Attention to the Unseen

Al Jazeera reports: As clouds of white smoke billowed overhead, Showqi had no other option but to flee. Nearby, dozens of people scattered as they tried to outrun a fresh volley of tear gas fired by security forces in Tahrir Square, in the centre of Iraq’s capital, Baghdad. “They’re the lucky ones, [the ones] who were not targeted by government snipers,” Showqi said on Saturday, referring to the men who had run alongside him, some holding masks and pieces of…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: By mid-May, the U.S. relationship with Ukraine was unraveling: The U.S. ambassador had been recalled home for no apparent reason, the country’s new president was anxious about U.S. support, and President Trump’s personal lawyer was hawking Kiev conspiracy theories. Amid this turbulence, an unexpected figure stepped forward to assert that he was now in charge of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, had no apparent standing to seize this critical…

Read More Read More

Vox reports: A top US diplomat told Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) that the Trump administration was blocking hundreds of millions of dollars in US military aid to Ukraine until the country agreed to launch investigations Trump was demanding, Johnson told the Wall Street Journal Friday. Johnson said that the US ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, told him in late August that the administration was demanding Ukraine investigate “what happened in 2016,” and that if President Trump had “confidence”…

Read More Read More

Jane Meyer writes: For nearly two years, conservative operatives have been trying to weaponize the Ukraine-based story that has led Trump to the brink of impeachment. A look back over the coverage of the story—a repeatedly discredited conspiracy theory involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s work in Ukraine—suggests that America’s news organizations continue to be just as susceptible to manipulation by political partisans pushing complicated and hard-to-check foreign narratives as they were in 2016. In fact, several of the…

Read More Read More

Harry Enten writes: The poll numbers are in on impeachment, and it’s not good news for President Donald Trump. A clear plurality of Americans approve of the House’s impeachment inquiry into Trump, and they are split on whether they want to impeach and remove him from office. Americans are more eager to impeach Trump now than they were at similar points in the impeachment sagas of Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon. Impeachment actions usually start off as being unpopular with…

Read More Read More

Daniel W. Drezner writes: Mike Pompeo came into the secretary of state position with a relatively simple assignment: be better than the most incompetent secretary of state in history. Rex Tillerson tried to ingratiate himself with President Trump and failed. In the process, he alienated every other stakeholder relevant to his job: Congress, the Foreign Service, the foreign diplomatic corps, even folks such as me. He had to go. There was an argument that Pompeo was stepping into a situation…

Read More Read More

The Guardian reports: The former Conservative leadership candidate Rory Stewart has resigned from the party, and announced plans to run for mayor of London as an independent. Stewart, who was among 21 Tories who lost the whip for rebelling over a no-deal Brexit, announced in a tweet on Friday that he would stand down as an MP. He later told the Evening Standard newspaper he was sick of the “madhouse of mutual insults in the Gothic shouting chamber of Westminster”….

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: The former U.S. special envoy for Ukraine told House investigators on Thursday that he warned President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, that Giuliani was receiving untrustworthy information from Ukrainian political figures about former vice president Joe Biden and his son, according to two people familiar with his testimony. Kurt Volker, who resigned last week after being named in a whistleblower complaint that sparked the House impeachment inquiry of Trump, said he tried to caution Giuliani…

Read More Read More

CNN reports: A newly unearthed letter from 2016 shows that Republican senators pushed for reforms to Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office and judiciary, echoing calls then-Vice President Joe Biden made at the time. CNN’s KFile found a February 2016 bipartisan letter signed by several Republican senators that urged then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to “press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General’s office and judiciary.” The letter shows that addressing corruption in Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s office had bipartisan support in the…

Read More Read More