Music: Esbjörn Svensson Trio — ‘In My Garage’
Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow Tower project
Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier report: President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter. Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. “Make it happen,” the sources said Trump told Cohen….
How Trump could wind up making globalism great again
Robert Wright writes: A few days before the 2016 election, journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote this about Donald Trump: “He has no concept of a nonzero-sum engagement, in which a deal can be beneficial for both sides. A win-win scenario is intolerable to him, because mastery of others is the only moment when he is psychically at peace.” I’m not sure dominating other people is the only occasion when Trump feels at peace. Presumably there’s a moment during what is reportedly…
The empathetic humanities have much to teach our adversarial culture
By Alexander Bevilacqua, Aeon, January 15, 2019 As anyone on Twitter knows, public culture can be quick to attack, castigate and condemn. In search of the moral high ground, we rarely grant each other the benefit of the doubt. In her Class Day remarks at Harvard’s 2018 graduation, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie addressed the problem of this rush to judgment. In the face of what she called ‘a culture of “calling out”, a culture of outrage’, she asked…
Impeach Donald Trump
Yoni Appelbaum writes: On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise. Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties…
Poll-rigging for Trump and creating @WomenForCohen: One IT firm’s work order
The Wall Street Journal reports: In early 2015, a man who runs a small technology company showed up at Trump Tower to collect $50,000 for having helped Michael Cohen, then Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, try to rig online polls in his boss’s favor before the presidential campaign. In his Trump Organization office, Mr. Cohen surprised the man, John Gauger, by giving him a blue Walmart bag containing between $12,000 and $13,000 in cash and, randomly, a boxing glove that Mr….
Trump administration separated thousands more migrants than previously known, federal watchdog says
Politico reports: The Trump administration separated thousands more migrant kids at the border than it previously acknowledged, and the separations began months before the policy was announced, according to a federal audit released Thursday morning. “More children over a longer period of time” were separated at the border than commonly known, an investigator with the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general’s office told reporters Thursday morning. “How many more children were separated is unknown, by us and HHS”…
Will Britain’s future be determined by voters who already died?
Polly Toynbee writes: You could call it swing Saturday or crossover day, for this Saturday, 19 January, marks an important moment. This is the day, in theory, when the country turns remain. Even if not a single person has changed their mind since the referendum, the demographic shift alone will have done the heavy lifting. Enough old leavers will have died and enough young remainers will have come on to the electoral register to turn the dial on what the…
Proposed bill would make no-deal Brexit legally impossible
The Guardian reports: Soft Brexit cabinet ministers are quietly backing a parliamentary bid to make it legally impossible for the UK to leave the EU without a deal on 29 March, the Conservative MP behind the bid has claimed. The bill tabled by the former minister Nick Boles would force the government to delay the UK departure from the EU unless a consensus could be found by early March. That would in effect make it impossible for the government to…
The Saudi government’s global campaign to silence its critics
Sarah Aziza writes: On the morning of August 18, 2017, Rana deboarded her Saudia Airlines flight in Munich, Germany, bleary-eyed and clutching a small leather bag. Her husband, a near-stranger whom she had married two days earlier, in Riyadh, with the stroke of her father’s pen, marched ahead of her. As the couple approached passport control, he reluctantly handed Rana her passport, which he had taken before landing. Rana stole a glance inside to insure that the note she had…
American anchor for Iranian TV is arrested on visit to U.S.
The New York Times reports: A prominent American-born journalist working for an Iranian state-run satellite television channel has been arrested in the United States, the broadcaster said Wednesday. The reported action, which has not been confirmed by the American authorities, was condemned by Iranian officials. The journalist, Marzieh Hashemi, who has lived in Iran since 2009, is an anchor at the channel, Press TV. It said that Ms. Hashemi, 59, was arrested at the St. Louis airport on Sunday and…
Music: Esbjörn Svensson Trio — ‘Winter in Venice’
A nation ‘bored of Brexit’ risks sleepwalking into disaster
John Harris writes: Whatever the noise from Westminster, for millions of people Brexit is something that happened two and a half years ago. It has since become synonymous with an indecipherable cacophony about cabinet splits, customs unions and the kind of arcana that might convulse Twitter but leaves most people cold. Clearly, this highlights a huge political failure – not least on the part of the supposed party of opposition – and a debate so distant from the public that…
Brexit is tearing Britain apart
Barbara Wesel writes: [F]or British politics, May’s persistence, which has long bordered on stubbornness, is a disaster. The prime minister deserves this defeat in Parliament because she herself is to blame. Brexit has divided and deadlocked her government and British politics in general — and that’s May’s fault, too. From the outset, as head of government, she only had her Conservatives in view. She spoke only to her own hardliners, trying to keep the party together at all costs. In…
Are we living through climate change’s worst-case scenario?
Robinson Meyer writes: The year 2018 was not an easy one for planet Earth. Sure, wind and solar energy kept getting cheaper, and an electric car became America’s best-selling luxury vehicle. But the most important metric of climatic health—the amount of heat-trapping gas entering the atmosphere—got suddenly and shockingly worse. In the United States, carbon emissions leapt back up, making their largest year-over-year increase since the end of the Great Recession. This matched the trend across the globe. According to…
New plant-focused diet would ‘transform’ planet’s future
The Guardian reports: The first science-based diet that tackles both the poor food eaten by billions of people and averts global environmental catastrophe has been devised. It requires huge cuts in red meat-eating in western countries and radical changes across the world. The “planetary health diet” was created by an international commission seeking to draw up guidelines that provide nutritious food to the world’s fast-growing population. At the same time, the diet addresses the major role of farming – especially…