Sept. 2023 News

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Editor's Choice: Scroll below for our monthly blend of mainstream and September 2023 news and views

Note: Excerpts are from the authors' words except for subheads and occasional "Editor's notes" such as this.

 

Sept. 25

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US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, right, and his wife Nadine Arslanian, pose for a photo on Capitol Hill in Washington, December 20, 2022. (Associated Press file photo by Susan Walsh).

 

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U.S. Immigration Crisis

 

More On Republican Threats To Shut U.S. Government

 

 

Litigation Against Trump, Allies

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More On Ukraine-Russian War, Russian Leadership

 

 Canada Accuses India of Sikh Leader's Assassination

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada during a frosty meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India during the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi earlier in September 2023 (Canadian Press photo by Sean Kilpatrick via Associated Press).

 

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An aerial view of Derna, Libya, on Thursday. Torrential rains burst through two dams near Derna, on Libya’s northeastern coast, destroying much of the city (Reuters photo b

 

U.S. Auto Workers Strike

 

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gop house chairs 2023 ny times logoNew York Times, Analysis: The Wrecking-Ball Caucus: How the Far Right Brought Washington to Its Knees, Carl Hulse, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). Far-right Republicans are sowing mass dysfunction, and spoiling for a shutdown, an impeachment, a House coup and a military blockade.

djt maga hatWhen it comes to his view of the United States government, Representative Bob Good, a right-wing Republican who represents a Virginia district that was once the domain of Thomas Jefferson, doesn’t mince words.

“Most of what Congress does is not good for the American people,” Mr. Good declared in an interview off the House floor as the chamber descended into chaos last week. “Most of what we do as a Congress is totally unjustified.”

Though his harsh assessment is a minority opinion even among his Republican colleagues, it encapsulates the perspective that is animating the hard right on Capitol Hill and, increasingly, defining a historically dysfunctional moment in American politics.

republican elephant logoWith a disruptive government shutdown just days away, Washington is in the grip of an ultraconservative minority that sees the federal government as a threat to the republic, a dangerous monolith to be broken apart with little regard for the consequences. They have styled themselves as a wrecking crew aimed at the nation’s institutions on a variety of fronts.

They are eager to impeach the president and even oust their own speaker if he doesn’t accede to their every demand. They have refused to allow their own party to debate a Pentagon spending bill or approve routine military promotions — a striking posture given that unflinching support for the armed forces has long been a bedrock of Republican orthodoxy.

Defying the G.O.P.’s longstanding reputation as the party of law and order, they have pledged to handcuff the F.B.I. and throttle the Justice Department. Members of the party of Ronald Reagan refused to meet with a wartime ally, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, this week when he visited the Capitol and want to eliminate assistance to his country, a democratic nation under siege from an autocratic aggressor.

And they are unbowed by guardrails that in past decades forced consensus even in the most extreme of conflicts; this is the same bloc that balked at raising the debt ceiling in the spring to avert a federal debt default.

“There is a group of Republican members who seem to feel there is no limit at all as to how you can wreck the system,” said Ross K. President Donald Trump officialBaker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University. “There are no boundaries, no forbidden zones. They go where relatively junior members have feared to tread in the past.”

 

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Meidas Touch Network, Analysis: Trump Vows to Ban All News Media That Doesn’t Praise Him, Brett Meiselas, Sept. 24-25, 2023. Donald Trump continues to tell us his fascist intentions should he be reelected. Will the mainstream media finally listen?

Donald Trump launched into his most overtly fascist assault on the First Amendment in a Sunday night tirade, promising that he will remove from the airwaves any news media that is not friendly towards him should he be reelected as president of the United States.

NBC News logoTrump specifically took aim at NBC News to make his point t (ironically, NBC is the network that employed and elevated Donald Trump during The Apprentice days, shown above in a publicity photo from the show), writing that the network “should be investigated for its ‘Country Threatening Treason.’”

Trump then made his intentions crystal clear:

“I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media djt maga hatwill be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events. Why should NBC, or any other of the corrupt & dishonest media companies, be entitled to use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA, FREE? They are a true threat to Democracy and are, in fact, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country!”

washington post logoWashington Post, As possible shutdown nears, a disconnect between political rhetoric and budget reality, Jeff Stein and Marianna Sotomayor, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). Lawmakers in both parties have called for getting serious about the rising federal debt. The shutdown fight ignores its key drivers.

Time is running out for Congress to prevent a government shutdown, as Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) tries to defuse the demands of ultraconservatives in the House who are demanding aggressive spending cuts.

When lawmakers return Tuesday, both the House and the Senate will try different tactics to fund the government past the fast-approaching deadline — each looking to jam their preferred legislation through the other chamber in a risky game of brinkmanship. djt maga hatCurrent spending laws expire on Sept. 30, so the government will shut down at 12:01 a.m. on Oct. 1 without action.

U.S. braces for costly government shutdown in eight days

In the House, the GOP majority failed several times last week to reach consensus on a short-term funding bill, known as a continuing resolution. Most of the conference says they want to avert a shutdown, but a small group of far-right members who oppose a short-term extension have blocked that option. So Republicans will try to pass some separate bills that would fund the government for the full fiscal year.

senate democrats logoThe Senate will begin work on its own short-term spending bill on Tuesday, aiming to send it to the House by the weekend with hours to go before a shutdown starts — where it would probably have enough votes to pass, but only with support from Democrats, a red line for many in the GOP.

But while the far-right rebels in McCarthy’s caucus say the rising national debt is such a threat that it’s worth forcing the government to close down in pursuit of spending cuts, the uncomfortable fiscal reality is that most of what is driving federal borrowing to record levels isn’t even up for discussion this week.

Conservatives want to pare federal discretionary spending back to 2022 levels, which would mean cutting more than $100 billion from agency budgets each year.

social security administrationThat’s a lot of money, but hitting the goal would require severe cuts to a small portion of the federal budget — mostly programs that provide services like education, medical research and aid for families in poverty. The government’s biggest annual expense, though, and the main projected drivers of U.S. debt, are the retirement programs Medicare and Social Security. The United States spends more than $6 trillion every year. McCarthy’s caucus is tying itself in knots over how to make cuts from domestic discretionary spending, which accounts for less than one-sixth of that total.

Looking at it another way, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that the annual federal deficit is expected to rise to nearly $3 trillion per year by next decade, up from roughly $2 trillion this year. If the conservatives in the House GOP get everything they’re seeking now, that number could drop to about $2.8 trillion per year.

“The people back in my district, they’re tired of the way this town works,” said Rep. Elijah Crane (R-Ariz.), who joined other conservatives in the last week to stymie McCarthy’s attempts to move spending bills. “They understand there’s no appetite to spend money we don’t have, and they expect me to do whatever I can to stop it, and to change how we do business. It’s not always the most comfortable thing.”

But the disconnect between the political rhetoric about the shutdown and the reality of the budget math underscores how little lawmakers are doing to try to rein in the long-term federal spending imbalance. Without a deal, the federal government will shut down, hurting economic growth and leading to the suspension of a wide range of essential public services.

Meidas Touch Network, Analysis: Trump Directs House GOP to Shut Down Government and Blame Biden, Ben Meiselas, Sept. 24-25, 2023. This is Trump’s second directive to compliant House Republicans via his social media posts

President Donald Trump officialDonald Trump has issued his latest order to House Republicans: shut down and refuse to fund the United States government and then blame President Biden for the catastrophic fallout.

On September 20, Trump issued his first directive to compliant House MAGA Republicans, telling them that a “very important deadline is approaching at the end of the month” and “this is the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me.”

djt maga hatIn his latest post, Trump orders the House GOP: “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN.

Trump goes on to say that Republicans shouldn’t worry about the damage that will be caused to the country, as he claims President Biden will get blamed for it. Trump also tells House Republicans not to listen to Republican Senate republican elephant logoMinority Leader Mitch McConnell if he wants to make a deal with Democrats, because Trump says McConnell is “weak” and “dumb.”

MAGA Republicans in the House continue to take their orders directly from Donald Trump and do whatever he says. They have followed his directives, bringing the country to the brink of a catastrophic shutdown.

ny times logoNew York Times, As Trump Prosecutions Move Forward, Threats and Concerns Increase, Michael S. Schmidt, Adam Goldman, Alan Feuer, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). As criminal cases proceed against the former president, heated rhetoric and anger among his supporters have authorities worried about the risk of political dissent becoming deadly.

Justice Department log circularAt the federal courthouse in Washington, a woman called the chambers of the judge assigned to the election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump and said that if Mr. Trump were not re-elected next year, “we are coming to kill you.”

FBI logoAt the Federal Bureau of Investigation, agents have reported concerns about harassment and threats being directed at their families amid intensifying anger among Trump supporters about what they consider to be the weaponization of the Justice Department. “Their children didn’t sign up for this,” a senior F.B.I. supervisor recently testified to Congress.

And the top prosecutors on the four criminal cases against Mr. Trump — two brought by the Justice Department and one each in Georgia and New York — now require round-the-clock protection.

As the prosecutions of Mr. Trump have accelerated, so too have threats against law enforcement authorities, judges, elected officials and others. The threats, in turn, are prompting protective measures, a legal effort to curb his angry and sometimes incendiary public statements, and renewed concern about the potential for an election campaign in which Mr. Trump has promised “retribution” to produce violence.

Given the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, scholars, security experts, law enforcement officials and others are increasingly warning about the potential for lone-wolf attacks or riots by angry or troubled Americans who have taken in the heated rhetoric.

In April, before federal prosecutors indicted Mr. Trump, one survey showed that 4.5 percent of American adults agreed with the idea that the use of force was “justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.” Just two months later, after the first federal indictment of Mr. Trump, that figure surged to 7 percent.

ny times logoNew York Times, Blasting Bullhorns and Water Cannons, Chinese Ships Wall Off the South China Sea, Hannah Beech, Photographs and Video by Jes Aznar, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). Traveling by boat, Times journalists saw firsthand how the world’s most brazen maritime militarization has transformed a major trade route.

China FlagThe world’s most brazen maritime militarization is gaining muscle in waters through which one-third of global ocean trade passes. Here, on underwater reefs that are known as the Dangerous Ground, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, or P.L.A., has fortified an archipelago of forward operating bases that have branded these waters as China’s despite having no international legal grounding. China’s coast guard, navy and a fleet of fishing trawlers harnessed into a militia are confronting other vessels, civilian and military alike.

The mounting Chinese military presence in waters that were long dominated by the U.S. fleet is sharpening the possibility of a showdown between superpowers at a moment when relations between them have greatly worsened. And as Beijing challenges a Western-driven security order that stood for nearly eight decades, regional countries are increasingly questioning the strength of the American commitment to the Pacific.

Semafor, China looms over Biden’s meeting with Pacific leaders, Benjy Sarlin, Jordan Weissmann and Morgan Chalfant, Sept. 25, 2023.  President Biden will meet with more than a dozen leaders from Pacific nations at the White House today for a summit that will see him establish diplomatic relations with the Cook Islands and Niue.

Climate change will be a major topic of the gathering, but as with many of the administration’s international engagements, China will be looming in the background. At least one leader is skipping the summit — Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare — causing disappointment in the White House. The leaders who are in town were scheduled to attend the Baltimore Ravens game yesterday and receive a briefing from the Coast Guard on U.S. plans to address illegal fishing and maritime issues.

China’s militarized coast guard fleet, recently detailed in the New York Times, might be a natural topic of conversation.

ny times logoNew York Times, On Day 146, Screenwriters Reach Deal With Studios to End Their Strike, Brooks Barnes and John Koblin, Sept. 25, 2023. The Writers Guild of America got most of what it wanted. With actors still on picket lines, however, much of Hollywood will remain shut down.

Hollywood’s bitter, monthslong labor dispute has taken a big first step toward a resolution.

The Writers Guild of America, which represents more than 11,000 screenwriters, reached a tentative deal on a new contract with entertainment companies on Sunday night, all but ending a 146-day strike that has contributed to a shutdown of television and film production.

In the coming days, guild members will vote on whether to accept the deal, which has much of what they had demanded, including increases in compensation for streaming content, concessions from studios on minimum staffing for television shows, and guarantees that artificial intelligence technology will not encroach on writers’ credits and compensation.

“We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional — with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership,” the Writers Guild’s negotiating committee said in an email to members.

Conspicuously not doing a victory lap was the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios. “The W.G.A. and A.M.P.T.P. have reached a tentative agreement” was its only comment.

ny times logoNew York Times, The deal reflects the strength of unions’ hands in the current moment, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Ravi Mattu, Bernhard Warner, Sarah Kessler and Michael J. de la Merced, Sept. 25, 2023. The work stoppage isn’t officially over yet, and actors remain on strike. But hints about what the W.G.A. attained suggest that as organized labor enjoys a surge in popularity across a variety of industries, its muscle-flexing is achieving results.

“We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional,” the W.G.A. told its members on Sunday, though it hasn’t yet disclosed details. News reports suggest the deal includes provisions for residual payments from streaming, minimum staffing of shows and limits on the use of artificial intelligence.

Expect more particulars once the W.G.A. informs its membership ahead of a vote that’s expected on Tuesday. Until then, writers are still on strike, though they’re not actively picketing. Late-night talk shows, which don’t rely on striking actors, are likely to resume production first.

 

More On U.S. Politics, Governance, Elections

 

US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, right, and his wife Nadine Arslanian, pose for a photo on Capitol Hill in Washington, December 20, 2022. (Associated Press file photo by Susan Walsh).

US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, right, and his wife Nadine Arslanian, pose for a photo on Capitol Hill in Washington, December 20, 2022. (Associated Press file photo by Susan Walsh).

ny times logoNew York Times, Menendez, Defiant, Says He Will Not Resign, Tracey Tully, Sept. 25, 2023. Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, returned Monday to Union City, the community where he rose to political prominence, to offer a clear answer to former allies who have called for his resignation in the face of federal bribery charges: No.

senate democrats logo“The allegations leveled against me are just that — allegations.” Mr. Menendez said at a news conference at a community college not far from where he grew up, the child of Cuban immigrants.

It was the first time he had appeared publicly since federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed a 39-page indictment on Friday that accused him and his wife, Nadine Menendez, of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for wielding his political influence to benefit the government of Egypt and business associates in New Jersey.

Investigators found $550,000 in cash and 13 bars of gold bullion during a June 2022 search of a safe deposit box and the couple’s home in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.

Many of New Jersey’s most prominent Democratic leaders have called on Mr. Menendez to step down. On Monday morning, he appeared at the lectern alone.

The indictment depicted a far-reaching web of political corruption involving aid and weapons sales to Egypt and efforts by Mr. Menendez to persuade state and federal prosecutors to go easy on his associates in three criminal cases.

Mr. Menendez was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee until stepping aside on Friday, as required by rules the Senate Democrats adopted to govern themselves.

