Out of the blue, an FBI raid on the workplace and home of the president’s longtime personal lawyer and all-around fixer and business associate. Hours later, in response, a blistering denunciation of the action from President Trump himself (“an attack on our country, in a true sense”), delivered unbidden before a meeting with senior security officials about the situation in Syria.

In other words, just another Monday in today’s wild Washington ride.

Or not. In many ways, the sudden seizure by federal law enforcement of piles of documents from Michael Cohen, a stalwart of Mr. Trump’s business for years, seems an extraordinary event, an inflection point for the legal problems gradually creeping up on current and former Trump campaign and administration officials.

The question is, in what way, for whom, the raid is evidence that problems will be getting worse. Given the stakes, and the people involved, it is almost certain that the Justice Department and FBI are trying to avoid missteps, proceeding slowing and double-checking along the way.

It’s a “huge deal” anytime the FBI executes a search warrant for lawyers, doctors, or anyone with documents that might be subject to confidentiality privileges, says Andrew Wright, an associate professor of law at Savannah Law School and former White House associate counsel. There are exacting procedures for handling such material in investigations. They are supposed to be handled carefully.

“In this case, since it’s the president’s lawyer, I’d magnify that times 10,” Mr. Wright says.

What does the execution of a search warrant to search for documents in the offices and hotel room used as a domicile by Mr. Cohen mean? In a basic sense, it means that a federal judge has agreed with the FBI that there is possibly evidence of a crime somewhere in Cohen’s possession – evidence that might not be possible to obtain through subpoena or other less-intrusive means.

“That’s unusual and interesting,” writes former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti in a thread on Twitter outlining the underlying legal aspects of the F.B.I. raid.

What’s especially interesting in this case is that search involves an attorney. Communications between a lawyer and his or her client are privileged – in other words, prosecutors aren’t supposed to use them. In a federal case, officials would normally leave those alone. All kinds of safeguards exist to keep them secret.

The fact that those safeguards were overridden tell us that prosecutors believe they would not have obtained the documents in question via subpoena, and that they might be evidence of a lawyer conspiring, abetting, or undertaking a criminal action on their own part.

During the raid, a so-called taint team of agents and prosecutors would work to determine whether documents were subject to attorney-client privilege, or were evidence of possible criminal action. They would act as a filter, and pass the evidence back to other agents and prosecutors for actual development of any possible case.

This means lots of personnel would be involved.

“What all this indicates is that it is not a small resource decision [to undertake such a search],” says John Q. Barrett, a professor of law at St. John’s University in New York.

The bottom line: Cohen may be in big legal trouble. News reports say that the subpoena was for documents related to possible bank fraud and other financial crimes. Some news organizations were reporting on Tuesday that at issue were alleged hush money payments to women who said they had affairs with the president. Other reports said Cohen’s side business in taxi medallions might also be a subject of interest for prosecutors.

It’s important to note that for Cohen’s main client – the president himself – the implications of the raid are much less clear. It is possible he knows nothing about the alleged payments to women, as he has publicly claimed.

The raid does not appear directly related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling into the 2016 presidential election.

It was not carried out by Mr. Mueller’s team, but rather handed off to the normal Justice Department chain of command, and carried out by agents and prosecutors from the Southern District of New York.

Trump did not make this distinction is his Monday attack on the FBI action against his lawyer. As part of his ad hoc monologue on the subject he mused that “many people” have said he should fire Mueller.

“We’ll see what may happen,” Trump said.

Given that the case against Cohen appears to lie with Southern District prosecutors, however, it is likely that firing Mueller would have little effect on any prosecutions developed from evidence seized Monday.

“Mueller is trying to find principled distinctions about what is in his lane, and what is not,” says Andrew Wright of Savannah Law School.

Still, it was the president’s reaction, as much as the raid itself, that made Monday seem as if it might go down as an important point in Trump administration history. Trump was obviously angry about the event, calling it “frankly, a real disgrace” as well as an “attack on the country.”

