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Category: Politics

Inside Trump’s battles with U.S. intelligence agencies

Inside Trump’s battles with U.S. intelligence agencies

Robert Draper writes: In early July of last year, the first draft of a classified document known as a National Intelligence Estimate circulated among key members of the agencies making up the U.S. intelligence community. N.I.E.s are intended to be that community’s most authoritative class of top-secret document, reflecting its consensus judgment on national-security matters ranging from Iran’s nuclear capabilities to global terrorism. The draft of the July 2019 N.I.E. ran to about 15 pages, with another 10 pages of…

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Bill Gates predicts pandemic will be over by the end of 2022

Bill Gates predicts pandemic will be over by the end of 2022

Wired: At this point, are you optimistic? Bill Gates: Yes. You have to admit there’s been trillions of dollars of economic damage done and a lot of debts, but the innovation pipeline on scaling up diagnostics, on new therapeutics, on vaccines is actually quite impressive. And that makes me feel like, for the rich world, we should largely be able to end this thing by the end of 2021, and for the world at large by the end of 2022….

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Can Minneapolis dismantle its police department?

Can Minneapolis dismantle its police department?

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: Early in the afternoon of Sunday, June 7th, nine members of the Minneapolis City Council appeared together on a stage in Powderhorn Park, masked and socially distanced. Demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd had been unfurling for nearly two weeks, and though the police commissioner had fired all four of the officers present during his death, and though the district attorney had indicted the police officer Derek Chauvin for murder, the protests had only grown more…

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U.S. intel: Russia is trying to ‘denigrate’ Biden while China prefers ‘unpredictable’ Trump not be reelected

U.S. intel: Russia is trying to ‘denigrate’ Biden while China prefers ‘unpredictable’ Trump not be reelected

The Washington Post reports: The government of China prefers that President Trump not win reelection in November, seeing the incumbent as “unpredictable,” and Russia is using a range of measures to try to “denigrate” the president’s opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, including selective leaks of information and efforts on social media, a top U.S. intelligence official said in a statement Friday. The statement by William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, was notable for identifying three…

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Trump has launched a three-pronged attack on the election

Trump has launched a three-pronged attack on the election

Laurence H. Tribe, Jennifer Taub, and Joshua A. Geltzer write: As President Donald Trump reflects on his sinking approval ratings and grows more desperate by the day, he’s been floating a dictator’s dream: postponing the November election. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Trump loyalists, including the Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi, swiftly rejected this authoritarian fantasy. So Trump has retreated to a fallback position: casting doubt on the legitimacy of any election he doesn’t win. That starts…

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The next global depression is coming and optimism won’t slow it down

The next global depression is coming and optimism won’t slow it down

Ian Bremmer writes: The world is confused and frightened. COVID-19 infections are on the rise across the U.S. and around the world, even in countries that once thought they had contained the virus. The outlook for the next year is at best uncertain; countries are rushing to produce and distribute vaccines at breakneck speeds, some opting to bypass critical phase trials. Meanwhile, unemployment numbers remain dizzyingly high, even as the U.S. stock market continues to defy gravity. We’re headed into…

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Lebanon is no stranger to disaster – but this is like nothing we’ve ever seen

Lebanon is no stranger to disaster – but this is like nothing we’ve ever seen

Kim Ghattas writes: The seismic event felt like an earthquake and an air raid wrapped into one. None of us in Lebanon have ever experienced anything like it, none of us have ever seen this type of utter devastation or can yet truly grasp the extent of what has befallen us and our beloved city, although we have been through more than any life could hold. If you’re in your mid-40s in Lebanon, you’ve lived through 15 years of war,…

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In the pandemic, the United States stands out as an exceptional failure

In the pandemic, the United States stands out as an exceptional failure

The New York Times reports: Nearly every country has struggled to contain the coronavirus and made mistakes along the way. China committed the first major failure, silencing doctors who tried to raise alarms about the virus and allowing it to escape from Wuhan. Much of Europe went next, failing to avoid enormous outbreaks. Today, many countries — Japan, Canada, France, Australia and more — are coping with new increases in cases after reopening parts of society. Yet even with all…

