Attention to the Unseen

Patrick Wintour writes: The resignation of Sir Kim Darroch followed the failure of the probable next prime minister, Boris Johnson, to say he supported him staying in post, despite being given repeated chances to do so during his TV debate on Tuesday night with Jeremy Hunt. As the current Foreign Office minister Alan Duncan put it, by six times refusing to back the ambassador, Johnson had thrown him under a bus. Without the backing of the US president or his…

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Politico reports: When Elizabeth Warren said earlier this year she was swearing off fundraisers, many Democratic strategists saw it as a sign of desperation from a flailing candidate. But that gamble against conventional wisdom — which is paying off handsomely, given the $19.1 million she raised in the second quarter — is far from the only way Warren is defying the traditional playbook for running a modern presidential campaign. The campaign has gone without an outside polling firm, and says…

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A+ trolling… https://t.co/mufVj0IoBF — Keerthik Sasidharan (@KS1729) July 9, 2019 The Guardian reports: Theresa May faces a full-blown diplomatic standoff with the US after Donald Trump condemned Britain’s “stupid” ambassador to Washington over leaked memos critical of the White House, as Downing Street insisted Sir Kim Darroch had its full support. [Continue reading…] Richard Wolffe writes: Inept and dysfunctional are two of the more diplomatic words you could choose to describe the Trump administration. Colossally moronic and self-defeating might be…

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Michael Isikoff reports: In the summer of 2016, Russian intelligence agents secretly planted a fake report claiming that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton, giving rise to a notorious conspiracy theory that captivated conservative activists and was later promoted from inside President Trump’s White House, a Yahoo News investigation has found. Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, first circulated a phony “bulletin” — disguised to read…

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The Guardian reports: Proroguing the House of Commons to achieve a no-deal Brexit would be “the end of parliamentary democracy” in the UK, Dominic Grieve has said in defending his move to seek to remove the option. Grieve’s amendment, which has cross-party support including from a handful of fellow Conservative MPs, is to the Northern Ireland bill going through the Commons, and would require fortnightly reports on that country’s formation of an executive, which has been vacant since 2017. Speaking…

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Daniel Levy writes: Jared Kushner’s long-awaited “Peace to Prosperity” gathering at the Manama Four Seasons Hotel in Bahrain generated just about the level of serious coverage that it merited—precious little. For all its borderline pantomime-style imbecility (Kushner himself put in a performance as someone pretending to care about the Palestinians), this convening actually matters. Coming at a time in the region when the U.S. is inching closer to an armed confrontation with Iran and endorsing Israel’s permanent annexation of more…

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The New York Times reports: Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts raised $19.1 million in the past three months, her campaign said on Monday, a total that places her firmly in the top echelon of the Democratic money race and ahead of her main rival for the party’s progressive wing, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The fund-raising haul represents a turnaround for Ms. Warren after she raised just $6 million in her campaign’s first three months, before her strategy of eschewing…

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Robert Reich writes: I keep hearing that the Democratic party has moved “left” and that Democratic candidates may be “too far left”. But in an era of unprecedented concentration of wealth and political power at the top, I can’t help wondering what it means to be “left”. A half-century ago, when America had a large and growing middle class, those on the “left” sought stronger social safety nets and more public investment in schools, roads and research. Those on the…

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HuffPost reports: President Donald Trump lit into his once-favorite network on Sunday, saying Fox News is now even “worse” than his longtime bête noire, CNN. Trump said the network “forgot the people who got them there.” He griped Fox News was “loading up with Democrats” and complained it was citing The New York Times as “a ‘source’ of information,” an apparent reference to the newspaper’s Sunday article about disease, hunger and overcrowding at a Texas center holding migrant children. [Continue…

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  Reuters reports: Britain’s trade minister said on Monday he would apologize to U.S. President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka for a leak of confidential memos in which the UK ambassador describes the U.S. administration as “dysfunctional” and “inept”. [Continue reading…] The Guardian reports: Britain’s ambassador to the US has done nothing wrong and is held in high regard, the international trade secretary, Liam Fox, has said following the leak of confidential internal memos that gave an unflattering portrait of Donald…

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“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” – Donald Trump, 2002 https://t.co/3pbKrcFdn6 — Tim O'Brien (@TimOBrien) July 7, 2019 The Daily Beast reports: Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for allegedly sex trafficking dozens of minors in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005, and will appear…

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