Politics Archives - Page 219 of 1005 - Attention to the Unseen

The January 6 crime paid off for Trump

January 14, 2025 From elsewhere

David Frum writes: Early this morning, the Department of Justice released the report of Special Counsel Jack Smith on his investigation of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. The saga of the U.S. criminal-justice system’s effort to hold the coup instigator accountable is thus closed. No prosecution will take place. Compared with the present outcome, it would have been better if President Joe Biden had pardoned Trump for the January 6 coup attempt. A…

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Pete Hegseth declines to answer

January 14, 2025 From elsewhere

Jonathan Chait writes: Pete Hegseth, President-Elect Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, was initially considered one of his most endangered nominees. But after the MAGA movement organized a campaign to threaten Republicans who expressed reservations about Hegseth’s fitness, criticism dried up quickly. “We gave the Senate an attitude adjustment,” Mike Davis, a Republican operative known for his florid threats to lock up Trump’s political targets, told Politico. That attitude adjustment was on vivid display in Hegseth’s confirmation hearing today before the…

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Israeli officials struggle to conceal frustrations as Gaza truce nears

January 14, 2025 From elsewhere

Middle East Eye reports: A ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas is at its closest point, according to officials involved in negotiations in Doha. With expectations that an announcement is immininent, Majed al-Ansari, Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesperson, said that final details were being discussed on Tuesday. “Negotiations are taking place on final details but we have ironed out the main obstacles,” he told a news conference. “Today we are closest to any time in the past to a deal. The…

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Could other countries prosecute soldiers in Gaza?

January 14, 2025 From elsewhere

Annie Hylton writes: Last spring, a video spread across social media. Filmed at night, it shows several soldiers in olive-green army fatigues transporting a group of prisoners. The captured men wear white jumpsuits and blindfolds, and they have their hands tied behind their backs. The person holding the camera begins to narrate, in French, “Did you see those motherfuckers?” Referring to a prisoner whose jumpsuit has fallen to his waist, he says, “Look, he’s pissed himself. . . . I…

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The CIA’s use of Sednaya and other prisons for outsourcing torture

January 14, 2025 From elsewhere

Barbara Koeppel reports: As rebel forces poured into Syria’s capital and President Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, Syrians surged to the streets to celebrate. Some rushed to Sednaya, the military prison they tagged “the human slaughterhouse” to search for missing family. Sadly, few were found. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, more than 30,000 people died there from 2011 to 2013 “either by execution, torture or starvation” and “at least 500 more died from 2018 to 2021.” Other…

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The New Apostolic Reformation seeks to destroy the secular state

January 13, 2025 From elsewhere

Stephanie McCrummen writes: On the Thursday night after Donald Trump won the presidential election, an obscure but telling celebration unfolded inside a converted barn off a highway stretching through the cornfields of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The place was called Gateway House of Prayer, and it was not exactly a church, and did not exactly fit into the paradigms of what American Christianity has typically been. Inside, there were no hymnals, no images of Jesus Christ, no parables fixed in stained…

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The U.S. military wrestles with possible deployment on U.S. soil under Trump

January 13, 2025 From elsewhere

Michael Hirsh writes: The last time an American president deployed the U.S. military domestically under the Insurrection Act — during the deadly Los Angeles riots in 1992 — Douglas Ollivant was there. Ollivant, then a young Army first lieutenant, says things went fairly smoothly because it was somebody else — the cops — doing the head-cracking to restore order, not his 7th Infantry Division. He and his troops didn’t have to detain or shoot at anyone. “There was real sensitivity…

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Trump’s sweeping deportation threat is unworkable and aimed at ‘rabid’ Republicans, says Newt Gingrich

January 13, 2025 From elsewhere

The Guardian reports: Newt Gingrich, the former US House speaker and presidential hopeful, said a section of his own Republican party was “rabid” over immigration and predicted Donald Trump’s suggestion that he could deport documented people as well as millions of undocumented people will not come to pass. “I’d be very surprised if you see any significant effort to change the game for people who are here legally,” Gingrich said, weeks before Trump’s return to the White House. “I just…

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Wildfire: Even in a blue city in a blue state, disaster does not force its residents to focus on climate change

January 13, 2025 From elsewhere

David Siders writes: Residents of California’s San Gabriel Valley had been coexisting with wildfire danger for generations before this week’s firestorm. Even relative newcomers, like me, know the house will shake when helicopters carrying water to fires in the foothills fly low overhead, or how to tape plastic to the windows and hose down our eaves. We’ve swept ash and burnt leaves that have rained down in our yards. We trim the trees and hope our insurance companies won’t drop…

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Sweden neither at war nor at peace, says prime minister, as warships sent to Baltic Sea

January 13, 2025 From elsewhere

The Guardian reports: The Swedish prime minister has said that his country is neither at war nor at peace as he announced that Sweden would be sending armed forces into the Baltic Sea for the first time as part of increased surveillance efforts amid a spate of suspected sabotage of undersea cables. The country announced it will contribute up to three warships and a surveillance aircraft to a Nato effort to monitor critical infrastructure and Russia’s “shadow fleet” as the…

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Steve Bannon: Elon Musk ‘is a truly evil guy’

January 12, 2025 From elsewhere

Breitbart News, summarizing an interview with Italy’s Corriere della Sera, reports: “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” Bannon told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera this week. “He will not have a blue pass to the White House, he will not have full access to the White House, he will be like any other person.” “He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this…

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Tech coup: How Elon Musk has secretly recruited Silicon Valley executives to infiltrate the U.S. government

January 12, 2025 From elsewhere

The New York Times reports: An unpaid group of billionaires, tech executives and some disciples of Peter Thiel, a powerful Republican donor, are preparing to take up unofficial positions in the U.S. government in the name of cost-cutting. As President-elect Donald J. Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency girds for battle against “wasteful” spending, it is preparing to dispatch individuals with ties to its co-leaders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to agencies across the federal government. After Inauguration Day, the…

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Team Trump plans a racist terror campaign to make undocumented immigrants flee from the U.S.

January 12, 2025 From elsewhere

Rolling Stone reports: Donald Trump is coming back into office this month on a vow to initiate the “largest” mass deportation operation in American history, and says he plans to unleash the U.S. military to help him do it. But according to three sources familiar with internal policy discussions in Trump’s circle, the president-elect and several of his key lieutenants are aware that their desired, larger-scale crackdowns — which could involve a new network of militarized “camps” — will take…

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