Attention to the Unseen

The Guardian reports: “That’s the tactic they use,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island senator, pondering whether Donald Trump might attach his name to the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. “You float stuff and you float stuff and you float stuff until people get inured to what a stupid or outrageous thing it is that has been floated and then you pull the trigger.” Whitehouse was sitting in his Senate office and speaking to the Guardian at…

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The New York Times reports: A federal judge on Wednesday said she would grant bail to Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist employed by Harvard University, in an immigration case stemming from Ms. Petrova’s failure to declare scientific samples she was carrying into the country. “There does not seem to be either a factual or legal basis for the immigration officer’s actions” in stripping Ms. Petrova of her visa on Feb. 16, Christina Reiss, chief judge of the U.S. District Court…

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Dan Sabbagh writes: “Crimea will stay with Russia,” Donald Trump told Time magazine in a largely sympathetic profile on Friday. And with that statement, the US president made clear that he wanted to carve up another country, Ukraine, and so legitimise the forcible seizure of land made by Moscow 11 years ago. From reading the transcript of the interview, Trump’s thinking is hardly coherent. Crimea, he says, wouldn’t have been seized if he had been president in 2014, but “it…

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Martin Kettle writes: The US is a nation increasingly governed by a court. But this governing court is not a court of law. Trump’s grip on the top judges in the US supreme court, many of whom he appointed during his first term, is already tight and likely to now grow tighter. Instead, Trump governs by placing himself at the centre of a presidential court almost on the monarchical model. Not all of this is down to Trump alone. During…

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Jonathan Martin writes: Since breaking her hip in Europe last month, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been deluged with messages, flowers and calls of concern from heads of state, colleagues in both parties and even royalty, most notably Luxembourg’s Grand Duke Henri, who was hosting her when she fell and has been solicitous through her recovery. Yet it’s who she has not heard from that’s most remarkable, and that has infuriated Pelosi’s friends and family: Joe and Jill Biden. Fueling…

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HuffPost reports: President Joe Biden never mentioned his successor by name in his goodbye speech to the nation Wednesday, but nevertheless made it clear he believes that American democracy is at risk. “I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern,” Biden said in a 16-minute address from the Oval Office. He then ticked off allusions to Trump and his wealthy advisers as threats to Americans’ freedom. The outgoing president referred to Republican President Dwight…

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The Washington Post reports: In the first three days of 2025, Elon Musk commandeered global politics through dozens of rapid-fire, often inflammatory posts to his 210 million followers on X. The world’s richest person called for the release of a jailed British far-right extremist. He shared a post pressing King Charles III to dissolve Parliament and order a new general election, as he posted memes and a flurry of attacks directed at Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Musk accused Starmer of…

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The Hill reports: Vice President-elect JD Vance took to the social platform X on Thursday to share an op-ed by Elon Musk in which the tech mogul expressed support for the far-right German political party Alternative for Germany, or AfD. Quoting Musk’s English version of the opinion piece, Vance said it was an “interesting piece.” The vice president-elect emphasized that he wasn’t endorsing AfD in the upcoming German elections, as it was not his country and “we hope to have…

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  The Republican National Convention begins next week in Wisconsin. In many ways, the battleground state reflects the recent history of the GOP, with Republicans swinging more and more to the right, ending in a full-on embrace of Donald Trump’s MAGA policies. A close observer of this phenomenon is Charlie Sykes, founder of The Bulwark and a respected voice amongst never-Trump Republicans. Sykes joined Walter Isaacson to analyze what cards Republicans might play in the upcoming election, and what strategies…

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The New York Times reports: Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California and the former House speaker, on Sunday called for the F.B.I. to investigate protesters demanding a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas conflict, suggesting without evidence that some activists may have ties to Russia and President Vladimir V. Putin. “For them to call for a cease-fire is Mr. Putin’s message,” Ms. Pelosi said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what…

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Michael Ignatieff writes: When in the Spring of 2017 Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, made it illegal for the Central European University to offer U.S.-accredited degrees at its Budapest campus, everyone there knew that this was more than an attack on George Soros, the Hungarian American businessman and philanthropist who’d founded the CEU. I was then the university’s president and rector, posts I held from 2016 to 2021, so I witnessed the more than 50,000 citizens of Budapest who marched…

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David French writes: There’s a popular story in Christian circles that’s literally too good to be true. According to legend, in the early 1900s, The Times of London sent an inquiry to a number of writers asking the question, “What’s wrong with the world today?” The Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton responded succinctly and profoundly: “Dear Sirs, I am.” The real story is just as profound, but less succinct. In 1905 Chesterton wrote a much longer letter to London’s Daily News,…

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In an editorial, the New York Times says: A homeowner gets angry at a county commission over a zoning dispute and writes a Facebook post accusing a local buildings official of being in the pocket of developers. A right-wing broadcaster criticizing border policies accuses the secretary of homeland security of being a traitor. A parent upset about the removal of a gay-themed book from library shelves goes to a school board meeting and calls the board chair a bigot and…

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Twitter users who are fleeing to the social media platform Mastodon are finding it to be a different animal. Davide Bonaldo/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images By Brian C. Keegan, University of Colorado Boulder In the wake of Elon Musk’s noisy takeover of Twitter, people have been looking for alternatives to the increasingly toxic microblogging social media platform. Many of those fleeing or hedging their bets have turned to Mastodon, which has attracted hundreds of thousands of new users since Twitter’s…

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The Guardian reports: Wildfires and heatwaves wreaking havoc across swathes of the globe show humanity facing “collective suicide”, the UN secretary general has warned, as governments around the world scramble to protect people from the impacts of extreme heat. António Guterres told ministers from 40 countries meeting to discuss the climate crisis on Monday: “Half of humanity is in the danger zone, from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil…

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