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Good morning, I’m Tim Walker with today’s essential stories.

Vindman’s testimony ‘extremely disturbing’, say Democrats

Alexander Vindman, a decorated US army officer and the national security council’s top Ukraine expert, told the impeachment inquiry on Tuesday that a White House transcript of the now-infamous call between Donald Trump and the Ukrainian president had omitted key phrases, and that the call had left him “concerned”. Democrats described his testimony as “very credible” and “extremely disturbing”, as they laid out the next steps for the inquiry.

Rudy in Ukraine. Rudy Giuliani first travelled to Ukraine in 2003, to visit a memorial to the victims of 9/11. And it was on that trip that he began to develop the deep ties which now put him at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, as Andrew Roth reports from Kyiv.

WhatsApp sues Israeli cyber firm over hacking of activists

Facebook Twitter Pinterest WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. Photograph: Martin Meissner/AP

WhatsApp has launched a lawsuit in California against an Israeli cyber surveillance firm it says was responsible for a series of highly sophisticated hacking attacks on leading human rights campaigners, lawyers, journalists and others earlier this year. The social media firm, which is owned by Facebook, says NSO Group sold technology that was employed to target more than 1,400 of its users, in 20 different countries, over just two weeks in April and May.

Brazil election. The Guardian has analysed the spread of misinformation during last year’s Brazilian presidential election and concluded the vast majority of “fake news” shared on WhatsApp favoured the far-right candidate and eventual winner, Jair Bolsonaro.

Facebook ads. A San Francisco man plans to run in California’s gubernatorial race solely so he can run false commercials on Facebook, in protest at the company’s current policy on political advertising.

Greta Thunberg declines Nordic Council’s environmental prize

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Greta Thunberg at a climate strike march in Vancouver, Canada, last week. Photograph: UPI/Barcroft Media

The teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg has turned down an environmental prize awarded annually by the Nordic Council and worth approximately $52,000. “The climate movement does not need any more awards,” Thunberg, 16, wrote in an Instagram post explaining her decision. “What we need is for our politicians and the people in power start to listen to the current, best available science.”

Sea levels. Land that is home to 300 million people will flood at least once every year by 2050 if the climate crisis continues unabated – more than three times the previous estimate – according to a new study published in Nature Communications.

Boeing chief accused of operating ‘flying coffins’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dennis Muilenburg watches as family members hold up photographs of those killed in the two 737 Max crashes. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP

Boeing’s chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg, was accused of supplying “flying coffins” at a congressional hearing on Tuesday, attended by many of the family members of the 346 people killed in two “entirely avoidable” 737 Max jet crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Muilenburg was forced to step down as the company’s chairman earlier this month, following the emergence of emails suggesting test pilots had known about defects in the jet’s anti-stall system, but that Boeing failed to alert regulators.

Profit over safety? Accused of rushing the profitable 737 Max into service despite safety concerns, Muilenburg said Boeing was “truly and deeply sorry”. The Senate commerce committee said it would change the system that allowed Boeing, not regulators, to sign off on aspects of the jet.

Cheat sheet

Southern California’s Santa Ana winds are projected to be at their strongest levels of the season through Wednesday, exacerbating the wildfires in LA, while millions in the north of the state continue to suffer preventive power outages.

British MPs have voted to break their deadlock on Brexit by holding a general election on 12 December, in hopes that a new parliament can come to a final decision on leaving the EU.

Thousands of viewers tuned in to watch a video stream of a brain surgery operation as it was broadcast on Facebook Live from a hospital in Dallas, Texas, on Tuesday.

HBO has ditched a planned Game of Thrones spin-off starring Naomi Watts and instead greenlit another prequel series, House of the Dragon, based on George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood and set 300 years before the events of the original hit show.

Must-reads

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kelly Bachman: ‘The first time I heard a comic talking about her sexual assault, it felt like a religious experience.’ Photograph: JT Anderson

Why I confronted Harvey Weinstein with comedy

The comedian Kelly Bachman made waves when she mocked Harvey Weinstein onstage in New York last week. As the creator of a show called Rape Jokes by Survivors, she was perfectly placed to do so. “There is something healing to the process of making a funny joke about your own rape,” she says.

Triggered: Donald Trump Jr’s 294-page rant

The Guardian has obtained a copy of Donald Trump Jr’s forthcoming book Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence US. According to Ed Pilkington and Martin Pengelly, it reveals its author to be every bit as devoted to partisan trolling, childish insults and grudge-holding as his father.

Why GM’s strike could inspire more collective action

A recently-ended strike by General Motors workers was remarkably successful, say labour analysts, resulting in better pay and healthcare protections. Amid a national wave of walkouts, the GM outcome seems likely to inspire further worker militancy, as Steven Greenhouse reports.

How a 19-year-old director wowed Hollywood

Filmmaker Phillip Youmans’s debut feature, Burning Cane, was the toast of this year’s Tribeca film festival, where it won the best US narrative feature award and a distribution deal from Ava DuVernay’s company. All this, and Youmans is still just 19. “I had to make this happen,” he tells Charles Bramesco.

Opinion

The ageing Democratic establishment remains desperate to nominate a traditionally centrist 2020 candidate, says Hamilton Nolan. But decades of growing inequality have left most Americans impatient with the status quo.

The core concern of those who consider themselves ‘moderate Democrats’ is not really that Trump might win – it is that Warren or Sanders might win. This is a political faction that finds itself caught between its aesthetic distaste for Trump’s social policies and its distaste for wealth taxes, public healthcare, and other policies contrary to their ambition to afford that lake house.

Sport

The Washington Nationals have levelled the World Series at three games apiece with a 7-2 win in Houston on Tuesday night, setting up a winner-takes-all Game 7 to decide the first ever Fall Classic in which the visiting team won the first six.

A group of scientists has been studying the mechanics of NBA flopping, in an attempt to identify when a player is acting – and to thus expose once and for all basketball’s dark, daffy art of fooling referees into calling fouls that aren’t. Patrick Hruby reports.

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