stanford-cs336/owt-sample · Datasets at Hugging Face

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ANU said the key to these wearable solar panels is a technology developed at the university, called “SLIVER,” which is now being used in commercial applications by Transform Solar. With this technology, cells “have the same thickness of a sheet of paper or a human hair,” according to project Chief Investigator Andrew Blakers. “This means they are flexible, lightweight and allow high power to weight ratios to be achieved. The cells are also bifacial, allowing modules to be constructed that allow light to be absorbed from both faces.”<\|endoftext\|>This 1968 Intermeccanica Italia listed here on eBay for the heady price of $44,950 may be rare, but in reality, it’s actually quite well done. An engine fire took this rare sports car off the road early in life, preventing the Ford-powered coupe from getting very far before the drivetrain was removed and disassembled, and the car subsequently taken off the road. What I always get a kick out of when looking at old cars like these are the stickers – the dealer it was sold at, the college it was parked at – it’s as if you can imagine its young driver rumbling past the quad in his Intermeccanica while the girls fawned over its sleek bodyshell and dual exhaust. Though the seller’s price isn’t cheap, these cars were not manufactured in any great quantity and this is a numbers-matching example – would that be enough for you to take the plunge on this Italian-American hybrid?<\|endoftext\|>Laurie Essig, a professor of sociology and women’s and gender studies at Middlebury College, is the author of “Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other.”

Twenty-five years ago, when I lived in Russia, I was in a restaurant with some friends. The meal abruptly ended when we were escorted, at gunpoint, into a back room. The restaurateurs-cum-criminals wanted us to pay them a few hundred dollars or else they would inform our families and employers that we were “pederasts” and “dykes.”

Just a few short years before the fall of the Soviet Union, homosexuality could land you in the gulag or a psychiatric hospital. When we escaped that night, we did not report the incident to the police because there was no legal protection for Russia’s gays and lesbians.

Later, as Russia opened up to the more or less free exchange of ideas, goods and services, it was easy to imagine that life would get better for its lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender residents. After all, how could a country with haute couture and organic food stores remain stubbornly anti-gay? How could a country with vibrant academic and activist communities not become more like the West in its attitudes toward sexuality?

No such luck. Russia is nearly as difficult a place to be gay today as it was under the Soviet regime.

Gay couples cannot adopt, nor can anyone from a country where same-sex marriage is legal adopt a Russian child. A new law banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” makes it a crime to say anything positive to minors about homosexuality.

The anti-gay targeting has a populist streak as well. Ultra-nationalist groups such as Occupy Pedophilia lure young gay men with classified ads, threaten or brutally harass them, then circulate videos of the treatment on social media as a “lesson” to others. Members of the group say homosexuality is as morally reprehensible as pedophilia. At least one young man has apparently died from his injuries. Several more have committed suicide.

Americans, like Lenin before them, are left with the question: What is to be done? On top of the current tension between President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, some U.S. activists are calling for a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Others are leading a boycott of Russian vodka. Even Lady Gaga is telling Russia’s LGBT community that “we will fight for your freedom.”

But it will take more than boycotts and pop stars to make the country more tolerant. Russia has a very different history of sexuality than the West does, and what is going on today is a result of that history.

In the West, homosexuality is now understood primarily as an unchangeable state of being. Whether we are “born that way” or became that way, the majority of people in the West do not consider gays to be “fixable.” As the French historian Michel Foucault put it, with modernity the homosexual transformed from a temporary aberration into a species. This change in thinking came in the late 1800s as a result of developments in biology and psychology, as well as changes in the law.

In Russia, in part because of the academic isolation of Stalininsm, science and the law went their own way. The homosexual was never “born” but rather learned behavior that could be “cured.” Russian science has always insisted that homosexuality is something that can be reoriented. When I was doing my research in the 1990s, I interviewed many sexologists who offered to change my sexuality; I even took a test at a medical center to find out just how gay I was. And I spoke with many lesbians who had been hospitalized in order to reorient their desire.

Medical “cures” for homosexuality in the 1990s included anti-psychotic drugs or hormone treatments. Some patients were put into a diabetic coma with the hope that they’d wake up and have changed their sexual preference. Women whose desire for other women could not be cured were often prescribed a sex change since, according to the logic of Russian psychiatry, they must really be men.

