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White House blocks Sondland testimony, obstructing impeachment inquiry

White House blocks Sondland testimony, obstructing impeachment inquiry

The New York Times reports: The White House all but declared war on the House impeachment inquiry on Tuesday, intervening for the first time to block the testimony of a key witness as President Trump signaled his administration would try to starve investigators of more witnesses and documents. The decision to block Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, from speaking with investigators for three House committees came just hours before he was to appear on…

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Russia opens digital interference front in Libya

Russia opens digital interference front in Libya

Nathaniel Greenberg writes: In February 2015, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi presided over a potentially momentous shift in the history of Arab news media. On the sidelines of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s official visit to Cairo, the country’s oldest state-run newspaper Al-Ahram signed a “memorandum of understanding” with the Director General of the Russian-backed media group Rossiya Segodyna, or Russia Today. While attention focused on Russian investments in Egypt’s Zohr gas complex, Russian construction of an industrial zone near the…

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What the Bureau of Land Management shake-up could mean for public lands and their climate impact

What the Bureau of Land Management shake-up could mean for public lands and their climate impact

InsideClimate News reports: The changes underway at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management might not seem like much: A few hundred employees are being relocated from offices near the White House and dispersed throughout the West, while agency leaders move in next door to energy companies in newly leased headquarters in Grand Junction, Colorado. But along with the appointment of a self-described Sagebrush Rebel as acting director, the shuffling of staff could help position conservatives to accomplish substantial political goals:…

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‘Another Trump gift to Putin’: Reactions to administration considering pulling out of the Open Skies Treaty

‘Another Trump gift to Putin’: Reactions to administration considering pulling out of the Open Skies Treaty

Business Insider reports: The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee has expressed alarm with the possibility that the US will pull out of a vital treaty with European allies and Russia. Rep. Eliot Engel of New York on Monday sent a letter to the US national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, in which he said he was “deeply concerned” by reports that the White House was considering withdrawing from the Open Skies Treaty. “I request your personal engagement on this…

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Trump’s America shines bright for Europe’s radical New Right

Trump’s America shines bright for Europe’s radical New Right

By Sylvia Taschka, Wayne State University Donald Trump might not be as popular in Europe as Barack Obama was, but for many groups on the far-right of Europe’s political spectrum, he has become a heroic figure. “With Trump, the pride of a whole population has awoken … Their hope is captured in one sentence ‘Make America Great Again,’” said Martin Sellner, the leader of Austria’s Identitarian Movement, one of these far-right groups, in a German magazine in 2016. “The ‘Trump…

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Trump ‘has no spine’ and got ‘rolled’ by Erdogan, says National Security Council official

Trump ‘has no spine’ and got ‘rolled’ by Erdogan, says National Security Council official

Newsweek reports: Donald Trump got “rolled” by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a National Security Council source with direct knowledge of the discussions told Newsweek. In a scheduled phone call on Sunday afternoon between President Trump and President Erdogan, Trump said he would withdraw U.S. forces from northern Syria. The phone call was scheduled after Turkey announced it was planning to invade Syria, and hours after Erdogan reinforced his army units at the Syrian-Turkish border and issued his strongest threat…

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Latest betrayal of Kurds risks undermining defeat of ISIS

Latest betrayal of Kurds risks undermining defeat of ISIS

Martin Chulov writes: In early 2015, as Islamic State trampled over armies of the Middle East and menaced the west, the US turned to the Kurds for help. It was a familiar call, having been repeated over the decades whenever Washington needed a friend in the region. The outcome has been similar too. Four years on, the people who helped safeguard the global order have been abandoned by the US on the eve of a Turkish push into Kurdish lands…

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Unless we act now, ISIS will rise again

Unless we act now, ISIS will rise again

Last month, an open letter from national security professionals to Western governments warned [PDF]: ISIS may have been defeated on the battlefield; but thousands of Western fighters and their families remain in detention in Syria and Iraq. We do not expect terrorists to attract much sympathy. But the majority of detainees are not terrorists; they are children. At the largest detention camp, al-Hol in northeastern Syria, around two-thirds of the approximately 70,000 detainees are under the age of twelve. The…

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U.S. military leaders struggle to accommodate a commander-in-chief who is both ignorant and capricious

U.S. military leaders struggle to accommodate a commander-in-chief who is both ignorant and capricious

Mark Bowden writes: For most of the past two decades, American troops have been deployed all over the world—to about 150 countries. During that time, hundreds of thousands of young men and women have experienced combat, and a generation of officers have come of age dealing with the practical realities of war. They possess a deep well of knowledge and experience. For the past three years, these highly trained professionals have been commanded by Donald Trump. To get a sense…

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Judge rejects Trump’s ‘repugnant’ immunity claim in tax-return ruling

Judge rejects Trump’s ‘repugnant’ immunity claim in tax-return ruling

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump suffered a major setback in the long struggle to conceal his tax returns on Monday, when he lost a federal court ruling in New York. A judge ruled that the president’s claim to immunity while in office was “repugnant” and said Manhattan’s district attorney could subpoena eight years of Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns from his accountants, Mazars USA. An appeals court blocked any immediate handover of the records but the escalating court battle…

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Impeachment tentacles spread throughout Trump’s team

Impeachment tentacles spread throughout Trump’s team

Politico reports: The tentacles of the Democratic impeachment investigation are extending far beyond the arms of President Donald Trump. The vice president’s office, acting chief of staff’s office, State Department, Energy Department, Office of Management and Budget and Justice Department are among the government entities quickly finding themselves ensnared in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, joining a huge squad of White House lawyers, Cabinet officials and national security staffers — many of them detailed from the Pentagon, CIA and elsewhere in…

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The center of the Milky Way exploded just three million years ago — the recent past in galactic history

The center of the Milky Way exploded just three million years ago — the recent past in galactic history

Cosmos reports: A titanic, expanding beam of energy sprang from close to the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way just 3.5 million years ago, sending a cone-shaped burst of radiation through both poles of the Galaxy and out into deep space. That’s the finding arising from research conducted by a team of scientists led by Professor Joss Bland-Hawthorn from Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D) and soon to…

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What Putin got from Trump’s Ukraine phone call

What Putin got from Trump’s Ukraine phone call

Molly K. McKew writes: A year ago, I was in Kiev when a young Ukrainian soldier was killed. Olesya Baklanova, 19, enlisted in the Ukrainian Armed Forces as soon as she was eligible and fought to be assigned a combat post. Deployed to the front lines of her country’s war against Russia, she was killed during the night while manning an observation post, shot by a sniper stationed among the Russian and proxy forces dug in a few hundred meters…

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‘If you pour poison unremittingly onto the land for 70 years — which is what we’ve done — you’re going to kill everything’

‘If you pour poison unremittingly onto the land for 70 years — which is what we’ve done — you’re going to kill everything’

  One in seven British species is threatened with extinction, according to a new report by the country’s main wildlife and conservation charities. The study shows there have been strong or moderate declines in 41% of all species since 1970.