Attention to the Unseen

Lili Loofbourow writes: Sanders didn’t just defend the president from the effects of his own statements; she offered herself as a kind of prosaic presence whose function it was to act like anything Trump did, no matter how shocking, was no big deal. She exemplified the stolid approval Trump wanted for everything from family separations to tax cuts for the rich. As her tenure ends, we can now see how much her reliance on reassuring phrases like “make a determination”—and…

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The Observer reports: Since he entered parliament in 1970, Kenneth Clarke has served under eight Conservative leaders, from Edward Heath to Theresa May. He has also stood three times, in 1997, 2001 and 2005, to be Tory leader himself during difficult periods for his party. But throughout it all he has never known a political crisis remotely like the present. Now aged 78, he still describes himself as “a natural optimist”. But a combination of Brexit and the Tory leadership…

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The New York Times reports: Carrie Lam, the chief executive of Hong Kong, has a very loyal majority in the territory’s legislature. She has the complete backing of the Chinese government. She has a huge bureaucracy ready to push her agenda. Yet on Saturday, she was forced to suspend indefinitely her monthslong effort to win passage of a bill that would have allowed her government to extradite criminal suspects to mainland China, Taiwan and elsewhere. Mrs. Lam’s decision represented the…

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Sam Knight writes: In the spring of 1989, the Daily Telegraph sent Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson to Brussels to cover what was then the European Economic Community. Johnson, who was twenty-four, knew the city well. His father, Stanley, had been one of the first British bureaucrats appointed to work at the European Commission after the United Kingdom joined the bloc, in 1973. Johnson, his parents, and his three younger siblings moved to Belgium when he was nine years old,…

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Julian Borger writes: Shinzo Abe’s trip to Tehran this week turned out to be one of the more ill-fated mediation efforts of recent times. What was billed as a grand gesture – the first Japanese leader to visit Iran in four decades – ended in humiliation, with split-screen television pictures showing Abe being told off by a stern supreme leader, while a thick plume of smoke rose from a burning Japanese tanker in the Gulf of Oman. The US has…

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Sheelah Kolhatkar reports: On September 20, 2016, John Stumpf, the C.E.O. of Wells Fargo, appeared before the Senate Banking Committee to defend his company’s role in one of the biggest financial scandals in recent memory. Wells Fargo employees, who were under pressure from senior management to meet overly aggressive sales targets, had opened more than two million bank and credit-card accounts for customers who had never asked for them. The tone of the questioning was initially courteous. Then Elizabeth Warren…

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Esquire reports: Surely, the United States of America could not operate concentration camps. In the American consciousness, the term is synonymous with the Nazi death machines across the European continent that the Allies began the process of dismantling 75 years ago this month. But while the world-historical horrors of the Holocaust are unmatched, they are only the most extreme and inhuman manifestation of a concentration-camp system—which, according to Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration…

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