Mr. Menendez, his wife, and three New Jersey businessmen, who were also accused in the bribery conspiracy, are expected to appear Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan to respond to the charges.

Nadine Menendez, 56, Mr. Menendez’s wife of three years, did not attend the news conference.

phil murphy o smile CustomNew Jersey’s governor, Philip D. Murphy, right, a close ally of Mr. Menendez, called for the senator’s resignation Friday evening, unleashing a chorus of similar messages from fellow Democratic leaders across the state.

Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey spoke publicly for the first time since being charged with taking bribes in exchange for exerting political influence.

Damian Williams, US attorney for the Southern District of New York, talks about a display of photos of evidence in an indictment against Democratic Senator Bob Menendez during a news conference, September 22, 2023, in New York (Associated Press photo by Robert Bumsted).

Damian Williams, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, talks about a display of photos of evidence in an indictment against Democratic Senator Bob Menendez during a news conference, September 22, 2023, in New York (Associated Press photo by Robert Bumsted).

Semafor, The White House and top Senate Democrats remain silent on Menendez, Morgan Chalfant, Sept. 25, 2023. Sen. Bob Menendez’s future, even as he’s facing growing pressure to resign after his indictment on federal bribery charges.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. suggested Menendez and New Jersey voters should decide his future, citing “the presumption of innocence.” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. said on MSNBC that he wanted to speak to his colleagues before weighing in and Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz. was similarly careful on CBS. New Jersey’s other Democratic senator, Cory Booker, is also still silent.

On the other side of the Capitol, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. has called on Menendez to step down, while Rep. Andy Kim, D-N.J. is promising a primary challenge. Meanwhile, a prominent Democratic figure, the former top Obama aide and ambassador Patrick Gaspard who now heads the Center for American Progress, urgently pressed the party to move, calling the allegations about Menendez so “egregious that his position just isn’t sustainable.”

“Corruption will be THE issue against Trump, and with a media susceptible to ‘both sides’ equivalencies there is every need to make the sharp distinction,” Gaspard told Semafor. “Dems can’t credibly paint R’s as extremist supporters of a man charged with multiple felonies while defending or remaining silent on one of their own who is out of central casting in an FBI lineup. This is a tragic end to a career, but it’s not the moment to preference personal friendships over democracy.”

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ny times logoNew York Times, Republicans may seize control of North Carolina’s state and local election boards, Michael Wines, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). The G.O.P.-led legislature may seize control of state and local election boards from the Democratic governor, fueling a feud that could resonate in 2024.

Shortly before Gov. Roy Cooper, a North Carolina Democrat, began his first term in 2017, his rivals in the Republican-controlled legislature voted to strip the position of key powers, including the governor’s longstanding authority to appoint majorities to the state election board and local election boards in all 100 counties. After the state Supreme Court ruled that move illegal, the lawmakers put the idea on the ballot, but the state’s voters shot that down, too.

Now, seven years after their first try, the legislators appear on the verge of getting what they have long sought.

On Wednesday, the State House of Representatives followed the State Senate in passing legislation that would put the legislature in charge of all election board appointments. It would also change the number of positions on each board to split seats equally between Republican and Democratic members, eliminating the extra seat — controlled by the governor — that had served as a tiebreaker in disputes.

Under the newly passed bill, ties in local election boards would be addressed by the State Board of Elections — which, under the bill, would also have an equal number of members from each party.

Republicans still have to meld the House and Senate versions into a single measure and then override a certain veto by Governor Cooper. Neither appears to pose a problem, particularly after a Charlotte-area state representative defected from Democratic ranks to the Republican Party last spring, giving it a veto-proof majority in both houses of the legislature.

ny times logoNew York Times, How a Little-Known Group Helped Resurgent Democrats Wield Power, Nick Corasaniti, Sept. 25, 2023. For decades, Republicans have had a robust network of conservative policy groups to push their legislative agenda. Now the States Project is aiming to fill that void on the left.

For decades, Republicans have outmaneuvered and outspent Democrats in state legislatures, gerrymandering them into the minority in both red states and political battlegrounds.

G.O.P. state lawmakers have used that advantage to pass countless conservative policies — with a lot of help along the way.

In back rooms and behind the scenes, conservative think tanks and other policy groups like the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council drafted model legislation for Republican lawmakers to cut taxes, expand gun rights and loosen environmental regulations.

Now Democrats are trying to put themselves on even footing.

An increasingly prominent player in this liberal push is a little-known group called the States Project, which was founded in 2017 and made a financial splash in state legislative elections last year, pouring $60 million into races in five competitive states: Arizona, Michigan, Maine, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

 

World Crisis Radio, Weekly Strategic Overview and Reform Agenda: Campaign by corrupt Wall Street media to foment Democratic defeatism webster tarpley 2007refuted by election returns! Webster G. Tarpley, right, historian and commentator, Sept. 23-24, 2023. Surveys of scores of 2023 state-level special elections show Democrats overperforming recent results by 8% to 10%; Tired demagogy of inflation and Biden’s age falls flat with voters: UNH-CNN poll shows Biden leading Trump 52% to 40% in New Hampshire, with 94% of Democrats committed to voting for Biden;

Garland’s duty is to defend US government against going fascist assault, not to curate his own inflated reputation for rectitude; Indictment of Hunter Biden reeks of dirty politics of both-sidesism Garland could stop if he wanted to;

Biden pledges vital ATACM missiles and $325 million to Zelensky; White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients must now assure rapid delivery; Ukraine hits Russian naval HQ for Crimea in Sevastopol; Is Russia on verge of a new warlord era?

After demanding end of US Constitution and pledging to have DoJ arrest opponents, Trump orders House MAGAts to paralyze government and stop his prosecution by Feds; reactionary anarchists rush to obey; Qevin sabotages support for Kyiv, but Ukrainian APCs are now operating south of Surovikhin line; Putin continues to bet everything on Trump’s return to power;

Ramaswampy, left, demands scrapping of XIV Amendment, fruit of Union sacrifice in Civil War; Haley and Scott spearhead GOP scab attack on striking UAW; Don’t be a chump for Trump, no matter what he promises;

Musk probed by Senate committees over taxes and his Starlink sabotage of Ukraine’s defense measures in occupied Crimea; The erratic billionaire says he wants a modern American version of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the bloody-handed leader of the oligarchical party in the late Roman Republic c. 80 BC, who started and won a civil war, becoming the gravedigger of the republic; What are we to make of this strange remark?

 

ny times logoNew York Times, Senator Robert Menendez Is Indicted With His Wife and 3 Others, Benjamin Weiser, Tracey Tully and William K. Rashbaum, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). The indictment said the the New Jersey senator and his wife accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of robert menendez obribes, including cash and gold bars.

Robert Menendez of New Jersey, right, the powerful Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was charged on Friday with taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes — including gold bars — to wield influence abroad and at home, aiding the government of Egypt and businessmen in New Jersey.

democratic donkey logoThe three-count federal indictment, which also charges the senator’s wife and three New Jersey businessmen, accuses him of using his official position in a wide range of corrupt schemes. In one, he sought to secretly provide Egypt with sensitive U.S. government information, prosecutors said. In two others, he aimed to influence criminal investigations of two New Jersey businessmen, one of whom was a longtime fund-raiser for Mr. Menendez.

Toward that end, the senator recommended that President Biden nominate a lawyer, Philip R. Sellinger, to be U.S. attorney for New Jersey because Mr. Menendez believed he could influence Mr. Sellinger’s prosecution of the fund-raiser, the indictment said. Mr. Sellinger, who was ultimately confirmed for the post, was not accused of any wrongdoing.

senate democrats logoIn another scheme, Mr. Menendez used his position to try to disrupt an investigation and prosecution by the New Jersey State attorney general’s office, according to the indictment.

In exchange for all those actions, the indictment said, the senator and his wife, Nadine Menendez, accepted cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, a luxury vehicle and other valuable things.

“Constituent service is part of any legislator’s job — Senator Menendez is no different,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a news conference announcing the charges. He said that Mr. Menendez’s Senate website explicitly states the kinds of services he would not provide because they are be improper.

“Behind the scenes, Senator Menendez was doing those things for certain people — the people who were bribing him and his wife,” he said.


Soon after the news conference, Mr. Menendez issued a page-long denial, blaming the charges on “forces behind the scenes” that have “repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave.”

He said he was confident that this matter would be “successfully resolved once all of the facts are presented and my fellow New Jerseyans will see this for what it is.”

“The excesses of these prosecutors is apparent,” he added. “They have misrepresented the normal work of a Congressional office. On top of that, not content with making false claims against me, they have attacked my wife for the longstanding friendships she had before she and I even met.”

National Legal and Policy Center, Commentary: This Time, Jared Kushner Can’t Save Robert Menendez, Peter Flaherty (NLPC co-founder), Sept. 23, 2023. This Time, Jared Kushner Can’t Save Robert Menendez.

If Senator Robert Menendez is successfully prosecuted by a Democratic Justice Department, it will be an ironic twist for Menendez, whose career likely would have ended in 2017 had Jared Kushner not been the president’s son-in-law.

jared kushner head shotKushner, left, and his family are longtime donors to New Jersey Democrats, including Menendez, who was tried on bribery and related charges in 2017, along with his co-defendant and biggest campaign donor, Dr. Salomon Melgen. Menendez was represented by Abbe Lowell, who was also Kushner’s lawyer. (Lowell now represents Hunter Biden.)

The 2017 trial resulted in a mistrial because of a hung jury. Under circumstances that have yet to be explained, the Justice Department chose not to retry the duo.

Justice Department log circularAmong the allegations, the prosecution accused Menendez of pressuring U.S. officials to get the Dominican Republic government to honor a long-dormant port security deal with a company owned by Melgen.

The port security deal was uncovered by NLPC, and was the subject of a front-page New York Times story on February 1, 2013. NLPC provided information to the Times on an exclusive basis, apparently prompting, or at least expanding, the federal criminal investigation.

Aside from the Justice Department decision not to seek a retrial, the biggest mystery of the bribery prosecution was that Justice Department never flipped Melgen to testify against Menendez. The Doctor seemed to be a prime candidate to become a prosecution witness, already facing significant prison time for Medicare fraud.

Could it be that Melgen was told that if he served a couple years in prison, saving Menendez, that political efforts could be exerted later to free him? President Trump’s subsequent commutation of the balance of Melgen’s 17-year sentence during his last days in office confirmed to me that this is exactly what happened.

Melgen may have been the least deserving candidate for presidential clemency in history, and that is saying a lot when the competition is the likes of Marc Rich, pardoned by President Clinton in 2001.

More irony is in the fact that Menendez’ wife Nadine was also indicted. Their marriage in 2020 was cited as evidence that Menendez was cleaning up his personal life after allegations (to which NLPC was not a party) involving underage girls in the Dominican Republic. According to the Justice Department media release:

In June 2022, the FBI executed a search warrant at the New Jersey home of MENENDEZ and NADINE MENENDEZ. During that search, the FBI found many of the fruits of this bribery scheme, including cash, gold, the luxury convertible, and home furnishings. Over $480,000 in cash — much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe — was discovered in the home, as well as over $70,000 in cash in NADINE MENENDEZ’s safe deposit box, which was also searched pursuant to a separate search warrant.

Menendez has engaged in transactional politics his entire career, which should have been over long ago.

ny times logoNew York Times, Egypt found a key ally in Senator Robert Menendez when it came to obtaining billions in U.S. aid, Vivian Yee and Karoun Demirjian, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.).

washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: Democrats need to shove Menendez off the stage, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 22, 2023. In a statement that, frankly, jennifer rubin new headshotsounded Trumpian in its grievance and grandiosity, Menendez lashed out at prosecutors and shamefully played the discrimination card. (“Those behind this campaign simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a U.S. Senator and serve with honor and distinction.”) His outrageous accusation ignores five other Latino Americans in the Senate.

The Democratic senator’s indictment refutes the GOP’s enraged allegations — on full display Wednesday in House Republicans’ interrogation of Attorney General Merrick Garland over the indictment of Hunter Biden — that the Justice Department has been “weaponized” against Republicans.

Yet this is a moment of choosing for Democrats. Unlike their GOP counterparts, they should not feel compelled to cover their eyes and ears when one of their own appears to be caught red-handed.

 washington post logoWashington Post, N.J. governor calls on Menendez to resign from Senate after indictment, Marisa Iati and Isaac Stanley-Becker, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D), shown in an official photo, and two veteran New Jersey members of Congress on Friday called on Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), a fellow Democrat, to resign after the senator was indicted on federal bribery charges, saying the “deeply disturbing” allegations “implicate national security.”

Menendez, an influential Democrat who has served in the Senate since 2006, already stepped down Friday — at least temporarily — as chair of the chamber’s Foreign Relations Committee, as the Senate Democratic Caucus’s rules require.

The call for Menendez to abdicate his seat was echoed by state Democratic Party Chairman LeRoy Jones Jr., who said urging the senator to step aside was a “tough decision.”

washington post logoWashington Post, Gen. Mark Milley, polarizing Joint Chiefs chairman, exits center stage, Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan and Karen DeYoung, mark milley army chief of staff Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). Admirers say he helped save American democracy. Critics contend he dragged the military deeper into the toxic political fray.

As the war in Ukraine approached its first anniversary, the Pentagon’s top officer, Gen. Mark A. Milley, assessed the carnage that had followed Russia’s full-scale invasion: With more than than 100,000 soldiers likely killed or wounded on each side, he said, there was a “window of opportunity” for the combatants to hammer out a deal.

The declaration was classic Milley, according to colleagues and observers who have worked closely with him. The general, immersed in military history and alarmed by the potential for escalation with Russia, the largest nuclear power in the world, was publicly advocating a position the Biden administration had eschewed as the president and other top advisers sought to project unqualified support for Ukraine’s defense. It was a notion that unnerved America’s partners in Kyiv.

Milley, whose four-year tenure as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ends with his retirement this month, will exit center stage as one of the most consequential and polarizing military chiefs in recent memory, leading America’s armed forces through a fraught period that included the precarious final months of Donald Trump’s presidency, a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Washington’s high-stakes standoff with Moscow.

Admirers commend the brash Boston-area native for steering the military through Trump’s attempts to subvert democracy and the constitutional rule of law, keeping troops out of the 2020 election chaos and choreographing key aspects of the Pentagon’s support to Ukraine. Milley would say later he harbored concern that Trump might issue unlawful orders, and that, if he had, they “wouldn’t have been followed.”

