Browsed by
Month: March 2019

Mueller report will be delivered to Congress without White House preview by ‘mid-April, if not sooner,’ says attorney general

Mueller report will be delivered to Congress without White House preview by ‘mid-April, if not sooner,’ says attorney general

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report detailing his investigation of President Trump and Russia’s election interference will be delivered to Congress “by mid-April, if not sooner,” Attorney General William P. Barr said Friday in a letter offering important new details about how the document will be edited before its public release. Barr’s letter aimed to reassure lawmakers and the public that the process for handling the report — which numbers nearly 400 pages, he said…

Read More Read More

Surge of asylum seekers highlights futility of Trump’s wall

Surge of asylum seekers highlights futility of Trump’s wall

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: While [Kevin] McAleenan [the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection] was emphasizing the need for more resources and legal authority to keep people from the U.S. interior, advocacy groups said the Trump administration should instead treat the migrants as refugees and invest in foreign aid. Migrants are streaming out of Central America for a complex set of reasons — including drought, poverty, violence and political instability — problems that will persist regardless of U.S. border…

Read More Read More

Mueller report: Did Barr write a summary or a cover-up?

Mueller report: Did Barr write a summary or a cover-up?

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: The still-secret report on Russian interference in the 2016 election submitted by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, last week was more than 300 pages long, according to the Justice Department, a length that raises new questions about Attorney General William P. Barr’s four-page summary. Mr. Barr wrote to Congress on Sunday offering what he called the “principal conclusions” of the report — including that Mr. Mueller had not found that the Trump campaign…

Read More Read More

Oliver North showed Republicans the way out

Oliver North showed Republicans the way out

Comments 0 Comment

Jamelle Bouie writes: Watergate, the modern template for an impeachment-worthy scandal, has informed much of the coverage of the Russia scandal, from congressional inquiries to the special counsel’s investigation into President Trump and his campaign. Central questions — Did the president conspire to illegally influence the election? Did he obstruct justice? — have clear antecedents in Watergate. And Trump himself bears more than a slight resemblance to Richard Nixon at his most paranoid and intransigent. But while Trump’s belligerent and…

Read More Read More

How Donald Trump inflated his net worth to lenders and investors

How Donald Trump inflated his net worth to lenders and investors

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: When Donald Trump wanted to make a good impression — on a lender, a business partner, or a journalist — he sometimes sent them official-looking documents called “Statements of Financial Condition.” These documents sometimes ran up to 20 pages. They were full of numbers, laying out Trump’s properties, debts and multibillion-dollar net worth. But, for someone trying to get a true picture of Trump’s net worth, the documents were deeply flawed. Some simply omitted properties that…

Read More Read More

Brexit has exposed a broken political system

Brexit has exposed a broken political system

Comments 0 Comment

Gary Younge writes: Yesterday’s events in parliament illustrated four things about our politics and the Brexit process that are now unavoidable. The first, and most evident, is that the Conservative party is not fit to govern. Let us leave aside for a moment its mendacious policies that pauperise the vulnerable and deport the eligible. Morally its agenda is contemptible; and from Windrush to trains to universal credit its incompetence is undeniable. But even if the Conservatives were decent and effective,…

Read More Read More

How the battle over Israel and anti-Semitism is fracturing American politics

How the battle over Israel and anti-Semitism is fracturing American politics

Comments 0 Comment

Nathan Thrall writes: In 2018, the Pew Research Center conducted a poll of more than 1,500 Americans. Among Democrats who self-identified as liberal, nearly twice as many said they sympathized more with the Palestinians than with Israel. In 2016, a University of Maryland poll found that 60 percent of Democrats supported economic sanctions or taking more serious action in response to new Israeli settlements. Yet year after year, Congress, citing “shared values” and Israel’s strategic importance, among other things, votes…

Read More Read More

U.S. lawmakers unveil bill to make Puerto Rico 51st state, as Trump escalates feud with island officials

U.S. lawmakers unveil bill to make Puerto Rico 51st state, as Trump escalates feud with island officials

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: House lawmakers will unveil legislation Thursday to make Puerto Rico the 51st state in the nation, pushing to give the island equal voting and economic rights in the U.S. government amid an escalating feud between President Trump and Puerto Rico officials over hurricane relief aid. The legislation, set to be introduced by Rep. Darren Soto (D-Fla.) with the support of Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, comes as several Democratic presidential candidates have embraced calls to grant…

Read More Read More

The plague killing frogs everywhere is far worse than scientists thought

The plague killing frogs everywhere is far worse than scientists thought

Comments 0 Comment

Carl Zimmer reports: On Thursday, 41 scientists published the first worldwide analysis of a fungal outbreak that’s been wiping out frogs for decades. The devastation turns out to be far worse than anyone had previously realized. Writing in the journal Science, the researchers conclude that populations of more than 500 species of amphibians have declined significantly because of the outbreak — including at least 90 species presumed to have gone extinct. The figure is more than twice as large as…

Read More Read More

Good Samaritans aren’t the exception

Good Samaritans aren’t the exception

Comments 0 Comment

Melanie McGrath writes: A few years ago, I was assaulted on a busy street in London by a man who came up behind me. Some details of the assault are hazy, others pin-sharp. I recall exactly what my attacker did, and that the assault was witnessed by rush-hour drivers sitting at a red light. If there were pedestrians nearby, I do not remember them, though the situation suggests that there were people at hand. I do remember that no one…

Read More Read More

EU cannot betray ‘increasing majority’ who want UK to remain, says Tusk

EU cannot betray ‘increasing majority’ who want UK to remain, says Tusk

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: Donald Tusk has issued a rallying call to the “increasing majority” of British people who want to cancel Brexit and stay in the European Union. In a stirring intervention, the European council president hailed those who marched on the streets of London and the millions who are petitioning the government to revoke article 50. Speaking to the European parliament, Tusk reprimanded those who voiced concerns about a potential lengthy extension to article 50 in the event of…

Read More Read More

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks to the concerns of ordinary Americans

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks to the concerns of ordinary Americans

Comments 0 Comment

Chris Cillizza writes: On the day that the Senate rejected — by a vote of 0-57 — the broad strokes of the so-called “Green New Deal,” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D), one of the leading voices for the legislation, went off on those who mock the effort as nothing more than an elitist fantasy. It began when Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy (R) introduced an amendment in a meeting of the Financial Services Committee that would force a homelessness bill…

Read More Read More

Republicans may come to regret their mockery of the Green New Deal

Republicans may come to regret their mockery of the Green New Deal

Comments 0 Comment

Sean McElwee writes: Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, brought the Green New Deal to a vote in the Senate on Tuesday. He defeated consideration of the plan 57-0, winning over three Democratic senators and one independent who caucuses with the Democrats. The rest of the Democratic caucus voted “present,” in an attempt to confound Mr. McConnell’s strategy, which was to tie down the Democratic Party to an ambitious proposal from its progressive wing. In his mind, this would clearly…

Read More Read More

The Republican party is the political arm of the fossil fuel industry

The Republican party is the political arm of the fossil fuel industry

Comments 0 Comment

Kate Aronoff writes: For Republicans, the climate crisis is a joke. On Tuesday in the Senate, Mike Lee, a Republican senator for Utah, spent several minutes on the floor showing pictures of Luke Skywalker on Hoth, giant seahorses and Ronald Reagan shooting off a machine gun whilst mounted atop a dinosaur. This was his bid to “treat the Green New Deal”, which came up for a vote in that body on Tuesday, “with the seriousness it deserves”. For a growing…

Read More Read More