Attention to the Unseen

Lawrence Douglas writes: Democracies empower the will of majorities. In the US, Republican lawmakers on both the state and national level have rejected that basic principle. In a lame-duck session in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Republican legislators in the state of Wisconsin passed a sweeping bill designed to radically check the powers of the incoming governor. The result of this 11th-hour tactic is an attack on progressive causes, the integrity of the electoral process, and democratic accountability. Last…

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The New York Times reports: Since the uproar over Mr. Khashoggi’s killing, the Trump administration has acknowledged only one conversation between Mr. Kushner and Prince Mohammed: an Oct. 10 telephone call joined by John R. Bolton, the national security adviser. The Americans “asked for more details and for the Saudi government to be transparent in the investigation process,” the White House said in a statement. But American officials and a Saudi briefed on their conversations said that Mr. Kushner and…

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Larry Elliott writes: Rioting in the streets. Filling stations running out of fuel. Panic buying in the supermarkets. A country in chaos. Not a dystopian vision of Britain after Brexit, but France in the here and now under that self-styled champion of anti-populism, Emmanuel Macron. French politicians invariably claim to be inspired by Charles de Gaulle, and Macron is no exception. His official presidential photograph has him standing in front of a desk with a copy of De Gaulle’s war…

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Nick Cohen writes: Nigel Farage clutched his pearls and resigned from Ukip last week, protesting that he of all people could not possibly associate with criminals. The decision of his successor Gerard Batten to hire convicted fraudster and inveterate yob Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) was simply “too awful to contemplate”. Farage isn’t always so choosy about the company he keeps. His alliance with “Ted” Malloch, a little man who thinks he’s a big deal, tells all you need to…

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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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