Critics say the general stretched the bounds of what is expected to be a nonpartisan role, wading into hot-button debates again and again, and dragging the military farther into the political fray at a time when the institution’s public backing is already under strain. Some found him overly focused on his own legacy.

washington post logoWashington Post, After Florida restricts Black history, churches step up to teach it, Brittany Shammas, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). More than 260 houses of worship have signed onto the effort. “We don’t want to whitewash anything,” one organizer says. “We want to tell the truth.”

washington post logoWashington Post, NASA capsule carrying pieces of an asteroid lands in Utah. Scientists will use them to study origins of life, Joel Achenbach, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). A NASA spacecraft flung the capsule onto a bombing range, delivering safely to Earth a sample of the potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft flung a capsule the size of a car tire onto a bombing range in Utah on Sunday, delivering safely to Earth a sample of the intriguing and potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu.

The capsule, released four hours earlier by the spacecraft, parachuted onto the muddy Utah Test and Training Range. Recovery teams in four helicopters raced to the landing site in a carefully rehearsed effort designed to bag the capsule quickly to lower the risk of contamination and then spirit it to a hangar on a military base. It will be flown Monday to the NASA Johnson Space Center in Texas for future scientific study.

Mission managers, pleased with the trajectory of the spacecraft, voted early Sunday morning to proceed with releasing the capsule, which spent four hours nearing Earth before plunging into the atmosphere. The parent spacecraft then fired thrusters to ensure that it would not wind up in Utah, but would instead move on to another target, the asteroid Apophis, with a scheduled encounter in 2029.

washington post logoWashington Post, Editorial: The United States can prevent millions from starving in 2023, Editorial Board, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). The children’s names rarely make the news. They are the millions of kids in Somalia, Libya, Mali, Haiti, Afghanistan, Yemen and other poor nations who don’t have enough to eat.

They were born into families that make less than $2.15 per person a day. Their plight has worsened as food prices around the world have soared because of global inflation, natural disasters and war, especially Russia’s unjust invasion of Ukraine, in which Russian President Vladimir Putin has attempted to block one of the world’s critical grain supplies from reaching many of the neediest nations.

The United States last year rallied other countries and wealthy families to ensure 160 million of the world’s neediest had enough to eat. The job needs doing again.

What sets the United States apart as a global leader is more than military might; it’s how this nation steps up in moments of global crisis, including times of hunger and famine. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this month, “The United States is the largest donor in the world to the U.N. World Food Program. We provide about 50 percent of its annual budget. Russia and China? Less than 1 percent each.”

This year brings another moment of crisis. Food prices remain high, Russia continues to thwart Ukrainian grain shipments, and a spate of earthquakes and severe floods have caused more nations than usual to request emergency assistance. Roughly 345 million people are in dire need of food aid, according to the U.N. World Food Program. That is virtually the same as the record set last year, yet funding has been slashed. There is no other way to say it: Millions will go hungry if the U.N. World Food Program does not get more funding. Its total budget for 2023 is $5 billion, the lowest since 2015 and less than half of the $14 billion the agency had last year as donors have become fatigued.

john fetterman tatoos

washington post logoWashington Post, Deep Reads: ‘What does next look like?’ Gisele Fetterman is still finding out, Ruby Cramer, Photos by Demetrius Freeman, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). Half a year after Sen. John Fetterman’s mental health crisis, his wife navigates between worry and acceptance. The future senator is shown above in a file photo.

How many times had her husband taken this trip to Washington? More than a dozen by now. At first, during the campaign of 2022, a U.S. Senate seat had meant something different to the family, a chance to lead on gun violence, abortion, immigration. Then came the stroke, the auditory processing disorder, the depression that became severe depression. Then came the hospitalization, Building 10, Room 768, of the Walter Reed neuropsychology unit. Then an end date to inpatient treatment and a prognosis: “remission,” the doctors had said, though nothing had ended, really. The center of the Fetterman family, the thing their lives revolved around daily, was now mental health.

Second Lady Gisele Fetterman speaking with the press outside of the York County YMCA. Governor Tom Wolf, Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, Second Lady Gisele Fetterman and Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine visited the York County YMCA to announce the findings of the Wolf Administration’s COVID-19 Response Task Force for Health Disparity. The task force, created in April to investigate issues with how the pandemic is affecting the state’s minority and vulnerable populations, has compiled recommendations for steps the commonwealth can take to reduce health disparities and work to dismantle systemic racism. August 13, 2020 - York Pennsylvania“How are you?” people ask Gisele Fetterman, shown at right in a file photo, if they aren’t asking about John. They tell her how strong she is. They tell her how sorry they are. They say they can’t thank her enough. Some send messages mocking her husband’s speech, or to say he should resign.

But in a time when more Americans are being diagnosed with depression than ever before, there are people looking around for families like their own, and here are the Fettermans, in view and within reach. All day, more messages arrive — in emails, in tweets, on Instagram. People want to tell her about their own depression, about loved ones with schizophrenia and thoughts of suicide. A man wants her to know about the son he lost a year ago. Another about the brother he lost three weeks ago. A woman texts her to say she’s checking herself into the hospital right now. They tell her they are scared and worried — and they wonder if maybe Gisele is scared and worried, too.

washington post logoWashington Post, Dallas mayor switches to GOP, making city the largest led by a Republican, Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, Sept. 22, 2023. The mayor of Dallas is switching parties after serving in public office for years as a Democrat, making the north Texas city the country’s largest led by a Republican.

Eric Johnson, a former Democratic Texas state lawmaker, wrote in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on Friday that he was switching parties because “too many Democrats insist on virtue signaling,” and argued that Democratic policies have not sufficiently addressed crime and homelessness.

“Next spring, I will be voting in the Republican primary,” Johnson wrote in a piece with the headline “America’s cities need Republicans, and I’m becoming one.”

Johnson was elected to the nonpartisan office — meaning candidates don’t run as Democrats or Republicans — in 2019 and reelected in May, but said he will leave the position in 2027 as a member of the GOP.

“American cities need Republicans — and Republicans need American cities,” Johnson wrote.

He went on to say that he was switching because American cities are “in disarray,” as local Democratic leaders haven’t, in his view, made public safety a priority. He also claimed Democrats spent tax dollars in a way that made homelessness worse while “finding new ways to thumb their noses at Republicans,” rather than focusing on solving problems.

Johnson called for other mayors to stand up for law and order while reducing taxes.

Republicans across the country have in recent years attacked Democrats over public safety, even with the rise of tougher-on-crime Democrats who have vowed to address violence and fund police.

Some local Democratic leaders were not surprised by the move, saying the mayor had governed more toward the center than they felt Dallas voters wanted. Johnson recently voted against the city’s nearly $5 billion budget passed by the city council, citing insufficient cuts of the property tax rate, and has supported anti-crime initiatives.

“He’s proven to be what we thought he was,” Kardal Coleman, chair of the Dallas County Democratic Party, told The Washington Post. “It’s an insult to the voters in the city of Dallas, who were sold on a bait and switch. Mayor Johnson is abandoning his values and, unfortunately, the people and voters of Dallas.”

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Republican Threats To Shut U.S. Government

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washington post logoWashington Post, House Republicans eye long-term funding without deal yet to avert shutdown, Marianna Sotomayor and Leigh Ann Caldwell, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). House Republicans on Friday continued work on a plan that would move several long-term spending bills through the chamber next week, fulfilling a long-standing request by hard-right lawmakers with no guarantee it will break loose the necessary support for a short-term funding solution to avoid a government shutdown.

kevin mccarthyAfter a handful of House Republicans blocked their party from considering funding bills twice this week, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), right, continued to insist that his conference will find a solution to fund the government without relying on Democratic support.

“I believe we have a majority here and we can work together to solve this,” McCarthy told reporters Friday, roughly one week before the government will shut down if a deal isn’t reached. “It might take us a little longer.”

McCarthy’s latest proposal is for lawmakers returning Tuesday to begin the process of considering and amending bills that would fund four government departments for all of fiscal 2024. However, it remains unclear if Republicans have enough support to overcome a procedural vote to even start debate on these bills, which is the same hurdle that five Republicans blocked twice this week.

Leaders hope that by amending the Defense and Homeland Security Department bills on the floor, they can appease certain objectors with policy concerns. Most notably, McCarthy said the House would remove any funding for Ukraine from existing legislation and put it up as a separate vote, a singular concession to earn the support of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).

In a video posted Friday on X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter, Greene said she was mad at leadership because she has consistently said she would not support spending any money on Ukraine, only to be finally taken seriously after she voted against starting debate on the Defense Department bill Thursday.

The changes could be made if Republicans don’t block the procedural vote set for Tuesday. Rep. Marcus J. Molinaro (R-N.Y.), a moderate who has been involved in ongoing negotiations, suggested that there will be enough support to start debate on four appropriation bills if assurances could be made about the process, including the amendments process.

But just focusing on passing full-year appropriation bills next week does nothing to avert a shutdown by Sept. 30, when the current fiscal year funding runs out. While McCarthy and several other lawmakers have said they hope to find a compromise among Republicans to pass a short-term deal that averts a shutdown, two proposed pathways to do so were rejected this week by more than four Republicans, who say they will never vote for any stopgap bill.

washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: In a leaderless House, the ‘clowns’ stumble toward a shutdown, Dana Milbank, right, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). Martin Luther dana milbank newestnailed his theses to a church door. Matt Gaetz displayed his in the men’s room.

Specifically, the congressman (or somebody) left a draft of his “Motion to Vacate” on a baby changing table in a restroom downstairs from the House chamber, where it was found by journalist Matt Laslo. “H. Res. __,” it began. “Resolved, that the Office of Speaker of the House of Representatives is hereby declared to be vacant.”

But Gaetz (R-Fla.) doesn’t need a resolution to “vacate the chair,” as a motion to remove Kevin McCarthy as speaker is called. For all practical purposes, the chair is already vacant.

It should have been obvious to all this week, if it wasn’t already, that McCarthy (R-Calif.) is speaker in name only, as his leaderless Republican caucus stumbles toward a government shutdown. Review some of the labels House Republicans hurled at each other over the last few days:

“Clown show.” “Clowns.” “Foolishness.” “Weak.” “Terribly misguided.” “Selective amnesia.” “Stupidity.” “Failure to lead.” “Lunatics.” “Disgraceful.” “New low.” “Enabling Chairman Xi.” “People that have serious issues.” “Pathetic.”

washington post logoWashington Post, Prospect of government shutdown poses a new threat to U.S. economy, Abha Bhattarai, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). Economists say a shutdown, along with other disruptions — the ongoing autoworkers’ strike, rising borrowing costs and a drop-off in child-care funding — is likely to strain family budgets.

The looming federal shutdown poses a new threat to American households, whose budgets are already facing pressure from higher gas prices, imminent student loan payments and depleting pandemic savings.

Although any of those shocks on their own wouldn’t be enough to sink the economy, economists say a pileup of disruptions — including the ongoing autoworkers’ strike, rising borrowing costs and a drop-off in child-care funding — is likely to strain family budgets at a time when things are already slowing. Economists now expect growth to dip considerably in last three months of the year, as a confluence of challenges chip away at household and business spending.

“We’re approaching a period of uncertainty just at a time when it seemed like the economy was improving,” said Megan Way, an economics professor at Babson College in Massachusetts. “Between the almost inevitable government shutdown, [autoworkers’] strike and student loan repayments, there is so much uncertainty out there, which means consumers are going to be hesitant to spend.”

U.S. braces for costly government shutdown in days

Economic growth has defied expectations so far this year, with Americans shelling out for cars, international vacations and pricey concerts all summer long. That spending, which makes up two-thirds of the U.S. economy, has helped propel growth and keep the country out a much-anticipated recession. But experts, including the head of the Federal Reserve, have cited concerns about the latest wave of uncertainties, which could cause consumers to start pulling back even if the job market remains strong.

washington post logoWashington Post, Youngkin downplays shutdown threat, which hits just as Va. voting begins, Gregory S. Schneider, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) said Thursday that Virginians are “really suffering” at the prospect of a federal government shutdown but counseled patience as his fellow Republicans try to work out their differences in Congress, though earlier this week he blamed the situation on President Biden.

republican elephant logoA government shutdown would hit especially hard in Virginia, which has more than 140,000 federal civilian employees — trailing only California among states — as well as large military bases. With the current federal budget running out at the end of September, a shutdown seems increasingly probable as a few hard-right Republicans in the House of Representatives prevent GOP leadership from producing a spending plan.

A major shutdown in 2013 was also blamed on Republicans and widely said to have cost the GOP in Virginia elections that year, with Democrat Terry McAuliffe narrowly defeating Republican Ken Cuccinelli for governor. This year, the potential shutdown looms as Virginians begin early voting on Friday for Nov. 7 elections in which all 140 seats in the General Assembly are on the ballot. Youngkin is pulling out all the stops to try to gain Republican control of the legislature, which is currently split, with a GOP-run House and Democratic-controlled Senate.

Politico, McCarthy stares into the shutdown abyss, Sarah Ferris, Olivia Beavers and Jordain Carney, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). The speaker has only one clear exit route away from a government closure: working with Democrats. It’s a path he still refuses to take.

politico CustomSpeaker Kevin McCarthy has only one way out of next week’s impending government shutdown: working with Democrats. It’s an exit he’s still refusing to take.

kevin mccarthyDuring the most tumultuous stretch of his speakership so far, McCarthy, right, hasn’t phoned a single member of the opposing party about a way to keep the lights on.

Instead, the speaker and his team will scramble this weekend to slash their own party’s spending bills in an effort to placate a handful of hard-liners who are threatening to eject him. Votes on some of those revised bills are now expected on Tuesday, four days before the Sept. 30 shutdown deadline. But even if they pass, that will move Congress no closer to a solution.

U.S. House logoMcCarthy’s central strategy remains the same; he wants to deliver a GOP opening bid to the Democratic Senate, while holding back a rebellion by his right flank — enough to hang on to his speakership after Democrats, by necessity, enter the talks. After his first two attempts at a short-term spending patch fell short, McCarthy is now trying to take up doomed full-year bills.

Some of McCarthy’s own allies fear that effort could prove futile as a shutdown fast approaches. These House Republicans worry that the Californian’s third attempt at a workable strategy, bringing spending measures to the floor next week, might also fail to get the votes they need and further humiliate the party.

“This is not checkers. This is chess. You got to understand that this next move by the House is not going to be the final answer,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) said. “Eventually, the Senate will weigh in … and it’s not going to be to our liking, and probably going to be pushed into our face and say: ‘Take it or leave it.’ And then the speaker will have a very difficult decision.”

The situation is getting worse still for McCarthy as he starts running out of room from his Senate allies. A group of conservatives across the Capitol, after days of deferring to the speaker, now want to see a vote on legislation that would automatically impose stopgap spending patches to permanently prevent shutdowns.

The House GOP is taking the opposite tack by resurrecting partisan spending bills that won’t do anything to prevent millions of U.S. workers — including the military and border patrol agents — from soon working without pay. At the same time, leadership is still trying to corral Republicans, so far unsuccessfully, behind passing a short-term conservative spending bill before Oct. 1.

