Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: Shortly after Joseph Mifsud’s efforts to help connect a Trump adviser with the Kremlin were detailed in court filings, an Italian reporter found him at a university in Rome, where he was serving as a visiting professor. “I never got any money from the Russians: my conscience is clear,” Mifsud told La Repubblica. “I am not a secret agent.” Then Mifsud disappeared. The Maltese-born academic has not surfaced publicly since that October 2017 interview, days after…

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Michael Tomasky writes: A number of observers, myself included, have written pieces in recent years arguing that the Republican Party is no longer simply trying to compete with and defeat the Democratic Party on a level playing field. Today, rather than simply playing the game, the Republicans are simultaneously trying to rig the game’s rules so that they never lose. The aggressive gerrymandering, which the Supreme Court just declared to be a matter beyond its purview; the voter suppression schemes;…

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ProPublica reports: Members of a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in Texas on Monday and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant, according to screenshots of their postings. In one exchange, group members responded with indifference and wisecracks to the post of a news story about a 16-year-old…

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The New York Times reports: From a seemingly fanciful tweet to a historic step into North Korean territory, President Trump’s largely improvised third meeting on Sunday with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, was a masterpiece of drama, the kind of made-for-TV spectacle that Mr. Trump treasures. But for weeks before the meeting, which started as a Twitter offer by the president for Mr. Kim to drop by at the Demilitarized Zone and “say hello,” a real idea has been…

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Fred Kaplan writes: It is tempting to chortle over the string of inanities that President Donald Trump unfurled at the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, this weekend. Asked about the status of “Western liberalism,” which Russian President Vladimir Putin had just pronounced dead in an interview with the Financial Times, Trump ranted about liberal Democrats in California, apparently thinking that’s what the term was referring to. Asked for his views about bussing, which had been a hot topic at the…

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David Rothkopf writes: As the first round of debates among Democratic candidates for president clearly showed, the intellectual vitality of the Democratic Party right now is coming from progressives. On issue after issue, the vast majority of the candidates embraced views that have been seen as progressive priorities for years—whether that may have been a pledge to provide healthcare for all or vows to repeal tax cuts benefiting the rich, whether it was prioritizing combating our climate crisis or seeking…

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Kenan Malik writes: The relationship between liberalism, radicalism and conservatism began to change in the last decades of the 20th century, largely as the left disintegrated. The idea of an alternative to capitalism seemed to many chimerical, more so after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even before the Berlin Wall had come down, a new kind of economic liberalism, unstitched from the restraints of social need, had emerged – what many now call “neoliberalism”. At its core was a…

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Der Spiegel reports: It was just before midnight when Fabian Heinz lost his faith in Europe. The Alan Kurdi, a ship belonging to Sea Eye, a German sea-rescue organization, was bobbing up and down between Lampedusa, in Italy, and Malta. Heinz, a 29-year-old photographer from Würzburg, remembers holding watch on deck that evening. He looked up from his post to the dozens of refugees that he and other rescuers had saved from the sea near the Libyan coast. They were…

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The Washington Post reports: President Trump on Saturday professed to be “very angry” over the murder last year of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at a Saudi consulate, but the president again declined to pin responsibility on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom he called “my friend.” Trump said nothing about Khashoggi at a photo op Salman before their meeting on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit here, ignoring shouted questions about the matter from reporters. In brief…

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