Attention to the Unseen

Peter Baker writes: Nothing in the Constitution gives President Trump the power to delay the November election, and even fellow Republicans dismissed it out of hand when he broached it on Thursday. But that was not the point. With a possible defeat looming, the point was to tell Americans that they should not trust their own democracy. The idea of putting off the vote was the culmination of months of discrediting an election that polls suggest Mr. Trump is currently…

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The Washington Post reports: The U.S. Postal Service is experiencing days-long backlogs of mail across the country after a top Trump donor running the agency put in place new procedures described as cost-cutting efforts, alarming postal workers who warn that the policies could undermine their ability to deliver ballots on time for the November election. As President Trump ramps up his unfounded attacks on mail balloting as being susceptible to widespread fraud, postal employees and union officials say the changes…

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The Washington Post reports: After President Trump ordered federal law enforcement officers into Portland, Ore., earlier this month, the protests largely ended the same way for days: with tear gas, rubber bullets and arrests. On Thursday, the first protest held since the federal agencies agreed to pull back their officers was a markedly more peaceful affair. As the Black Lives Matter-inspired vigil wound down early Friday morning, there was virtually no sign of the Oregon State Police officers who had…

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Nicholas Kristof writes: I’ve been on the front lines of the protests here, searching for the “radical-left anarchists” who President Trump says are on Portland streets each evening. I thought I’d found one: a man who for weeks leapt into the fray and has been shot four times with impact munitions yet keeps coming back. I figured he must be a crazed anarchist. But no, he turned out to be Dr. Bryan Wolf, a radiologist who wears his white doctor’s…

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The Oregonian reports: For weeks, it was unclear how Oregon leaders could defuse the increasingly violent standoff between federal officers and protesters in downtown Portland and convince Homeland Security officers to leave. Gov. Kate Brown’s administration says that proved relatively easy in the end because the Trump administration was clearly looking for a way out. Trump administration officials did not demand any concessions or pledges from Brown before they agreed officers would depart, Brown’s chief of staff Nik Blosser told…

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Ross Andersen writes: Northwest of Beijing’s Forbidden City, outside the Third Ring Road, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has spent seven decades building a campus of national laboratories. Near its center is the Institute of Automation, a sleek silvery-blue building surrounded by camera-studded poles. The institute is a basic research facility. Its computer scientists inquire into artificial intelligence’s fundamental mysteries. Their more practical innovations—iris recognition, cloud-based speech synthesis—are spun off to Chinese tech giants, AI start-ups, and, in some cases,…

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