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Will courts hold Trump accountable after Congress, Mueller failures?

Will courts hold Trump accountable after Congress, Mueller failures?

Barbara McQuade writes: Truth still matters in some places. A courtroom is one of them. In imposing a 40-month sentence on Roger Stone, Judge Amy Berman Jackson did something that the executive and legislative branches have been unwilling to do lately — defend truth. Stone appeared before Jackson in her courtroom in Washington, D.C., on Thursday following his conviction at trial of seven counts of lying to Congress, obstructing justice and tampering with a witness. The crimes occurred in the…

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How conservatives learned to wield power inside Facebook

How conservatives learned to wield power inside Facebook

The Washington Post reports: Facebook created “Project P” — for propaganda — in the hectic weeks after the 2016 presidential election and quickly found dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports ahead of Donald Trump’s surprise victory. Nearly all were based overseas, had financial motives and displayed a clear rightward bent. In a world of perfect neutrality, which Facebook espouses as its goal, the political tilt of the pages shouldn’t have mattered. But in a videoconference between Facebook’s…

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Billionaires don’t like Bernie

Billionaires don’t like Bernie

Politico reports: Former Goldman Sachs CEO and lifelong Democrat Lloyd Blankfein told the Financial Times in an interview published Friday that he could have an easier time voting to reelect President Donald Trump than for Sen. Bernie Sanders, should the latter secure the Democratic nomination for president. “I think I might find it harder to vote for Bernie than for Trump,” the billionaire banker said, though he pointed out that the Democratic primary has just kicked off and the nomination…

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Ancient Antarctic ice melt caused extreme sea level rise 129,000 years ago – and it could happen again

Ancient Antarctic ice melt caused extreme sea level rise 129,000 years ago – and it could happen again

A blue ice area, part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Professor Chris Turney, Author provided By Chris Fogwill, Keele University; Chris Turney, UNSW, and Zoë Thomas, UNSW Rising global temperatures and warming ocean waters are causing one of the world’s coldest places to melt. While we know that human activity is causing climate change and driving rapid changes in Antarctica, the potential impacts that a warmer world would have on this region remain uncertain. Our new research might be…

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It’s well past time to bury the ‘Bernie is unelectable’ trope

It’s well past time to bury the ‘Bernie is unelectable’ trope

Kirsten Powers writes: There has been a mass freak-out among the Democratic establishment as Bernie Sanders continues to surge in the polls. In two surveys released Tuesday, the Vermont Senator has opened up a double-digit lead over his closest competitors in the Democratic primary. The desperation has caused many Democrats to set their sights on former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg as the man who will save us all from Donald Trump. But first he’ll have to save us…

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Rohrabacher confirms he offered Trump pardon to Assange for proof Russia didn’t hack DNC email

Rohrabacher confirms he offered Trump pardon to Assange for proof Russia didn’t hack DNC email

Michael Isikoff reports: Former California Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher confirmed in a new interview that during a three-hour meeting at the Ecuadorian Embassy in August 2017, he told Julian Assange he would get President Trump to give him a pardon if he turned over information proving the Russians had not been the source of internal Democratic National Committee emails published by WikiLeaks. In a phone interview with Yahoo News, Rohrabacher said his goal during the meeting was to find proof…

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A disaster in Syria as Russia and Turkey clash

A disaster in Syria as Russia and Turkey clash

Ishaan Tharoor writes: Almost a decade into its ruinous civil war, Syria is experiencing perhaps its single biggest humanitarian crisis. An offensive by the Syrian regime in the last remaining rebel-held enclaves in the country’s northwest has sparked an exodus of more than 800,000 civilians, mostly women and children, since Dec. 1. For some of them, it’s the third or fourth time they have fled bombardments in a war that has claimed close to 400,000 lives and displaced more than…

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Far-right shooting shatters an already fragile sense of security in Germany

Far-right shooting shatters an already fragile sense of security in Germany

The New York Times reports: Hanau, a small city in western Germany, considered itself a melting pot, an island of tolerance. That was before a racist extremist opened fire at a hookah bar Wednesday night, killing nine mostly young people in Germany’s worst attack in recent memory. A working-class community just outside Frankfurt, Hanau was ethnically diverse long before the issue of immigration began tearing apart German politics with the arrival of nearly a million asylum seekers five years ago….

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What the Taliban wants

What the Taliban wants

Sirajuddin Haqqani, the deputy leader of the Taliban, writes: We are aware of the concerns and questions in and outside Afghanistan about the kind of government we would have after the foreign troops withdraw. My response to such concerns is that it will depend on a consensus among Afghans. We should not let our worries get in the way of a process of genuine discussion and deliberation free for the first time from foreign domination and interference. It is important…

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Think the U.S. is more polarized than ever? You don’t know history

Think the U.S. is more polarized than ever? You don’t know history

Union dead at Gettysburg, July 1863. National Archives, Timothy H. O’Sullivan photographer By Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia It has become common to say that the United States in 2020 is more divided politically and culturally than at any other point in our national past. As a historian who has written and taught about the Civil War era for several decades, I know that current divisions pale in comparison to those of the mid-19th century. Between Abraham Lincoln’s election…

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Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities

Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities

Bruce Bower writes: Nebelivka, a Ukrainian village of about 700 people, sits amid rolling hills and grassy fields. Here at the edge of Eastern Europe, empty space stretches to the horizon. It wasn’t always so. Beneath the surface of Nebelivka’s surrounding landscape and at nearby archaeological sites, roughly 6,000-year-old remnants of what were possibly some of the world’s first cities are emerging from obscurity. These low-density, spread-out archaeological sites are known as megasites, a term that underscores both their immense…

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Quid pro quo: Trump offered Assange pardon if he covered up Russian hack, lawyer claims

Quid pro quo: Trump offered Assange pardon if he covered up Russian hack, lawyer claims

The Daily Beast reports: A lawyer for Julian Assange has claimed in court that President Trump offered to pardon Assange if the WikiLeaks founder agreed to help cover up Russia’s involvement in hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee. Assange’s lawyers said on Wednesday that former Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher offered Assange the deal in 2017, a year after emails that damaged Hillary Clinton in the presidential race had been published. WikiLeaks posted the stolen DNC emails after they were…

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Trump is passing most of the checkpoints on the way to dictatorship

Trump is passing most of the checkpoints on the way to dictatorship

Stephen Walt writes: Trump has railed against the so-called Deep State ever since he became president, for one simple reason: He objects to any institution that might serve as a check on his own actions. That’s not how presidents behave; it’s what dictators do. Look what happened last year: Following well-established legal procedures, patriotic civil service members brought a case of questionable presidential conduct to light, beginning with the whistleblower’s report about Trump’s attempt to get the government of Ukraine…

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Post-impeachment, Trump declares himself the ‘chief law enforcement officer’ of America

Post-impeachment, Trump declares himself the ‘chief law enforcement officer’ of America

The Washington Post reports: During his Senate impeachment trial, Democrats repeatedly asserted that President Trump is “not above the law.” But since his acquittal two weeks ago, analysts say, the president has taken a series of steps aimed at showing that, essentially, he is the law. On Tuesday, Trump granted clemency to a clutch of political allies, circumventing the usual Justice Department process. The pardons and commutations followed Trump’s moves to punish witnesses in his impeachment trial, publicly intervene in…

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