Perhaps it was his long relationship with Cohen that sparked this reaction. The lawyer has been one of his closest business associates in recent years, serving as a deal maker and fixer for Trump in both the United States and overseas.

But far from being a disgrace, Monday’s action is likely the result of a long and very serious process involving Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and many other Justice Department officials putting their heads together to consider the implications of the step and possible alternatives, says Mr. Barrett, who served as counsel on the Iran-Contra investigation.

“The government is going to be very careful not to hurry, not to be casual in this case,” he says.

Francisco Proner/Reuters

Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is carried by supporters in front of the metallurgic trade union in Sao Bernardo do Campo, Brazil on April 7. On Saturday, 'Lula' turned himself in to police to begin a 12-year prison sentence for corruption charges.

Lorena Faria travelled more than 100 miles by bus last week to hunker down with thousands of protesters outside the metalworkers union headquarters in São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil, in support of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

“[He’s] responsible for taking me out of my humble beginnings,” says Ms. Faria, a Portuguese language teacher from the rural town of Capivari, and the first in her family to receive a university degree. She raises her fist and yells out in encouragement, “No surrender!”

But on Saturday, Lula, as the two-term president and former union boss is popularly known, did just that. He turned himself in for a 12-year prison sentence for corruption charges related to the sweeping Car Wash investigation into kickbacks, which has landed 123 politicians and business leaders behind bars with sentences totaling over 1,800 years.

Lula is the first former president in Brazil to be convicted of corruption, and arguably the most high-profile case in all of Latin America in recent years, overshadowing even scandals that led the president of Peru to step down just last month. In a moment when Latin Americans are taking to the streets to speak out against corruption, from Mexico to Argentina and Honduras to Brazil, Lula’s presence behind bars is symbolic of the region’s broader fight for transparency.

Voters across Latin America say they’re watching Brazil’s high-profile investigations and arrests with admiration – and in some cases, jealousy – for a judiciary that can hold the powerful accountable. But deep divisions have emerged in Brazil over the legitimacy of Lula’s arrest. It sheds an important light on the complicated and deep-seated nature of corruption here, and the politicization that many see motivating the judicial process.

“People are fed up with corruption, but there’s a certain element of ‘they’re all corrupt,’ ” says Christopher Sabatini, a Latin America lecturer at Columbia University and executive director of the regional analysis portal Global Americans. While leftists like Lula and former President Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached in 2016, have fallen from power over corruption, others like conservative President Michel Temer have been able to ride out serious allegations. The sense that corruption is everywhere gives more leeway to politicians like Lula, who may have a rap sheet, but also have a legacy of helping the poor, analysts say.

“Lula is still remembered favorably by constituents who see his indictment and conviction as politically motivated. It reinforces the injustices many feel from the ruling class.”

First-place prisoner

After four years of powerful Brazilians falling at the hands of the Car Wash scandal, Lula was convicted of corruption and money laundering last July. He is fighting the charges, claiming his innocence, but last week the Federal Supreme Court rejected his appeal to remain free while continuing to fight the rulings.

He was ordered to turn himself in for detention by Friday afternoon. But Lula defied authorities and hunkered down at the union headquarters, where he started out as a leader some 50 years ago. His ardent followers rallied around the building, with many tearfully swearing to prevent his arrest. “We’re here and we’re not scared to fight,” supporters chanted while waving Workers’ Party (PT) banners and keeping federal police at bay.

Many supporters acknowledge Lula’s conviction, but given the sweeping corruption surfacing in Brazil, those like Omar Aparecido, an unemployed civil engineer, feel Lula deserves a pass.

“Corruption has stolen our economic future and livelihoods,” says Mr. Aparecido, selling fruit sorbets to the hordes of Lula supporters over the weekend.

“Losing my job isn’t Lula’s fault; it stems from the corrupt system that has been entrenched for decades in our society,” he says. Although he’s against the “rot” of corruption – and acknowledges that Lula has been convicted of it – he believes the man who led Brazil between 2003 and 2010 is the only person who can “stop injustice in society from prevailing.”