But McCarthy allies also acknowledge the political reality could shift. Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) said questions about whether a bipartisan bill could pass in the final 48 hours before a shutdown weren’t yet “timely.”

Yet McCarthy knows he needs to ultimately strike a spending deal with the White House to avoid a government closure. He also knows, given how little political capital he has to spare, that decision could doom his gavel.

Hard-liners like Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) and other loud critics have made it obvious they won’t help dig the speaker out of the spending crisis, and they’re also most likely to trigger the first vote of no-confidence against a party leader in 113 years.

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) — who cautioned it was too soon to have a speakership discussion — warned that if Republicans worked with Democrats on funding the government “they are switching teams … They are going over to the Democratic side.”

“I understand their concerns. But, look, we are the Republican Party,” Norman added, predicting a shutdown.

Asked about the prospect of Democrats working with Republicans to keep the government open, hard-liner Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) said: “I remain concerned that any member of the Republican Conference would threaten to hijack or take hostage the Republican Conference.”

The stakes are high for House Republicans, who have barely nine months of power under their belts. They’re also 13 months away from an election in which the fate of their threadbare majority will rest on 18 incumbents sitting in turf friendly to President Joe Biden — where, unlike in deep-red districts, compromise to end a crisis is actually popular.

washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: Enough is enough. McCarthy must bring the GOP rebels to heel, Henry Olsen, right, Sept. 23, 2023. Ultra-MAGA henry olsenobstructionists once again humiliated House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) this week, defeating a rule to move the defense appropriations bill forward. The GOP defectors are surely chortling over their ability to control the chamber, albeit to no apparent end.

republican elephant logoEnough is enough. McCarthy has not used the full power of his office to bring the nihilist rebels to heel, nor has he tried to marshal his colleagues’ anger and frustration at these recalcitrant children. He should move to change House Republican rules to hit them where it hurts: their reelection prospects.

Current rules prevent McCarthy from doing that.

But this is no ordinary moment for the party. Time and again, the same group of malcontents have refused to demonstrate a shred of party loyalty. They demand things that cannot obtain the assent of their colleagues, much less Congress as a whole. They laugh in the face of their supposed friends by voting against what almost everyone in the party has agreed upon.

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More On 2024 Presidential Race

 

joe biden kamala harris

 washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: Forget fantasies about replacing Biden. Kamala Harris can’t beat Trump, Max Boot, right, Sept. max boot screen shot25, 2023. I fear for America’s future and hence the world’s — more so now than ever. I had relaxed a bit after the last two national elections, which had seemed to signal a return to normalcy. Donald Trump was decisively defeated in 2020 and, in 2022, most of his fellow election deniers also lost in their bids to take over the election machinery of swing states.

The prospect of another Trump term is the greatest foreseeable disaster that can befall the United States and the world. Trump is likely to be 10 times more dangerous this time around, because he won’t allow any adults in the White House to act as a check on his worst instincts — no more Jim Mattis as defense secretary, John F. Kelly as chief of staff or H.R. McMaster as national security adviser. In a second term, Trump is likely to only appoint advisers as unhinged as he is.

We can only speculate what this will mean, but the likelihood is that Trump will cut off aid to Ukraine, pull out of NATO, eviscerate the civil service and the military’s top ranks, and appoint an attorney general who will prosecute his enemies. For a start. He was eager to do all of those things in his first term but was dissuaded or blocked by the “deep state.” He’s unlikely to allow that to happen again. He has become even more radical and more authoritarian since leaving office, and he now has much more experience in getting what he wants out of the government.

The consequences will be dire enough domestically, imperiling U.S. democracy, but they will be even worse internationally. Among other alarming consequences, a Trump presidency could allow Russian leader Vladimir Putin to defeat Ukraine and remake the 21st-century global order in favor of tyrants and aggressors.

So how do we stop Trump? Biden is a feeble vessel at best, but he’s the only realistic option we have.

In the world as it is, we’re just a few months before the start of the primaries, so if Biden were to step down now, the almost certain Democratic nominee would be Vice President Harris. (The last sitting vice president who sought but failed to secure a party’s presidential nomination was Alben Barkley in 1952.) And I have yet to meet a Democrat who has any confidence in Harris’s ability to beat Trump.

At the same time, any move to challenge Biden in the primaries or to replace Harris on the ticket would lead to Democratic fratricide which would likely ease Trump’s path back to power. Anyone who believes in preserving American democracy and the U.S.-led world order, therefore, has no choice but to back Biden in 2024, however uninspiring that might be.

 

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ny times logoNew York Times, Investigation: Inside the Unfounded Claim That DeSantis Abused Guantánamo Detainees, Matthew Rosenberg and Carol Rosenberg, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). A former prisoner’s story of mistreatment at the hands of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, made headlines. But The Times found no evidence to back it up.

Nearly a year ago, as Ron DeSantis’s political stock was rising, a former Guantánamo Bay detainee came forward with a stunning claim: Before he was Florida’s governor, as a young Navy lawyer, Mr. DeSantis had taken part in a forced feeding of a hunger striker at the notorious American prison, and laughed as he did so.

The detainee, Mansoor Adayfi, said he was tied to a chair, crying and screaming as tubes were shoved down his throat and cases of the dietary supplement Ensure were pumped into his stomach.

As the ordeal drew to an end, Mr. Adayfi added, he was approached by Mr. DeSantis and, “he said, ‘You should eat.’ I threw up in his face. Literally on his face.”

Mr. Adayfi told his story on a left-wing podcast, then in Harper’s Magazine and then again in mainstream media reports. He found other former detainees who also claimed to remember Mr. DeSantis and his cruelty. The accounts traveled quickly through the liberal media ecosystem, landing in Democratic opposition research and coalescing into a narrative that portrayed the Republican presidential candidate as an accessory to torture.

Yet, an examination of military records and interviews with detainees’ lawyers and service members who served at the same time as Mr. DeSantis found no evidence to back up the claims. The New York Times interviewed more than 40 people who served with Mr. DeSantis or around the same time and none recalled witnessing or even hearing of any episodes like the ones Mr. Adayfi described.

Instead, nearly all of those interviewed dismissed the story as highly improbable. Mr. DeSantis was a junior officer, who visited only for short stints and was tasked with what one fellow lawyer described as “scut work.” He would have had no reason to witness, and no power to authorize, a force feeding, according to the officer who supervised Mr. DeSantis at Guantánamo. Even senior lawyers were not allowed near force feedings, according to the commandant of the prison guards at the time.

“He was just too junior and too inexperienced and too green to have had any substantial role,” said Morris D. Davis, a retired Air Force colonel, who served as chief prosecutor of Guantánamo cases the year that Mr. DeSantis visited the prison.

ny times logoNew York Times, As Haley and Ramaswamy Rise, Some Indian Americans Have Mixed Feelings, Jazmine Ulloa, Sept. 25, 2023. Nikki Haley’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s presence in the presidential race is celebrated by many Indian Americans, though not all agree with their policies.

Suresh Reddy, a centrist Democrat and city councilman, is watching the Republican presidential primary with a mix of pride and disappointment.

republican elephant logoWhen Mr. Reddy and his wife, Chandra Gangareddy, immigrants from southern India, settled in the Des Moines suburbs in September 2004, they could count the number of Indian American families on one hand. Only one Indian American had ever served in Congress at the time, and none had dared to mount a bid for the White House.

vivek ramaswamy linked inNow, for the first time in the nation’s history, two Indian Americans — Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, left — are serious presidential contenders who regularly invoke their parents’ immigrant roots. But their deeply conservative views, on display as they seek the Republican nomination, make it difficult for Mr. Reddy to fully celebrate the moment, he said.

“I’m really proud,” he said. “I just wish they had a better message.”

That disconnect, reflected in interviews with two dozen Indian American voters, donors and elected officials from across the political spectrum — in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and across the country — may complicate the G.O.P.’s efforts to appeal to the small but influential Indian American electorate.

Indian Americans now make up about 2.1 million, or roughly 16 percent, of the estimated 13.4 million Asian Americans who are eligible to vote, the third largest population of Asian origin behind Chinese and Filipino Americans, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the 2021 American Community Survey. Indian Americans also have tended to lean more Democratic than any other Asian American subgroups, according to Pew.

Though a small slice of the overall electorate, the demographic has become one of the fastest-growing constituencies, and is large enough to make a difference at the margins in swing states and in purple suburbs, including in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada.

Democratic-Republican Campaign logos

washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: Trump isn’t as strong as he looks — his GOP rivals are letting him win, E.J. Dionne Jr., right, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). ej dionne w open neckTo understand why Donald Trump is once again skipping a Republican presidential debate, realize that the conventional way of looking at the GOP’s nomination contest has things largely backward. Trump’s standing in the polls is less about his strength than about the weakness of the rest of the field — and the traditional Republican Party.

Trump wants his foes to stay weak. By not showing up, he reduces them to squabbling bit players trying to bring each other down while the major contenders offer pale imitations of his own message and values.

Republican voters once open to someone other than the former president are concluding that if they’re going to get Trumpism, they might as well go with the guy who invented it. And they’re getting little useful advice from party leaders who — as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told his biographer McKay Coppins — see Trump as a disaster but are too timid to say so publicly.

It didn’t have to be like this, because the strength of Trump’s lock on the party is vastly exaggerated.

Sure, Trump has an unshakable base, those who would stick with him if he were indicted a dozen more times. But that hard core accounts for no more than about 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate. There really is (or was) room for someone else to break through.

But not one of them has inspired real excitement, and the politician who once seemed best placed to take Trump on, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has had a miserable year.

As a result, Trump has been able to combine his base with a fair share of the largest group of Republicans: those with a more or less positive view of the former president but willing to support someone else.

Not so long ago, such Republicans were flocking to others, particularly DeSantis. Trump seemed anything but inevitable at the beginning of 2023. Many in the party blamed him (and the candidates he backed) for its disappointing showing in the 2022 midterms.

 washington post logoWashington Post, Democrats embrace Biden’s upcoming visit to Michigan UAW picket lines, Lauren Kaori Gurley, Jeanne Whalen and Erica Werner, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). As strikes against the Big Three Detroit automakers enter their 10th day Sunday, Democrats are praising a visit by President Biden to Michigan, scheduled for Tuesday, to show support for autoworkers on the picket lines.

The White House announced the news Friday, as United Auto Workers members walked out of 38 parts warehouses and distribution centers for General Motors and Stellantis in 20 states. The strike escalation, which spared Ford, added another 5,600 workers to the work stoppage for a total of 18,300 — about 12 percent of the union’s autoworker members.

Biden’s Michigan visit — which labor experts say is probably the first time a sitting president has visited a strike in at least 100 years — will come a day before his expected rival in the 2024 presidential race, former president Donald Trump, plans to deliver his own speech to hundreds of union members in Michigan.

“President Biden is doing what he has always done, which is to stand with American workers,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. Defending the president’s decision to visit, Buttigieg added that a strong deal would be a “win-win” for both parties: “Record profits should lead to record pay and record benefits for the workers.”

On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) also applauded Biden’s trip as a “historic event” warranted by the “crisis of inequality in our economy.”

Asked about UAW leadership’s decision to withhold an endorsement of Biden for now, Ocasio-Cortez said “it needs to be earned,” adding, “President Biden is working toward that, especially when he lands in Michigan on Tuesday to earn that.”

ny times logoNew York Times, Opinion: What Really Happened at the Biden-Netanyahu Meeting, Thomas L. Friedman, right, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). In tom friedman twitterrecent weeks there has been a lot of discussion about Joe Biden’s age. He’s old.

But you know what comes with age besides a slower gait and forgetting words? Wisdom — in particular how to handle a high-stakes diplomatic encounter without blowing things up (or blowing things up before you want them to blow up). And that’s what I think I saw at the face-to-face meeting between Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Wednesday in New York.

A lot of Israeli reporters and people I know were left depressed by the meeting, because Netanyahu came out and told everyone how warm and friendly it was. And Biden spoke about the unbreakable bonds between America and the Jewish state. Many Israelis so detest Netanyahu that they wanted Biden to publicly rebuke him over the judicial coup that Bibi has mounted — and when that didn’t happen they thought the meeting was a huge missed opportunity.

I get it, I get it, I told them. But didn’t you see it, I asked?

See what, they responded?

While Biden was publicly putting his right arm around Netanyahu’s shoulder — precisely to defuse any attacks from Republicans for being too tough on Israel — I hear the president was, SO TO SPEAK, using his left hand to privately slip a homework assignment into Bibi’s pocket. It was like a magician at work; you’d need to find the instant replay in double slow-motion to see it.

It was a master class in how a U.S. president puts a fateful decision to an Israeli leader — one that poses to that Israeli leader the most excruciating challenge of his political career. That is: either blow up the extremist cabinet you’ve built to keep yourself out of jail — and replace it with a national unity coalition — or blow up the chance for peace with Saudi Arabia, which could pave the way for Israel’s acceptance across the whole Muslim world.

And Biden did it all by looking like what he actually is — one of Israel’s best friends ever — defusing any political blow back in America.

So, I’m not getting into the debate about whether Biden is too old to run for re-election. I’m just telling you that when it comes to diplomacy — age and experience are his greatest assets.

ny times logoNew York Times, Dana Perino of Fox News will moderate the next Republican debate and faces her biggest test as a journalist, Jeremy W. Peters, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). The former press secretary in the Bush White House will moderate the next Republican debate. She’s managed to rise at Fox without being a Trump supplicant.

It will be the biggest moment for Ms. Perino at Fox News since she began co-hosting “The Five” in 2011. Not known for being as provocative or partisan as many of her colleagues behind the desk, Ms. Perino, 51, has spent a good part of the last decade trying to thrive as a Bush Republican working for a network where loyalty to former President Donald J. Trump is often the ticket to high ratings and the career advancement that accompanies them.

Politico, Move over Dark Brandon, this group wants to make Joe Cool a new meme, Holly Otterbein, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). ProgressNow is betting that improving Biden’s online presence — through memes, videos and other social media images — will help win over voters.

politico CustomA major liberal group has drawn up a multimillion dollar plan to make Joe Biden cooler online. And the initiative has the blessing of a top White House official.

The organization, ProgressNow, is launching a $70 million project to help the president and down-ballot Democrats win the war for voters’ digital attention. The idea is to create, in their own words, an “echo chamber” on the left. At its heart, it is an effort to compete with one they say already operates on all cylinders on the right.

More broadly, it represents an important test of whether Democrats can successfully market the oldest president ever to an electorate that has consistently expressed reservations about his age and wished that another person would be the party’s standard-bearer, according to polls.

The center of ProgressNow’s plan is an app that the group has developed called Megaphone. Users who download the app can scroll through a series of liberal memes, videos and graphics created by the organization, add their own captions, and then quickly share them on social media platforms.

