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Trump’s long history of lying about 9/11 and exploiting it for personal gain

Trump’s long history of lying about 9/11 and exploiting it for personal gain

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Paul Waldman writes: On Tuesday, President Trump traveled to Shanksville, Pa., where Flight 93 was brought down on Sept. 11, 2001, by a group of passengers who gave their lives to save others. Given how he has acted at other events that were supposed to be removed from politics, it was a surprise that Trump didn’t take the occasion to offer extended remarks on the magnificence of his 2016 victory or the unfairness of the Russia investigation. Still, it’s worth…

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The Democrat who could lead Trump’s impeachment isn’t sure it’s warranted

The Democrat who could lead Trump’s impeachment isn’t sure it’s warranted

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Russell Berman writes: [T]here is likely no Democrat currently serving in Congress who has talked more about impeachment or developed a more fully formed opinion about its intended purpose than Jerry Nadler. He first articulated his view under vastly different circumstances, and in defense of a Democratic president. But over the course of 20 years, it hasn’t changed much. Born in Brooklyn and educated at Columbia and Fordham, Nadler won his first election to the House in 1992, after a…

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China has placed hundreds of thousands of Muslims in cultural extermination camps

China has placed hundreds of thousands of Muslims in cultural extermination camps

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The New York Times reports: On the edge of a desert in far western China, an imposing building sits behind a fence topped with barbed wire. Large red characters on the facade urge people to learn Chinese, study law and acquire job skills. Guards make clear that visitors are not welcome. Inside, hundreds of ethnic Uighur Muslims spend their days in a high-pressure indoctrination program, where they are forced to listen to lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party…

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Woodward is truth’s gold standard

Woodward is truth’s gold standard

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Jill Abramson writes: It’s hard to imagine a more disturbing portrait of a president than the one Bob Woodward painted of Richard Nixon in his final days: paranoid, poisoned by power, pounding the carpet and talking to the portraits on the walls. But the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency, as recounted by Woodward in his new book, “Fear,” are strikingly similar and in some ways even more gut-wrenching. Then, as now, the country faced a crisis of leadership caused…

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Trump is destroying America’s system for resettling refugees

Trump is destroying America’s system for resettling refugees

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The Atlantic reports: A young girl hangs from a chair, swinging her legs and watching a fidget spinner spiral around her small finger. A couple huddles together, sifting through paperwork. A woman quietly speaks into her cellphone. A new life in America begins with quotidian routine here in this waiting room. But the placid, ordinary moment at the International Rescue Committee’s office in Baltimore is vanishing in some areas of the country: Deep cuts by the Trump administration in the…

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Germany’s Nazi past is still present

Germany’s Nazi past is still present

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Jason Stanley writes: Much of the world seemed surprised by the riots that erupted in Germany late last month, when thousands of neo-Nazis and Nazi sympathizers took to the streets of Chemnitz, chasing down immigrants, with police almost powerless to stop them. Meanwhile, support for Germany’s new far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD), has continued to grow; in a poll taken after the riots in Chemnitz, AfD overtook the German Social Democrats to become the second…

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U.S. to close PLO office in Washington, citing lack of progress on peace process with Israel

U.S. to close PLO office in Washington, citing lack of progress on peace process with Israel

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The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration has ordered the closure of the Palestine Liberation Organization office in Washington because the PLO “has not taken steps to advance the start of direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel,” the State Department said Monday. The decision follows an extended period of estrangement between the Palestinian Authority government on the West Bank and the administration, which has already canceled most U.S. aid to Palestinians and recognized Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. Those moves…

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Remembering 1968

Remembering 1968

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Jackson Lears writes: The religious dimension of American radicalism was what separated it from the student uprisings in Paris and other European cities during the spring of 1968. American radicals lacked the anticlerical animus of Europeans; priests, rabbis, and ministers enlisted in the front ranks of the civil rights and antiwar movements. King’s decision to bear witness against the war was central to legitimating resistance to it, while provoking government counterattacks as well as denunciations from both liberals and conservatives….