Lula was once dubbed “the most popular politician on Earth,” by former President Barack Obama. But his humble beginnings as the son of illiterate farmers and later a metalworkers’ union leader make his life story both relatable and aspirational.

His two terms in power are defined by progressive social programming and a booming economy. He is credited with helping lift some 20 million Brazilians out of poverty and into the middle class. He paid off Brazil’s International Monetary Fund debt in full and helped put Brazil on the geopolitical map, winning an Olympic bid and putting the nation forth as a an emerging economic power.

A January poll ahead of Brazil’s October presidential election showed Lula polling number one with roughly 34 percent support, according to São Paulo-based research group Datafolha. Extreme right-wing candidate Sen. Jair Bolsonaro was second with roughly 16 percent support.

“Lula may be considered corrupt,” says Claudio Couto, a political scientist with the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in São Paulo. But “when you consider that everyone is corrupt in our society, when one of the corrupt politicians presents you something that makes sense in terms of public policy and political ideology, then you say, ‘Well, this guy is corrupt, but he is corrupt in a way that I can forgive and understand,’ ” Mr. Couto says.

Brazil ranked 96th out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s 2017 Corruption Perception Index. Brazilians scored their public sector as a 37 on a scale of 0-100, where zero is “highly corrupt.”

Lula argues his conviction is a political scheme designed to keep him out of presidential office. Important players have fallen on both sides of the political spectrum, but the timing of Lula’s imprisonment has some observers scratching their heads.

“The rush to put Lula behind bars is extraordinary. The judiciary leap-frogged some two hundred other cases to issue this arrest,” says Gustavo Sampaio, a constitutional law professor at Fluminense University in Rio de Janeiro. “The timing is an important key that opens the door to who becomes Brazil’s next president.”

Interest and 'jealousy' abroad

Despite the political chasms in Brazil that have deepened with Lula’s detention, anti-corruption investigators and activists across the region are eagerly watching this process.

Salvador Camarena, an investigative journalist for the nongovernmental organization Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity, says those watching Brazil from afar are “trying to see more than just the end of the movie.”

That’s how he describes Brazil’s feat of putting a high-powered politician behind bars on corruption charges. But there were a lot of “scenes” that led to this point, and civil society in Mexico and elsewhere can learn from them.

“We are watching with interest, and in some moments with jealousy,” Mr. Camarena says. “But we also try to remember that Brazil’s path has been carved out over many more years [than Mexico’s anti-corruption fight] through the construction of an independent system of prosecutors and judges with institutional strengthening,” he says.

Mr. Sabatini says it’s not unusual to hear people in other Latin American countries look to Brazil with envy: “At least Brazil is pursuing the corrupt” is a common refrain, he says.

The irony is that a lot of strengthening of the judicial system took place under Workers’ Party leadership, which is important, he says. Five of the six justices that voted to deny Lula’s most recent appeal, for example, were appointed under PT leadership.

“The PT was sort of bitten by their own professionalized judiciary that they helped build,” he says.

“It’s a success story.”

It wasn’t a massive demonstration. But the hundreds of protesters who congregated outside of Britain’s Labour headquarters over the weekend, to rail against anti-Semitism that they say reaches intolerable heights of party leadership, shows a sustained pressure on the left as it finds itself wrestling with assertions that may go deeper than individual members.

The protests, the second to be organized by Jewish groups in two weeks, have been directed at party leader Jeremy Corbyn, kicked up over his support for an anti-Semitic mural in London in 2012 in the name of free speech. The resurfacing of his years-old comments revitalized concerns that Mr. Corbyn, at best, turns a blind eye to anti-Semitism in party ranks, and at worst, permits it, in both overt and more subtle forms.

Labour’s troubles are further heated as Western countries grapple with a rise in populism that has seen norms on political correctness break down and, in some instances, fanned xenophobic flames. That has put Labour, a party that professes to defend all minorities, in a harsher spotlight and made a solution more urgent.

