Attention to the Unseen

Politico reports: With relations between the West and Moscow at a post-Cold War low point, Russia’s closest EU neighbors are turning to tougher military and financial measures to send a message to Vladimir Putin. At a White House meeting last week, the presidents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania asked Donald Trump to do more to deter Russia by bolstering U.S. forces in Eastern Europe. Trump didn’t give a clear answer. He praised the Baltic countries’ robust defense spending in recent…

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Roger Cohen writes: Hungary had a horrendous 20th century of lost territory and freedom, but Budapest, a handsome city set on a broad sweep of the Danube, suggests its wounds have healed. Trams hum along boulevards lined with elegant cafes and clogged with the cars German companies manufacture here. The country has escaped what Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, called the “kidnapped West,” the great swath of Europe yielded to the Soviet empire after World War II, and has returned…

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The Washington Post reports: For more than a year, Roger Stone has asserted that he spent Christmas 2016 trying to survive an assassination attempt — most likely radioactive polonium poisoning — by someone trying to frame Russia. Tests were conducted; doctors were baffled, the longtime political operative and adviser to Donald Trump told journalists. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was contacted. But from the moment he made the claims, Stone has deflected questions when asked to back…

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The Observer reports: Hashem Zakout should have been at his local hospital yesterday doing the voluntary work as a clerk that he hopes will lead to a paid full-time job. Instead the 24-year-old was a patient in the emergency room at another northern Gaza hospital, shot in the left knee after throwing “little stones” at Israeli troops across the border, east of the Jabaliya refugee camp where he lives. Zakout was wounded on Friday when he was 10 metres from…

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BuzzFeed reports: Twitter DMs obtained by BuzzFeed News show that in the summer of 2016, WikiLeaks was working to obtain files from Guccifer 2.0, an online hacktivist persona linked to by Russian military intelligence, the clearest evidence to date of WikiLeaks admitting its pursuit of Guccifer 2.0. “[P]lease ‘leave,’ their conversation with them and us,” WikiLeaks asked journalist Emma Best, who was also negotiating with Guccifer 2.0 for access to what it had teased on its blog as “exclusive access”…

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Politico reports: The United States is granting fewer visitor visas to people from around the world — not just Muslims — as President Donald Trump ratchets up his anti-immigration rhetoric. By one measure, the U.S. granted 13 percent fewer visitor visas over the past 12 months when compared with fiscal year 2016, according to State Department data analyzed by POLITICO — a downward trend that appears to have accelerated in the past six months. It’s unclear whether the drop is…

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The New York Times reports: Weeks after the militants seized the city, as fighters roamed the streets and religious extremists rewrote the laws, an order rang out from the loudspeakers of local mosques. Public servants, the speakers blared, were to report to their former offices. To make sure every government worker got the message, the militants followed up with phone calls to supervisors. When one tried to beg off, citing a back injury, he was told: “If you don’t show…

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Joshua Keating writes: International attention briefly returned to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after 18 Palestinians were killed and at least 750 wounded by Israeli fire during mass protests on the Gaza-Israel border Friday, according to Gaza authorities. It was the worst day of violence in the enclave since the 2014 Gaza war. The idea for the marches originally came from a local social media activist several months ago but was then promoted by Hamas, which rules Gaza, as part of what…

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BuzzFeed reports: Mike Lofgren wrote the book on the deep state — literally. The longtime Republican aide, who worked for three decades on Capitol Hill, published The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government in January 2016. Its jacket copy touts Lofgren’s “gripping portrait of the dismal swamp on the Potomac and the revolution it will take to set us back on course.” So you might think the 64-year-old Lofgren is gratified that…

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Politico reports: China’s latest trade actions in response to U.S. tariffs are striking right at the heart of Trump country. Just the mere mention of the threat to slap tariffs on key U.S. exports threatens to further upend a farm economy already suffering from low prices. It also risks further alienating an important base that has long been frustrated with the administration’s trade policies. U.S. farmers preparing to plant soybeans this season are now facing the prospect of losing money…

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