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Amazon’s antitrust antagonist has a breakthrough idea

Amazon’s antitrust antagonist has a breakthrough idea

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David Streitfeld reports: The dead books are on the top floor of Southern Methodist University’s law library. “Antitrust Dilemma.” “The Antitrust Impulse.” “Antitrust in an Expanding Economy.” Shelf after shelf of volumes ignored for decades. There are a dozen fat tomes with transcripts of the congressional hearings on monopoly power in 1949, when the world was in ruins and the Soviets on the march. Lawmakers believed economic concentration would make America more vulnerable. At the end of the antitrust stacks…

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3 million people with nowhere to go as Assad’s forces are about to attack

3 million people with nowhere to go as Assad’s forces are about to attack

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Kareem Shaheen writes: The first thing that struck me when I saw Idlib, the rebel-held province in northwestern Syria, in April last year was how green the country was. Olive and cherry trees lined the pockmarked roads leading from the Turkish border down to the province’s towns. Smoke rose in the distance in the aftermath of an airstrike or an exploding shell, and the buildings in most towns were scarred by blows from the sky. I had traveled to Idlib…

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How the U.S. government misleads the public on Afghanistan

How the U.S. government misleads the public on Afghanistan

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The New York Times reports: Seventeen years into the war in Afghanistan, American officials routinely issue inflated assessments of progress that contradict what is actually happening there. More than 2,200 Americans have been killed in the Afghan conflict, and the United States has spent more than $840 billion fighting the Taliban insurgency and paying for relief and reconstruction. The war has become more expensive, in current dollars, than the Marshall Plan, which helped to rebuild Europe after World War II….

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In a ‘grotesque parody of justice,’ Egyptian court sentences 75 people to death

In a ‘grotesque parody of justice,’ Egyptian court sentences 75 people to death

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The New York Times reports: An Egyptian court on Saturday sentenced 75 people to death, including leaders of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, for their involvement in a 2013 sit-in protest in Cairo that spiraled into violence and resulted in the death of hundreds of demonstrators by security forces. Cairo Criminal Court was considering the case of 739 people facing charges ranging from killing police officers, incitement to violence and damaging property during the 2013 violence in Rabaa al-Adawiya, a square…

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A growing wave of extinctions is sweeping across the continents

A growing wave of extinctions is sweeping across the continents

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The Guardian reports: Spix’s macaw, a brilliant blue species of Brazilian parrot that starred in the children’s animation Rio, has become extinct this century, according to a new assessment of endangered birds. The macaw is one of eight species, including the poo-uli, the Pernambuco pygmy-owl and the cryptic treehunter, that can be added to the growing list of confirmed or highly likely extinctions, according to a new statistical analysis by BirdLife International. Historically, most bird extinctions have been small-island species…

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Google pulls Russian opposition leader’s YouTube advert ahead of vote

Google pulls Russian opposition leader’s YouTube advert ahead of vote

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Reuters reports: Google removed a YouTube advert by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny after authorities complained that the videos would violate an election silence law before Sunday’s vote for regional governors, an aide to Navalny said on Saturday. The series of YouTube videos featured Navalny inviting Russians to join demonstrations on Sunday, when polls suggest President Vladimir Putin’s former chief-of-staff Sergei Sobyanin will be comfortably re-elected as the capital’s mayor. Navalny’s aide, Leonid Volkov, said in a social media post…

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Trump administration discussed coup plans with rebel Venezuelan officers

Trump administration discussed coup plans with rebel Venezuelan officers

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The New York Times reports: The Trump administration held secret meetings with rebellious military officers from Venezuela over the last year to discuss their plans to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro, according to American officials and a former Venezuelan military commander who participated in the talks. Establishing a clandestine channel with coup plotters in Venezuela was a big gamble for Washington, given its long history of covert intervention across Latin America. Many in the region still deeply resent the United States…

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