Although homosexuality ceased to be an official psychiatric illness in Russia in 1999, it remains a reason that many young women are committed to psychiatric institutions. I have been an expert witness in cases in which Russian lesbians are seeking political asylum, and a handful of women have cited forced hospitalization as the reason they want to leave the country.

Unlike “sick” lesbians who needed to be cured, men who desired other men were regarded as “criminals” who needed to be punished. The Russian legal code, until President Boris Yeltsin overturned it in 1993, treated gay male relationships like bank robberies: a crime for which a man could serve time and then, presumably, be rehabilitated to a crime-free and straight life. Even men who didn’t end up with prison sentences were blackmailed by the police so that their employers and families would not be informed of their “crimes.”

These attitudes are evident in the West as well. Finding homosexual reparative therapy on the Web is almost as easy as finding a hook-up on Grindr. This year’s huge anti-gay-marriage demonstrations in Paris and deadly attacks on gay men in Manhattan remind us that we’re not living in a rainbow-filled gaytopia. However, the difference between Russia and much of the West lies in the majority. In the West, most people and most laws reflect some agreement that homosexuality is here to stay, whether we like it or not.

In contrast, Russian attitudes are built on more than 100 years of scientific and legal thinking that construes homosexuality as a temporary and treatable problem. Add to this a disturbing history of nationalism that has viewed queer sexual practices as “foreign” and “threats” to the Slavic soul. Even in the 1980s and 1990s, the Russian authorities allowed gangs of nationalist youths to beat up people coming out of gay dance clubs and to blackmail gays and lesbians. According to Russian gay and lesbian activists I’ve spoken to, something very similar is occurring today — even in central Moscow and other supposedly gay-friendly spaces.

My friends and I escaped a kidnapping nearly three decades ago only to face a moment that is depressingly similar. Whatever is done to help sexual minorities in Russia, it must be done with an understanding that sex in Russia has a very different history than it does in the West — and that history will continue to shape its future.

[email protected]

Read more from Outlook, friend us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.<\|endoftext\|>EAST VILLAGE, NY — A mural of the twin towers painted just days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks got a second life on Sunday, 16 years after it first came to the East Village.

The mural, located on the outside of a building at Avenue A and Ninth Street, was believed to have been painted in the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Although its exact date of origin remains unclear, locals believe the the work went up just days after the most devastating terror attack on American soil.

In the years after the attacks, the mural became an impromptu memorial for the neighborhood, where locals would place votive candles every September 11th. Since then, however, much of the mural has been defaced with graffiti and stickers. As the image became increasingly weathered, and obscured, the local artist and musician David Ouimet thought it looked like a promising spot for his next canvas.

Ouimet, who has lived in the East Village and the Lower East Side for the past 25 years, had recently picked up street art, painting numerous murals throughout the neighborhood. (For more information on this and other neighborhood stories, subscribe to Patch to receive daily newsletters and breaking news alerts.)

Here's a photo of the mural last year, as captured by neighborhood blog EV Grieve:

Ninth Street at Avenue A #eastvillage #911 #9/11 #worldtradecenter #streetart #mural

A post shared by EV Grieve (@evgrieve) on Sep 11, 2016 at 6:49am PDT

A post shared by EV Grieve (@evgrieve) on Sep 11, 2016 at 6:49am PDT

Watch: 9/11 Victims Honored In NYC

The street canvas on Ninth Street, which is home to the newly-opened ice cream shop Gelarto, is located just across the road from Tompkins Square Park in the heart of the East Village. Ouimet, whose work as an artist has spanned films, music, children's book illustrations and, now, street art, decided to approached the Gelarto's owners about updating the mural from its state of disrepair.

Gelarto's owners suggested that Ouimet build off of the original mural, which has been credited to local businessman Jesse Fishler, Ouimet said. Patch was not able to locate Fishler to comment for this article. Scott Richey, Gelarto's manager, told Patch that the business wanted to "preserve it as well as add to it."

Richey have also speculated that prolific NYC street artist Chico was responsible for the mural. Chico painted a 9/11 memorial mural nearby at Avenue A and 14th Street, which has since been partially covered with advertisements.

Ouimet decided to preserve a window of the 2001-era painting, and build off of it with his own work. He spent about a week cleaning up the wall, donning a Hazmat suit to clean the bricks of 16 years of detritus.

