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Category: Politics

Turkey’s motley crew of proxy fighters in Syria

Turkey’s motley crew of proxy fighters in Syria

Elizabeth Tsurkov writes: A small Turkish flag was standing on the desk of the offices of the Turkish-backed faction in a residential area of Şanlıurfa, in southern Turkey. The men in the room, most of them veteran fighters from eastern Syria, were expecting me and did their best to locate a Syrian revolutionary flag in time for our meeting in the summer of 2019. They could not find one. Everything about the meeting, its location, décor, and content, indicated to…

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Tipping points signal a climate emergency

Tipping points signal a climate emergency

Timothy M. Lenton, Johan Rockström, Owen Gaffney, Stefan Rahmstorf, Katherine Richardson, Will Steffen & Hans Joachim Schellnhuber write: Politicians, economists and even some natural scientists have tended to assume that tipping points in the Earth system — such as the loss of the Amazon rainforest or the West Antarctic ice sheet — are of low probability and little understood. Yet evidence is mounting that these events could be more likely than was thought, have high impacts and are interconnected across…

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The war-crimes president

The war-crimes president

Adam Serwer writes: Donald Trump is a war-crimes enthusiast. This is not an exaggeration, a mischaracterization, or a misrepresentation. As a candidate, the president regaled his audiences with vivid tales of brutality, some apocryphal, and vowed to imitate them. On the campaign trail, Trump frequently invoked a false story about General John Pershing crushing a Muslim insurgency in the Philippines with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, declaring, “There was no more radical Islamic terror for 35 years!” He vowed to…

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Trump knew about whistle-blower complaint when he released aid to Ukraine

Trump knew about whistle-blower complaint when he released aid to Ukraine

The New York Times reports: President Trump had already been briefed on a whistle-blower’s complaint about his dealings with Ukraine when he unfroze military aid for the country in September, according to two people familiar with the matter. Lawyers from the White House counsel’s office told Mr. Trump in late August about the complaint, explaining that they were trying to determine whether they were legally required to give it to Congress, the people said. The revelation could shed light on…

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The absurdity of Trump trying to distance himself from Giuliani’s work on Ukraine

The absurdity of Trump trying to distance himself from Giuliani’s work on Ukraine

Philip Bump writes: President Trump certainly wouldn’t be the first employer to retroactively try to designate a staff member as an independent contractor, but he might be the first to do so to aid his fight against being impeached and removed from the White House. His assertion to former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly that his personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani was acting independently on Ukraine, perhaps for other clients, has an obvious goal. Giuliani was the point of contact…

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Giuliani privately pursued business in Ukraine while publicly pushing for inquiries for Trump

Giuliani privately pursued business in Ukraine while publicly pushing for inquiries for Trump

The New York Times reports: As Rudolph W. Giuliani waged a public campaign this year to unearth damaging information in Ukraine about President Trump’s political rivals, he privately pursued hundreds of thousands of dollars in business from Ukrainian government officials, documents reviewed by The New York Times show. Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, has repeatedly said he has no business in Ukraine, and none of the deals were finalized. But the documents indicate that while he was pushing Mr….

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‘There’s something terribly wrong’: Americans are dying young at alarming rates

‘There’s something terribly wrong’: Americans are dying young at alarming rates

The Washington Post reports: Death rates from suicide, drug overdoses, liver disease and dozens of other causes have been rising over the past decade for young and middle-aged adults, driving down overall life expectancy in the United States for three consecutive years, according to a strikingly bleak study published Tuesday that looked at the past six decades of mortality data. The report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, was immediately hailed by outside researchers for its comprehensive…

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The inside story of Christopher Steele’s Trump dossier

The inside story of Christopher Steele’s Trump dossier

Jane Mayer writes: For nearly three years, President Trump has spun an alternate reality in which he was not helped and tainted by Russia during the 2016 Presidential campaign but, rather, his political opponents and his accusers were. During a rambling fifty-three-minute live phone interview with “Fox & Friends” on Friday, Trump insisted again that the plot to block his election and bring him down once he was installed in the White House was “perhaps the biggest scandal in the…

