Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: A White House official who listened to President Trump’s July phone call with Ukraine’s leader described it as “crazy,” “frightening,” and “completely lacking in substance related to national security,” according to a memo written by the whistle-blower at the center of the Ukraine scandal, a C.I.A. officer who spoke to the White House official. The White House official was “visibly shaken by what had transpired,” the C.I.A. officer wrote in his memo, one day after…

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Nathaniel Greenberg writes: In February 2015, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi presided over a potentially momentous shift in the history of Arab news media. On the sidelines of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s official visit to Cairo, the country’s oldest state-run newspaper Al-Ahram signed a “memorandum of understanding” with the Director General of the Russian-backed media group Rossiya Segodyna, or Russia Today. While attention focused on Russian investments in Egypt’s Zohr gas complex, Russian construction of an industrial zone near the…

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Business Insider reports: The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee has expressed alarm with the possibility that the US will pull out of a vital treaty with European allies and Russia. Rep. Eliot Engel of New York on Monday sent a letter to the US national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, in which he said he was “deeply concerned” by reports that the White House was considering withdrawing from the Open Skies Treaty. “I request your personal engagement on this…

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By Sylvia Taschka, Wayne State University Donald Trump might not be as popular in Europe as Barack Obama was, but for many groups on the far-right of Europe’s political spectrum, he has become a heroic figure. “With Trump, the pride of a whole population has awoken … Their hope is captured in one sentence ‘Make America Great Again,’” said Martin Sellner, the leader of Austria’s Identitarian Movement, one of these far-right groups, in a German magazine in 2016. “The ‘Trump…

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Politico reports: The tentacles of the Democratic impeachment investigation are extending far beyond the arms of President Donald Trump. The vice president’s office, acting chief of staff’s office, State Department, Energy Department, Office of Management and Budget and Justice Department are among the government entities quickly finding themselves ensnared in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, joining a huge squad of White House lawyers, Cabinet officials and national security staffers — many of them detailed from the Pentagon, CIA and elsewhere in…

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The New York Times reports: After a jet carrying Attorney General William P. Barr touched down in Rome late last month, some diplomats and intelligence officials at the American Embassy were unsure why he had come to the Eternal City. They were later surprised, two officials said, to discover that he had circumvented protocols in arranging the trip, where he met with Italian political and intelligence officials. Everything about the visit was unusual — perhaps most of all, the attorney…

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The Guardian reports: When Hong Kong’s summer of protests began in June, the city was so shocked by police unleashing 150 canisters of tear gas and using their batons, it helped bring two million people into the streets to demonstrate again and denounce police brutality. Four months of rolling protests later, they used nearly 10 times as many tear gas rounds in 24 hours in a futile bid to control the city as China celebrated 70 years of communist rule…

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