Ouimet said he hadn't planned on doing 9/11-related artwork, but when Gelarto suggested he build off what was already on Ninth Street, the idea came quickly.

"It was an immediate, immediate thought," he explained. "The days after [the attack] that the one thing that I remember clearly is I felt like I was frozen. I had no sense of movement, I couldn't even wash dishes...and I started to think about movement and one thing I felt very in tune to in the weeks and months after was nature, and birds and dogs and animals."

Ouimet's mural takes the original structure of the twin towers from the 2001 mural, and expands on the two columns using birds and fish.

Ouimet said he witnessed the terrorist attacks from his home on the Lower East Side in 2001, initially mistaking the first plane crash for a fire, as many observers did during the chaotic and confusing first minutes of the attack.

"When I saw the second plane coming I put the camera down and I realized it was something profoundly significant that was happening," he said.

After quickly developing to the concept for his own take on the original mural, Ouimet said he was influenced by conversations he had with passers by on the street while he worked, conversations which helped him to develop the mural's motif.

Ouimet painted the entire mural in a marathon session on Sunday, starting before dawn and completing the work later that day.

Images via Ciara McCarthy / Patch<\|endoftext\|>MCALLEN, Texas — The FBI added a Mexican woman to their most wanted list over her alleged role as the mastermind in the murder for hire of a prominent Dallas dentist. The love triangle murder appears to have a Mexican cartel connection.

On Wednesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation added 33-year-old Brenda Delgado to their “10 Most Wanted” list, information provided to Breitbart Texas by the FBI revealed. Delgado, who is wanted on the charge of capital murder, has deep ties to Mexico and is believed to have fled there.

The charges against Delgado stem from the September 2, 2015 murder of Dallas Dentist Kendra Hatcher who was shot to death in the parking garage of her Uptown apartment. While Delgado was charged in state court with capital murder for her alleged role in the crime, the FBI was able to get a federal warrant charging her with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.

According to investigators, Hatcher’s murder was the result of her dating Delgado’s ex-boyfriend a local dermatologist, Dallas Morning News reported at the time. The relationship had taken a serious turn sending Delgado into a rage as she allegedly hired Kristopher Ledell Love and Crystal Cortes to murder Hatcher. Court records published by the Dallas newspaper reports that the indictment mentions a “drug cartel” being linked to the murder. Delgado and “a drug cartel” are the ones who paid Ledell Love with cash and drugs for the murder. Information as to which drug cartel or their specific role in the murder was not readily available.

Hatcher’s murder is not the only high profile murder near Dallas that has a Mexican drug cartel connection. As Breitbart Texas recently reported, two Mexican cops and one of their relatives are set to go to trial this month in the cartel execution of a prominent Mexican lawyer in Southlake. The victim in that case was the attorney for the leader of Mexico’s Gulf Cartel.

Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas you can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.<\|endoftext\|>President Donald Trump said Thursday that though he thinks Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia’s election interference makes “the country look very bad,” but he believes the outcome will be “fair.”

Trump held forth on Mueller’s investigation in a meandering 30-minute interview with The New York Times at his Mar-A-Lago resort in West Palm Beach, where he’s spending the holidays. No White House aides were present for the on-the-record conversation.

The President told the newspaper 16 times that the probe has discovered “no collusion” by his campaign, but added that he thinks Mueller is “going to be fair” to him.

Those comments are in line with what Trump has said previously, but run counter to a weeks-long effort by his supporters in Congress and in the conservative media to paint the investigation as hopelessly tainted by partisan bias. Those supporters have tried to pivot the national conversation towards Democrats’ dealings with Russia, instead.

Trump has enthusiastically assisted that effort, telling the Times that there was “tremendous collusion on behalf of the Russians and the Democrats,” particularly those affiliated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He argued that special counsel investigators should focus their attention on past work that the lobbying firm of Tony Podesta, brother of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, did for a client referred by his own former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Trump called Manafort, who was indicted on a slew of financial crimes charges, a “very nice man” and “an honorable person,” repeating that he only managed the campaign for a short period of time. Manafort worked for Trump from March to August 2016.

Trump did not appear bothered by his associates’ indictments and plea agreements, or the fact that Mueller’s probe is continuing past the Christmas deadline his lawyers provided to reporters because, he said, there is nothing incriminating to find.

