Ex-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows granted immunity, tells special counsel he warned Trump about 2020 claims

Ex-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows granted immunity, tells special counsel he warned Trump about 2020 claims

ABC News reports: Former President Donald Trump’s final chief of staff in the White House, Mark Meadows, has spoken with special counsel Jack Smith’s team at least three times this year, including once before a federal grand jury, which came only after Smith granted Meadows immunity to testify under oath, according to sources familiar with the matter. The sources said Meadows informed Smith’s team that he repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election that the allegations…

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Barack Obama: Thoughts on Israel and Gaza

Barack Obama: Thoughts on Israel and Gaza

Barack Obama writes: [I]n dealing with what is an extraordinarily complex situation where so many people are in pain and passions are understandably running high, all of us need to do our best to put our best values, rather than our worst fears, on display. That means actively opposing anti-semitism in all its forms, everywhere. It means rejecting efforts to minimize the terrible tragedy that the Israeli people have just endured, as well as the morally-bankrupt suggestion that any cause…

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Where did all those structures inside complex cells come from?

Where did all those structures inside complex cells come from?

Viviane Callier writes: More than 1.5 billion years ago, a momentous thing happened: Two small, primitive cells became one. Perhaps more than any event — barring the origin of life itself — this merger radically changed the course of evolution on our planet. One cell ended up inside the other and evolved into a structure that schoolkids learn to refer to as the “powerhouse of the cell”: the mitochondrion. This new structure provided a tremendous energetic advantage to its host…

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U.S. advises Israel to delay Gaza invasion, officials say

U.S. advises Israel to delay Gaza invasion, officials say

The New York Times reports: The Biden administration has advised Israel to delay a ground invasion of Gaza, hoping to buy time for hostage negotiations and to allow more humanitarian aid to reach Palestinians in the sealed-off enclave, according to several U.S. officials. American officials also want more time to prepare for attacks on U.S. interests in the region from Iran-backed groups, which officials said are likely to intensify once Israel moves its forces fully into Gaza. The administration is…

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Pentagon rushes defenses and advisers to Middle East as Israel’s ground assault in Gaza looms

Pentagon rushes defenses and advisers to Middle East as Israel’s ground assault in Gaza looms

The Associated Press reports: The Pentagon has sent military advisers, including a Marine Corps general versed in urban warfare, to Israel to aid in its war planning and is speeding multiple sophisticated air defense systems to the Middle East days ahead of an anticipated ground assault into Gaza. One of the officers leading the assistance is Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James Glynn, who previously helped lead special operations forces against the Islamic State and served in Fallujah, Iraq, during some…

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Turnover has plagued local election offices since 2020. One swing state county is trying to recover

Turnover has plagued local election offices since 2020. One swing state county is trying to recover

The Associated Press reports: The polls had just opened for last year’s midterms in Pennsylvania when the phones began ringing at the election office in Luzerne County. Polling places were running low on paper to print ballots. Volunteers were frustrated, and voters were getting agitated. Emily Cook, the office’s interim deputy director who had been in her position for just two months, rushed to the department’s warehouse. She found stacks of paper, but it was the wrong kind — ordered…

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Trump plots to pull out of NATO — if he doesn’t get his way

Trump plots to pull out of NATO — if he doesn’t get his way

Rolling Stone reports: Donald Trump wanted to pull the United States out of NATO during his first term, but was repeatedly talked out of it by senior administration officials. For a possible second term in the White House, the 2024 Republican presidential frontrunner is already discussing how he could actually get it done, if his demands aren’t met by NATO. He and his policy-wonk allies are also gaming out how he could dramatically wind down American involvement to merely a…

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American journalist detained and charged in Russia

American journalist detained and charged in Russia

NBC News reports: A U.S. journalist has been detained in Russia, her employer said, the second such case since the war in Ukraine started. Alsu Kurmasheva, a dual Russian American reporter with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), was detained in the southwest Russian city of Kazan on Wednesday while awaiting the return of her passports, her employer said Thursday in a statement. RFE/RL said Kurmasheva, who is based in Prague, has been charged with failure to register as a foreign…

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Republicans can’t govern — and they say it’s embarrassing and even dangerous

Republicans can’t govern — and they say it’s embarrassing and even dangerous

Aaron Blake writes: It’s not clear yet that House Republicans’ inability to elect a new speaker has significantly recast the political paradigm in this country. But the danger for the party is in a drawn-out process continuing to cast doubt on the GOP’s ability to actually govern when voters give it power. A poll released this weekend showed two-thirds of Americans agreed that “Congress needs to elect a speaker as soon as possible” to deal with issues such as Israel, Ukraine and…

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The House GOP’s unlikely resistance fighter

The House GOP’s unlikely resistance fighter

Noah Berlatsky writes: The ongoing GOP House speakership debacle has been a clownish, humiliating spectacle which has made basically every Republican involved look like a dunderhead unfit to look smug on Sean Hannity’s show, much less govern the country. So it’s all the more surprising that one legislator who has emerged as a figure of resolve is Colorado’s Ken Buck. Buck has not, up to now, been a figure of integrity, to put it mildly. He’s a radical right Freedom…

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Little light, no beds, not enough anesthesia: A view from the ‘nightmare’ of Gaza’s hospitals

Little light, no beds, not enough anesthesia: A view from the ‘nightmare’ of Gaza’s hospitals

The Associated Press reports: The only thing worse than the screams of a patient undergoing surgery without enough anesthesia are the terror-stricken faces of those awaiting their turn, a 51-year-old orthopedic surgeon says. When the Israeli bombing intensifies and the wounded swamp the Gaza City hospitals where Dr. Nidal Abed works, he treats patients wherever he can — on the floor, in the corridors, in rooms crammed with 10 patients instead of two. Without enough medical supplies, Abed makes do…

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The end of Biden’s Middle East mirage

The end of Biden’s Middle East mirage

Matthew Duss writes: In his popular 1998 book, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, the late scholar Fouad Ajami offered a critique of 20th-century Arab nationalists and intellectuals for having built what Ajami saw as a fictional sense of their own accomplishments, which he claimed in turn had promoted a chauvinistic and conspiratorial worldview. “In an Arab political history littered with thwarted dreams, little honor would be extended to pragmatists who knew the limits of what could and could not…

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Russia’s first known act of war against a NATO and EU member-state

Russia’s first known act of war against a NATO and EU member-state

Roman Dobrokhotov, Christo Grozev, and Michael Weiss report: It started with a contest. The Russian spies were to invent their own remote-controlled detonators. They also had to devise disguises for the triggers. Over the course of four days in a mosquito-infested guesthouse across the road from the infectious diseases hospital in Krasnodar, southern Russia, they hid their inventions in the casing of a WiFi router, within an apple juice container and inside a cell phone. In the end, everyone won….

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Trump operates ‘like the mafia’ says Australian billionaire, Anthony Pratt

Trump operates ‘like the mafia’ says Australian billionaire, Anthony Pratt

The New York Times reports: New details of how an American president and an Australian billionaire bonded over their mutual self-interest help to document the transactional ethos of the Trump presidency, and show how Mr. Trump melded his White House with his personal business in a way that, according to prosecutors, had ramifications for national security. Mr. Pratt was hardly the only favor seeker circling Mar-a-Lago, which became the fulcrum of the president’s two overlapping worlds, and a marketplace of…

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