Attention to the Unseen

Market Watch reports: The pro-Israel lobby is a significant player in terms of political donations, contributing $14.9 million in the 2018 election cycle, according to data from OpenSecrets.org, a website tracking money in politics that’s run by a nonpartisan research group, the Center for Responsive Politics. The center ranks this lobby as the 50th-biggest spender in the last cycle — well behind the securities and investment industry at No. 1 with its $399 million, as well as lagging the electronics…

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Bloomberg reports: Major U.S. banks shaved about $21 billion from their tax bills last year — almost double the IRS’s annual budget — as the industry benefited more than many others from the Republican tax overhaul. By year-end, most of the nation’s largest lenders met or exceeded their initial predictions for tax savings. On average, the banks saw their effective tax rates fall below 19 percent from the roughly 28 percent they paid in 2016. And while the breaks set…

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The New York Times reports: The princess known as Sheikha Latifa had not left Dubai, the glittering emirate ruled by her father, in 18 years. Her requests to travel and study elsewhere had been denied. Her passport had been taken away. Her friends’ apartments were forbidden to her, her palace off-limits to them. At 32, Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum went nowhere without a watchful chauffeur. “There’s no justice here,” she said in a video she secretly recorded last year….

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In an editorial, the New York Times says: The Saudi heir and his friends in the White House evidently calculated that the outcry over the barbarous murder of Jamal Khashoggi would die out over time, and that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman would be free to continue on his autocratic way, repressing critics and dissidents with impunity. They were wrong. More than four months have passed since Mr. Khashoggi was savagely throttled and dismembered in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul…

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The Washington Post reports: At first, Michael Cohen appeared indifferent as he listened to the group of Republican leaders urge his boss to run for governor. It was the fall of 2013, and Donald Trump was already fixated on “the big thing,” as he referred to running for president. But the Republicans knew they were getting somewhere when Trump signaled to his attorney that he wanted more talks. “So Michael,” Trump would say, “you get us a date on the…

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The Guardian reports: Theresa May could win parliament’s approval for her controversial Brexit deal in return for guaranteeing another referendum, under a new plan being drawn up by a cross-party group of MPs. The new vote would give the British people a simple choice: to confirm the decision or stay in the EU. The initiative, aimed at breaking the political impasse, is being advanced by Labour MPs Peter Kyle and Phil Wilson and has won the support of prominent Remainers…

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Reuters reports: Britain is leading a group of European Union states who are trying to block an EU plan to include Saudi Arabia and 22 other jurisdictions on a blacklist of countries that pose money-laundering and terrorism financing threats, sources said. The EU’s executive commission adopted last month a draft list that adds Saudi Arabia, Panama and small Pacific and Caribbean islands to the existing list of 16 states, which currently includes Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and North Korea….

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Joshua Keating writes: When it comes to the threats to global democracy, the call is coming from inside the house. U.S.-based NGO Freedom House’s annual Freedom in the World report, released Monday, found that for the 13th straight year, global freedom has declined. (The report scores countries on 25 indicators—factors like rule of law and freedom of the press—and categorizes them as “free,” “partly free,” or “not free.”) For much of this period, which political scientist Larry Diamond has called…

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Politico reports: President Donald Trump has missed a deadline imposed by a bipartisan group of senators to identify the killers of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and to determine if the U.S. should impose sanctions on them. “Consistent with the previous Administration’s position and the constitutional separation of powers, the President maintains his discretion to decline to act on congressional committee requests when appropriate,” a senior administration official said Friday. The group of lawmakers, led by Sens. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.),…

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Franklin Foer writes: For two years, in the early 1990s, Richard Palmer served as the CIA station chief in the United States’ Moscow embassy. The events unfolding around him—the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russia—were so chaotic, so traumatic and exhilarating, that they mostly eluded clearheaded analysis. But from all the intelligence that washed over his desk, Palmer acquired a crystalline understanding of the deeper narrative of those times. Much of the rest of the world…

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