Is our attention for sale?
With fires raging up and down the West Coast, the instinct to bolt has nowhere to go
Emma Marris writes: The West is on fire and there’s nowhere to run. Up and down Interstate 5, the artery connecting most of the major cities on the West Coast, a pall of thick smoke has turned the sun red. Millions of acres have burned. I’m calling and texting friends in communities across Oregon, Washington, California. A friend who lives in the Medford area of Oregon, where hundreds of homes have been destroyed, has evacuated; another lost her childhood home….
Trump couldn’t resist talking to Bob Woodward
Timothy L. O’Brien writes: Maybe it’s all Senator Lindsey Graham’s fault. “It was Lindsey Graham who helped convince Donald Trump to talk to Bob Woodward,” Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson told his TV audience Wednesday night. “Lindsey Graham brokered that meeting. Lindsey Graham even sat in on the first interview between Bob Woodward and the president. How’d that turn out?” It hasn’t turned out well, of course. Trump admitted in a taped interview with the veteran investigative reporter that he…
Trump’s own officials label his Ukraine theory as Russian election interference
HuffPost reports: An anti-Joe Biden conspiracy theory pushed by President Donald Trump, his personal lawyer and his favorite television network has been labeled Russian interference into the coming U.S. election — by Trump’s own administration. “Andrii Derkach and other Russian agents employ manipulation and deceit to attempt to influence elections in the United States and elsewhere around the world,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Thursday in a statement announcing sanctions against the pro-Russian Ukrainian lawmaker and three Russian employees of…
Leading prosecutor looking into the origins of Russia probe resigns
The Associated Press reports: A federal prosecutor who was helping lead the investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe has resigned from the Justice Department, a spokesman said Friday. Nora Dannehy was a top prosecutor on a team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham of Connecticut, who was appointed last year to lead an investigation into how the FBI and other federal agencies set out to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether the Trump campaign…
Peter Thiel met with the racist fringe as he went all in on Trump
BuzzFeed reports: Four years ago, billionaire venture capitalist and Facebook board member Peter Thiel made one of his biggest bets: He went all in on Donald Trump. The normally tight-lipped and enigmatic Thiel gave a very public imprimatur as a prominent speaker at the Republican convention, tying his reputation as one of the most successful figures in modern tech to a presidential candidate despised throughout Silicon Valley. “Tonight,” he said in a nationally televised address at the convention, “I urge…
ICE flew detainees to Virginia so the planes could transport agents to D.C. protests. A huge coronavirus outbreak followed
The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration flew immigrant detainees to Virginia this summer to facilitate the rapid deployment of Homeland Security tactical teams to quell protests in Washington, circumventing restrictions on the use of charter flights for employee travel, according to a current and a former U.S. official. After the transfer, dozens of the new arrivals tested positive for the novel coronavirus, fueling an outbreak at the Farmville, Va., immigration jail that infected more than 300 inmates, one of…
U.S. judge urged to stop ‘corrupt’ reversal in case of Trump ex-aide Flynn
Reuters reports: A retired judge blasted the U.S. Justice Department’s plan to drop the criminal case against President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn as corrupt on Friday and urged the judge presiding over the case to reject the move. John Gleeson, a former trial judge and prosecutor, was named by U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan to argue against the department’s stance in the high-profile case in Washington. Critics have accused the department and Attorney General William Barr…
Music: ARTEMIS — ‘Big Top’
U.S. identifies Giuliani ally and Biden dirt-peddler as an ‘active Russian agent’
The Daily Beast reports: The president’s personal lawyer has been working closely with “an active Russian agent” trying to smear the president’s chief political rival. That’s the conclusion of the U.S. Treasury Department, which sanctioned on Thursday one of Rudy Giuliani’s Ukrainian allies for interference in the upcoming U.S. elections. Andriy Derkach worked closely with Giuliani—and with the Trump-friendly cable network, OANN—to push accusations of political misconduct against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Derkach, a member…
Trump boasted that he protected Saudi Crown Prince MBS after Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal murder, Woodward’s new book says
Business Insider reports: President Donald Trump bragged that he protected Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from congressional scrutiny after the brutal assassination of the American journalist Jamal Khashoggi. That’s according to the veteran reporter Bob Woodward’s upcoming book, “Rage,” set to be released next Tuesday. Insider obtained a copy of the book. Woodward conducted 18 wide-ranging interviews with the president for the book, as well as interviews with multiple senior White House officials and former administration officials. Still,…
Russian state hackers suspected in targeting Biden campaign firm
Reuters reports: Microsoft Corp recently alerted one of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s main election campaign advisory firms that it had been targeted by suspected Russian state-backed hackers, according to three people briefed on the matter. The hacking attempts targeted staff at Washington-based SKDKnickerbocker, a campaign strategy and communications firm working with Biden and other prominent Democrats, over the past two months, the sources said. A person familiar with SKDK’s response to the attempts said the hackers failed to gain…
Would you feel more urgency about climate change if all you could see was smoke?
Charlie Warzel writes: The American West does not have a monopoly on climate-related disasters. Hurricane seasons grow worse each year and devastating earthquakes loom. The flooding in the Midwest and storms like the recent derecho in Iowa are calamities that deserve equal attention. They’re also urgent alarm bells. Everyone on earth right now is experiencing unpredictable and dire weather. No region is alone in experiencing the tragedy of our dying planet. I’m not so naïve as to think that all…
As quality of life has risen across most of the world over the last decade, it has fallen in the U.S.
Nicholas Kristof writes: This should be a wake-up call: New data suggest that the United States is one of just a few countries worldwide that is slipping backward. The newest Social Progress Index, shared with me before its official release Thursday morning, finds that out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary…
Huge cavities threaten Antarctica glacier larger than Great Britain
The Guardian reports: British scientists have mapped cavities half the size of the Grand Canyon that are allowing warm ocean water to erode the vast Thwaites glacier in the Antarctic, accelerating the rise of sea levels across the world. Like decay in a tooth, the channels of warm water are melting the ice from below, threatening the stability of a glacier that is larger than Great Britain. Using an aircraft, ship and robot submarine, the British Antarctic Survey and a…
Police shot Portland slaying suspect without warning or trying to arrest him first, says ordained minister
The Washington Post reports: When police last week surrounded Michael Forest Reinoehl, a self-described anti-fascist suspected of fatally shooting a member of a far-right group in Portland, Ore., the wanted man wasn’t obviously armed, a witness to the scene said Wednesday. In fact, according to Nate Dinguss, Reinoehl was clutching a cellphone and eating a gummy worm as he walked to his car outside an apartment complex in Lacey, Wash. That’s when officers opened fire without first announcing themselves or…