Attention to the Unseen

NBC News reports: Saudi Arabia shows no sign of easing up on its crackdown against dissent and the Trump administration remains reluctant to punish the kingdom over its alleged abuses, including the killing of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi, former U.S. officials, foreign diplomats and human rights groups told NBC News. In the run-up to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit to Riyadh on Sunday, the Trump administration expressed praise for the kingdom’s role in the region and issued no warnings…

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'It looks like Brexit is effectively over.' My 284 word speech on Mrs May's deal in the House of Lords pic.twitter.com/LaVTKAva50 — Andrew Adonis (@Andrew_Adonis) January 14, 2019

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write: Crises are a time-tested means of subverting democracy. From Getúlio Vargas and other better-known dictators in the 1930s to Indira Gandhi and Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s and on to Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan more recently, autocratic-minded leaders have long used national emergencies — some real, some fabricated — to claim extraordinary powers. One of our greatest concerns about Donald Trump’s presidency has always been that he would exploit (or invent) a…

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Alia al-Hathloul writes: When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visits Saudi Arabia on Sunday, he is expected to discuss Yemen, Iran and Syria and “seek an update on the status of the investigation into the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.” I am struck by what is not included in Mr. Pompeo’s itinerary: the brave women activists of Saudi Arabia, who are being held in the kingdom’s prisons for seeking rights and dignity. Mr. Pompeo’s apathy is personal for me because…

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The Guardian reports: The EU is preparing to delay Brexit until at least July after concluding that Theresa May is doomed to fail in getting her deal through parliament. The country’s 29 March deadline for exiting the EU is now regarded by Brussels as highly unlikely to be met given the domestic opposition facing the prime minister and it is expecting a request from London to extend article 50 in the coming weeks. A special leaders’ summit to push back…

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The Washington Post reports: President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said. Trump did so after a meeting with Putin in 2017 in Hamburg that was also attended by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. U.S….

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Akbar Shahid Ahmed reports: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) told CNN on Friday that she definitely will seek the 2020 Democratic nomination for president, ending months of speculation. Her bid makes sense on its face: Democrats swept the 2018 midterm elections with a crop of young candidates like Gabbard, many of them with public service backgrounds and from historically underrepresented communities. (She is a military veteran and was the first Hindu member of Congress.) Much of the party also associates her…

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Soumya Shankar reports: Long before the Indian strongman Narendra Modi became prime minister of the world’s largest democracy, he was a prominent leader of the Hindu right. He rose as a public figure through the nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, whose ideology includes a desire to carve out a Hindu nation in which Muslims and Christians are considered second-class citizens. It was a well-known activist who once had links to the RSS who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, accusing him…

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The New York Times reports: In Georgia, a pecan farmer lost out on his chance to buy his first orchard. The local Farm Service Agency office that would have processed his loan application was shut down. In Wisconsin’s dairy country, a 55-year-old woman sat inside her new dream home, worried she would not be able to pay her mortgage. Her loan had come from an Agriculture Department program for low-income residents in rural areas, but all of the account information…

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