The mounting criticism directed at Labour over the past two years has gotten hijacked politically, at turns verging on farcical and obscuring the matter at hand. But the accusations are also seen as a sign of a greater capacity to recognize the problem, and it’s led to soul-searching about old and deeply ingrained attitudes and traditions within the party.

“The Labour leadership in general has not always recognized the nature of the problem,” says David Feldman, director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck, University of London. “This isn’t an issue about Corbyn, it’s an issue about ways of thinking on the left. … It’s not about individuals, it’s about elements in the political culture.”

‘Not just a few bad apples’

That culture can be found in radical socialist thinking and writing from the early 19th century in its critique of the “evils of capitalism,” Professor Feldman says, “often personified by a rapacious Jewish banker.” More recently, anti-Zionist sentiment on the left born out of sympathy for the Palestinians can morph into anti-Semitism. And legitimate debate can degenerate when distinctions between Israel and Jews are blurred. Too often for many Jews, their culture and the politics of Israel are too easily conflated.

Many in Labour have voiced discomfort with some of Corbyn’s positions as a staunch supporter of pro-Palestinian rights, such as once referring to members of Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends.”

The recent protests against Labour are only the latest to dog the party under Corbyn’s leadership. In April 2016, Facebook comments by lawmaker Naseem Shah compared Israel to Nazi Germany; she was temporarily banned from the party after apologizing. That same month former London Mayor Ken Livingstone said that Hitler had been a Zionist before the Holocaust. He was also suspended from the party and remains so.

The outcry led to an investigation by British lawyer Shami Chakrabarti into anti-Semitism in the party. Her resulting report concluded that it’s not endemic, but there is an “occasionally toxic atmosphere” and listed a package of reforms moving forward.

Peter Nicholls/Reuters

The leader of Britain's opposition Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn, speaks at an event presenting a report on antisemitism within the Labour party in London in June 2016.

Criticized for not responding firmly enough initially, Momentum, the grassroots Labour movement behind Corbyn, issued a statement earlier this month showing a willingness to get to the root of the problem. “Current examples of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party are not only a problem of a few, extreme ‘bad apples’ but also of unconscious bias which manifests itself in varied, nuanced, and subtle ways and is more widespread in the Labour Party than many of us had understood even a few months ago,” it read.

Despite the scrutiny on the left and magnification by social media and hate speech, a 2017 study by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) estimated that only 5 percent of the general population can “justifiably be described as anti-Semites.” It also showed that those on the far left only hold slightly more anti-Semitic attitudes, by intensity of anti-Israel attitudes, than the general population. But the far left are still much less anti-Semitic than both very right-wing members of society and Muslims.

David Hirsh, a professor at Goldsmiths University and author of “Contemporary Left Anti-Semitism,” says that the issue has gained more prominence because Corbyn has moved into mainstream British politics since he was elected to lead Labour in 2015. “Jeremy Corbyn isn’t some kind of magic evil anti-Semite, but he is a man from a political tradition and political faction which embodies this kind of anti-Semitism,” says Professor Hirsh, who is also the founder of Engage, a campaign against the academic boycott of Israel.

He says that the issue is confounded by the rise of populism. In many places in Europe, populist parties on the far right have gained power, particularly with anti-migrant and anti-Muslim messaging that can also be anti-Semitic. In Britain, Corbyn's victory amounted to a populist surge on the left, and with it has come simplistic thinking about Israel, Hirsh says.

“There are a lot of people on the left who have been educated to believe that Israel is the key evil on the planet, and anyone who defends Israel is a racist or pro-apartheid,” he says.

Party politics

This deeper questioning threatens to be overtaken by politics though. In a recent YouGov poll for The Times, eight out of 10 Labour members say they believe accusations of anti-Semitism are exaggerated to damage Corbyn. And the issue continues to be used for political opportunity on both sides, generating additional claims of anti-Semitism.

