Matt Bai writes: For months now, a lot of Democrats have been telling us that Buttigieg inspires them. They love the idea of a Rhodes scholar with military credentials, a gay candidate who doesn’t let identity define him, a candidate who came of age with social media and isn’t pushing 80. They just wish Buttigieg were even five years older or that he was the mayor of, you know, a real city. They’d like to be able to vote for…
The New York Times reports: A city council member in California took the dais and quoted from QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory about “deep state” traitors plotting against the president, concluding her remarks, “God bless Q.” A man spouting QAnon beliefs about child sex trafficking swung a crowbar inside a historic Catholic chapel in Arizona, damaging the altar and then fleeing before being arrested. And outside a Trump campaign rally in Florida, people in “Q” T-shirts stopped by a tent…
Disturbing from Communist China. Chinese government are only suspecting these people have been exposed & therefore are going to quarantine them w/ people who have #coronavirus. They are fighting because they don’t want to be quarantined w/ the infected. pic.twitter.com/6Lvnr2Cj7o — Nat Shupe (@NatShupe) February 7, 2020 Richard McGregor writes: Soon after Li Wenliang succumbed to the coronavirus in Wuhan early on Friday morning, a drawing of the Chinese doctor appeared on the internet, sleeping and being hoisted gently into…
Rory Carroll reports: Sinn Féin’s breakthrough in Ireland’s general election was decades in the making, but not even Sinn Féin saw it coming. Once a revolutionary party associated with guns and balaclavas, a toxic brand, it slowly edged from the fringe into the mainstream, inch by inch, and then on Saturday made a giant leap. An exit poll gave Sinn Féin 22.3% of the vote, a statistical dead heat with Fine Gael on 22.4% and Fianna Fáil on 22.2%, two…
The New York Times reports: President Xi Jinping strode onstage before an adoring audience in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing less than three weeks ago, trumpeting his successes in steering China through a tumultuous year and promising “landmark” progress in 2020. “Every single Chinese person, every member of the Chinese nation, should feel proud to live in this great era,” he declared to applause on the day before the Lunar New Year holiday. “Our progress will not…
Benjamin Wittes writes: [Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman] is an active military officer, rotating through the NSC on assignment. The president can put quotation marks around lieutenant colonel, as he did in today’s tweets, in an effort to demean Vindman’s service, but there is nothing to demean about his service, which has been in all respects honorable. The conduct for which his career has been attacked, what the president calls Vindman’s “insubordination,” was exceptionally brave truth-telling—both in real time and later…
John Gans writes: On Friday, the White House announced that it was transferring Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified during the House impeachment hearings, out of the National Security Council. The move is unsettling, petty and vindictive. But it’s not a surprise: The dismissal is just one part of a campaign by the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, to trumpify one of the most powerful and important institutions in government. Over the last six months, while impeachment dominated the news,…
Waad al Kateab writes: When the forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria destroyed and took control of my city of Aleppo, its residents, including my family, were forced to flee to the northwestern Idlib province. The pattern repeated after every military assault by the Syrian regime on cities and towns outside its control. Idlib became the sanctuary for about four million people. Relentless aerial bombardment by the Assad regime and its Russian allies and a devastating ground offensive have…
Bloomberg reports: Alexander Vindman, who testified in Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry, was escorted out of the White House on Friday, two days after the president’s acquittal in his Senate trial. “Vindman was asked to leave for telling the truth,” said his lawyer, David Pressman. “His honor, his commitment to right, frightened the powerful.” The ouster of Vindman, who worked on the National Security Council, came after the Senate acquitted Trump of two articles of impeachment in a near party-line vote….
The Washington Post reports: China’s streets were quiet and its neighborhoods sealed, but grief and rage against the government poured onto social media on Friday as the country confronted the death of the “whistleblower doctor” whose story was seen as a parable for the Communist Party’s failings. Within hours of Li Wenliang’s death, millions of Chinese, homebound in the coronavirus crisis, tried to bypass censors to post the hashtag “We demand freedom of speech” in a remarkable but short-lived digital…
Vox reports: The coronavirus outbreak has created global anxiety since the first cases were reported in Wuhan, China, late last year. So far, over 30,000 illnesses and 635 deaths have been reported in mainland China, with cases in the double digits found throughout Asia, parts of Europe, Australia, and beyond; in the US, 12 people have been found to have the pneumonia-like virus. In response, Chinese cities have been quarantined, borders have been sealed, and travel has been banned. The…
Mathew Ingram writes: The United States is not the only country where journalists work in a toxic political environment, in which the leader of the nation routinely attacks and demonizes them. A recently published report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University in the UK describes how similar patterns can be seen in a number of other countries in central and eastern Europe, including Hungary—where leader Viktor Orbán has centralized control of the press—and Turkey,…
The Washington Post reports: In the year since the Trump administration declared what amounted to economic war against the Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro — an oil embargo that cut it off from its biggest petroleum buyer, the United States — the move has yielded some clear losers, including U.S. investors now shut out of the market. It has also produced one clear winner: Vladimir Putin’s Russia. U.S. officials, oil industry insiders and analysts say secret deals between Moscow…
The Intercept reports: A judge today declined to proceed with cybercrime charges lodged against Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald for his reporting on prosecutorial and judicial misconduct in Brazil. In a decision announced Thursday, Judge Ricardo Augusto Soares Leite ruled that Greenwald’s prosecution would not go forward, but only on account of a previous finding by the Brazilian Supreme Court that The Intercept’s reporting on Operation Car Wash had not transgressed any legal boundaries. In the absence of the injunction issued…
McKay Coppins writes: One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked “Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebook’s algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like “In Trump We Trust.” I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined…
Marie L. Yovanovitch writes: After nearly 34 years working for the State Department, I said goodbye to a career that I loved. It is a strange feeling to transition from decades of communicating in the careful words of a diplomat to a person free to speak exclusively for myself. What I’d like to share with you is an answer to a question so many have asked me: What do the events of the past year mean for our country’s future?…