Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: As he jetted to Paris last Friday, President Trump received a congratulatory phone call aboard Air Force One. British Prime Minister Theresa May was calling to celebrate the Republican Party’s wins in the midterm elections — never mind that Democrats seized control of the House — but her appeal to the American president’s vanity was met with an ornery outburst. Trump berated May for Britain not doing enough, in his assessment, to contain Iran. He questioned…

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Fintan O’Toole writes: So, at long last, it seems that the negotiations on Brexit between the United Kingdom and the European Union have produced a draft agreement. We do not yet know what it contains but it will be a compromise that falls far short of the high expectations of June 2016 when the British voted to leave. It will tie Britain to the EU’s customs union and single market for an indefinite but probably very long time. Instead of…

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Marie Brenner reports: Perhaps all you need to know to understand the essense of Bill Browder is what he carried with him in his briefcase when he lived in Putin’s Russia. “At all times,” he told me not long after we met, “I had $5,000 in cash in case I had to flee for the border and pay off the guards.” Bill Browder’s stories are melodramas. They often begin with a ringing phone—or a knock on a door. In May…

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The New York Times reports: North Korea is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new commercial satellite images, a network long known to American intelligence agencies but left undiscussed as President Trump claims to have neutralized the North’s nuclear threat. The satellite images suggest that the North has been engaged in a great deception: It has offered to dismantle a major launching site — a step it began, then halted…

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The New York Times reports: Shortly after the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed last month at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, a member of the kill team instructed a superior over the phone to “tell your boss,” believed to be Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, that the operatives had carried out their mission, according to three people familiar with a recording of Mr. Khashoggi’s killing collected by Turkish intelligence. The recording, shared last month with the C.I.A. director, Gina Haspel,…

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