ANU said the key to these wearable solar panels is a technology developed at the university, called “SLIVER,” which is now being used in commercial applications by Transform Solar. With this technology, cells “have the same thickness of a sheet of paper or a human hair,” according to project Chief Investigator Andrew Blakers. “This means they are flexible, lightweight and allow high power to weight ratios to be achieved. The cells are also bifacial, allowing modules to be constructed that allow light to be absorbed from both faces.”<|endoftext|>This 1968 Intermeccanica Italia listed here on eBay for the heady price of $44,950 may be rare, but in reality, it’s actually quite well done. An engine fire took this rare sports car off the road early in life, preventing the Ford-powered coupe from getting very far before the drivetrain was removed and disassembled, and the car subsequently taken off the road. What I always get a kick out of when looking at old cars like these are the stickers – the dealer it was sold at, the college it was parked at – it’s as if you can imagine its young driver rumbling past the quad in his Intermeccanica while the girls fawned over its sleek bodyshell and dual exhaust. Though the seller’s price isn’t cheap, these cars were not manufactured in any great quantity and this is a numbers-matching example – would that be enough for you to take the plunge on this Italian-American hybrid?<|endoftext|>Laurie Essig, a professor of sociology and women’s and gender studies at Middlebury College, is the author of “Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other.”

Twenty-five years ago, when I lived in Russia, I was in a restaurant with some friends. The meal abruptly ended when we were escorted, at gunpoint, into a back room. The restaurateurs-cum-criminals wanted us to pay them a few hundred dollars or else they would inform our families and employers that we were “pederasts” and “dykes.”

Just a few short years before the fall of the Soviet Union, homosexuality could land you in the gulag or a psychiatric hospital. When we escaped that night, we did not report the incident to the police because there was no legal protection for Russia’s gays and lesbians.

Later, as Russia opened up to the more or less free exchange of ideas, goods and services, it was easy to imagine that life would get better for its lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender residents. After all, how could a country with haute couture and organic food stores remain stubbornly anti-gay? How could a country with vibrant academic and activist communities not become more like the West in its attitudes toward sexuality?

No such luck. Russia is nearly as difficult a place to be gay today as it was under the Soviet regime.

Gay couples cannot adopt, nor can anyone from a country where same-sex marriage is legal adopt a Russian child. A new law banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” makes it a crime to say anything positive to minors about homosexuality.

The anti-gay targeting has a populist streak as well. Ultra-nationalist groups such as Occupy Pedophilia lure young gay men with classified ads, threaten or brutally harass them, then circulate videos of the treatment on social media as a “lesson” to others. Members of the group say homosexuality is as morally reprehensible as pedophilia. At least one young man has apparently died from his injuries. Several more have committed suicide.

Americans, like Lenin before them, are left with the question: What is to be done? On top of the current tension between President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, some U.S. activists are calling for a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Others are leading a boycott of Russian vodka. Even Lady Gaga is telling Russia’s LGBT community that “we will fight for your freedom.”

But it will take more than boycotts and pop stars to make the country more tolerant. Russia has a very different history of sexuality than the West does, and what is going on today is a result of that history.

In the West, homosexuality is now understood primarily as an unchangeable state of being. Whether we are “born that way” or became that way, the majority of people in the West do not consider gays to be “fixable.” As the French historian Michel Foucault put it, with modernity the homosexual transformed from a temporary aberration into a species. This change in thinking came in the late 1800s as a result of developments in biology and psychology, as well as changes in the law.

In Russia, in part because of the academic isolation of Stalininsm, science and the law went their own way. The homosexual was never “born” but rather learned behavior that could be “cured.” Russian science has always insisted that homosexuality is something that can be reoriented. When I was doing my research in the 1990s, I interviewed many sexologists who offered to change my sexuality; I even took a test at a medical center to find out just how gay I was. And I spoke with many lesbians who had been hospitalized in order to reorient their desire.

Medical “cures” for homosexuality in the 1990s included anti-psychotic drugs or hormone treatments. Some patients were put into a diabetic coma with the hope that they’d wake up and have changed their sexual preference. Women whose desire for other women could not be cured were often prescribed a sex change since, according to the logic of Russian psychiatry, they must really be men.

