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The loss of local news coverage in much of the United States has frayed communities and left many Americans woefully uninformed, according to a new report.
November 20, 2019Read More
As Democratic presidential candidates gather to debate on Wednesday night, Barack Obama is increasingly pressing a 2020 message: Focus on defeating President Trump and ditch the ideological purity.
November 20, 2019Read More
As president of Putnam’s, he broke ground with sexually explicit works like “Lolita” and “Fannie Hill,” worked with top authors and scored many best sellers.
November 20, 2019Read More
U.N. Security Council members have rebuked the U.S. announcement that it no longer considers Israeli settlements to be a violation of international law. The council’s monthly Mideast meeting, just two days after the U.S. announcement, was dominated by…
November 20, 2019Read More
Restless mobility in search of opportunity is an American hallmark, but new Census Bureau data finds that more people, especially millennials, are staying put.
November 20, 2019Read More
President Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, Rudy Giuliani, found himself at the heart of the impeachment hearing on Wednesday after the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, implicated him in allegedly setting up a quid pro quo between the White House and Ukraine. Giuliani, needless to say, was not having it, going as far as to demand an apology from the GOP’s own attorney.Republicans had attempted to dismiss Giuliani’s activities in Ukraine as nothing but self-interested meddling, as to distance Trump from the possible scheme to pressure Ukraine into investigating the Bidens. That was the line of questioning the GOP counsel, Steve Castor, pursued on Wednesday: “Granted, Mr. Giuliani had business interests in Ukraine,” Castor suggested, prompting Sondland to answer “now I understand he did; I didn’t know that at the time.”> GOP counsel Steve Castor now advances the argument that Giuliani was acting on his own, and invokes his two indicted associates. Of course, throughout all of this Giuliani was Trump’s lawyer and clearly acting on his behalf. pic.twitter.com/YMj1eTEPJi> > — Oliver Willis (@owillis) November 20, 2019Giuliani hit back on Twitter: “Republican lawyer doesn’t do his own research and preparation, and is instead picking up Democrat lies, shame,” he tweeted. “Allow me to inform him: I have NO financial interests in Ukraine, NONE! I would appreciate his apology.”Giuliani spent the day on the defensive on social media, tweeting earlier that “I never met with [Sondland]” and that there was “no quid pro quo.” He later deleted that tweet. Read more about Giuliani’s alleged interests in Ukraine here.More stories from theweek.com Ken Starr on the Sondland testimony: ‘It’s over’ Putin says the Ukraine scandal has distracted the U.S. from Russian election meddling: ‘Thank God’ Sondland just obliterated Trump and put the entire White House in peril
November 20, 2019Read More
Abdirizak Warsame was among nine Minnesota men who planned to travel to Syria to join ISIS. When the FBI foiled their plot, each faced a decision that would influence their sentencing.
November 20, 2019Read More
Gordon Sondland drew a blank. The details of his July 26 call with President Trump, conducted on a cell phone in a restaurant in Kyiv, Ukraine, are fuzzy, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union testified Wednesday at the fourth day of public hearings in the House impeachment inquiry. Yet he has “no reason to doubt that this conversation included the subject of investigations” Trump allegedly pressured the Ukrainian president to conduct, Sondland said. “Actually, I would have been more surprised if President Trump had not mentioned investigations.”And well he should be, for Trump has spent years yammering on about conspiracies. It would be surprising if he didn’t bring that obsession into the White House, if he failed to seize the unique opportunities of his office both to probe at least some of the conspiracy theories he believes to be true — most obviously here, that a hacked DNC server is located in Ukraine — and to conspire himself.Conspiracy theories are rarely necessary to understand our world — simple self-interest, cruelty, and incompetence usually have more explanatory power — but they are demonstrably attractive to the president. Trump’s infamous years-long fixation on former President Obama’s birth certificate is just the start.During the 2016 election, recall, Trump suggested the father of his then-rival, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), was involved in the assassination of former President Kennedy. He retweeted birther allegations against Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). He claimed the Islamic State attacked him at a campaign rally. He ran ads proposing Syrian refugees “could be ISIS.” He promoted a theory that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered by being smothered with a pillow. He raised the possiblity that a Clinton aide who died in 1993 was also murdered. He had a dalliance with the antivax movement.And that’s just during