“ProgressNow has become an important partner to the groups supporting the Biden-Harris agenda,” said Anita Dunn, a senior White House adviser and top 2020 Biden strategist who added she was providing her comment in a personal capacity. Ramping up “ensures they will be in an even stronger position to deliver compelling digital communications to people in their communities through a grassroots network that effectively complements efforts in 2024 and beyond.”

Inherent in the ProgressNow strategy is the fact that liberals have been outmaneuvered online by the conservative movement for years, something the group’s leaders readily admit — and that more than a decade after former President Barack Obama was supposed to have ushered in a new form of voter communication, the party has been uninventive under Biden.

To combat this, ProgressNow is hiring more than 65 new digital organizers across 10 battleground states to manage a band of volunteers who will be tasked with sharing the organization’s online content far and wide through Megaphone. By the fall of 2024, the group is looking to expand its grassroots army to 13,000 volunteers nationwide.

The group has already begun message-testing its efforts, revealing some unexpected details.

For example, the organization looked at a handful of social media graphics touting Biden’s handling of the economy, a critical weakness for him among voters. Staffers thought that a bright pink image that depicted a text message conversation — rather than graphics featuring photos of Biden himself — would perform better

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump’s Meet The Press interview was even more of a disaster behind the scenes, Bill Palmer, right, Sept. 24, bill palmer2023. Meet The Press host Kristen Welker went so soft on Donald Trump during their interview earlier this month, she might as well have handed him free ice cream. The fact that Trump incriminated himself during the interview, admitting that he wasn’t following his lawyers’ advice when he was committing his crimes, was merely a sign of just how mentally incompetent Trump is these days.

bill palmer report logo headerNow it turns out the Trump interview was even more of a debacle behind the scenes than we knew. Meet The Press reportedly had to lop off the first nine minutes of the pre-taped interview after Trump spent that entire time spewing crazed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

President Donald Trump officialWhen you’re interviewing someone who’s so unhinged that you have to cut out the first nine minutes of the conversation, it’s a good sign that you shouldn’t be putting that person on the air to begin with.

By interviewing Trump and then cutting out the most insane and dishonest parts, Meet The Press chose to falsely present viewers with a more sane and stable version of Trump. In that sense, Meet The Press essentially conspired with Trump to help him sell the false notion that he’s a coherent and viable candidate.

Given that Trump is currently awaiting criminal trial for fraud, it’s not much of a stretch to argue that – morally at least – Meet The Press and large chunks of the media are criminally conspiring with Trump at this point. The media’s dishonesty is becoming a crisis and we the public need to push for full scale ethical reforms within the media.

CBS Sunday Morning, Cassidy Hutchinson on fallout from her Trump testimony, Sept. 24, 2023. The former Trump loyalist and senior advisor to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said she was "disgusted" upon witnessing the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters over the lie of election fraud.

But after testifying to the January 6 Committee, Cassidy Hutchinson was forced into hiding. In her first TV interview she talks with correspondent Tracy Smith about the price of telling the truth, as detailed in her new book, "Enough."

 

 joe biden black background resized serious file

ny times logoNew York Times, Biden, Warning Trump Could ‘Destroy’ Democracy, Moves Past G.O.P. Primary, Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Months before the first Republican primaries, the president is turning his attention to his old adversary as he tries to re-energize his party’s voters and donors.

This spring, as the Republican presidential primary race was just beginning, the Democratic National Committee commissioned polling on how the leading Republicans — Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis — fared against President Biden in battleground states.

But now, as Mr. Trump’s lead in the primary has grown and hardened, the party has dropped Mr. DeSantis from such hypothetical matchups. And the Biden campaign’s polling on Republican candidates is now directed squarely at Mr. Trump, according to officials familiar with the surveys.

djt maga hatThe sharpened focus on Mr. Trump isn’t happening only behind the scenes. Facing waves of polls showing soft support for his re-election among Democrats, Mr. Biden and his advisers signaled this week that they were beginning to turn their full attention to his old rival, seeking to re-energize the party’s base and activate donors ahead of what is expected to be a long and grueling sequel.

On Sunday, after Mr. Trump sought to muddy the waters on his position on abortion, the Biden operation and its surrogates pushed back with uncommon intensity. On Monday, Mr. Biden told donors at a New York fund-raiser that Mr. Trump was out to “destroy” American democracy, in some of his most forceful language so far about the implications of a second Trump term. And on Wednesday, as the president spoke to donors at a Manhattan hotel, he acknowledged in the most explicit way yet that he now expected to be running against “the same fella.”

robert f kennedy jr gage skidmore

ny times logoNew York Times, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Flirts With the Libertarian Party, Nicholas Nehamas, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). Mr. Kennedy, shown in a Gage Skidmore photo, sat down with the party’s chair in July, a previously undisclosed meeting, as Democrats fret about a third party bid.

For months, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he plans to continue his long-shot challenge against President Biden in the Democratic primary rather than dropping out to launch a third-party bid.

But lately Mr. Kennedy’s message has seemed to shift, including publicly telling a voter who asked about his plans that he was keeping his “options open.”

If Mr. Kennedy does decide to leave the party of his famous father and uncles to run in the general election, one potential landing spot may be the Libertarian Party, which at the moment lacks a widely known candidate but has excelled at securing ballot access.

In July, Mr. Kennedy met privately with Angela McArdle, the chair of the Libertarian Party, at a conference they were both attending in Memphis — a meeting that has not previously been reported.

“He emphasized that he was committed to running as a Democrat but said that he considered himself very libertarian,” Ms. McArdle said in an interview, adding that they agreed on several positions, including the threat of the “deep state” and the need for populist messaging. “We’re aligned on a lot of issues.”

“My perspective is that we are going to stay in touch in case he does decide to run,” Ms. McArdle said. “And he can contact me at any time if that’s the case.”

In a June interview with the libertarian magazine Reason, Mr. Kennedy acknowledged his ideological disagreements with the party — including on issues like environmental protection, abortion and civil rights — while also saying, “I’ve always been aligned with libertarians on most issues.”

In a general election, Democrats worry that a third-party run by Mr. Kennedy could draw votes away from Mr. Biden and help elect former President Donald J. Trump. They have expressed similar concerns about No Labels, the bipartisan group trying to recruit a moderate candidate for a third-party run, and also about the progressive scholar Cornel West, who is already in the race to lead the Green Party’s ticket for 2024.

Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, has been helping coordinate Democratic efforts to stop the No Labels effort. He said the hope in the party has been that Mr. Kennedy would “go away” after losing primaries to Mr. Biden.

 

djt ron desantis cnn collage

ny times logoNew York Times, Urgency Grows for DeSantis in Iowa as Trump Looks to Finish Him Off, Nicholas Nehamas, Sept. 20, 2023 (print ed.).  Despite spending far more time campaigning across the must-win state, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida still trails former President Trump by double digits.

ny times logoNew York Times, Polls Show Ron DeSantis Sliding in the Republican Primary, Maggie Astor, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). Several recent surveys, nationally and in early-voting states, undermine the governor’s argument that the primary is a two-way race between him and former President Donald J. Trump.

Ron DeSantis is shown in the foreground through a camera as he speaks on stage in the background. His image is also reflected on a screen on the right side of the frame.

Several recent polls show Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida losing ground in the Republican presidential primary, both nationally and in early-voting states.

The numbers undermine an argument pushed by Mr. DeSantis’s campaign: that the primary is effectively a two-way race in which he is the only candidate who can consolidate support against former President Donald J. Trump.

A CNN/University of New Hampshire poll released Wednesday found that in New Hampshire, home to the first Republican primary, Mr. DeSantis had lost more than half of his support since the last U.N.H. poll two months ago. He had just 10 percent in the poll — not only far behind Mr. Trump (39 percent), but roughly tied with Vivek Ramaswamy (13 percent), Nikki Haley (12 percent) and Chris Christie (11 percent).

In Iowa, which will hold the first Republican caucus in January, a Fox Business poll released Wednesday showed him at 15 percent, more than 30 points behind Mr. Trump and not far from third place, with Ms. Haley at 11 percent. Unlike the New Hampshire poll, the Fox poll didn’t show Mr. DeSantis actively shedding support — he was down only one point compared with the outlet’s July survey, which is not significant. But it showed no progress for him as the time he has to make gains grows shorter.

The picture was similar in South Carolina, where another Fox Business poll found him at 10 percent, significantly behind not only Mr. Trump, who was at 46 percent, but also Ms. Haley, the state’s former governor, at 18 percent. In July, he had been roughly tied with Ms. Haley.

And nationally, a Quinnipiac University poll released last week showed Mr. DeSantis at 12 percent — a full 50 points behind Mr. Trump and six points below where he was in August.

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djt looking up

 

Ukraine-Russian War, Russian Leadership

 

President Biden met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office on Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023 (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

President Biden met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office on Thursday (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

ny times logoNew York Times, Russia-Ukraine War: Zelensky Thanks Americans in Emotional Speech to End Washington Visit, Karoun Demirjian and Ben Shpigel, Updated Sept. 22, 2023. “There is not a soul in Ukraine that does not feel gratitude to you, America,” the Ukrainian president said after a long day of lobbying Congress for more aid and a meeting with President Biden.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine finished a long day of lobbying in Washington at the White House, where he met Thursday with President Biden after receiving a $325 million air-defense package, but appeared to have made little immediate progress in persuading House leadership to approve another $24 billion in military and humanitarian aid.

ukraine flagMr. Zelensky, accompanied by his wife, Olena Zelenska, capped off his visit with an emotional speech at the National Archive on Thursday evening, during which he and his wife thanked Americans for their support.

Zelensky is working hard to highlight the values that bind the American and Ukrainian people, stressing a shared love of freedom. He says U.S. aid has saved millions of lives in Ukraine by keeping most of the country out of Russian hands.

washington post logoWashington Post, The spat that is threatening to wipe out the goodwill between Warsaw and Kyiv, Loveday Morris and Annabelle Chapman, Sept. 25, 2023. Polish farmers angry over cheap Ukrainian grain imports are posing a real challenge to Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party ahead of elections.

Politico, Ukraine claims senior Russian navy officers killed, injured in Crimea missile strike, Carlo Martuscelli, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). A Ukrainian politico Custommissile attack on the Russian navy’s Black Sea fleet headquarters on Friday killed and injured “dozens” of Russian troops, including a number of senior officials, Ukraine’s armed forces claimed on Saturday.

The claim, which couldn’t be verified, came as another rocket attack was launched on the Crimean city of Sevastopol, where the fleet is based, on Saturday. The Russia-installed governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said on Telegram that debris from intercepted missiles fell near a pier during the latest assault.

Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces said on Telegram that more details of Friday’s missile attack would be communicated “when possible.”

Ukraine’s intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov told U.S. broadcaster Voice of America that at least nine people were killed and another 16 were injured in Friday’s attack.

According to Budanov, Russian Colonel-General Alexander Romanchuk was in “very serious condition,” while chief of staff Lieutenant General Oleg Tsekov was unconscious, Voice of America reported. Budanov didn’t, however, confirm reports that the Black Sea Admiral Viktor Sokolov had been killed in the attack, the broadcaster said. The claims could not be verified.

Crimea, which extends into the Black Sea, was occupied illegally by Russia in 2014.

ny times logoNew York Times, Europe Pledged Ammunition for Ukraine. Providing It Is Another Challenge, Lara Jakes, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). After 30 years of atrophy, experts say, Europe’s shrunken defense industry will struggle to provide the Ukrainians with a million artillery shells by next March.

The pledge last March sounded as catchy as it was ambitious: European Union states would deliver a million rounds of 155-millimeter ammunition to Ukraine within a year.

Now, at a critical moment in the war and with Ukraine running short of artillery shells to drive its counteroffensive, experts, weapons manufacturers and even some government officials are expressing growing doubts. Europe’s shrunken military sector, they say, may simply be unable to ramp up production fast enough to achieve the million-shell goal.

Since March, governments across Europe have become more aggressive about assessing — and replenishing — ammunition needs, not just for Ukraine, but also for their own military stockpiles.

Manufacturers are building 155-millimeter rounds even before being fully paid. And European Union officials have fast-tracked at least eight contracts with producers on the continent to supply and reimburse states that jointly procure artillery ammunition instead of competing for it.

ny times logoNew York Times, Ukrainian forces targeted occupied Crimea with an air attack on Saturday, the second in two days, Russia said, Constant Méheut, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). Russian-installed authorities in the occupied peninsula said debris from a downed rocket fell in the Sevastopol bay, where Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet is based.

ukraine flagUkrainian forces targeted the peninsula with another air attack on Saturday, the second in two days as Kyiv increasingly takes aim at the region in an effort to disrupt Moscow’s military operations.

Mikhail Razvozhayev, the governor of Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city and the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, said that air defenses had been activated in the area and that debris from a downed rocket fell in the bay. The local authorities issued several warnings about possible air assaults on Saturday morning, urging residents to stay calm and seek shelter.

Saturday’s attack, which was not immediately confirmed by Ukraine’s military, came a day after Ukrainian forces launched a missile strike that damaged the Black Sea Fleet’s headquarters. Russia’s Defense Ministry said that a serviceman was missing after that attack.

The back-to-back assaults on Crimea, which the Kremlin illegally annexed in 2014, are part of a Ukrainian campaign to hit deep behind Russian lines in an effort to sever Moscow’s battlefield supply chain and undermine Russia’s ability to hit Ukrainian territory from afar. In recent weeks, Ukraine has sharply accelerated the pace of strikes on the peninsula, hitting air-defense systems, a submarine and a command post.

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President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday and said Russia had weaponized essentials like food and energy (Reuters photo).

 President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday and said Russia had weaponized essentials like food and energy (Reuters photo).

 

Canada Accuses India of Sikh Leader's Assassination

 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada during a frosty meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India during the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi earlier in September 2023 (Canadian Press photo by Sean Kilpatrick via Associated Press).

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada during a frosty meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India during the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi earlier this month, in September 2023 (Canadian Press photo by Sean Kilpatrick via Associated Press).

ny times logoNew York Times, Uncertainty ‘Is Killing Us’: Sikhs in India Are in Limbo Amid Canada Dispute, Suhasini Raj, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). Canada is home to the largest Sikh population outside India, where many people are now caught in a diplomatic firestorm over the death of a separatist.

Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh from Punjab who championed the creation of a separate state for Sikhs, was shot dead in June by hooded assailants. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government considered him a terrorist, and he was on a wanted list, but Indian officials deny accusations made last week by the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, which have caused a firestorm.

One result: The Indian government has temporarily put on hold visas to citizens of Canada, which has a large Indian diaspora. Both countries also expelled diplomats in a tit-for-tat response, and trade talks are frozen.

ny times logoNew York Times, U.S. Provided Canada With Intelligence on Killing of Sikh Leader, Julian E. Barnes and Ian Austen, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). U.S. intelligence gave assistance, but communications intercepted by Canada were more definitive in linking India to the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

canadian flagAmerican spy agencies provided information to Ottawa after the killing of a Sikh separatist leader in the Vancouver area, but Canada developed the most definitive intelligence that led it to accuse India of orchestrating the plot, according to Western allied officials.