Although homosexuality ceased to be an official psychiatric illness in Russia in 1999, it remains a reason that many young women are committed to psychiatric institutions. I have been an expert witness in cases in which Russian lesbians are seeking political asylum, and a handful of women have cited forced hospitalization as the reason they want to leave the country.

Unlike “sick” lesbians who needed to be cured, men who desired other men were regarded as “criminals” who needed to be punished. The Russian legal code, until President Boris Yeltsin overturned it in 1993, treated gay male relationships like bank robberies: a crime for which a man could serve time and then, presumably, be rehabilitated to a crime-free and straight life. Even men who didn’t end up with prison sentences were blackmailed by the police so that their employers and families would not be informed of their “crimes.”

These attitudes are evident in the West as well. Finding homosexual reparative therapy on the Web is almost as easy as finding a hook-up on Grindr. This year’s huge anti-gay-marriage demonstrations in Paris and deadly attacks on gay men in Manhattan remind us that we’re not living in a rainbow-filled gaytopia. However, the difference between Russia and much of the West lies in the majority. In the West, most people and most laws reflect some agreement that homosexuality is here to stay, whether we like it or not.

In contrast, Russian attitudes are built on more than 100 years of scientific and legal thinking that construes homosexuality as a temporary and treatable problem. Add to this a disturbing history of nationalism that has viewed queer sexual practices as “foreign” and “threats” to the Slavic soul. Even in the 1980s and 1990s, the Russian authorities allowed gangs of nationalist youths to beat up people coming out of gay dance clubs and to blackmail gays and lesbians. According to Russian gay and lesbian activists I’ve spoken to, something very similar is occurring today — even in central Moscow and other supposedly gay-friendly spaces.

My friends and I escaped a kidnapping nearly three decades ago only to face a moment that is depressingly similar. Whatever is done to help sexual minorities in Russia, it must be done with an understanding that sex in Russia has a very different history than it does in the West — and that history will continue to shape its future.

[email protected]

Read more from Outlook, friend us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.<|endoftext|>EAST VILLAGE, NY — A mural of the twin towers painted just days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks got a second life on Sunday, 16 years after it first came to the East Village.

The mural, located on the outside of a building at Avenue A and Ninth Street, was believed to have been painted in the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Although its exact date of origin remains unclear, locals believe the the work went up just days after the most devastating terror attack on American soil.

In the years after the attacks, the mural became an impromptu memorial for the neighborhood, where locals would place votive candles every September 11th. Since then, however, much of the mural has been defaced with graffiti and stickers. As the image became increasingly weathered, and obscured, the local artist and musician David Ouimet thought it looked like a promising spot for his next canvas.

Ouimet, who has lived in the East Village and the Lower East Side for the past 25 years, had recently picked up street art, painting numerous murals throughout the neighborhood. (For more information on this and other neighborhood stories, subscribe to Patch to receive daily newsletters and breaking news alerts.)

Here's a photo of the mural last year, as captured by neighborhood blog EV Grieve:

Ninth Street at Avenue A #eastvillage #911 #9/11 #worldtradecenter #streetart #mural

A post shared by EV Grieve (@evgrieve) on Sep 11, 2016 at 6:49am PDT

Watch: 9/11 Victims Honored In NYC

The street canvas on Ninth Street, which is home to the newly-opened ice cream shop Gelarto, is located just across the road from Tompkins Square Park in the heart of the East Village. Ouimet, whose work as an artist has spanned films, music, children's book illustrations and, now, street art, decided to approached the Gelarto's owners about updating the mural from its state of disrepair.

Gelarto's owners suggested that Ouimet build off of the original mural, which has been credited to local businessman Jesse Fishler, Ouimet said. Patch was not able to locate Fishler to comment for this article. Scott Richey, Gelarto's manager, told Patch that the business wanted to "preserve it as well as add to it."

Richey have also speculated that prolific NYC street artist Chico was responsible for the mural. Chico painted a 9/11 memorial mural nearby at Avenue A and 14th Street, which has since been partially covered with advertisements.

Ouimet decided to preserve a window of the 2001-era painting, and build off of it with his own work. He spent about a week cleaning up the wall, donning a Hazmat suit to clean the bricks of 16 years of detritus.

