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Justice Deptartment asks appeals court to restore access to Trump raid documents

Justice Deptartment asks appeals court to restore access to Trump raid documents

Politico reports: The Justice Department has asked a federal appeals court to lift a judge’s order blocking criminal investigators from accessing about 100 documents with national security classification markings recovered from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound last month. In a filing with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta Friday night, prosecutors said the government is facing irreparable harm as a result of U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling putting the potentially classified records off-limits to the…

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The Mar-a-Lago judge’s latest opinion is as atrocious as legal experts say it is

The Mar-a-Lago judge’s latest opinion is as atrocious as legal experts say it is

Harry Litman writes: Thursday’s 10-page opinion by U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon denying the government’s motion for a stay in the Mar-a-Lago documents case is being savaged by commentators in terms normally reserved for grotesque transgressions of justice like the infamous Dred Scott Supreme Court decision. Respected and generally sober legal analysts have called it an atrocity, “legally and practically incoherent,” “dangerous garbage,” and declared Cannon “a partisan hack.” “No honest and competent legal analyst could have ruled as…

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Trump’s team of lawyers marked by infighting and possible legal troubles of its own

Trump’s team of lawyers marked by infighting and possible legal troubles of its own

The New York Times reports: To understand the pressures, feuds and questions about competence within former President Donald J. Trump’s legal team as he faces potential prosecution on multiple fronts, consider the experience of Eric Herschmann, a former Trump White House lawyer who has been summoned to testify to a federal grand jury. For weeks this summer, Mr. Herschmann tried to get specific guidance from Mr. Trump’s current lawyers on how to handle questions from prosecutors that raise issues of…

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What happens when a party rejects humanity?

What happens when a party rejects humanity?

Sarah Jones writes: When two planeloads of migrants from Venezuela arrived in Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday, they had no idea where they were or where they could go to find shelter. A woman called Perla had lured them onto the plane with promises of a journey to Boston and expedited work papers, NPR reports. “She offered us help. Help that never arrived,” one migrant, Andres Duarte, said. “Now we are here. We got on the plane with a vision of…

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Criticism intensifies after big oil admits ‘gaslighting’ public over green aims

Criticism intensifies after big oil admits ‘gaslighting’ public over green aims

The Guardian reports: Criticism in the US of the oil industry’s obfuscation over the climate crisis is intensifying after internal documents showed companies attempted to distance themselves from agreed climate goals, admitted “gaslighting” the public over purported efforts to go green, and even wished critical activists be infested by bedbugs. The communications were unveiled as part of a congressional hearing held in Washington DC, where an investigation into the role of fossil fuels in driving the climate crisis produced documents…

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Ukraine says victims from Izium mass grave show signs of torture

Ukraine says victims from Izium mass grave show signs of torture

The Guardian reports: Ukrainian officials have said some of the bodies pulled from a mass grave outside the recently recaptured city of Izium showed signs of torture. Oleg Synegubov, the regional governor, said some of the more than 440 bodies buried in a forest near the north-eastern city also had their hands tied behind their backs. “We are at the site of the mass burial of people, civilians who were buried here, and now, according to our information, they all…

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Xi Jinping’s coming checkmate of Putin

Xi Jinping’s coming checkmate of Putin

Diane Francis writes: Ukraine has Russian President Vladimir Putin’s armed forces on the run and has recaptured land the size of the state of Maine in a matter of days. But a more serious setback is the public distancing of Russia by his so-called “no limits” partner, Chinese President Xi Jinping. It seems there are limits, and Xi articulated these before and after a meeting with Putin in Uzbekistan. Beijing is distancing itself from Moscow as its war against Ukraine…

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Negotiations on whether to send F-16s and Patriots to Ukraine continue, but quietly

Negotiations on whether to send F-16s and Patriots to Ukraine continue, but quietly

Politico reports: Ukraine has stopped publicly asking for high-end U.S. weapons such as Patriot air defense systems, F-16 fighter jets and Gray Eagle drones. But behind the scenes, the push hasn’t stopped for weapons that could turn the tide of the war. Kyiv’s just getting savvier about its requests. Both sides are discussing whether to send all three items as long-term financing deals are being hammered out, according to advisers to the Ukrainian government, Pentagon officials and defense industry executives….

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Judge appoints special master, rejects DOJ bid to delay Mar-a-Lago ruling

Judge appoints special master, rejects DOJ bid to delay Mar-a-Lago ruling

Politico reports: U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon on Thursday rejected a Justice Department demand to let federal prosecutors continue their review of records marked classified that were recovered from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. In her ruling, Cannon refused to accept department officials’ contention that the records they are trying to review as part of an ongoing criminal investigation remain highly classified or contain extraordinarily sensitive defense information that could damage national security if released. “The Court does…

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Trump lawyer claimed boxes of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago only held ‘news clippings,’ report

Trump lawyer claimed boxes of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago only held ‘news clippings,’ report

Insider reports: A lawyer for former President Donald Trump falsely told the National Archives that 12 boxes containing classified documents at Mar-a-Lago only contained “news clippings,” The Washington Post reported Friday. In a September 2021 call, Pat Philbin, a lawyer for Trump and former White House deputy counsel, told the federal agency that no classified documents were contained in the boxes. According to The Post, citing “sources familiar with the conversations,” Philbin based that assertion on representations made to him…

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Pakistan’s devastating floodwaters could take six months to recede

Pakistan’s devastating floodwaters could take six months to recede

HuffPost reports: Catastrophic floods in Pakistan have submerged large swaths of farmland, swallowed whole villages and turned some communities into islands ― and the water likely won’t be gone anytime soon. Floodwaters will take an estimated three to six months to fully recede, Sindh province’s chief minister Syed Murad Ali Shah said in a statement, according to CNN. As of late August, the southern province had already gotten almost six times as much rainfall as its 30-year annual average. Those…

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Chaos researchers can now predict perilous points of no return

Chaos researchers can now predict perilous points of no return

Ben Brubaker writes: Predicting complex systems like the weather is famously difficult. But at least the weather’s governing equations don’t change from one day to the next. In contrast, certain complex systems can undergo “tipping point” transitions, suddenly changing their behavior dramatically and perhaps irreversibly, with little warning and potentially catastrophic consequences. On long enough timescales, most real-world systems are like this. Consider the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic, which transports warm equatorial water northward as part of an…

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Putin is banking on his friends in the Balkans to help sustain his bloody war in Ukraine

Putin is banking on his friends in the Balkans to help sustain his bloody war in Ukraine

Michael Colborne writes: I work at the investigative journalism website Bellingcat, where I lead our project using open-source research methods to monitor the far right across central and eastern Europe. In the Balkans, we’re seeing how Serbia’s far-right fringes are bolstering Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine. These groups aren’t just helping fan the flames in support of Russia’s war; they’re also receiving Russian help to push their own dangerous agenda in an already fractious part of Europe. As Russia’s war…

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Ostracized by the West, Russia finds a partner in Saudi Arabia

Ostracized by the West, Russia finds a partner in Saudi Arabia

The New York Times reports: As Russia massed troops on its border with Ukraine and invaded the country at the start of the year, Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding Company quietly invested more than $600 million in Russia’s three dominant energy companies. Then, over the summer, as the United States, Canada and several European countries cut oil imports from Russia, Saudi Arabia doubled the amount of fuel oil it was buying from Russia for its power plants, freeing up its own…

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