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The inside story of Christopher Steele’s Trump dossier

The inside story of Christopher Steele’s Trump dossier

Jane Mayer writes: For nearly three years, President Trump has spun an alternate reality in which he was not helped and tainted by Russia during the 2016 Presidential campaign but, rather, his political opponents and his accusers were. During a rambling fifty-three-minute live phone interview with “Fox & Friends” on Friday, Trump insisted again that the plot to block his election and bring him down once he was installed in the White House was “perhaps the biggest scandal in the…

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Inside Iran’s plot to attack Saudi Arabia

Inside Iran’s plot to attack Saudi Arabia

Reuters reports: Four months before a swarm of drones and missiles crippled the world’s biggest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia, Iranian security officials gathered at a heavily fortified compound in Tehran. The group included the top echelons of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite branch of the Iranian military whose portfolio includes missile development and covert operations. The main topic that day in May: How to punish the United States for pulling out of a landmark nuclear treaty…

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Chief rabbi’s criticism of Labour strikes a chord among many Jews in UK

Chief rabbi’s criticism of Labour strikes a chord among many Jews in UK

The Guardian reports: Plenty of Jews in the UK would say the chief rabbi does not speak for them. They may be from different traditions in Judaism – progressive or ultra-Orthodox – or they may be secular. But many, probably most, agree with the thrust of his unprecedented intervention in next month’s general election. Ephraim Mirvis, the UK’s most senior Jewish leader who represents Orthodox Judaism, accused Jeremy Corbyn of allowing a “poison sanctioned from the top” to take root…

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Thoreau, the scientist

Thoreau, the scientist

Curt Stager writes: Much more has been said and written about Thoreau’s philosopher-poet side than his naturalist side, but as a scientist I am more interested in the latter. The journals that he kept from 1837 to 1861 were so full of natural history observations that they might have become a major scientific work if he had not died of a lung ailment at age 44. He probably thought so, too. Two months before his death in 1862 he wrote…

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What makes a polymath?

What makes a polymath?

David Robson writes: If it weren’t for an actress and a pianist, GPS and WiFi might not exist. In the late 1930s and early 40s, Hedy Lamarr was already the toast of Hollywood, famed for her portrayals of femme fatales. Few of her contemporaries knew that her other great passion was inventing. (She had previously designed more streamlined aeroplanes for a lover, the aviation tycoon Howard Hughes.) Lamarr met a kindred spirit in George Antheil, however – an avant-garde pianist,…

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Why Giuliani singled out two Ukrainian oligarchs to help look for dirt on Biden

Why Giuliani singled out two Ukrainian oligarchs to help look for dirt on Biden

The New York Times reports: They were two Ukrainian oligarchs with American legal problems. One had been indicted on federal bribery charges. The other was embroiled in a vast banking scandal and was reported to be under investigation by the F.B.I. And they had one more thing in common: Both had been singled out by Rudolph W. Giuliani and pressed to assist in his wide-ranging hunt for information damaging to one of President Trump’s leading political rivals, former Vice President…

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Investigators scrutinize Giuliani firm and donations to Trump super PAC as part of broad probe

Investigators scrutinize Giuliani firm and donations to Trump super PAC as part of broad probe

The Washington Post reports: The federal investigation into two associates of Rudolph W. Giuliani is exploring a wide range of potential crimes — includingwire fraud and failure to register as a foreign agent — as prosecutors dig into the pair’s interactions with the president’s personal lawyer and the main pro-Trump super PAC, according to people familiar with the investigation. Giuliani’s dealings with the two men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, are being investigated by federal prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s…

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Don McGahn must testify about time as White House lawyer, judge rules

Don McGahn must testify about time as White House lawyer, judge rules

Politico reports: Don McGahn must testify to Congress about his time as the White House’s top lawyer, a federal judge ruled Monday — a decision that will put pressure on other reluctant Trump administration witnesses to testify about President Donald Trump’s actions. In a ruling that could reshape the balance of power between Congress and the executive branch, U.S. District Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson ruled that McGahn, who spent 30 hours talking to former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team,…

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In firing Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, Trump recklessly crosses another line

In firing Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, Trump recklessly crosses another line

David Ignatius writes: ​President Trump’s attempt to manipulate military justice had a sorry outcome Sunday with the firing of Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer. For the past nine months, Spencer had tried to dissuade Trump from dictating special treatment for Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher — but in the end Spencer was sacked for his efforts to protect his service. ​With Spencer’s firing, Trump has recklessly crossed a line he had generally observed before, which had exempted the military from his…

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I was a juror in Roger Stone’s trial. I am proud of how we came to our decision

I was a juror in Roger Stone’s trial. I am proud of how we came to our decision

Seth Cousins writes: During the first half of November, I made a brief journey with 14 fellow Americans, all of them strangers to me. Together we were the 12 jurors (and two alternates) sitting in judgment of longtime political consultant Roger Stone. We sat through five days of testimony and half a day of closing arguments. After eight hours of deliberation, we returned guilty verdicts on each of the seven counts we were charged to consider. Since we delivered that…

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How American anti-Semitism reflects the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of religious liberty

How American anti-Semitism reflects the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of religious liberty

A mother hugs her son at the memorial of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27, 2019, the first anniversary of the shooting at the synagogue. AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar By Tisa Wenger, Yale University Americans recently observed the first anniversary of the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which 11 were killed and six wounded. A year earlier, white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted the slogan, “Jews shall not replace us.”…

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The man behind China’s detention of a million Muslims

The man behind China’s detention of a million Muslims

The Associated Press reports: After bloody race riots rocked China’s far west a decade ago, the ruling Communist Party turned to a rare figure in their ranks to restore order: a Han Chinese official fluent in Uighur, the language of the local Turkic Muslim minority. Now, newly revealed, confidential documents show that the official, Zhu Hailun, played a key role in planning and executing a campaign that has swept up a million or more Uighurs into detention camps. Published in…

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Emails reveal extensive effort in White House to contrive justification for Trump’s decision to block Ukraine military aid

Emails reveal extensive effort in White House to contrive justification for Trump’s decision to block Ukraine military aid

The Washington Post reports: A confidential White House review of President Trump’s decision to place a hold on military aid to Ukraine has turned up hundreds of documents that reveal extensive efforts to generate an after-the-fact justification for the decision and a debate over whether the delay was legal, according to three people familiar with the records. The research by the White House Counsel’s Office, which was triggered by a congressional impeachment inquiry announced in September, includes early August email…

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Newly released documents reveal details of Pompeo’s role in Ukraine affair

Newly released documents reveal details of Pompeo’s role in Ukraine affair

The New York Times reports: Internal State Department emails and documents released late Friday further implicate Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a campaign orchestrated this year by President Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to pressure Ukraine for political favors. The emails indicate that Mr. Pompeo spoke at least twice by telephone with Mr. Giuliani in March as Mr. Giuliani was urging Ukraine to investigate Mr. Trump’s rivals, and trying to oust a respected American ambassador to…

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