the last election! In the years before, he proposed climate change might be a Chinese hoax. He called regulations against asbestos a “great con” perpetrated by the mob. In the time since, he has intimated MSNBC host Joe Scarborough murdered an intern. More seriously in terms of national politics, he has repeatedly claimed his loss of the popular vote was due to widespread election fraud. And all three of these lists are inevitably incomplete, for conspiracy theories are a structural component of Trump’s mental blueprints. He loves them, and he didn’t stop loving them when he got elected president.The trouble for Trump is that many of the people whose help he would need to turn the administrative branch into his personal conspiracy theory investigation machine are not Trump people. That’s not to say, as he likes to complain, that they are never-Trumpers, just that they’re career civil servants. Ordinary bureaucrats more than political appointees. They were there before Trump got elected, and they’ll probably be there after he leaves office. They are unlikely to be enthusiastic about tracking down evidence for presidential daydreams, especially daydreams already debunked in whole or part by other federal investigations. That’s where Rudy Giuliani comes in.Sondland hinted as much in his testimony Wednesday, describing the president’s personal attorney as the tugboat pushing a disinterested barge of federal bureaucracy into conducting Trump’s desired bribery scheme with Ukraine. “Secretary [of Energy Rick] Perry, [former Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt] Volker and I worked with Mr. Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine matters at the express direction of the president of the United States,” Sondland said. “We did not want to work with Mr. Giuliani. Simply put, we played the hand we were dealt.” In Sondland’s telling, Giuliani served as a de facto Secretary of the Conspiracy Theories, arranging a quid pro quo with the Ukrainian president at Trump’s request.This is what makes Sondland’s testimony so easily plausible to me: Why would a President Trump not retain the conspiracy theory obsession of real estate developer, reality star, and candidate Trump?Again and again, Trump has called for state investigations of his conspiracy theories du jour. Now he is head of state. Are we supposed to think he just lost interest? Trump’s own public comments since taking office show that is not the case. He clearly still thinks in conspiratorial terms.With Ukraine, it seems Trump saw a chance to get to the bottom of some of his present pet theories, theories he may sincerely believe (or at least hopes to be true). And it also seems he was willing to conspire to get what he wanted.More stories from theweek.com Ken Starr on the Sondland testimony: ‘It’s over’ Putin says the Ukraine scandal has distracted the U.S. from Russian election meddling: ‘Thank God’ Sondland just obliterated Trump and put the entire White House in peril
November 20, 2019Read More
Former EU Council president Donald Tusk pledged Wednesday to fight political populism as he was elected leader of Europe’s main conservative parties during their group meeting in Croatia. The former Polish prime minister will be tasked with boosting t…
November 20, 2019Read More
Austria’s Interior Minister Wolfgang Peschorn announced Tuesday that the country will turn the birthplace of Adolf Hitler into a police station in the hopes of preventing it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.”The future use of the house by the police should send an unmistakable signal that the role of this building as a memorial to the Nazis has been permanently revoked,” Peschorn said in a statement. Neo-Nazis have reportedly long frequented the house in downtown Braunau am Inn, turning it into a pilgrimage site of sorts. The government has tried to step in and stop that from happening for quite a while, but the building’s owner had refused sell it even though the interior ministry had taken over the main lease in 1972. The owner also refused to renovate the building, which meant it was difficult to rent to tenants who would turn it into an administrative, educational, or social services building as required by the government. So it remained challenging to prevent Hitler’s admirers from flocking to it, even as support for Nazism dwindled. But the government seized the building in 2017, and will now hold a redesign competition for architects that will begin this month as the building transitions into the hands of law enforcement.The timing of the announcement is not insignificant, as some far-right parties have continued to make gains in Europe. Read more at The New York Times.More stories from theweek.com Ken Starr on the Sondland testimony: ‘It’s over’ Putin says the Ukraine scandal has distracted the U.S. from Russian election meddling: ‘Thank God’ Sondland just obliterated Trump and put the entire White House in peril
November 20, 2019Read More
Four female moderators. Four female candidates. That’s more women on a presidential debate stage than ever before. So what will listeners hear?
November 20, 2019Read More
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