Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: President Trump is blaming Kim Jong Un for changing the scope of their summit talks planned for next month and will doubtless air his frustrations when he meets with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in Washington on Tuesday. But in South Korea, many say the blame for the sudden problems in the diplomatic process lies squarely at the feet of someone else: John Bolton. “There are several land mines on the way to the summit between…

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The Washington Post reports: President Trump said Sunday that he would demand that the Justice Department explore whether it or the FBI “infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes” — escalating a battle over federal law enforcement’s use of a confidential source to aid its probe into whether the Trump campaign and Russia coordinated to influence the 2016 election. Trump wrote on Twitter, “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look…

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Vladimir Kara-Murza writes: “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” This phrase from Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, even if apocryphal, summarizes the Soviet regime’s attitude to repressing its citizens. The “crimes” used most often for political prosecutions in the Stalin era were the ones detailed in Article 58 of the criminal code, from “counter-revolutionary activity” and “anti-Soviet agitation” to “contacts with foreigners with counter-revolutionary purposes” and “urging a foreign entity to [conduct] aggressive actions against…

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Reuters reports: A political bloc led by populist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a long-time adversary of the US who also opposes Iranian influence in Iraq, has been confirmed as the winner of the country’s parliamentary election, the electoral commission said on Saturday. Sadr himself cannot become prime minister as he did not run in the election, though his bloc’s victory puts him in a position to have a strong say in negotiations. His Sairoon electoral list captured 54 parliamentary seats. The…

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The New York Times reports: A night after the dedication of the new United States Embassy in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel convened American evangelicals to plan their next steps. In a conference room off his office, Mr. Netanyahu thanked the small circle of prominent pastors and activists on Tuesday for pressing President Trump to open the embassy, breaking with decades of American policy that Jerusalem’s status should be decided in peace talks. Which embassy would be next?…

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BuzzFeed reports: All through the hot summer campaign of 2016, as Donald Trump and his aides dismissed talk of unseemly ties to Moscow, two of his key business partners were working furiously on a secret track: negotiations to build what would have been the tallest building in Europe and an icon of the Trump empire — the Trump World Tower Moscow. Talks to construct the 100-story building continued even as the presidential candidate alternately bragged about his relationship with Vladimir…

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The Guardian reports: Donald Trump has threatened Kim Jong-un with the same fate as Muammar Gaddafi if the North Korean leader “doesn’t make a deal” on his nuclear weapons programme. The US president issued the threat at the White House when he was asked about the recent suggestion by his national security adviser, John Bolton, that the “Libyan model” be a template for dealing with North Korea at a summit between Trump and Kim planned for 12 June in Singapore….

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The Guardian reports: The EU has put itself on a collision course with the US over Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal with Iran, as major European firms started to pull out of the country to avoid being hit by sanctions. In an attempt to shield EU companies doing business with Iran, the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, said he would turn to a plan last used to protect businesses working in Cuba before a US trade…

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The Washington Post reports: Trump and his top aides, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, have repeatedly said that the United States wants the “complete verifiable irreversible denuclearization of North Korea” — a high standard that Pyongyang has previously balked at. Bolton, known for his sharply hawkish views, has said that North Korea must commit to a disarmament similar to “Libya 2004.” He was undersecretary of state for arms control in 2004, when Libyan…

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Ian Black writes: Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are desperate. Not only because they are burying their dead while marking the anniversary of the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 that saw their grandparents flee or expelled from homes in what is now Israel, but also because their lives under blockade are intolerable, as is the sense that they have been abandoned to their fate by an indifferent world. Israel was their main enemy before and after the 1967 war. It unilaterally…

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Simon Tisdall writes: The unexpectedly poor showing of Haider al-Abadi, Iraq’s prime minister, in parliamentary elections has dealt a blow to US influence in the country. It was a poor return for American backing for the Baghdad government’s drive to extirpate Islamic State and regain lost territory. But the bigger loser may be Iran, whose allies in Iraq’s Shia militias known as the Popular Mobilisation Forces were pushed into second place by Moqtada al-Sadr, the veteran nationalist. Put simply, Sadr…

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Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel write: President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear agreement is likely to add fuel to the fires of sectarianism in the Middle East. From the cataclysmic wars in Syria and Yemen to the volatile assemblages of Iraq and Lebanon, Sunni-Shiite relations are at a breaking point. But the cause of this spike in tensions is recent, not ancient. It is rooted in politics, not piety. To stop it from aggravating,…

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The Guardian reports: Ecuador bankrolled a multimillion-dollar spy operation to protect and support Julian Assange in its central London embassy, employing an international security company and undercover agents to monitor his visitors, embassy staff and even the British police, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Over more than five years, Ecuador put at least $5m (£3.7m) into a secret intelligence budget that protected the WikiLeaks founder while he had visits from Nigel Farage, members of European nationalist groups and…

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