Attention to the Unseen

The Intercept reports: In January 2017, three days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, a businessman from the United Arab Emirates was invited to a lavish dinner planned by Trump’s longtime ally Thomas J. Barrack Jr., who was chair of the president’s inaugural committee. The guest list placed Rashid al-Malik, a onetime business associate of Barrack’s, amid more than 100 foreign diplomats and top members of the incoming administration. The president-elect himself made a surprise appearance at the gathering. Al-Malik’s name…

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One and a half million views of @rafaelbehr’s Brexit rant now. I think people may feel he has a point pic.twitter.com/G62NWH9WEq — Alan White (@aljwhite) June 10, 2019

Middle East Eye reports: A secret bomb factory run by members of the Iran-backed movement Hezbollah was found on the outskirts of London in 2015, with as much as three metric tonnes of bomb-making ingredients, the Daily Telegraph reported on Monday. The case, which was kept “hidden from the public”, unfolded after the British police and the MI5 intelligence service were tipped-off by a foreign government, security sources told the daily. Thousands of disposable ice packs containing three tonnes of…

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The New York Times reports: As the 23 candidates seeking the Democratic nomination struggle to distinguish themselves, Senator Elizabeth Warren has set herself apart with a series of sweeping proposals that would significantly remake the American economy, covering everything from tax policy to business regulation to student debt relief. Together, her plans offer a detailed portrait of what her presidency might look like. Many of the proposals from Ms. Warren, a former Harvard law professor and hawk on financial regulation,…

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Reuters reports: Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg on Tuesday urged a stop to the “endless war” that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and a return to the Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate accord scrapped by Republican President Donald Trump. Buttigieg, a Navy reservist who was deployed to Afghanistan, repudiated Trump’s go-it-alone, America First approach to the world in the first foreign policy speech of his 2020 White House campaign. He outlined a policy based on “America at our…

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Bloomberg reports: China has spent much of the past five years tightening its grip over Hong Kong with little challenge. Now, hundreds of thousands in the city are fighting back. Hong Kong is bracing for a potentially historic showdown over extradition legislation that could for the first time subject residents to face justice in Chinese courts, further eroding the city’s autonomy. Opponents on Sunday staged one of the largest protests since the former British colony’s return to China: Organizers said…

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Nicholas Kristof writes: To stop the flow of migrants, Trump has called for a wall at the Mexico border that would cost billions of dollars, has separated children from parents for months, has cut off aid to Central America and, most recently, threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico. The result? The torrent keeps getting bigger, with twice as many migrants seized at the border in each of the last few months as a year earlier. Trump’s strategy so far seems…

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The Guardian reports: A real estate company part-owned by Jared Kushner has received $90m in foreign funding from an opaque offshore vehicle since he entered the White House as a senior adviser to his father-in-law Donald Trump. Investment has flowed from overseas to the company, Cadre, while Kushner works as an international envoy for the US, according to corporate filings and interviews. The money came through a vehicle run by Goldman Sachs in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven that…

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