In the aftermath of the killing, U.S. intelligence agencies offered their Canadian counterparts context that helped Canada conclude that India had been involved. Yet what appears to be the “smoking gun,” intercepted communications of Indian diplomats in Canada indicating involvement in the plot, was gathered by Canadian officials, allied officials said.

While Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has called on India to cooperate with the Canadian investigation, American officials have largely tried to avoid triggering any diplomatic blowback from India. But the disclosure of the involvement of U.S. intelligence risks ensnaring Washington in the diplomatic battle between Canada and India at a time when it is keen to develop New Delhi as a closer hardeep singh nijjarpartner.

The United States did not learn about the plot, or evidence pointing to India’s involvement in it, until after operatives had killed the Sikh leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, right, allied officials said.

ny times logoNew York Times, India Suspends Visas for Canadians, Escalating Clash Over Sikh’s Killing, Suhasini Raj and Yan Zhuang, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). The suspension came after Canada claimed that India was involved in the assassination of a Canadian citizen who supported a separatist cause.

india flag mapIndia has suspended visa applications by Canadian nationals, a sharp escalation in the diplomatic conflict that has followed Canada’s claim that Indian agents were behind an assassination in June on Canadian soil.

Arindam Bagchi, the Indian foreign ministry spokesman, described the move as a technical and security issue, saying on Thursday that the country’s high commission and consulates in Canada were “temporarily unable” to process visas because of safety threats.

“This has disrupted their normal function,” Mr. Bagchi said during a regularly scheduled news briefing, adding: “We will be reviewing the situation on a regular basis.”

canadian flagBut the suspension came as tensions between India and Canada have soared in the days since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in Parliament that Canada’s intelligence services had information linking the Indian government to the killing of a Sikh separatist in British Columbia on June 18.

The Indian government on Tuesday forcefully rejected the claim that it had been involved in the assassination of the Sikh Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, and accused Canada of harboring terrorists who are seeking to carve a Sikh homeland out of India’s territory.

India then moved to expel a high-ranking Canadian diplomat from New Delhi. Canada had expelled an Indian diplomat — described as the head of New Delhi’s intelligence agency in Canada — the day before.

On Thursday, Mr. Bagchi signaled that more Canadian diplomats could soon leave India, in what he called a step to ensure “parity” between the two countries’ diplomatic presences.

ny times logoNew York Times, Analysis: Biden Is Caught Between Allies as Canada Accuses India of Assassination, Peter Baker, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). President Biden has prioritized bolstering partnerships over full-throated advocacy for democracy among American allies.

washington post logoWashington Post, Masked gunmen, an ambush, a chase: The execution of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, Samantha Schmidt, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). From the outset, the Sikh leader’s community in Surrey, British Columbia, believed the Indian government of Narendra Modi was behind his death.

Hardeep Singh Nijjar was in a hurry to leave the temple. It was Father’s Day, and his wife and two sons were waiting for him.

On his way out of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara, Nijjar’s Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia, he called his 21-year-old son. The family had made pizza, Balraj Singh Nijjar told his father, and had prepared the sweet pudding seviyan, his favorite dessert.

“Have dinner ready,” Nijjar told his son. “I’m coming home.”

But outside the gurdwara, three men were waiting. They had masks. They were armed.

Less than 10 minutes later, the phone at the Nijjar home rang again.

“Did you hear?” a family friend asked the son. “Something happened at the gurdwara. Your dad was shot.”

No arrests have been made in the brazen June 18 killing of Nijjar, the 45-year-old president of the temple. But from the outset, his family and friends in the local Sikh community were all but certain who was behind the brazen attack: the Indian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Nijjar was an outspoken leader of the separatist Khalistan movement, which aims to establish an independent Sikh state in the Punjab region of India. The movement is outlawed in India.

On Monday, precisely three months after Nijjar’s killing, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the House of Commons that investigators were pursuing “credible allegations” linking Nijjar’s slaying to agents of the Indian government.

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 U.S. Auto Workers Strike

ny times logoNew York Times, U.A.W. Extends Walkouts to More Plants, but Cites Progress in Ford Talks, Neal E. Boudette, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). The union designated 38 parts distribution factories as additional strike targets at G.M. and Stellantis.

uaw logoThe United Automobile Workers union on Friday significantly raised the pressure on General Motors and Stellantis, the parent of Jeep and Ram, by expanding its strike against the companies to include all the spare parts distribution centers of the two companies.

By widening the strike to the distribution centers, which supply parts to dealerships for repairs, the union is effectively taking its case to consumers, some of whom might find it difficult or impossible to have their cars and trucks fixed. The strategy could pressure the automakers to make more concessions to the union but it could backfire on the union by frustrating car owners and turning them against the U.A.W.

Shawn Fain, the union’s president, said Friday that workers at 38 distribution centers at the two companies would walk off the job. He said talks with two companies had not progressed significantly, contrasting them with Ford Motor, which he said had done more to meet the union’s demands.

Here’s what to know about the expanded strikes by autoworkers.

The president of the United Automobile Workers publicly invited President Biden to join workers on the picket lines.

 

GM Ford

 washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: The UAW might be demanding too big a slice of a soon-to-shrink pie, Catherine Rampell, right, Sept. 20, 2023 (print ed.). catherine rampellLabor leaders might be setting union expectations too high given the boom time for U.S. automakers might not last.

Rank-and-file autoworkers are absolutely overdue for a big pay hike. But the demands they’re making go far beyond that. In fact, labor and political leaders are doing workers no favors by setting expectations so sky-high that, if they actually get everything they want, they might end up putting their employers out of business — especially since those employers might already be in a more precarious position than recent profit levels suggest.

ny times logoNew York Times, U.A.W. Strike: Biden Will Join Autoworkers on the Picket Line in Michigan on Tuesday, Reid J. Epstein, Katie Rogers and Shane Goldmacher, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). President Biden’s move is one of the most significant displays of presidential support for striking workers in decades.

President Biden announced that he would travel to Michigan on Tuesday to “join the picket line” with members of the United Automobile Workers who are on strike against the nation’s leading automakers, in one of the most significant displays of presidential support for striking workers in decades.

“Tuesday, I’ll go to Michigan to join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of U.A.W. as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create,” Mr. Biden wrote on Friday on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

The trip is set to come a day before Mr. Biden’s leading rival in the 2024 campaign, Donald J. Trump, has planned his own speech in Michigan, and was announced hours after Shawn Fain, the union’s president, escalated pressure on the White House with a public invitation to Mr. Biden.

“We invite and encourage everyone who supports our cause to join us on the picket lines, from our friends and family all the way to the president of the United States,” Mr. Fain said in a Friday morning speech streamed online.

It was not immediately clear where Mr. Biden would go in Michigan. The White House had already announced plans for Mr. Biden to fly to California on Tuesday as part of a three-day trip to the West Coast. Mr. Biden made the decision on Friday, after Mr. Fain’s public invitation, according to two people familiar with the White House deliberations.

Mr. Fain on Friday announced the expansion of the U.A.W.’s work stoppage from three facilities to 38 assembly plants and distribution centers in 20 states, including six — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia — that are expected to be presidential battlegrounds in next year’s election.

Michigan, the home of the American automotive industry, is home to the bulk of the facilities and striking workers.

There is little to no precedent for a sitting president joining striking workers on a picket line.

Seth Harris, a former top labor policy adviser for Mr. Biden, said he was not aware of any president walking a picket line before.

“This president takes seriously his role as the most pro-union president in history,” Mr. Harris said. “Sometimes that means breaking precedent.”

 ny times logoNew York Times, Little Progress in Talks to End Strike Against 3 Detroit Automakers, Ivan Penn, Sept. 18, 2023 (print ed.). The U.A.W. returned to the bargaining table on Sunday after its president warned, “We’re going to amp this thing up” if the car companies don’t improve their offers. The United Auto Workers and the big three Detroit automakers largely held their ground on Sunday, seemingly no closer to reaching deals than they were when the autoworkers went on strike on Friday.

uaw logo“If we don’t get better offers and we don’t get down to taking care of the members’ needs, then we’re going to amp this thing up even more,” Shawn Fain, the president of the U.A.W., which has 150,000 members, said in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. Asked about an offer by one of the automakers, Stellantis, for a 21 percent pay increase over four years, Mr. Fain said, “It’s definitely a no-go.”

In a separate interview on MSNBC, Mr. Fain said that progress in the negotiations had been slow.

The union had talks with Ford on Saturday. It was going back to the bargaining table on Sunday with General Motors and planned talks with Stellantis — the parent of Chrysler, Jeep and Ram — on Monday, a spokesman said.

The union has been pushing for a 40 percent wage increase over four years, improved retiree benefits and shorter work hours as well as an end to a tiered wage system that starts new hires at much lower wages than the top U.A.W. pay of $32 an hour.

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U.S. Immigration Crisis

 

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ny times logoNew York Times, U.S. Will Allow Nearly 500,000 Venezuelan Migrants to Work Legally, Nicholas Fandos, Updated Sept. 21, 2023. The move, announced late Wednesday, followed intense lobbying by New York Democrats before and during President Biden’s visit to New York City this week.

The Biden administration said late Wednesday that it would allow hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans already in the United States to live and work legally in the country for 18 months.

The decision followed intense advocacy by top New York Democrats, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, Mayor Eric Adams and party leaders in Congress. It will affect about 472,000 Venezuelans who arrived in the country before July 31, temporarily protecting them from removal and waiving a monthslong waiting period for them to seek employment authorization.

In an unusual break with a president of their party, the New York Democrats had argued that the city’s social safety net would tear under the weight of more than 110,000 recently arrived migrants unless they were allowed to work and support themselves more quickly.

Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, said that he made the decision because conditions in Venezuela “prevent their safe return” but stressed that immigrants who had entered the country since August were not protected and would be “removed when they are found to not have a legal basis to stay.”

ny times logoNew York Times, One Day on the Border: 8,900 Migrants Arrested, and More on the Way, Miriam Jordan, Jack Healy and Eileen Sullivan, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). A sudden surge of people is arriving at the southern border, despite danger. “If you don’t take risks, you cannot win,” said one man who traveled from Peru.

They come from Brazil, Burkina Faso, Uzbekistan, India and dozens of other countries, a moving global village of hundreds of thousands of people crossing the Rio Grande and slipping through gaps in the border wall at a pace of nearly 9,000 people a day, one of the highest rates of unlawful crossings in months.

Despite new border barriers and thickets of razor wire, risk of deportation and pleas for patience, a resurgent tide of men, women and children is not waiting. Driven by desperation, families and individuals are pushing across the southern border and past new efforts by the Biden administration to keep migrants waiting until they secure hard-to-get appointments to enter the nation with permission.

The influx is creating a humanitarian and political crisis that stretches from packed migrant processing facilities in border states to major American cities struggling to house and educate the new families. Though many get through, thousands are being sent back across the border or on flights to their home countries. But from Texas to California, more than two dozen migrants who have entered illegally in recent days said they could not afford to wait.

“If you don’t take risks, you cannot win,” said Daniel Soto, 35, who crossed with his mother on Tuesday after they sold their car, restaurant and house in Lima, Peru, betting their entire fortune of $25,000 on a weeklong journey to the border near Tijuana.

Surges in migration at the southern border, while motivated by poverty, violence and hunger, are also tied to weather patterns, policy changes and personal circumstances. The pace of unlawful crossings dropped sharply in the spring amid uncertainty surrounding the end of a pandemic-era measure that allowed the government to quickly deport migrants. But numbers rebounded over the summer, and are now nearly double the 4,900 unlawful crossings a day that were recorded in mid-April.

ny times logoNew York Times, U.S. Wants to Keep Migrants Away From the Border by Moving Checkpoints South, Genevieve Glatsky and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). By opening migration processing centers in three Latin American countries, the Biden administration is trying to coax people not to trek to the border.

As the Biden administration struggles to tackle a humanitarian and political crisis at America’s doorstep, it is focusing increasingly on keeping migrants far from the U.S.-Mexico border by establishing migration processing centers in Central and South America.

But the program is off to a rocky start, with demand for appointments far outstripping supply, leading to periodic shutdowns of the online portal, and some countries’ limiting applicants over concerns that the centers will cause migrants to overwhelm their own borders.

The centers, in Colombia, Costa Rica and others planned in Guatemala, have become a primary focus of the president’s migration strategy, U.S. officials said, and the administration is already exploring expanding the program to other nations in the region, including opening a similar office in Mexico.

The program, known as the safe mobility initiative, is “the most ambitious plan I’ve seen,” said Sean Garcia, the deputy refugee coordinator for the U.S. Embassy in Colombia, who has worked on migration for over a decade.

ny times logoNew York Times, Officials scrambled to respond as migrants overwhelmed Eagle Pass, Texas, J. David Goodman, Edgar Sandoval, Miriam Jordan and Eileen Sullivan, Sept. 21, 2023 (print ed.). The mayor of Eagle Pass said 2,500 migrants arrived in one day, part of a recent surge in crossings along the border that has taxed local, state and federal resources.

Thousands of migrants crossed into the small city of Eagle Pass, Texas, from Mexico on Wednesday, crowding onto the banks of the Rio Grande and under an international bridge in what officials described as an unfolding crisis.

The mayor, Rolando Salinas Jr., declared a state of emergency, seeking additional support to respond to an influx of migrants that reached 2,500 on Wednesday, overwhelming the city of 28,000 that has been a focal point of efforts by the state of Texas to deter illegal crossings.

The arrivals, including a large number of people from Venezuela, were part of a substantial increase in recent crossings along the southern border. The number of arrivals has reached levels not seen in months, taxing local governments in California, Arizona and Texas as large numbers of people claiming asylum have been released by Border Patrol agents directly into border communities.

That was the case in Eagle Pass, officials said, where the city’s lone shelter provider strained to accommodate the sudden arrival of so many people. Many were released onto the streets of the city.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Mass south-to-north migration: It's because of climate change and it will get worse, wayne madsen may 29 2015 cropped SmallWayne Madsen, left, Sept. 18-19, 2023. From the United Nations to the world's leading climate scientists, the verdict is in: Our planet has reached and exceeded the tipping points for climate collapse and the mass migration of those affected and who live in the equatorial zones of the Americas, Asia, and Africa is a direct result of rising temperatures and multi-year drought.

wayne madesen report logoClimate change refugees from Sub-Saharan Africa and Central America and the Caribbean littoral of South America may find temporary respite from unbearable temperatures and drought by moving north into Europe and North America, but massive fires, powerful storms, and record floods will result in an inability of national and sub-national governments and assistance organizations to provide them much in the way of relief.

