Mobster talk: Trump says Schiff ‘has not paid the price’ for impeachment

Mobster talk: Trump says Schiff ‘has not paid the price’ for impeachment

The Washington Post reports: President Trump escalated his attacks on Rep. Adam B. Schiff on Sunday, issuing what appears to be a veiled threat against the California Democrat one day before Trump’s team is expected to deliver the crux of its defense in the third presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history. “Shifty Adam Schiff is a CORRUPT POLITICIAN, and probably a very sick man,” Trump tweeted Sunday morning. “He has not paid the price, yet, for what he has done…

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Understanding the events of 1979 is crucial for finding a better future for today’s Middle East

Understanding the events of 1979 is crucial for finding a better future for today’s Middle East

Kim Ghattas writes: What happened to us? The question haunts us in the Arab and Muslim world. We repeat it like a mantra. You will hear it from Iran to Syria, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, and in my own country, Lebanon. For us, the past is a different country, one not mired in the horrors of sectarian killings. It is a more vibrant place, without the crushing intolerance of religious zealots and seemingly endless, amorphous wars. Though the past…

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How Iran covered up the shooting down of an airliner

How Iran covered up the shooting down of an airliner

The New York Times reports: When the Revolutionary Guards officer spotted what he thought was an unidentified aircraft near Tehran’s international airport, he had seconds to decide whether to pull the trigger. Iran had just fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at American forces, the country was on high alert for an American counterattack, and the Iranian military was warning of incoming cruise missiles. The officer tried to reach the command center for authorization to shoot but couldn’t get through….

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Tech giants led by Amazon, Facebook and Google spent nearly half a billion on lobbying over the past decade

Tech giants led by Amazon, Facebook and Google spent nearly half a billion on lobbying over the past decade

The Washington Post reports: Ten years ago, Google executives rarely spoke to Congress. Amazon employed just two of its own registered lobbyists in Washington. And Facebook had only recently graduated to a real office after running its D.C. operation out of an employee’s living room. Since then, though, these technology companies have evolved into some of the most potent political forces in the nation’s capital, a Washington Post analysis of new federal records reveals, with just seven tech giants accounting…

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Unhinged Pompeo cursed NPR reporter because she questioned him about Ukraine

Unhinged Pompeo cursed NPR reporter because she questioned him about Ukraine

USA Today reports: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo used the “F-word” and other expletives after a testy interview with a National Public Radio host on Friday, the news outlet said. Pompeo unloaded on NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly after an interview in which she questioned him on Ukraine and Iran, among other issues. He grew extremely irritated by Kelly’s Ukraine questions, according to NPR. “‘Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?’” Pompeo apparently shouted at Kelly after the interview. On Saturday,…

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U.S. diplomats view Pompeo’s failure to defend foreign service officers as ‘beyond reprehensible’

U.S. diplomats view Pompeo’s failure to defend foreign service officers as ‘beyond reprehensible’

Nik Steinberg writes: The lack of accountability for what they see as the administration’s foreign-policy malpractice, several diplomats told me, has undermined already-low morale at the department, which has seen a striking number of resignations under Trump; seen more ambassadorships go to political appointees, as opposed to career diplomats, than at any time since the Franklin Roosevelt administration; and whose experts have been smeared repeatedly by the president and his inner circle experts as “Obama holdovers” or part of the…

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Sanders supporters have weaponized Facebook to spread angry memes about his Democratic rivals

Sanders supporters have weaponized Facebook to spread angry memes about his Democratic rivals

The Washington Post reports: A Democrat in Michigan scrolled through a surge of nasty Facebook memes about Sen. Elizabeth Warren last week before fixing on one that captured his growing dislike of the candidate. It depicted her smiling face as a mask. Behind it was Hillary Clinton. Matt Walters, 64, a retired factory worker and supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), shared the image onward to eight Facebook groups and tens of thousands of potential eyeballs with a few taps…

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Huge rally as Iraqis demand U.S. troops pull out

Huge rally as Iraqis demand U.S. troops pull out

BBC News reports: Huge crowds have taken to the streets of Iraq’s capital, Baghdad, to demand that US forces leave Iraq. Powerful Iraqi Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr earlier called for a million people to join Friday’s march, close to the US embassy in the capital. Iranian-backed militias were among those protesting in the city. The US killing of the top Iranian military commander, Gen Qasem Soleimani, on 3 January at Baghdad airport has fuelled tensions. [Continue reading…]

Venture capital shaped the past decade. It could destroy the next

Venture capital shaped the past decade. It could destroy the next

Nathan Heller writes: For a certain sort of nineteenth-century person—the sort with high risk tolerance and little revulsion to brutality—a natural career lay in whaling. The odds of success here were, by almost every measure, poor. An expedition first needed to find whales in the vastness of the oceans. If it succeeded, it had to approach the whales in silence, with a small craft; strike with a harpoon; stay afloat, intact, engaged, and oriented as the poor creatures thrashed about,…

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Do we live in a multiple universe?

Do we live in a multiple universe?

David J. Eicher writes: Decades of astrophysical research beginning in the late 19th century established the universe as we see it, culminating with the Big Bang theory. We now know the universe is about 13.8 billion years old and at least 150 billion trillion miles across. But in recent years, astronomers have begun to address a staggering possibility — the universe we can observe, and in which we live, may be one of many that makes up the cosmos. The…

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Doomsday Clock is now 100 seconds from midnight

Doomsday Clock is now 100 seconds from midnight

Live Science reports: Humanity’s headlong dash toward our own destruction is marked in minutes and seconds in the ticking of the hypothetical Doomsday Clock. How close we are to destroying ourselves registers in the nearness of the clock’s hands to midnight — the hour of absolute extinction. In 2019, the clock’s “timekeepers” with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) fixed the hands at 2 minutes to midnight; that time, set in 2018, is the closest the clock’s hands have…

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George Soros gives $1bn to fund universities ‘and stop drift towards authoritarianism’

George Soros gives $1bn to fund universities ‘and stop drift towards authoritarianism’

The Guardian reports: The philanthropist and former financier George Soros has announced that he is to donate $1bn to fund a new global network of universities designed to promote liberal values and his vision of an open society. In what he hailed as the “most important and enduring project of my life”, Soros said it was important to fund institutions that would help resist the drift towards growing authoritarianism in the US, Russia and China. He also launched a fresh…

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How the gun show became the Trump show

How the gun show became the Trump show

Tim Alberta writes: In a state Trump carried by fewer than 11,000 votes, out of more than 4.5 million cast, even the smallest ripple could be enough to tip the boat. Mid-Michigan may lack the raw numbers of Grand Rapids and metro Detroit, but its political volatility is far more pronounced. Given how dramatically the region swung from 2008 to 2016, it offers an ideal case study for the two questions that will define the 2020 election: Can Trump sustain…

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