dec 11), he talked about Apple opening a third store in Singapore and about helping students and adults come of age in the digital economy.

He likened learning coding to speaking a global language and being equipped for jobs of the future. “Even the most spoken languages are regional,” he said, referring to common languages such as English and Mandarin.

Although coding will not establish new frontiers for the human race, it provides an opportunity for creative problem-solving and, as such, should be injected into Math, History or English classes, he said.

For instance, he watched how children used the iPad and augmented reality tools to learn about plastic pollution during his visit to Apple’s Orchard Road retail store earlier on Wednesday. He said it is a testament to the potential coding provides.

“If we can visualise a greener future, we can make it real,” he wrote in his Twitter post about the event.

Mr Cook also visited the Singapore School of Science and Technology to meet with some 30 secondary school students who have graduated from Apple’s Swift Accelerator coding programme.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook with some of the 100 graduates of the Swift Accelerator programme on Dec 11, 2019.  PHOTO: APPLE

Swift Accelerator has been running in Singapore since January 2018, with a total 100 graduates from 17 secondary schools having gone through over 180 hours of coding lessons to date.

Among the graduates are Faith Lim, 13, from Nanyang Girls’ High School and Kim Hyeong Hu, 15, from Admiralty Secondary School who have created a quiz game app called Quizercise to make exercising more fun.

Mr Cook also told The Straits Times that the tech firm “could use a third (retail) store” in Singapore as the Orchard store was “pretty full”. But he would not confirm if the dome-like structure emerging from the water at Marina Bay Sands is Apple’s third flagship store here – as reported by ST, citing sources, earlier this year.

Asked why Singapore needs a third store, he said: “We try to look at where people are and where people live and arrange the Apple stores where it’s reasonably convenient to go to.”

Singapore is a popular tourist destination, he added.

Mr Cook also posted on Twitter a picture of himself eating chwee kueh, a type of steamed rice cake with preserved radish, with local iPhone photographers at Tiong Bahru Market.

In a Facebook post on Wednesday evening, PM Lee – who met Mr Cook – wrote about Apple’s long ties with Singapore and how the tech scene has evolved since he previously met four years ago.

Apple has been in Singapore for almost 40 years; its printed circuit boards for the Apple IIe and the candy-coloured iMacs were made here decades ago.

“While Apple no longer manufactures devices here, many Singaporeans work in Apple locally and around the world, and many more are fans of their gadgets,” PM Lee added in his post.

Over the last five years, Apple’s headcount here has doubled. The tech giant now hires some 3,200 people, one-third of whom are retail staff. The remaining two-thirds comprise sales, marketing, communications, finance and research and development personnel.

“If you look at all the different things going on in Singapore, it tends to be a microcosm of things going on in Cupertino,” said Mr Cook.

Amid raging protests, the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2019 was passed after a fierce debate in the Rajya Sabha with 125 votes in support while 105 against in the strength of 230 members. The majority mark in the House was 116.

Union Home Minister and Member of Rajya Sabha Amit Shah, while answering the queries raised by the members of the House on the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2019 on Wednesday, assured that the “Bill is not anti-Muslim and Indian Muslims need not worry about anything”.

Shah said that there would have been no need for this Bill if the country would not have been divided in 1947. This Bill will bring a solution to the issues related to citizenship that aroused after the partition.

Earlier, in reply to Home Minister’s response that no Muslim in India needs to worry about their citizenship due to this Bill, senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal said that there is no Muslim who fears him (Amit Shah).

“You made an objectionable statement earlier. No Muslim fears from you. Neither I nor any citizen fears from you, we only fear from the Constitution of India,” Sibal said.

In an attack on Congress which echoed vehement opposition, Shah said, “Statements of Congress leaders and Pakistani leaders coincide many times, as yesterday what the Pakistani Prime Minister said about the Bill and what the Congress leaders in this House said, were similar.”

“During Balakot Air Strike the statement by Pakistan and by the Congress leaders were same. Similarly, during the surgical strike, the statements of Pakistani leaders and Congress leaders were identical,” said Shah.

Giving reference to the Nehru-Liaquat Pact, Shah said that under the pact both parties came under to an understanding that the minorities will be given equality, freedom to trade, freedom of expression, and religion. But on contrary to the pact, the minorities on the other (Pakistan) side were barred from contesting elections and their number also declined continuously.  However, in India, the minorities got the chance to hold reputed positions like President, Vice-President, and Chief Justice.

“This is not the first time that an amendment has been brought in the Bill,” Shah asserted.

“When citizenship was granted to Sri Lankan immigrants then why Bangladeshis were left out? When Uganda immigrants were given citizenship then why Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants were left out?” asked Shah.

Further giving clarification that the Bill is not the violation of Article 14 of Constitution, the minister said that the Right to Equality guaranteed under Article 14 does not restrict from making law on the grounds of ‘reasonable classification’.