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Inside Iran’s plot to attack Saudi Arabia

Inside Iran’s plot to attack Saudi Arabia

Reuters reports: Four months before a swarm of drones and missiles crippled the world’s biggest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia, Iranian security officials gathered at a heavily fortified compound in Tehran. The group included the top echelons of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite branch of the Iranian military whose portfolio includes missile development and covert operations. The main topic that day in May: How to punish the United States for pulling out of a landmark nuclear treaty…

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Chief rabbi’s criticism of Labour strikes a chord among many Jews in UK

Chief rabbi’s criticism of Labour strikes a chord among many Jews in UK

The Guardian reports: Plenty of Jews in the UK would say the chief rabbi does not speak for them. They may be from different traditions in Judaism – progressive or ultra-Orthodox – or they may be secular. But many, probably most, agree with the thrust of his unprecedented intervention in next month’s general election. Ephraim Mirvis, the UK’s most senior Jewish leader who represents Orthodox Judaism, accused Jeremy Corbyn of allowing a “poison sanctioned from the top” to take root…

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Why Giuliani singled out two Ukrainian oligarchs to help look for dirt on Biden

Why Giuliani singled out two Ukrainian oligarchs to help look for dirt on Biden

The New York Times reports: They were two Ukrainian oligarchs with American legal problems. One had been indicted on federal bribery charges. The other was embroiled in a vast banking scandal and was reported to be under investigation by the F.B.I. And they had one more thing in common: Both had been singled out by Rudolph W. Giuliani and pressed to assist in his wide-ranging hunt for information damaging to one of President Trump’s leading political rivals, former Vice President…

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Investigators scrutinize Giuliani firm and donations to Trump super PAC as part of broad probe

Investigators scrutinize Giuliani firm and donations to Trump super PAC as part of broad probe

The Washington Post reports: The federal investigation into two associates of Rudolph W. Giuliani is exploring a wide range of potential crimes — includingwire fraud and failure to register as a foreign agent — as prosecutors dig into the pair’s interactions with the president’s personal lawyer and the main pro-Trump super PAC, according to people familiar with the investigation. Giuliani’s dealings with the two men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, are being investigated by federal prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s…

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Don McGahn must testify about time as White House lawyer, judge rules

Don McGahn must testify about time as White House lawyer, judge rules

Politico reports: Don McGahn must testify to Congress about his time as the White House’s top lawyer, a federal judge ruled Monday — a decision that will put pressure on other reluctant Trump administration witnesses to testify about President Donald Trump’s actions. In a ruling that could reshape the balance of power between Congress and the executive branch, U.S. District Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson ruled that McGahn, who spent 30 hours talking to former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team,…

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In firing Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, Trump recklessly crosses another line

In firing Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, Trump recklessly crosses another line

David Ignatius writes: ​President Trump’s attempt to manipulate military justice had a sorry outcome Sunday with the firing of Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer. For the past nine months, Spencer had tried to dissuade Trump from dictating special treatment for Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher — but in the end Spencer was sacked for his efforts to protect his service. ​With Spencer’s firing, Trump has recklessly crossed a line he had generally observed before, which had exempted the military from his…

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I was a juror in Roger Stone’s trial. I am proud of how we came to our decision

I was a juror in Roger Stone’s trial. I am proud of how we came to our decision

Seth Cousins writes: During the first half of November, I made a brief journey with 14 fellow Americans, all of them strangers to me. Together we were the 12 jurors (and two alternates) sitting in judgment of longtime political consultant Roger Stone. We sat through five days of testimony and half a day of closing arguments. After eight hours of deliberation, we returned guilty verdicts on each of the seven counts we were charged to consider. Since we delivered that…

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How American anti-Semitism reflects the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of religious liberty

How American anti-Semitism reflects the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of religious liberty

A mother hugs her son at the memorial of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27, 2019, the first anniversary of the shooting at the synagogue. AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar By Tisa Wenger, Yale University Americans recently observed the first anniversary of the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which 11 were killed and six wounded. A year earlier, white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted the slogan, “Jews shall not replace us.”…

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