Music: Balanço — ‘Metti Una Sera A Cena’ (Jazzanova Remix)
Boris Johnson hasn’t been as positive about Donald Trump as the latter imagines
Robert Mackey writes: Washington and Westminster politics seemed to merge on Monday, as Donald Trump arrived in London for a state visit — tweeting insults from Air Force One at the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan — just as Boris Johnson, described by the American president as “a friend of mine,” officially launched his campaign to become the country’s new prime minister. Before his trip, Trump had warm words for Johnson in an interview with The Sun, Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid….
Trump’s defiance of the rule of law
Paul Rosenzweig writes: President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that his administration is the “most transparent in history,” and that it has “cooperated totally” with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, or words to that effect. But the truth is quite the opposite. No prior administration has pushed the envelope of the law to deflect outside scrutiny to the same degree as this one. In a recent letter from the White House to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the…
Pete Buttigieg’s plan to overhaul the Supreme Court
NBC News reports: As Democrats agonize over a spate of state laws restricting abortion rights and even a potential reversal of Roe v. Wade, one 2020 presidential candidate is putting an ambitious, long-shot plan to reform the Supreme Court front-and-center of his campaign. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has talked about his plan to overhaul the high court since his first days as a candidate. In short, it calls for expanding the number of justices from nine…
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao’s unorthodox requests raise ethics questions
The New York Times reports: The email arrived in Washington before dawn. An official at the American Embassy in Beijing was urgently seeking advice from the State Department about an “ethics question.” “I am writing you because Mission China is in the midst of preparing for a visit from Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao,” the official wrote in October 2017. Ms. Chao’s office had made a series of unorthodox requests related to her first scheduled visit to China as…
Orientalism: Kushner questions whether Palestinians can govern themselves
Bloomberg reports: Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner said in an interview that the Palestinians aren’t yet able to govern themselves and declined to promise them an independent state in the White House’s long-awaited Mideast peace plan. “The hope is that they over time will become capable of governing,” Kushner said in an interview with Axios on HBO that aired on Sunday. Kushner is leading a White House effort to draft a new peace proposal for the Israelis…
The seasons after the Arab Spring
Gilbert Achcar writes: Images of popular protests that recall the revolutionary movement of 2011 have dominated news from the Arabic-speaking world for months. Uprisings began in Sudan on 19 December and in Algeria with the marches of Friday 22 February. They revived memories of the huge, peaceful demonstrations early in the Arab Spring that shook Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Syria. Commentators have been more cautious this time, asking questions rather than commenting directly, mindful of the bitter disappointment…
In ecology studies and selfless ants, E.O. Wilson finds hope for the future
Claudia Dreifus writes: No one else in biology has ever had a career quite like that of Edward O. Wilson. One of the world’s leading authorities on ants, an influential evolution theorist, and a prolific, highly honored author, E. O. Wilson—his first name comes and goes from bylines, but the middle initial is ever-present—has over several decades been at the center of scientific controversies that spilled out of the journals and into wider public awareness. Among activists in the environmental…
Music: Joan Chamorro presents Carla Motis, Èlia Bastida & Andrea Motis — ‘Doodlin”
UK and Trump are diametrically opposed on the necessity of tackling the climate crisis
Mark Lynas writes: Fresh from the latest disasters on Brexit, surely the last thing the UK needs is a state visit from the world’s provocateur-in-chief, Donald Trump. Trump’s position on Brexit — bring it on — may be divisive, but his denialist and pro-coal view on global heating and the climate crisis is even more extreme and makes him particularly unwelcome at this moment in Britain. The British parliament declared a ‘climate emergency’ in May, while a day later the…
Theresa May should issue a powerful rejection of Trump and the far-right agenda he embodies
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, writes: Praising the “very fine people on both sides” when torch-wielding white supremacists and antisemites marched through the streets clashing with anti-racist campaigners. Threatening to veto a ban on the use of rape as a weapon of war. Setting an immigration policy that forcefully separates young children from their parents at the border. The deliberate use of xenophobia, racism and “otherness” as an electoral tactic. Introducing a travel ban to a number of predominately…
A divisive president landing in Normandy
Rachel Donadio writes: [On the 40th anniversary of the Normandy landings, Ronald Reagan] spoke of how the rangers had scaled the cliff, and also of “a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest.” That line reads differently today, after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where liberation has proved more vexing. Reagan also spoke out against isolationism. “We in America have learned bitter lessons from two world wars: It is…
Trump’s tariffs will threaten GOP’s Senate majority
National Journal reports: President Trump’s abrupt threat to impose tariffs on Mexico doesn’t just threaten to stagnate the country’s economy and raise the price of goods for consumers back home. It poses a serious threat to Senate Republicans, who are fighting to hold their majority in battleground states that will suffer from a protracted trade war with our southern neighbor. It’s no coincidence that most of the Republican senators who spoke out against Trump’s move late last week are up…
Democrats, in California, confront deep divisions over how to handle increasing calls for Trump’s impeachment
The Washington Post reports: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was just moments into her speech Saturday when a man shouted out from the back of a convention hall stuffed with thousands of delegates to the state Democratic Party convention. “Impeach Donald Trump!” he screamed, uttering a battle cry Pelosi has rebuffed, despite growing demands from her party’s activist wing. “President Trump will be held accountable for his actions,” she said. The I-word never left her lips. Less than an hour…
The U.S. dubbed the UAE ‘a force for peace’ and showered its rulers with weapons. Now they’re destabilizing the region
The New York Times reports: Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the 29-year-old commander of the almost negligible air force of the United Arab Emirates, had come to Washington shopping for weapons. In 1991, in the months after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the young prince wanted to buy so much military hardware to protect his own oil-rich monarchy — from Hellfire missiles to Apache helicopters to F-16 jets — that Congress worried he might destabilize the region. But the Pentagon, trying to…
Pentagon tells White House to stop politicizing military
The Associated Press reports: The Pentagon has told the White House to stop politicizing the military, amid a furor over a Trump administration order to have the Navy ship named for the late U.S. Sen. John McCain hidden from view during President Donald Trump’s recent visit to Japan. Trump’s top aide scoffed at the idea that anyone working for the White House might be punished. “We think it’s much ado about nothing.” A U.S. defense official said Patrick Shanahan, Trump’s…