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A bleak tale of chronic negligence leading to Beirut’s giant explosion

A bleak tale of chronic negligence leading to Beirut’s giant explosion

The New York Times reports: The countdown to catastrophe in Beirut started more than six years ago when a troubled, Russian-leased cargo ship made an unscheduled stop at the city’s port. The ship was trailed by debts, crewed by disgruntled sailors and dogged by a small hole in its hull that meant water had to be constantly pumped out. And it carried a volatile cargo, more than 2,000 tons of ammonium nitrate, a combustible material used to make fertilizers —…

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What will happen if Trump uses Facebook to dispute election results, employees ask Zuckerberg

What will happen if Trump uses Facebook to dispute election results, employees ask Zuckerberg

BuzzFeed reports: After months of debate and disagreement over the handling of inflammatory or misleading posts from Donald Trump, Facebook employees want CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain what the company would do if the leader of the free world uses the social network to undermine the results of the 2020 US presidential election. “I do think we’re headed for a problematic scenario where Facebook is going to be used to aggressively undermine the legitimacy of the US elections, in a…

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New York Attorney General files lawsuit to dissolve the NRA after fraud investigation

New York Attorney General files lawsuit to dissolve the NRA after fraud investigation

NPR reports: The Attorney General of New York took action today to dissolve the National Rifle Association, following an 18-month investigation that found evidence the powerful gun rights group is “fraught with fraud and abuse.” Attorney General Letitia James claims in a lawsuit filed Thursday that she found financial misconduct in the millions of dollars, and that it contributed to a loss of more than $64 million over a three year period. The suit alleges that top NRA executives misused…

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Trader Joe’s knows that petitions aren’t commandments

Trader Joe’s knows that petitions aren’t commandments

John McWhorter writes: Trader Joe’s has long given playful foreign versions of its name to certain international product lines: Trader José, Trader Giotto, Trader Ming, and so on. One could have guessed that amidst our racial reckoning (“the Great Awokening,” as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias calls it), these names would come under attack. This happened: A 17-year-old woman spearheaded a petition that attracted more than 5,000 signatures, asking Trader Joe’s to eliminate names that reflect “a narrative of exoticism that perpetuates…

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Two decades of pandemic simulations failed to account for Donald Trump

Two decades of pandemic simulations failed to account for Donald Trump

Nature reports: Like all pandemics, it started out small. A novel coronavirus emerged in Brazil, jumping from bats to pigs to farmers before making its way to a big city with an international airport. From there, infected travellers carried it to the United States, Portugal and China. Within 18 months, the coronavirus had spread around the world, 65 million people were dead and the global economy was in free fall. This fictitious scenario, dubbed Event 201, played out in a…

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Israeli involvement in massive Beirut port blast ruled out by both sides

Israeli involvement in massive Beirut port blast ruled out by both sides

The Times of Israel reports: Massive blasts that struck Beirut were not caused by Israeli activity, sources in Lebanon and Jerusalem said Tuesday afternoon, as officials attempted to determine what sparked the huge explosions. Lebanese officials indicated that an initial explosion was caused by fireworks stored at the port, and a second, even larger explosion may have been caused by the fire reaching explosive material that has been kept there for years. The blasts came amid high tensions between Israel…

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The racial underpinnings of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings

The racial underpinnings of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings

Elaine Scarry writes: This past Memorial Day, a Minneapolis police officer knelt on the throat of an African-American, George Floyd, for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Seventy-five years ago, an American pilot dropped an atomic bomb on the civilian population of Hiroshima. Worlds apart in time, space, and scale, the two events share three key features. Each was an act of state violence. Each was an act carried out against a defenseless opponent. Each was an act of naked racism….

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Don’t believe the lie that voting is all you can do

Don’t believe the lie that voting is all you can do

Daniel Hunter writes: The Black Lives Matter movement has had significant wins in recent months. Municipalities have removed statues of racists, corporations have changed branding that reinforced racial stereotypes, schools have cut ties with police forces and cities have reduced police funding. But too often, politicians, celebrities and community leaders who applaud the protesters for these victories are quick to follow up by asserting, like Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta, that voting “would be the most effective response, the…

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