Insider reports: The Georgia prosecutor pursuing one of the most high-stakes investigations in US history built her career by successfully using racketeering charges, typically employed against organized crime, to convict Atlanta public school teachers for conspiring to alter student test scores. Those RICO cases, and a key hire of a racketeering law expert to her… Read More »
Scott R. Anderson writes: No criminal charges have yet been filed against Trump or anyone else in relation to the Mar-a-Lago files. But if and when that happens, Trump’s declassification defense is unlikely to solve his or his associates’ legal problems. While Trump could have declassified whatever he liked while president, his apparent inability to… Read More »
Arash Azizi writes: In April 2001, Indian-born British author Salman Rushdie was among the guests of honor at the Prague Writers’ Festival. Having only recently come out of years of hiding, Rushdie was clearly frustrated with the massive security detail that followed him everywhere. “To be here and to find a large security operation around… Read More »
In an editorial, the Washington Post says: Salma al-Shehab, the mother of two young children, was studying for a PhD at the University of Leeds and took time off to go home to Saudi Arabia for a vacation. Ms. Shehab is a Shiite Muslim, a persecuted minority in the kingdom, and a women’s rights activist… Read More »
Bud Ward writes: Miracles indeed can happen. And sometimes do. Such is the case with enactment of major climate legislation, part of the Inflation Reduction Act now, with President Joe Biden’s signature, enacted. Not just passed by the Senate and the House on strict party-line votes, but passed by each chamber as presented to them,… Read More »
The Atlantic reports: When the heat index—the temperature multiplied by humidity—reaches 80 degrees, the National Weather Service advises Americans to take caution. When it reaches 90, that advisory gets bumped to possibly dangerous; at 100, it’s likely so. At a heat index of 125 or above, the National Weather Service warns of “extreme danger” and… Read More »
NBC News reports: Senior intelligence officials realized early on that President Donald Trump wasn’t going to read even short written summaries of his regular intelligence briefings. So the CIA officers who prepared the briefings made sure they came to the Oval Office laden with striking images, pared-down charts and slick graphics designed to grab the… Read More »
Paul Rosenzweig writes: Donald Trump is making a serious mistake. The FBI’s execution of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago is, he apparently thinks, of great political benefit to him. Perhaps so—I am not one to judge politics. But public reports also suggest that he may accelerate his re-election announcement in response to the search. Trump… Read More »
Robert Draper writes: Rose Sperry, a state committeewoman for Arizona’s G.O.P., answered immediately when I asked her to name the first Republican leader she admired. “I grew up during the time that Joe McCarthy was doing his talking,” Sperry, an energetic 81-year-old, said of the Wisconsin senator who in the 1950s infamously claimed Communists had… Read More »
The New York Times reports: Two of the laws referred to in the search warrant executed this week criminalize the taking or concealment of government records, regardless of whether they had anything to do with national security. And laws against taking material with restricted national security information are not dependent on whether the material is… Read More »
The Jerusalem Post reports: Former US president Donald Trump authorized then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to annex parts of the West Bank, in a letter obtained exclusively by The Jerusalem Post on Sunday. In a three-page letter dated January 26, 2020, two days before Trump presented his Vision for Peace in the White House, the president… Read More »
The Wall Street Journal reports: The first sign of danger came when the dwindling crew of Ukrainian technicians running the Zaporizhzhia nuclear-power station noticed that officers from Russia’s state atomic energy company had left the premises without explanation. It was Aug. 5, and Russian soldiers were patrolling the facility. Then, at 2:40 p.m., explosions rocked… Read More »
Nature reports: Westerly winds are thrusting warm waters towards the East Antarctic ice sheet, and have thinned the region’s ice masses at alarming rates over recent decades, a study has found. Scientists say that the research, published in Nature Climate Change on 2 August, also helps to resolve one of the largest uncertainties in projections… Read More »
Shutterstock By Ross Pain, Australian National University; Michael David Kirchhoff, University of Wollongong, and Stephen Francis Mann, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology In the early 1990s, British neuroscientist Karl Friston was poring over brain scans. The scans produced terabytes of digital output, and Friston had to find new techniques to sort and classify the… Read More »