Attention to the Unseen

Rick Noack writes: More than 20 nations signed a letter this week forcefully condemning China’s apparent systematic detention of minority Uighurs and other Muslims — a landmark step toward holding Beijing accountable for what human rights groups and the United States have described as a policy of mass incarceration based solely on ethnicity. The letter to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights was also notable for another reason: that it was written at all. The United States has…

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Peter Wehner, who served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and as a senior aide to George W. Bush, describes the hypocrisy of a party that has yet to demand the resignation of Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, and that has aligned itself with a president who is a sexual predator.   The Guardian reports: Alexander Acosta, the US labor secretary under fire for having granted Jeffrey Epstein immunity from federal prosecution in 2008, after the billionaire was investigated…

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The New York Times reports: It was supposed to be an exclusive party at Mar-a-Lago, Donald J. Trump’s members-only club in Palm Beach, Fla. But other than the two dozen or so women flown in to provide the entertainment, the only guests were Mr. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. The year was 1992 and the event was a “calendar girl” competition, something that George Houraney, a Florida-based businessman who ran American Dream Enterprise, had organized at Mr. Trump’s request. “I arranged…

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Jennifer Szalai writes: “American Carnage” isn’t just another drop in the deluge of Trump books; in fact, it isn’t really a Trump book at all. Instead it’s a fascinating look at a Republican Party that initially scoffed at the incursion of a philandering reality-TV star with zero political experience and now readily accommodates him. [Tim] Alberta, a political correspondent for the conservative magazine National Review before moving to Politico, brings more than a decade of reporting and a real understanding…

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Patrick Wintour writes: The resignation of Sir Kim Darroch followed the failure of the probable next prime minister, Boris Johnson, to say he supported him staying in post, despite being given repeated chances to do so during his TV debate on Tuesday night with Jeremy Hunt. As the current Foreign Office minister Alan Duncan put it, by six times refusing to back the ambassador, Johnson had thrown him under a bus. Without the backing of the US president or his…

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Politico reports: When Elizabeth Warren said earlier this year she was swearing off fundraisers, many Democratic strategists saw it as a sign of desperation from a flailing candidate. But that gamble against conventional wisdom — which is paying off handsomely, given the $19.1 million she raised in the second quarter — is far from the only way Warren is defying the traditional playbook for running a modern presidential campaign. The campaign has gone without an outside polling firm, and says…

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A+ trolling… https://t.co/mufVj0IoBF — Keerthik Sasidharan (@KS1729) July 9, 2019 The Guardian reports: Theresa May faces a full-blown diplomatic standoff with the US after Donald Trump condemned Britain’s “stupid” ambassador to Washington over leaked memos critical of the White House, as Downing Street insisted Sir Kim Darroch had its full support. [Continue reading…] Richard Wolffe writes: Inept and dysfunctional are two of the more diplomatic words you could choose to describe the Trump administration. Colossally moronic and self-defeating might be…

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Michael Isikoff reports: In the summer of 2016, Russian intelligence agents secretly planted a fake report claiming that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton, giving rise to a notorious conspiracy theory that captivated conservative activists and was later promoted from inside President Trump’s White House, a Yahoo News investigation has found. Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, first circulated a phony “bulletin” — disguised to read…

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The Guardian reports: Proroguing the House of Commons to achieve a no-deal Brexit would be “the end of parliamentary democracy” in the UK, Dominic Grieve has said in defending his move to seek to remove the option. Grieve’s amendment, which has cross-party support including from a handful of fellow Conservative MPs, is to the Northern Ireland bill going through the Commons, and would require fortnightly reports on that country’s formation of an executive, which has been vacant since 2017. Speaking…

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