Attention to the Unseen

Politico reports: The outgoing chair of the California GOP — the nation’s largest state Republican Party — has issued a dire warning that his state represents “the canary in the coal mine” for the party‘s national fortunes unless it confronts demographic shifts that have already turned California into a majority-minority state. “We have not yet been able to figure out how to effectively communicate and get significant numbers of votes from non-whites,’’ said former state Sen. Jim Brulte, who’s held…

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The Guardian reports: The investigation has established that: A Philadelphia-based thinktank, the Middle East Forum (MEF), acknowledges it has spent about $60,000 (£47,000) on Robinson’s legal fees and demonstrations staged in London earlier this year. A senior MEF executive has been closely involved in preparations for this weekend’s march, though the thinktank said she was there in a personal capacity. A US tech billionaire, Robert Shillman, financed a fellowship that helped pay for Robinson to be employed in 2017 by…

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Michelle Goldberg writes: On Monday, in an interview with The Intercept, Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat who in November became the first Palestinian-American elected to Congress, went public with her support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks to use economic pressure on Israel to secure Palestinian rights. That made her the second incoming member of Congress to publicly back B.D.S., after Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar, who revealed her support last month. No current member of Congress supports…

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The Hill reports: State Department official Scott Busby told senators this week that China has detained at least 800,000 Muslim minorities in internment camps. “The U.S. government assesses that since April 2017, Chinese authorities have indefinitely detained at least 800,000 and possibly more than 2 million Uighurs, ethnic Khazakhs, and other members of Muslim minorities in internment camps,” Busby, the deputy assistant secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor, told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Tuesday. “Reports…

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John Kerr writes: The real debate now is between leaving under the humiliating terms of the proposed withdrawal agreement, with no certainty about the eventual permanent relationship, or staying with our current rights as full members, with a voice, a vote and veto. So the choice is between a bad Brexit deal and sticking with the deal we have in the EU. And it’s a choice for the people. I don’t think it would be right for parliament to just…

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Mikhail Gorbachev and George P. Shultz write: More than 30 years have passed since the day the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union, meeting in Geneva, adopted a joint statement declaring that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” It was more than just rhetoric. Less than a year later, in Reykjavik, Iceland, they agreed on the parameters of future treaties on the elimination of intermediate-range nuclear forces, or INF, and the radical…

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Natalie Nougayrède writes: For Europe’s sake, Emmanuel Macron needs help – not our scorn or hatred. A young, reformist French president who promised a “European renaissance” finds himself struggling at the helm of a country that is fast becoming “the sick man of Europe” again. It was a telling moment last weekend when rioters disfigured the face of a statue of Marianne, the republic’s symbol, at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Just three weeks earlier, world leaders had gathered…

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CNN reports: Britain could be trapped in endless negotiations with the European Union by Theresa May’s Brexit deal, the British government’s top legal adviser has warned. In the full written advice by the attorney general, which the government was forced to publish after lawmakers found it in contempt of parliament, ministers are warned that the “backstop” insurance policy relating to Northern Ireland could last “indefinitely” if relations with the EU break down. The six-page document, dated November 13, was described…

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The Washington Post reports: Lobbyists representing the Saudi government reserved blocks of rooms at President Trump’s D.C. hotel within a month of Trump’s election in 2016 — paying for an estimated 500 nights at the luxury hotel in just three months, according to organizers of the trips and documents obtained by The Washington Post. At the time, these lobbyists were reserving large numbers of D.C.-area hotel rooms as part of an unorthodox campaign that offered U.S. military veterans a free…

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BuzzFeed reports: The allegations that Republicans tampered with absentee ballots in a close North Carolina election represent the most serious federal election tampering case in years, one that allegedly stole votes from elderly black voters in the state’s rural south. Now two women intimately involved with the McCrae Dowless’s absentee ballot machine have revealed to BuzzFeed News its grim and chaotic workings, in which Dowless tracked votes on yellow paper and paid his workers, including family members, from stacks of…

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The Washington Post reports: President Trump and senior members of his administration, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, have insisted that no single piece of evidence irrefutably links [Saudi Crown Prince] Mohammed [bin Salman] to the killing [of journalist Jamal Khashoggi]. But [after a briefing from CIA Director Gina Haspel] the senators, in effect, said that doesn’t matter, because the evidence they heard convinced them beyond the shadow of a doubt. “If the Crown…

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