Music: Miles Davis — ‘Water on the Pond’
Barr previously contradicted Trump’s claim that abuse of power is not impeachable
The New York Times reports: Scholars have roundly rejected a central argument of President Trump’s lawyers that abuse of power is not by itself an impeachable offense. But it turns out that another important legal figure has contradicted that idea: Mr. Trump’s attorney general and close ally, William P. Barr. In summer 2018, when he was still in private practice, Mr. Barr wrote a confidential memo for the Justice Department and Mr. Trump’s legal team to help the president get…
Where the Trump defense goes too far
Jonathan Turley writes: In my December testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, I raised objections to the House rushing the impeachment forward on an incomplete and inferential case. There are ample defenses to be raised on both articles without claiming, implausibly, that this was handled perfectly. This is probably why presidents and professors run in different circles. Where professors see this trial as a teachable moment, Trump sees it as a television moment. Trump knows television and may know his…
Trump minimizes traumatic brain injuries in Iraq attack as merely ‘headaches’
ABC News reports: President Donald Trump appeared to brush off the traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and concussion-like injuries sustained by U.S. service members after Iran’s missile strike on a military base in Iraq, saying he did not consider them to be “very serious injuries.” “I heard that they had headaches. And a couple of other things,” Trump said Wednesday at a news conference in Davos, Switzerland. “But I would say and I can report it is not very serious.” Trump’s…
U.S. drinking water contamination with ‘forever chemicals’ far worse than scientists thought
Reuters reports: The contamination of US drinking water with manmade “forever chemicals” is far worse than previously estimated with some of the highest levels found in Miami, Philadelphia and New Orleans, said a report on Wednesday by an environmental watchdog group. The chemicals, resistant to breaking down in the environment, are known as perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. Some have been linked to cancers, liver damage, low birth weight and other health problems. The findings here by the Environmental Working Group…
Saudi crown prince appeared to taunt Jeff Bezos over secret affair before Enquirer exposé
The Daily Beast reports: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sent Jeff Bezos a photograph of a woman loosely resembling the one he was having an affair with months before the National Enquirer published a report exposing the liaison, according to a United Nations investigation. Two United Nations special rapporteurs released a statement Wednesday detailing forensic evidence linking MBS to the Bezos hack, which suggests the future king of Saudi Arabia may have been threatening the owner of The Washington Post…
Glenn Greenwald on Brazil’s charges against him
Isaac Chotiner writes: On Tuesday, Brazilian prosecutors charged the journalist Glenn Greenwald with “cybercrimes” as part of what the government claims was his role in a “criminal organization.” They allege that Greenwald—who reported on wrongdoing in Brazil’s judicial establishment last year for the Intercept, the Web site he co-founded—participated in the hacking of cell phones, the content of which was later used in his stories. But the reporting itself is the reason much of the Brazilian government is furious with…
How Margaret Mead became a hate figure for conservatives
Sam Dresser writes: The explosively curious and acerbic Margaret Mead was born in 1901 and brought up by a tough academic family in Pennsylvania. After a childhood dotted with melancholy, her purpose in life – anthropology – emerged in her undergraduate years at Barnard College in New York City. As a graduate student at Columbia University in the 1920s, she fell under the sway of Franz Boas. The moustachioed polymath was born in Germany and defined American anthropology. It was…
Music: Five Corners Quintet — ‘Trading Eights’
Mitch McConnell’s impeachment cover-up
Greg Sargent writes: Now that Mitch McConnell has rolled out the rules for President Trump’s impeachment trial, the full dimensions of the Senate majority leader’s efforts to cover up Trump’s bottomless corruption are coming into view. They’re worse than expected, which is really something given McConnell’s long-running devotion to shielding Trump from accountability. As it happens, the formal legal brief that the White House just released in Trump’s defense itself illustrates the true nature of this attempted coverup as clearly…
Trump’s lawyers, Senate GOP allies are afraid of Bolton testifying publicly
The Washington Post reports: President Trump’s legal defense team and Senate GOP allies are quietly gaming out contingency plans should Democrats win enough votes to force witnesses to testify in the impeachment trial, including an effort to keep former national security adviser John Bolton from the spotlight, according to multiple officials familiar with the discussions. While Republicans continue to express confidence that Democrats will fail to persuade four GOP lawmakers to break ranks with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.),…
Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ foreign policy failure
Jackson Diehl writes: When the postmortems are written about President Trump’s foreign policy — sooner, we have to hope, rather than later — one phrase will stand out as a hallmark of failure: “maximum pressure.” Much of this president’s international engagement has been a hodgepodge of impulsive and contradictory actions. But to the extent there is a Trump doctrine, it amounts to this: Use tariffs, sanctions and other means of economic pressure to compel U.S. adversaries — and, as often,…
Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’s phone ‘hacked by Saudi crown prince’
The Guardian reports: The Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos had his mobile phone “hacked” in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message that had apparently been sent from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, sources have told the Guardian. The encrypted message from the number used by Mohammed bin Salman is believed to have included a malicious file that infiltrated the phone of the world’s richest man, according to the results of a digital forensic analysis. This analysis…
Glenn Greenwald charged with cybercrimes in Brazil
The New York Times reports: Federal prosecutors in Brazil on Tuesday charged the American journalist Glenn Greenwald with cybercrimes for his role in the spreading of cellphone messages that have embarrassed prosecutors and tarnished the image of an anti-corruption task force. In a criminal complaint made public on Tuesday, prosecutors in the capital, Brasília, accused Mr. Greenwald of being part of a “criminal organization” that hacked into the cellphones of several prosecutors and other public officials last year. Mr. Greenwald…
The nightmare economy created by Silicon Valley’s overlords
Lia Russell writes: Vanessa Bain was less than a year into her gig as an Instacart shopper when the company announced it would no longer allow tipping on its app. Instacart instead began imposing a 10 percent “service fee” that replaced the previous default tip of 10 percent. The change had no impact on customers, who could be forgiven for assuming that the new fee would still go to the workers who shopped for their groceries and delivered them to…
Psychology still skews Western and affluent. Can it be fixed?
By Michael Schulson, January 20, 2020 When Cristine Legare gives talks to groups of psychology researchers, she likes to take a quick poll of the room. How many of them, she asks, consider themselves to be “Western ethnopsychologists?” The question does not go over well. “They’re like, ‘What?’” Legare, a developmental psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, said. “It doesn’t resonate at all.” That confusion is precisely Legare’s point. For decades, the overwhelming majority of psychology research has…