Recode Daily: Brett Kavanaugh meets his accuser on the Senate stand today

Christine Blasey Ford is scheduled to testify in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee today about an alleged sexual assault committed by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Arizona sex-crimes prosecutor Rachel Miller will question Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that Republicans on the committee — all of whom are men — wanted to bring in a woman to ask questions for them in order to keep the hearing “fair and respectful.” The decision was made in the shadow of another Supreme Court nomination hearing: The 1991 proceedings where Anita Hill testified that then-nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her at work. Yesterday, 1,600 men signed a full-page print ad in the New York Times supporting Blasey Ford and honoring Anita Hill; the ad is an homage to a 1991 ad signed by 1,600 black women. Follow updates on the story here. [Claudia Koerner / BuzzFeed News]

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Uber agreed to pay a $148 million settlement over its 2016 data breach that exposed the names, email addresses and phone numbers of 57 million people around the world. The announcement came just as U.S. lawmakers were debating whether to write a national consumer privacy law, with witnesses testifying from companies such as Apple, Google and Twitter. [Brian Fung / The Washington Post]

Google Android’s first decade: Here’s how Google beat incumbents Microsoft, BlackBerry and Symbian — and zipped past Apple’s iOS — to become the world’s dominant operating system. [Dieter Bohn / The Verge]

Tech giants Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft collectively spent $80 billion last year on big-ticket physical assets, including specialized manufacturing equipment, to make sure no one else can compete. Their combined outlay is about 10 times what GM spends annually on its plants, vehicle-assembly robots and other materials. [Shira Ovide / Bloomberg]

Listen to the full interview on Recode Decode: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | or read the transcript here →

The U.S. government will soon spend more on interest than on the Defense Department budget. Already the fastest-growing major government expense, the cost of interest is on track to hit $390 billion next year, nearly 50 percent more than in 2017 — making it harder to respond to future recessions and other needs. [Nelson D. Schwartz / The New York Times]

A content moderator sued Facebook in a class-action lawsuit, claiming that the job gave her PTSD. Facebook has about 7,500 content moderators worldwide who are tasked with deleting hate speech, graphic violence and self-harm images and video, nudity and sexual content, bullying and a host of other content that violates its policies. Alleging that Facebook does not have proper mental health services and monitoring in place for its content moderators, Selena Scola sued for being “exposed to highly toxic, unsafe, and injurious content” during her employment at Facebook’s headquarters from June 2017 through March of this year. [Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox / Motherboard]

Amazon will open a new store in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood today that only sells products with four-star ratings and above; it’s the online retailer’s latest effort at physical stores, where most consumer spending still occurs. Called “Amazon 4-Star,” the new location will feature consumer electronics, kitchen items, toys, books and games. Members of the company’s Prime subscription service pay the online price, while other shoppers pay list price. [Chris Welch / The Verge]

Top stories from Recode

Facebook’s reputation as a good place for founders is suddenly under attack.

But David Marcus, who runs Facebook’s new blockchain division, will have none of it.

[Kurt Wagner]

It may be ‘data journalism,’ but Julia Angwin’s new site the Markup is nothing like FiveThirtyEight.

Rather than analyzing data that others have collected, Angwin says the new nonprofit will be collecting data sets about technology that don’t exist today.

[Recode Media with Peter Kafka]

This is cool

Sister Mary Jane and the weed nuns.

And a robot brothel is coming to Houston.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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