Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: As a 12-year-old refugee from Somalia adjusting to life in the Virginia suburbs, Ilhan Omar fended off bullies who stuck gum on her scarf, knocked her down stairs and jumped her when she changed clothes for gym class. Her father “sat me down, and he said, ‘Listen, these people who are doing all of these things to you, they’re not doing something to you because they dislike you,’” Ms. Omar recalled in a recent interview….

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The New York Times reports: President Trump has a well-documented problem telling the truth. Fact checkers have compiled lists of all of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods since he took office (The Washington Post counts over 7,500, and The Toronto Star over 3,900), rounded up his most egregious whoppers in year-end lists and scrutinized his claims in real time with television chyrons. Here at The New York Times, we have also fact-checked countless campaign rallies, news conferences, interviews and Twitter posts. After…

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Mark MacKinnon reports: There was a joke more than 30 years ago, when immigrants from the former Soviet Union began settling in Toronto’s North York neighbourhood, that they came here because it was as drab and grey as the Soviet cities they’d left behind. That description still fits parts of this vast and occasionally bleak suburb. But not this tidy, manicured avenue, lined as it is with multimillion-dollar houses – one of which, for me, is the end of a…

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Middle East Eye reports: Omar Abdulaziz says “it could have happened” to him. The Saudi dissident knows he came close to the fate that befell Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who was murdered inside his country’s Istanbul consulate in October. Months earlier, two Saudi government agents came to Montreal, the Canadian city Abdulaziz has called home for almost a decade, to convince him to return to the Gulf kingdom. “They said, ‘We have a message from MBS,’” said the Saudi…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Saudi Arabian officials arrested a partner at consulting giant McKinsey & Co. in the fall of 2017 and have been holding him in detention since then, people familiar with the matter say. In recent months, he has been repeatedly beaten, two of those people said. A McKinsey spokesman said that as of early this year the consultant, Hani Khoja, is no longer a McKinsey employee. Few companies are as involved with the Saudi state as…

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Elizabeth Drew writes: An impeachment process against President Trump now seems inescapable. Unless the president resigns, the pressure by the public on the Democratic leaders to begin an impeachment process next year will only increase. Too many people think in terms of stasis: How things are is how they will remain. They don’t take into account that opinion moves with events. Whether or not there’s already enough evidence to impeach Mr. Trump — I think there is — we will…

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