Attention to the Unseen

James Reston Jr. writes: On July 30, 1974, nine days before President Richard Nixon resigned, the House Judiciary Committee added a third article to its impeachment charges against the president. The first two had dealt with obstruction of justice and abuse of power; Article III charged that Nixon had failed to comply with eight congressional subpoenas related to the Watergate investigation. Now, with President Trump and William Barr, his attorney general, refusing to cooperate with congressional investigations, the Democrats in…

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Ian Millhiser writes: Once upon a time, nobody lived in Nevada. In 1860, the year Abraham Lincoln was elected president, Nevada was a desert wasteland with fewer than 7,000 residents. Indeed, the Silver State didn’t even exist on the day of Lincoln’s election. Two days before the lame-duck President James Buchanan left office, he signed legislation carving off part of Utah Territory, which stretched across most of modern-day Nevada, about a third of Colorado and some of Wyoming, to form…

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Elizabeth Weil writes: Kamala Harris—the Democratic presidential hopeful and 54-year-old junior senator from California—is a prosecutor by training. She knows well that any misstep, anything you say or do, can and will be held against you. Her fundamental, almost constitutional, understanding of this has made her cautious, at times enragingly so. Harris’s demographic identity has always been radical. She was San Francisco’s first female district attorney, first black district attorney, first Asian American district attorney. She was then California’s first…

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Vox‘s Alex Ward reports: On Monday, I spoke to activists inside the [Venezuelan] embassy [in Washington D.C.] from Code Pink, an antiwar group, about why they were occupying the space. [Ariel] Gold [a Code Pink national co-director] told me her team was living and working inside the mission [since April 10] because they oppose US-led conflict and intervention. “We are willing to put our bodies on the line” to stop President Donald Trump’s support of [Juan] Guaidó [head of Venezuela’s…

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The New York Times reports: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo avoided saying on Sunday whether the Trump administration would impose targeted sanctions on China over mass detentions of Muslims, in another sign of the administration’s paralysis on the issue. Mr. Pompeo was asked on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” about whether the administration might punish Chinese officials for the detention of hundreds of thousands to millions of ethnic minority Muslims in camps in Xinjiang, a vast region in northwest China….

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The Guardian reports: Rory Stewart has declared he wants the prime minister’s job, becoming the first cabinet minister to openly do so, as he warned the Conservatives the party would lose 4m votes if it pursued a hard version of Brexit to “outdo Nigel Farage”. Stewart, who was made international development secretary this week, said “yes” when asked if he would throw his hat into the ring to become prime minister, but insisted he was not keen for Theresa May…

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John Sipher writes: Although Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe is over, and although President Trump on Friday again described the probe as a “Witch Hunt,” the FBI is almost certain to continue its counterintelligence investigation into Russian espionage efforts related to the 2016 election. More important, they will continue to search for Americans working on behalf of the Kremlin. The inability to establish that the Trump campaign conspired in a “tacit or express” agreement with the Russian government is…

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Kevin Poulsen reports: When it comes to putting disinformation in front of American eyeballs, Vladimir Putin has long been able to count alt-right social media stars like Alex Jones and Mike Cernovich as reliable allies. Now the One America News Network, a pro-Trump cable news and commentary channel, is joining them in embracing some of Moscow’s most vile fake news. On Wednesday OANN aired a segment claiming to reveal that dozens of members of the Syrian Civil Defense, a humanitarian…

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The New York Times reports: The United States and China are racing to clinch a historic economic treaty as early as next week that could drastically reshape relations between the world’s two largest economies. But as negotiations reach their final stages, the sensitive subject of human rights has been left conspicuously off the table. China has faced growing condemnation from human rights groups in recent months for its detention of up to one million ethnic Uighurs and other minority Muslims…

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Christopher Clark writes from Zolani: On the outskirts of this overcrowded township in South Africa’s Cape Winelands, Phumlani Zota, a 32-year-old pig farmer, sifted through piles of waste in a refuse dump beneath the Langeberg mountains, filling a burlap sack with scraps of food for his livestock. “There is not enough land here,” he told me. Yet on all sides, the impoverished settlement was hemmed in by great tracts of white-owned farmland, neat rows of fruit trees and grapevines punctuated…

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