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U.S. Courts, Crime, Guns, Civil Rights, Immigration

washington post logoWashington Post, Justice Clarence Thomas reportedly attended Koch network donor events, Amy B Wang and Ann E. Marimow, Sept. 22, 2023. New report comes as some justices have suggested the Supreme Court should act on ethics issues.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas flew on a private jet in 2018 to speak at the annual winter donor summit of the Koch network — a trip that was intended to be a fundraising draw for the influential conservative political organization with interests before the court, according to a report published Friday by ProPublica.

At the summit, held in Palm Springs, Calif., Thomas attended a private dinner for the Koch network’s donors, ProPublica reported. According to the outlet, it was at least the second time Thomas had attended a meeting of the network founded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and his brother, David Koch, who died in 2019. Thomas did not disclose the 2018 trip, ProPublica reported.

The revelation adds to the controversies facing Thomas and the court more broadly that have led Democrats and court transparency advocates to call for the nine justices to adopt a binding code of ethics.

In recent weeks, at least two of the justices have publicly suggested the court should act. Justice Elena Kagan on Friday said she and her colleagues could adapt the policy that governs all lower court judges to reflect the unique structure of the Supreme Court.

“I think it would be a good thing for the court to do,” Kagan said during a live-streamed conversation with the dean of Notre Dame’s law school. “It would help in our own compliance with the rules, and it would, I think, go far in persuading other people that we were adhering to highest standards of conduct.”

Kagan noted that Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh had also recently said he hoped the court would soon take steps to address ethics issues.

The latest ProPublica report focused on Thomas’s interactions with the Koch network, which has given millions of dollars to a conservative legal organization behind one of the Supreme Court’s biggest cases of the term that begins in October. The group, Cause of Action Institute, is asking the justices to overturn a decades-old precedent long targeted by conservatives concerned about the power of federal government agencies. The precedent has been used extensively by the government to defend environmental, financial and consumer protection regulations.

In response to the report, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) called for Thomas to recuse himself from the case, questioning whether the justice could be impartial because of his previously undisclosed involvement with the Koch network.

ny times logoNew York Times, New Jersey Governor Calls on Menendez to Resign Over Bribery Charges, Benjamin Weiser, Tracey Tully and William K. Rashbaum, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Senator Robert Menendez was charged with taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes. He stepped down from his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was charged on Friday with taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, including bars of gold bullion, to wield his power abroad and at home.

The three-count federal indictment depicted a brazen plan hatched during furtive dinners, in text messages and on encrypted calls — much of it aimed at increasing U.S. assistance to Egypt and aiding businessmen in New Jersey.

Mr. Menendez’s wife, Nadine Menendez, is accused of acting as a go-between, passing messages to an American-Egyptian businessman, Wael Hana, who maintained close connections with Egyptian military and intelligence officials, the indictment said. In one text, to an Egyptian general, Mr. Hana referred to the senator, who held sway over military sales, financing and other aid, as “our man.”

Mr. Menendez, in a strongly worded rebuke to prosecutors, said that he was confident the matter would be “successfully resolved once all of the facts are presented.”

 ny times logoNew York Times, Incarcerated for Life, an Inmate Is Left Behind by Prison Reforms, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). A disabled Black man who has served 39 years could not benefit from “compassionate release.” His former lawyer voted against the new law in Congress.

ny times logoNew York Times, A Day Care Death and the Dilemma Over How to Crack Down on Drugs, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). Fentanyl use is increasingly out in the open, and increasingly fatal. But New Yorkers are divided over what to do: decriminalize it, or make more arrests?

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Oath Keeper Ray Epps and his wife Robyn Epps (New York Times photo by Alan Feuer).

Oath Keeper Ray Epps and his wife Robyn Epps (New York Times photo by Alan Feuer).

 

Prosecutions Of Trump, Allies

donald trump money palmer report Custom

ny times logoNew York Times, 2 Looming Rulings Could Shape Trump’s Fraud Trial in New York, Ben Protess, Jonah E. Bromwich and William K. Rashbaum, Sept. 25, 2023. Donald Trump has adopted a long-shot legal strategy to try to delay his upcoming civil trial and severely limit the case against him.

After four years of investigating and litigating, Letitia James was finally due for her day in court against Donald J. Trump.

But with that day fast approaching — a trial in her civil fraud lawsuit against him is scheduled to start on Oct. 2 — the former president’s lawyers threw a legal Hail Mary that could delay the case and seeks to gut it altogether.

The last-ditch move that left the trial in limbo came in a familiar form for the famously litigious Mr. Trump: He filed a lawsuit.

His targets were Ms. James, the New York attorney general, and the judge overseeing the trial, Arthur F. Engoron. Mr. Trump’s lawsuit argues that they ignored a June appeals court ruling that excused Mr. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, from the case and also raised the notion that some of the accusations against the former president and his company might be too old to go to trial.

Mr. Trump’s lawsuit — and in turn the fate of Ms. James’s case against him — hinges on a passage in the June appeals court ruling that has become a legal Rorschach test of sorts, in which each side sees what they want. Mr. Trump’s lawyers are convinced that the June ruling effectively tossed out the claims against him, while Ms. James’s team has argued that it had little effect on the accusation at the heart of her case — that Mr. Trump overstated his net worth by billions of dollars in his annual financial statements.

Christopher M. Kise, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, recently argued to Justice Engoron that Ms. James’s legal strategy was predicated on ignoring the appeals court’s decision.

“The foundation of the case is ignore everything except for what they want you to focus on,” he said. Mr. Kise separately asked the appeals court to delay the trial while it considered Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against Ms. James and Justice Engoron. One of the appeals court judges granted a provisional delay, which teed up the case to be considered by the full appellate court panel.

The attorney general’s office called Mr. Trump’s lawsuit “brazen and meritless,” saying in court papers that it reflected a complete misunderstanding of the June appeals court decision. The decision, Ms. James’s office argued, left it up to Justice Engoron to decide which claims against Mr. Trump can stay and which are so old that they must go.

The high-stakes battle is coming to a head this week, with Justice Engoron expected to issue his ruling by Tuesday. He has already expressed sympathy with some of Ms. James’s arguments: At a court appearance last week, addressing Mr. Kise, Justice Engoron pounded his fist in apparent frustration and remarked, “You cannot make false statements and use them in business.”

After Justice Engoron decides which of Ms. James’s claims can proceed to trial, the appeals court is expected to rule on Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against Ms. James and Justice Engoron, perhaps as soon as Thursday, according to a spokesman for the New York State Court system.

When the appeals court issues its ruling, there is no telling whether it will resolve the confusion about its original decision in June. It could simply decide that the timing of Mr. Trump’s lawsuit was improper and allow the trial to proceed as planned, potentially with major repercussions for the future of the former president’s family business. (Ms. James is seeking a roughly $250 million penalty and wants to oust Mr. Trump and his adult sons from leading their own company).

But if the appeals court sides with Mr. Trump, it could delay or defang the case before the trial even begins.

Some legal experts said that was unlikely to happen. David B. Saxe, who served nearly 20 years on the same appeals court, said the lawsuit seemed like an attempt to interfere with Justice Engoron’s implementation of that court’s June order. “I think it won’t fare well,” he said.

washington post logoWashington Post, Trump’s lawyers have until Monday to explain why he should not be subject to a gag order in election-obstruction case, Perry Stein and Devlin Barrett, Sept. 25, 2023. Donald Trump’s lawyers have until Monday to explain why he should not be subject to a gag order restricting what he can say about the election-obstruction case he faces in the nation’s capital. Earlier this month, prosecutors asked U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan to issue the gag order — arguing that Trump’s incendiary comments about the case could intimidate witnesses and make it hard to find an impartial jury.

The government’s proposed gag order hit the public docket Thursday. The main takeaway: It’s broad and would be tricky to enforce. Prosecutors want Trump and his attorneys prohibited from making inflammatory statements about “the identity, testimony, and credibility of prospective witnesses” or disparaging prosecutors, court officers or potential jurors.

Trump’s lawyers have previously told the judge he is a presidential candidate who has a right to respond to criticism and his rivals on the campaign trail. Prosecutors will have five days to respond to whatever Trump’s lawyers file. After that, Chutkan can rule at any time.

washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: Don’t bet on the Constitution disqualifying Trump, Ruth Marcus, right, Sept. 25, 2023. Some legal scholars says ruth marcus twitter CustomTrump is disqualified from running for president. Maybe, maybe not.

If you are hoping that Donald Trump is disqualified from running for president, don’t count on it. As a legal matter, it’s unlikely — not impossible but unlikely — that courts will invoke Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to keep the former president off the ballot. And as a policy question, though another Trump presidency would pose a great danger to democracy, invoking this once-obscure corner of the Constitution to stop Trump would also be dangerous.

washington post logoWashington Post, Judge in fraud suit against Trump chides defense for repeating arguments, Shayna Jacobs, Sept. 22, 2023. The judge overseeing New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $250 million business fraud lawsuit against Donald Trump on Friday became visibly annoyed with defense lawyers for what he called false statements and previously used arguments.

New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron — who will preside over an upcoming bench trial that may last three months — grew frustrated with a Trump attorney’s repeated assertions that Trump and his namesake company were not liable for wrongdoing.

Trump and the other defendants are accused of giving banks and insurance companies drastically inflated estimates of Trump’s net worth during a decade’s worth of official transactions to get better loan and policy rates.

“You cannot make false statements used in business,” Engoron told Christopher Kise, banging his fist on his bench and raising his voice. “That’s what this statute prohibits, and that’s what’s alleged here.”

 

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ny times logoNew York Times, Analysis: Request for Gag Order on Trump Raises Free Speech Dilemma, Charlie Savage, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Federal prosecutors are putting the prospect of political violence at the heart of their argument to limit Donald Trump’s statements about the election case.

The request by prosecutors that a judge impose a gag order on former President Donald J. Trump in the federal election-subversion case presents a thorny conflict between the scope of his First Amendment rights and fears that he could — intentionally or not — spur his supporters to violence.

Justice Department log circularThere is little precedent for how the judge overseeing the case, Tanya S. Chutkan, should think about how to weigh strong constitutional protections for political speech against ensuring the functioning of the judicial process and the safety of the people participating in it.

It is one more example of the challenges of seeking to hold to account a norm-shattering former president who is being prosecuted in four cases as he makes another bid for the White House with a message that his opponents have weaponized the criminal justice system against him.

“Everything about these cases is making new law because there are so many gaps in the law,” said Paul F. Rothstein, a Georgetown University law professor and a criminal procedure specialist. “The system is held together by people doing the right thing according to tradition, and Trump doesn’t — he jumps into every gap.”

Citing threats inspired by the federal indictments of Mr. Trump, a recently unsealed motion by the special counsel, Jack Smith, has asked Judge Chutkan to order the former president to cease his near-daily habit of making “disparaging and inflammatory or intimidating” public statements about witnesses, the District of Columbia jury pool, the judge and prosecutors.

A proposed order drafted by Mr. Smith’s team would also bar Mr. Trump and his lawyers from making — or causing surrogates to make — public statements “regarding the identity, testimony or credibility of prospective witnesses.” It would allow Mr. Trump to say he denies the charges but “without further comment.”

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More On Climate, Environment, Transportation

 

climate change photo

washington post logoWashington Post, Perspective: How the dream of air conditioning turned into the dark future of climate change, Philip Kennicott, Sept. 21, 2023. This summer, all across the torrid globe, air conditioning was a necessity for billions of people, though less than a third of households have it. In the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, it offered defense against not just the heat but also the eerie orange smoke from Canadian wildfires exacerbated by climate change.

In Phoenix, where the temperature rose above 110 degrees for weeks on end, temporary cooling centers were a lifesaver for homeless people, though hundreds of heat-related deaths were confirmed or suspected throughout the metropolitan area. In Europe, where air conditioning is evolving from an eccentric, American-style indulgence to a standard amenity, AC offered a critical defense against a heat wave so powerful and persistent that the Europeans gave the high-pressure system causing it a name, “Cerberus,” after the mythological three-headed hellhound who guards the gates of Hades.

As temperature records were broken across the planet this summer, you could sense something shift in our relationship to air conditioning. Billions of people in the Global South and other hot zones still live without household air conditioning. And the cost of remedying that is staggering. But it isn’t just the financial challenge of manufacturing and distributing more cooling systems. The environmental costs are terrifying, too. Making internal spaces cooler for humans means making external environments hotter for all living things, with more industrial production, shipping and energy consumption, all of which contribute to the buildup of greenhouse gases.

ny times logoNew York Times, Gold’s Deadly Truth: Much Is Mined With Mercury, Fabian Federl and Jack Nicas, Photographs by Ian Cheibub, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Jeovane de Jesus Aguiar was knee-deep in mud in the 100-yard gash he had cut into the Amazon rainforest, filtering brown water out of a pan, when he found the small, shiny flake he was looking for: a mixture of gold and mercury.

Mr. Aguiar had drizzled liquid mercury into the ground in his makeshift gold mine on the eastern edge of the small South American nation of Suriname, just as he had every few days.

The toxic element mixes with gold dust and forms an amalgam he can pluck out of the sludge. Then he sets the mixture aflame, burning off the mercury into the air, where winds spread it across the forest and across borders, poisoning the plants, animals and people it finds.

Left behind is the gold. That part usually ends up in Europe, the United States and the Persian Gulf, most often as expensive jewelry.

Ten years after an international treaty to ban mercury, the toxic metal continues to poison. The reason might have to do with your wedding ring.

 

An aerial view of Derna, Libya, on Thursday, Sept. 14, 2023. Thousands of people were killed or are missing after massive floods destroyed the city (Washington Post photo by Alice Martins)An aerial view of Derna, Libya, on Thursday, Sept. 14, 2023. Thousands of people were killed or are missing after massive floods destroyed the city (Washington Post photo by Alice Martins).

ny times logoNew York Times, East Libya Strongman Keeps Tight Control Over Aid After Floods, Ben Hubbard, Sept. 20, 2023 (print ed.). Khalifa Hifter, who oversees a military dictatorship that rules the eastern half nation, could use the response to the disaster to entrench his power.

Days after a torrential downpour collapsed two aging dams and unleashed a rushing wall of water that swept parts of the Libyan city of Derna and thousands of its people into the sea, the military strongman who rules the area came for a quick visit.

Khalifa Hifter, the 79-year-old renegade commander and longtime C.I.A. asset shook hands with soldiers, took a brief drive through Derna’s muddy streets and flew off in a helicopter.

The disaster that struck Derna on Sept. 11 has drawn renewed international attention to Mr. Hifter and his so-called Libyan National Army, a military coalition that controls the eastern half of the divided North African nation with an iron fist.

