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Biden accused of betrayal of Khashoggi over push to deepen Saudi ties

Biden accused of betrayal of Khashoggi over push to deepen Saudi ties

The Guardian reports: Joe Biden is facing accusations of betraying a pre-election promise to re-evaluate ties with Saudi Arabia over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in favour of pursuing a rapprochement with the kingdom aimed at repelling a challenge from China to US primacy in the Middle East. The charge, from human rights campaigners and some Democrats, follows the fifth anniversary of Khashoggi’s death at the hands of Saudi regime agents and comes amid mounting criticism of a proposed new…

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Trump’s claim of ‘absolute immunity’ from Jan. 6 prosecution is risible

Trump’s claim of ‘absolute immunity’ from Jan. 6 prosecution is risible

Norman L. Eisen and Joshua Kolb write: On Thursday, Donald Trump’s legal team filed a long-awaited motion to dismiss the special counsel’s 2020 election interference charges on presidential immunity grounds. We anticipated that Trump would mount this defense even before the charges officially dropped in a model prosecution memo on the case earlier this summer and published an extended takedown of the arguments. Now that the motion is here and we can judge the substance, it is still likely to…

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The oil industry has taken over the GOP but nature is intervening, says Al Gore

The oil industry has taken over the GOP but nature is intervening, says Al Gore

David Remnick interviews Al Gore: Gore: [I]t now seems obvious to almost everyone that the severity of the crisis has reached a new level of intensity. Climate-related extreme events have become so common and so dangerous that people who wanted to dismiss it are now waking up to the reality that we’re facing. And, of course, the underlying substance is shocking. We’re still using the sky as an open sewer for the heat-trapping, gaseous pollution that we spew into it…

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Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen

Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen

The Washington Post reports: Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Asked about fraud in the race — in which President Biden defeated former president Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored…

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Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric echoes Hitler’s in Mein Kampf

Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric echoes Hitler’s in Mein Kampf

The New York Times reports: Former President Donald J. Trump said undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” in a recent interview, language with echoes of white supremacy and the racial hatreds of Adolf Hitler. Mr. Trump made the remark in a 37-minute video interview with The National Pulse, a right-leaning website, that was posted last week. It drew broader scrutiny on Wednesday after the liberal MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan surfaced the quote in a post on X….

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This isn’t democracy. It’s the heartbeat of authoritarianism

This isn’t democracy. It’s the heartbeat of authoritarianism

Joanne Freeman writes: Without a doubt, the Republican ousting of Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy is a banner of dysfunction. Sifting through the chaos for its meaning is more complex. It certainly signals that something is broken, but what? It’s not the Republican Party’s fracture in and of itself. Fractured political parties are hardly new; the 19th century was the great age of splintering parties. We’ve had contentious speakerships before (though a party ousting its own speaker is something special). Extremism…

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How much of Trump’s ‘wealth’ might secretly belong to Russian oligarchs?

How much of Trump’s ‘wealth’ might secretly belong to Russian oligarchs?

  Former Forbes reporter Jonathan Greenberg: “I think another shoe is going to drop very soon, which is, in the order today, they ordered him to disclose secret equity partners in any of the interests in his New York properties. Now, I’ve been theorizing for years now, to editors and to other journalists that Trump has these investors — that his piece of the equity is not really his piece; that he has loaned it out. We will see what…

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Compromises on territory, legal order, and world peace: The fate of international law lies on Ukraine’s borders

Compromises on territory, legal order, and world peace: The fate of international law lies on Ukraine’s borders

Maksym Vishchyk and Jeremy Pizzi write: As Russia’s war against Ukraine persists, officials in Ukraine, Russia, and beyond have differing visions of how hostilities should end. Ukraine has consistently made its position clear that no peace negotiations with Russia are possible before the complete restoration of Ukrainian territorial integrity, that is, a return to Ukraine’s 1991 internationally recognized borders. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy laid down that marker when he first outlined his 10-point Peace Formula in November 2022. In contrast, Russia has repeatedly stated that…

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Ukraine is ‘freaking out’ as McCarthy chaos threatens U.S. aid

Ukraine is ‘freaking out’ as McCarthy chaos threatens U.S. aid

Politico reports: After a year and a half of war, Ukraine’s leaders now have a new reason to worry: Mounting political chaos in America is threatening to derail their supply of money and weapons. Days after lawmakers shelved a vital U.S. plan to send billions of dollars in aid to Kyiv, U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted by his own Republican Party colleagues. Aid to Ukraine was named as one of the reasons. In Kyiv, officials are at a…

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Team Trump readies attacks on RFK Jr. as spoiler anxiety grows

Team Trump readies attacks on RFK Jr. as spoiler anxiety grows

Shelby Talcott reports: Members of Donald Trump’s team are quietly preparing to go on offense against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as internal campaign polling suggests his expected third party bid could draw more votes from Trump than President Joe Biden in a general election. Semafor has not independently reviewed the polling. One person close to Trump’s campaign said it showed that Kennedy took more votes from Trump than left-wing independent Cornel West drew from Biden when both were tested. “It’s…

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Trump gave up the idea of running for speaker when he learned he’d probably lose — badly

Trump gave up the idea of running for speaker when he learned he’d probably lose — badly

Politico reports: It wasn’t that anyone seriously thought he’d win the 218 votes to be elected. In fact, most who were familiar with the conference’s internal dynamics believed he couldn’t even get the conference nomination, requiring a simple majority of Republicans. Centrist Republicans running in Biden districts were dreading the prospect of being tied to Trump as speaker. And even traditional and conservative Republicans were not happy about the idea of reporters peppering them with questions about whether they think…

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A broken Congress is what MAGA always wanted

A broken Congress is what MAGA always wanted

David Rothkopf writes: There have been MAGA true believers shitting on the floor of the Congress ever since Jan. 6, 2021. But the right wing’s active desecration of the U.S. government extends far beyond ugly recent events on Capitol Hill, and dates back long before the Trumpist insurrection of two and a half years ago. In fact, the origins of the attacks on the government date back at least four decades to the Reagan administration, when the former president popularized…

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From his ‘War Room,’ Steve Bannon stokes the Republican Party meltdown

From his ‘War Room,’ Steve Bannon stokes the Republican Party meltdown

The New York Times reports: On Wednesday morning, two Republicans who hours earlier had toppled Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House made a well-worn trek to a 19th-century brick townhouse a few blocks away from the Capitol and entered the cluttered sanctuary of Stephen K. Bannon’s recording studio. Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida, the instigator of the rebellion, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, one of seven other Republican defectors, huddled with Mr. Bannon for a morning meeting ahead…

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The GOP wants power without responsibilities

The GOP wants power without responsibilities

Greg Sargent writes: What’s become clear now is there is no Republican majority in the House united behind any governing approach. The Gaetz faction is committed to a project that most House Republicans ultimately are not: eschewing consensus governing entirely wherever possible and making no concessions to Democrats whatsoever. In this, the Gaetz crew has been urged on by Trump, who wants Republicans to shut down the government to defund ongoing prosecutions of him, a Total War posture that would…

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