Ouimet said he hadn't planned on doing 9/11-related artwork, but when Gelarto suggested he build off what was already on Ninth Street, the idea came quickly.

"It was an immediate, immediate thought," he explained. "The days after [the attack] that the one thing that I remember clearly is I felt like I was frozen. I had no sense of movement, I couldn't even wash dishes...and I started to think about movement and one thing I felt very in tune to in the weeks and months after was nature, and birds and dogs and animals."

Ouimet's mural takes the original structure of the twin towers from the 2001 mural, and expands on the two columns using birds and fish.

Ouimet said he witnessed the terrorist attacks from his home on the Lower East Side in 2001, initially mistaking the first plane crash for a fire, as many observers did during the chaotic and confusing first minutes of the attack.

"When I saw the second plane coming I put the camera down and I realized it was something profoundly significant that was happening," he said.

After quickly developing to the concept for his own take on the original mural, Ouimet said he was influenced by conversations he had with passers by on the street while he worked, conversations which helped him to develop the mural's motif.

Ouimet painted the entire mural in a marathon session on Sunday, starting before dawn and completing the work later that day.

Images via Ciara McCarthy / Patch<|endoftext|>MCALLEN, Texas — The FBI added a Mexican woman to their most wanted list over her alleged role as the mastermind in the murder for hire of a prominent Dallas dentist. The love triangle murder appears to have a Mexican cartel connection.

On Wednesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation added 33-year-old Brenda Delgado to their “10 Most Wanted” list, information provided to Breitbart Texas by the FBI revealed. Delgado, who is wanted on the charge of capital murder, has deep ties to Mexico and is believed to have fled there.

The charges against Delgado stem from the September 2, 2015 murder of Dallas Dentist Kendra Hatcher who was shot to death in the parking garage of her Uptown apartment. While Delgado was charged in state court with capital murder for her alleged role in the crime, the FBI was able to get a federal warrant charging her with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.

According to investigators, Hatcher’s murder was the result of her dating Delgado’s ex-boyfriend a local dermatologist, Dallas Morning News reported at the time. The relationship had taken a serious turn sending Delgado into a rage as she allegedly hired Kristopher Ledell Love and Crystal Cortes to murder Hatcher. Court records published by the Dallas newspaper reports that the indictment mentions a “drug cartel” being linked to the murder. Delgado and “a drug cartel” are the ones who paid Ledell Love with cash and drugs for the murder. Information as to which drug cartel or their specific role in the murder was not readily available.

Hatcher’s murder is not the only high profile murder near Dallas that has a Mexican drug cartel connection. As Breitbart Texas recently reported, two Mexican cops and one of their relatives are set to go to trial this month in the cartel execution of a prominent Mexican lawyer in Southlake. The victim in that case was the attorney for the leader of Mexico’s Gulf Cartel.

Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas you can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.<|endoftext|>President Donald Trump said Thursday that though he thinks Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia’s election interference makes “the country look very bad,” but he believes the outcome will be “fair.”

Trump held forth on Mueller’s investigation in a meandering 30-minute interview with The New York Times at his Mar-A-Lago resort in West Palm Beach, where he’s spending the holidays. No White House aides were present for the on-the-record conversation.

The President told the newspaper 16 times that the probe has discovered “no collusion” by his campaign, but added that he thinks Mueller is “going to be fair” to him.

Those comments are in line with what Trump has said previously, but run counter to a weeks-long effort by his supporters in Congress and in the conservative media to paint the investigation as hopelessly tainted by partisan bias. Those supporters have tried to pivot the national conversation towards Democrats’ dealings with Russia, instead.

Trump has enthusiastically assisted that effort, telling the Times that there was “tremendous collusion on behalf of the Russians and the Democrats,” particularly those affiliated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He argued that special counsel investigators should focus their attention on past work that the lobbying firm of Tony Podesta, brother of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, did for a client referred by his own former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Trump called Manafort, who was indicted on a slew of financial crimes charges, a “very nice man” and “an honorable person,” repeating that he only managed the campaign for a short period of time. Manafort worked for Trump from March to August 2016.

Trump did not appear bothered by his associates’ indictments and plea agreements, or the fact that Mueller’s probe is continuing past the Christmas deadline his lawyers provided to reporters because, he said, there is nothing incriminating to find.