Attention to the Unseen

Adam Serwer writes: Over the past two weeks, a parade of sober and coldly furious civil servants has come forward to testify before Congress about President Donald Trump’s decision to withhold congressionally approved aid to Ukraine. Acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor emphasized that “the security assistance we provide is crucial to Ukraine’s defense,” invoking the sacrifice of Ukrainian soldiers fighting Russia. Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine, testified that “the stakes for the United States in…

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The Intercept reports: To launch her campaign, back in January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had a number of locations to choose from. She could have started in Norman, Oklahoma, the setting of her ragged-edge-of-the-middle-class origin story, where her prairie populism could have been brought to the fore. She spent years in Houston, Philadelphia, and Boston, too, all chock full of their own useful imagery for a campaign. Instead, she chose Lawrence, Massachusetts, for her opening salvo, linking her campaign to the…

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Simon Tisdall writes: It’s long been clear that Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump’s Middle East mini-me, will do almost anything to keep his job as Israel’s prime minister. His resort to overtly racist, divisive tactics last week in a dispute over who will form the next government was ugly, yet unsurprising. Netanyahu’s vicious brand of hard-right identity politics has become a familiar blister on the face of Israel’s democracy. A bigger mystery is how Netanyahu has got away with it for…

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The New York Times reports: Republicans have sought for weeks amid the impeachment inquiry to shift attention to President Trump’s demands that Ukraine investigate any 2016 election meddling, defending it as a legitimate concern while Democrats accuse Mr. Trump of pursuing fringe theories for his benefit. The Republican defense of Mr. Trump became central to the impeachment proceedings when Fiona Hill, a respected Russia scholar and former senior White House official, added a harsh critique during testimony on Thursday. She…

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Politico reports: [During a nearly hour-long interview] Trump repeated his claims, which had been debunked less than 24 hours earlier by no less than his former top Russia adviser, that Ukraine is harboring the servers of the Democratic National Committee that the FBI determined had been hacked by Russia in the lead-up to the 2016 election. “It is very interesting, it is very interesting, they have the server, right? From the DNC,” Trump said. “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade…

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The Washington Post reports: A sudden move to raise fuel prices in Iran has sparked nationwide protests over the past week and, in turn, drawn a fierce crackdown by security forces, marking some of the worst violence in the country in years. Scores have been reported killed. The protests have flared in many of the same areas that experienced unrest two years ago, when demonstrators protested a similar proposal to slash state subsidies. Then, as now, lower-income Iranians rose up…

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  A Washington Post editorial says: A pillar of the Republican defense of President Trump during the impeachment inquiry has been that he had good reason to believe that Ukraine intervened against him during the 2016 presidential election — and that he therefore was justified in demanding that the new Ukrainian government investigate. That made the testimony Thursday of Fiona Hill, who served Mr. Trump as the National Security Council’s senior director for Europe and Russia for more than two…

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