“There is a reasonable classification in the Bill as it doesn’t include one religion, in fact, we are including minorities from three countries who are persecuted due to their religion,” he said.

“Earlier, Manmohan Singh had also said in the House that the minorities in Bangladesh are being persecuted. It is our duty to help such people and provide them the citizenship,” Shah said.

Attacking his former ally in Maharashtra, Shiv Sena, who formed the government with Congress and NCP, Shah said, “Shiv Sena had supported the Bill in Lok Sabha now they are speaking against it. The people of Maharashtra want to know what happened over-night that they have to change their stance?”

“This bill won’t take rights of Muslims, it is a Bill to give citizenship not to take it back,” he said.

Attacking opposition members for comments on him to understand the ‘idea of India’, Shah said, “They are trying to teach me the idea of India, my seven generations have lived in this country only, I have not come from abroad.”

“This Bill won’t harm the sentiments of any religion,” Shah clarified.

The Bill was introduced and passed on Lok Sabha on Monday with a 311-80 margin.

According to the legislation, which is soon to be a law, members of Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian communities, who have come from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, till December 31, 2014, facing religious persecution there, will not be treated as illegal immigrants but given Indian citizenship.

The Bill relaxes the requirement of residence in India from 11 years to six years for these migrants.

Company officials claim they are in the early phases of a long-term effort to make robotic delivery via self-driving vehicles a staple of daily life in cities across the country.

This week, Nuro took a giant step in that direction by announcing a grocery delivery partnership with Walmart – the big box behemoth and the nation’s largest employer. For now, the company said, the partnership will remain a pilot program and be focused on Houston, where Nuro is already delivering merchandise across the sprawling metropolis from major brands like Kroger and Dominos.

The Walmart delivery service will be available to a select group of Nuro customers, but will expand to the general public in 2020.

“Walmart is committed to serving our customers whenever and however they choose to shop,” Tom Ward, Walmart’s senior vice president of digital operations, said in a statement. “We are excited to work with Nuro and continue to learn as we are incorporating self-driving technology in our delivery options, learning more about our customers’ needs, and evolving Walmart’s future delivery offerings.”

In a statement posted on Medium, Nuro credited Walmart with reinventing the modern supply chain and hinted at the potential for expansion created by teaming up with the retailer. The statement noted that Walmart, the world’s largest company by revenue, moves products to 200 million customers across more than 11,000 stores worldwide.

Walmart says customers can now order groceries online and pick them up at nearly 3,100 locations. The company already offers delivery at more than 1,600 stores around the country using human “associates” to drop off groceries. Though the current delivery system relies on the company’s employees, Walmart has invested heavily in robotics in recent years, introducing thousands of automated shelf-scanners, box-unloaders, artificial-intelligence cameras and other machines. By filling roles traditionally left for human workers, critics say the changes have come at the expense of workers’ job satisfaction and security.

“Walmart has invested heavily in its Grocery Delivery service, making it available to customers across the country,” Nuro’s statement added. “Partnering with Walmart gives Nuro a new opportunity to improve and expand our delivery services for the public, and represents an important moment for us as we continue to expand our reach and serve more customers.”

The Walmart delivery service will be carried out using Nuro’s self-driving Toyota Priuses, as well as R2, Nuro’s futuristic-looking, autonomous delivery vehicle that carries only products with no onboard driver or passengers.

For months now, as Nuro’s robotically piloted Priuses have been making deliveries across Houston, the vehicles’ sensors mapping the city. The faster Nuro’s vehicles map Houston’s notoriously chaotic roadways, the faster the company can refine its software and export its business model elsewhere.

The deliveries provide the company with valuable traffic data, but also insight into customer shopping habits. The company noted that the partnership with Walmart will increase its insight into customer shopping habits, giving it leg up on its competition by answering some fundamental questions about autonomous delivery.

“The big question for us is: Who is going to use this service, and how often will they do it?” Sola Lawal, a Nuro product operations manager based in Houston who formerly worked for Uber, told The Washington Post in November. “Our robots don’t care who they’re delivering to, but we want to understand how different demographics interact with and feel about the robots. Houston allows for this broad swath of experience in one city.”

Like Nuro, companies such as Amazon, Alphabet-owned Waymo, Robomart, General Motors’ Cruise division, Ford-affiliated Argo AI, Starship Technologies and many others are also rushing to deploy high-functioning autonomous vehicles for delivery and passenger transport, with some companies attracting major deals and billions in funding. Their goal is to earn public trust and offer real-life convenience, experts say, heightening their chances of securing a valuable foothold in a new era defined by autonomous transportation.

“The pressure is real,” David Syverud, head of robot operations at Nuro, told The Post last month. “And to be clear, it is a race in the AV space to deploy quickly and be the first to really get there.”