Corbyn issued a statement calling his party an “anti-racist party” and acknowledged “pockets” of anti-Semitism within the party. Then he was panned for sharing a Seder dinner during Passover with a Jewish far-left collective called Jewdas who critics said, essentially, aren’t Jewish enough. “To claim that we in Jewdas are somehow not real Jews is offensive, and frankly anti-Semitic,” the group said in a Guardian opinion piece earlier this month.

One Jewish Labour activist, who wished to remain unnamed due to the polemic, says that moderate Jewish Labour members who attended the anti-Semitic protests have been forced to defend themselves, which he calls "absolutely shameful."

Emily Robinson, a professor in British party politics at the University of Sussex, says for a party that traditionally has strong links to the Jewish community, Labour isn't applying the same standards that it would for others who claimed to be victims of racial attack. The accusations of anti-Semitism have been called a media conspiracy. But "that feeds back into particular Jewish stereotypes of them having control of the media, so I think there is a really dangerous circularity to that argument that we need to resist,” she says.

Part of the problem continues to lie in the recognition of what constitutes an oppressed population. “The politics of anti-racism for understandable reason focus on a black/white binary, so people of color and white people. Some anti-racists on the left can therefore find it difficult to recognize and see racism when it’s directed at Jews,” Feldman says.

“There needs to be strong leadership on this point which is to say that opposition to racism and in this case opposition to anti-Semitism needs to be unconditional,” he says. “So even if Jews are predominantly middle class, and even if most Jews in this country support the state of Israel, and even if Jews are in the whole ‘wrong’ class position or have views that people on the left disagree with on Israel, and even if they are more Tory than Labour in their voting preferences, and even if they are not friends of the left – even if all that is the case, anti-Semitism needs to be opposed unconditionally.”

AP Photo

67 of 900China Trade Shoppers in Beijing exit a storefront advertising American apparel April 10. President Xi Jinping promised to cut auto import taxes, open China's markets further and improve conditions for foreign companies in a speech Tuesday that called for international cooperation against a backdrop of a spiraling dispute with Washington over trade and technology.

How will it end?

That’s the question hanging over the so-called trade war now being waged by the world’s two largest economies, the United States and China.

It’s easy to get lost in the tit-for-tat tariffs and other hard-knuckle penalties being used by each side to gain an advantage. In an April 10 speech, President Xi Jinping suggested China will continue on its government-driven path to be a technological superpower by 2025 despite US actions. And President Trump keeps repeating he will end China’s illegal use of American ingenuity, conducted through theft, forced technology transfers, and mandatory joint ventures.

The most likely outcome will be a negotiated truce. Yet beneath the current posturing, the trade dispute has also forced each side to look at its prime weak spot. For each, that is a perceived concern about an ability to invent new ideas that drive new services and products in a competitive global market. The final compromises to end this “trade war” may depend on how much each country changes its view of itself as able to invent and create new markets.

For the US, a report by the National Science Foundation in January warned that the country’s global share of science and technology activities is declining. The report recommends a number of ways for government, academia, and business to reboot the nation’s creative juices, such as increased federal spending on basic research.

In China, one big concern is not more government intervention but perhaps having less of it.

In an article last month, Chen QuQing, an economist working for the Communist Party, wrote that only 2 percent of patents that came out of Chinese universities have been transferred or licensed. “The country’s overall capacity for innovation falls short of the standards of other science and technology superpowers,” he states. While China spends heavily on research, “a lot of research has failed to produce useful or marketable technologies.”

The main reasons are a poor capability for original innovation, a lack of high-quality talent, and a low rate of applied uses for basic research. China’s economy and its scientific work “remain two highly disjointed fields,” he wrote.

Who should drive innovation? he asks. The answer is market entities, Mr. Chen concludes.

China’s most creative private companies are demanding better legal protections of their ideas in the domestic market. That shift in thinking is forcing Mr. Xi to speed up reforms of the patent system. For the US, such reforms must also apply to foreign companies who want to operate in the Chinese economy.

If each side can only recognize a common interest in fostering innovation – no matter where it happens – the “trade war” could end sooner rather than later.