Attention to the Unseen

Marie L. Yovanovitch writes: After nearly 34 years working for the State Department, I said goodbye to a career that I loved. It is a strange feeling to transition from decades of communicating in the careful words of a diplomat to a person free to speak exclusively for myself. What I’d like to share with you is an answer to a question so many have asked me: What do the events of the past year mean for our country’s future?…

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France 24: On Wednesday evening, at least seven protesters were shot dead in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf, sparking fresh anti-government rallies across the country. Since the start of the protest movement in October, several hundred people, mostly demonstrators, have been killed in clashes, while tens of thousands more have been injured. Our reporters Cyril Payen and Amar Al Hameedawi travelled to the south of Iraq to get to the heart of the protests.  

Peter Beinart writes: The impeachment struggle is now over. Historians may one day vindicate Democrats for exposing Donald Trump’s abuse of power. But as of now, they have lost. Not only will Trump remain president, and not only does he appear stronger politically than before the impeachment battle began, but he has succeeded in doing precisely what he wanted in the first place: He tarred Joe Biden, who last year looked like Trump’s most formidable Democratic rival, with the kind…

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BuzzFeed reports: At the heart of the impeachment saga that ended on Wednesday in Donald Trump’s acquittal was $391 million in US military assistance for Ukraine that the president ordered be withheld. But that aid package, which was eventually released last September, wasn’t the only US arms transfer meant for the war-torn country that was held up. Several direct commercial sales of arms and ammunition to Ukraine faced significant delays at the same time — and they remain mysteriously frozen…

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Politico reports: Mitt Romney brought a stunning twist to the end of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial: A bipartisan vote to convict the president on charges of abuse of power. The Wednesday announcement by the Utah Republican made him the only member of the GOP to break with the president and his party on the crucial question of whether Trump deserved to be removed from office. The 2012 Republican nominee said he was left with no other options, regardless of…

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The Guardian reports: At least 200 Salvadoran migrants and asylum seekers have been killed, raped or tortured after being deported back to El Salvador by the United States government which is turning a blind eye to widely known dangers, a new investigation reveals. Human Rights Watch has documented 138 deported Salvadorans murdered by gang members, police, soldiers, death squads and ex-partners between 2013 and 2019. The majority were killed within two years of deportation by the same perpetrators they had…

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BuzzFeed reports: In the summer of 2018, an American evangelical pastor and dozens of Ukrainian Christian groups prayed for Marie Yovanovitch to be fired from her job as the US ambassador to Kyiv. With their prayers still unanswered a few months later, they put their faith in fellow evangelical Christian Mike Pompeo instead, sending a letter to the US secretary of state via a trusted Republican political appointee at the State Department. A copy of the letter was provided to…

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David Enrich writes: One Day in early 2017, Mike Offit went to the Yale Club in Manhattan for a lunch hosted by a group called Business Executives for National Security. Offit, who has a craggy face and shoulder-­length hair, had spent much of his career in banking, but that had ended nearly two decades earlier. Since then, he had puttered around the outskirts of finance, dabbled in journalism and even published a novel about a pair of murders at a…

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