More than a week after the disaster, as rescue efforts shift to the long and costly work of caring for the displaced and helping the city recover, Mr. Hifter’s tight hold over eastern Libya has made it clear that he will be the overall arbiter of the aid operation in the oil-rich country.

ny times logoNew York Times, Opinion: Is the Disaster in Libya Coming Soon to an Aging Dam Near You? Josh Klemm and Isabella Winkler (co-directors of International Rivers, a group that advocates for healthy rivers and the rights of river communities), Sept. 18, 2023 (print ed.).

libya flag mapThe collapse of two dams in Libya, unleashing torrential floodwaters that left at least 3,000 people dead and over 4,200 still missing, was both predicted and preventable.

And they won’t be the last big dams to collapse unless we remove and repair some of the aging and obsolete structures that are long past their expiration date.

Like many dams around the world, the Wadi Derna dams in Libya were built in the 1970s during the era of peak global dam construction, when 1,000 large dams were installed each year. Now most of these dams are reaching the end of their life spans.

Details are still emerging, but the Libya dam collapses appear to have been caused by poor maintenance, and by poor monitoring of reservoirs that were overwhelmed by a huge rainstorm. Critical warnings were issued last year about the dams’ deteriorated state and the repairs needed to avert such a scenario, yet no action was taken.

Similar disasters are waiting to happen around the world. The biggest danger is in India and China, where the 28,000 large dams built in the mid-20th century are now nearing obsolescence. Mullaperiyar Dam in Kerala, India is over 100 years old, visibly damaged and located in a region prone to earthquakes. Its collapse would harm 3.5 million people downstream.

An aerial view of Derna, Libya, on Thursday. Torrential rains burst through two dams near Derna, on Libya’s northeastern coast, destroying much of the city (Reuters photo b

An aerial view of Derna, Libya, on Thursday. Torrential rains burst through two dams near Derna, on Libya’s northeastern coast, destroying much of the city (Reuters photo by Ayman Al-Sahili).

ny times logoNew York Times, Dire Warnings About Libya Dams Went Unheeded, Aaron Boxerman and James Glanz, Sept. 17, 2023 (print ed.). “The state wasn’t interested,” said an engineer who published a paper on why Derna’s ill-maintained dams might fail under the stress of a powerful storm.

It had been clear for years that the dams protecting Derna, on Libya’s Mediterranean coast, were in danger of giving way.

Torrential rains were not new. Decade after decade, they had pounded the area, washing away the soil that helped soak up water as it ran down from the dry hills above town.

Climate change had also changed the land, making it drier, harder and increasingly shorn of vegetation, less able to absorb the water before it pooled up dangerously behind the dams.

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More Global News

ny times logoNew York Times, Star Uyghur Scholar Who Vanished Was Sentenced to Life in China, Tiffany May, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). Rahile Dawut, who recorded her people’s traditions, disappeared in 2017. New information indicates that she faces decades in prison. Star Uyghur Scholar Who Vanished Was Sentenced to Life in China.

China FlagShe was a trailblazing professor and ethnographer from the Uyghur ethnic group in far-western China who documented the religious and cultural traditions of her people. She was at the height of a career that the Chinese government had once recognized with awards and research grants. But it was not enough to keep her safe.

Rahile Dawut, who nurtured a generation of academics and scholars, disappeared in 2017, along with other prominent intellectuals and academics targeted by the Chinese government in its campaign to crush the Uyghur cultural identity. Details about her case were shrouded in secrecy for years, leaving her family and friends to wonder about her fate.

On Thursday, the Dui Hua Foundation, a group that campaigns on behalf of political prisoners held in China, said that it had seen a document written by a senior Chinese official stating that Dr. Rahile Dawut had been sentenced to life in prison on charges of endangering national security.

“For the Chinese government to strike her is really to strike at the heart of Uyghur culture,” John Kamm, the group’s founder and chairman, said in a phone interview. “It’s appalling.”

Mr. Kamm added that the official also wrote that Dr. Rahile Dawut had attempted to appeal her sentence after she was first tried in 2018, but that her appeal was rejected. The Chinese government has applied a sweeping definition of “endangering national security” to detain and often imprison Uyghurs deemed to oppose or even question official policies.

Her daughter, Akeda Pulati, who lives in Seattle, said that the prospect of never again seeing her mother was deeply painful. “I felt very angry and devastated,” at learning of the sentence, she said in a phone interview, “even though I was already devastated for several years.” She added, “I couldn’t accept the news when I heard it.”

ny times logoNew York Times, Refugees Flee to Armenia as Breakaway Enclave Comes Under Azerbaijan’s Control, Ivan Nechepurenko, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). More than 1,000 ethnic Armenians fleeing the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh crossed the border into Armenia on Sunday, days after a military offensive brought the enclave firmly back under Azerbaijan’s control.

More refugees are expected to follow in the coming days, according to the refugees and their relatives waiting for them near the border. They took with them little but the most basic necessities, leaving behind their homes and possessions with little prospects of return.

“The past two days were the most horrific in my life,” said Meline Hakobyan, 23, a law student who left Yeghtsahogh, a village in Nagorno-Karabakh. “My wish is that the feeling we have now, nobody goes through it.”

Azerbaijan was emboldened to take military action last week because of the region’s shifting geopolitics as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Russia, Armenia’s traditional security guarantor, appeared less inclined to intervene this time, given its increasing reliance on trade with Turkey, Azerbaijan’s principal ally.

Over 1,000 people crossed the border from Nagorno-Karabakh, days after a military offensive returned the ethnic Armenian enclave to Azerbaijan’s control.

Politico, France withdraws troops from Niger, Clea Caulcutt, Sept. 25, 2023 (print ed.). Troops involved in anti-terror operations are coming home, Macron announced. 1,500 French troops are stationed in several bases across Niger.

politico CustomFrench President Emmanuel Macron announced Sunday that French troops would be withdrawn from Niger in the next couple of months, in the wake of a coup d’état in the Western African country this summer.

The military withdrawal from Niger comes after French troops were ousted from neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali, amid growing anti-French sentiment across the continent and military failures in containing jihadist terrorism in the Sahel region.

Macron also said France would imminently withdraw its ambassador, who had been living under effective house arrest in the French embassy in the capital Niamey, according to French authorities.

“France has decided to withdraw its ambassador. In the next hours, our ambassador and several diplomats will return to France,” Macron said during an interview with French TV channels.

Macron also said the military cooperation between France and Niger was “over” and that French troops would return before the end of the year. “In the weeks and months to come, we will consult with the putschists, because we want this to be done peacefully,” he added.

The military junta, which came to power in July, had set France an ultimatum to withdraw its troops that were involved in anti-terrorist operations in North Africa. France at the time pledged not to withdraw troops unless requested by the deposed Nigerien President Mohamed Bazoum.

 

moldova map

ny times logoNew York Times, Cash, Mules and Paid Protests: How a Fraudster Seized an Ethnic Enclave, Andrew Higgins, Sept. 24, 2023. The war in Ukraine has intensifed frictions in Moldova’s Gagauzia region. A man convicted of plundering his country’s central bank saw an opportunity.

Less than a decade after Moldova’s financial system almost collapsed following the theft of nearly $1 billion from major banks, the architect of that catastrophe, the Israeli-born Moldovan businessman Ilan Shor, had somehow seized an entire region.

Worse still, lamented Moldova’s president, Maia Sandu, Mr. Shor, who was convicted in 2017 for his role in ransacking Moldova’s banking system, was working in the interests of Russia, meaning that Gagauzia had “fallen into the hands of pro-Russian criminal groups.”

Bundles of cash arriving on flights from Russia via Armenia provided an early sign of mischief in a tiny Eastern European enclave. Then came a wave of noisy street demonstrations featuring destitute pensioners paid to chant for the removal of their country’s pro-Western president.

But events in that enclave, Gagauzia, in the Republic of Moldova, took their most bizarre turn this summer when — at an outdoor meeting of officials and journalists next to a statue of Lenin — a fugitive convicted criminal announced the members of a new regional government.

They were, the fugitive fraudster declared while speaking by video link from Israel, a “dream team.”

However, for the central government of Moldova, one of Europe’s poorest and most fragile nations, the drama unfolding in Gagauzia was more of a nightmare.

marin le pen franciya

ny times logoNew York Times, French Far-Right Leader May Face Trial on Embezzlement Charges, Roger Cohen, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Prosecutors recommended charges against Marine Le Pen, shown above, that could potentially bring a 10-year jail term and a 10-year ban from public office.

After a seven-year investigation, the Paris prosecutor’s office requested on Friday that the far-right leader Marine Le Pen and more than 20 other members of her National Rally party stand trial for embezzlement of funds from the European Parliament between 2004 and 2016.

The case has centered on whether party members who were representatives in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, along with their assistants, used money allocated to cover expenses at the assembly for party costs that had nothing to do with their european union logo rectangleparliamentary functions.

The request from the prosecutor’s office does not mean the case will go to trial. That decision will be made by Paris magistrates, probably within the next several weeks. Ms. Le Pen faces a possible 10-year prison sentence, a fine of one million euros ($1.1 million) and 10 years of ineligibility for public office, the prosecutor’s office said.

The decision comes as the jostling begins over a successor to President Emmanuel Macron, who must leave office under term limits in 2027, and nine months before European Parliament elections. It is a blow to Ms. Le Pen, a perennial candidate for the presidency who has increased her vote share but has always fallen short.

ny times logoNew York Times, Darfur’s New Generation, Once Full of Promise, Now Suffers ‘Fire of War,’ Abdi Latif Dahir, Sept. 21, 2023. In a Sudanese region with a history of genocide, weeks of intense fighting between rival military factions have left hundreds dead and sent thousands fleeing.

Five months after a devastating war began in Sudan between rival military forces, the western region of Darfur has quickly become one of the hardest hit in the nation. People in Darfur have already suffered genocidal violence over the past two decades that has left as many as 300,000 people dead.

Now Darfur, which had been edging toward relative stability, is being torn apart by a nationwide war between the Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The Rapid Support Forces and its allies, predominantly Arab militias, have assumed control of large parts of Darfur, while the regular army mostly operates from garrisons in major cities, residents and observers said.
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ny times logoNew York Times, Delegations from Armenia and Azerbaijan met to discuss the fate of the breakaway region Nagorno-Karabakh, Ivan Nechepurenko, Sept. 21, 2023. Officials of the breakaway region met with representatives of Azerbaijan to talk about the future of its residents, many of whom strongly resist the idea of coming under Azerbaijani rule.

One day after Azerbaijan used force to assert its authority over a mountainous breakaway region in the South Caucasus, its officials met with representatives of the pro-Armenian enclave on Thursday to discuss the future of the residents there under new rule.

Escorted by Russian peacekeepers, a delegation of the government of Nagorno-Karabakh arrived in the town of Yevlakh in Azerbaijan to meet with representatives of the Azerbaijani government.

Azerbaijan’s brisk military recapture of Nagorno-Karabakh — a strategic slice of land slightly bigger than Rhode Island that is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan — could further alter power dynamics in the combustible region where interests of Russia, Turkey and Western states collide.

Azerbaijan’s victory also posed a humanitarian challenge for tens of thousands of Armenians living there. Citing multiple historic grievances, many Armenians have been adamantly opposed to coming under Azerbaijani rule.

washington post logoWashington Post, Fighting flares between Azerbaijan and Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh, Mary Ilyushina, Sept. 20, 2023 (print ed.).  Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry on Tuesday declared an “anti-terrorist” campaign in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region under Armenian control, as Armenian media reported air raid sirens and mortar fire in the regional capital of Stepanakert.

Azerbaijan and Armenia have repeatedly clashed over Nagorno-Karabakh, which is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but largely populated by ethnic Armenians and largely governed by the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh.

The two nations fought two wars over the region: one in the early 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, and another in 2020 when Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, regained territories bordering Karabakh from Armenia, which had held them since 1994. The six-week-long hostilities ended after a truce brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin was signed in November 2020, but a full peace agreement remained elusive.

washington post logoWashington Post, In Wagner’s largest African outpost, Russia looks to tighten its grip, Rachel Chason and Barbara Debout, Sept. 19, 2023 (print ed.). Since the mercenaries of Russia’s notorious Wagner Group first arrived here [in the Central African Republic] five years ago, they have embedded themselves in the security operations and economy of this impoverished but resource-rich country. While operating largely independently of Moscow, the group helped project Russian influence deep into Africa.

wagner group logoNow, after the death of Wagner boss Yevgeniy Prigozhin last month in a suspicious plane crash, officials in the Central African Republic say the Russian government is moving to take direct control over the more than 1,000 mercenaries here.

President Faustin-Archange Touadéra said in an interview at the presidential palace that Russian fighters would remain in his country under his agreement with Moscow and continue to provide security at a “difficult moment,” as the Central African Republic continues to struggle with rebel groups that have been attacking soldiers and civilians in the countryside.

“It has always been the Russian government with which we contracted,” said Touadéra, whose security detail included Wagner fighters in khakis standing guard outside his office.

This month, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov and Maj. Gen. Andrei Averyanov of the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU, visited Bangui and informed Touadéra and other top CAR officials that the Russian presence would continue but under the command of the Russian Defense Ministry, according to Central African and Western officials. The president confirmed the meeting, saying, “We have state-to-state relations with Russia, so it is normal that the vice minister visited us in the context of our security relationship.”

Fidele Gouandjika, an adviser to Touadéra, said that if the fighters don’t want to obey Russia’s Defense Ministry, they will have no choice but to depart. “It is Russia that sent them and armed them,” Gouandjika said, “and Russia that will decide when Wagner leaves.”

The Central African Republic has historically represented Wagner’s largest outpost on the continent, though the group has been active in at least four African countries and set its sights on multiple others, provoking growing concern in Western capitals.

The Africa tour by Yevkurov and Averyanov also included stops in Mali, where Wagner has a substantial presence, and Burkina Faso, where Wagner leaders had previously offered their services. A Western official said the trip was intended to send a clear message: Prigozhin’s sprawling empire is now under government control.

washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: A top NSC official explains why Biden moved ahead with the Iran hostage deal, Jason Rezaian, Sept. 19, 2023 (print ed.). Five Americans who have been held hostage in Iran are flying to freedom right now, accompanied by two of their spouses. Three of them — Siamak Namazi, Morad Tahbaz and Emad Shargi — had for years languished in the notorious Evin Prison.

Their release brings the number of wrongfully detained Americans brought home under President Biden to 35. This demonstrates both the high priority this White House has put on freeing unjustly imprisoned citizens and the reality that hostage-taking by state actors is spiraling out of control. Two more U.S. residents, Shahab Dalili and Jamshid Sharmahd, remain imprisoned in Iran.

In exchange, the United States will release five Iranian citizens either sentenced or with trials pending. And South Korea will transfer to banks in Qatar $6 billion owed to Iran for the purchase of crude oil. Some critics call this transaction a ransom payment. The reality, as usual, is far more complex.

To unpack the details of the deal, I spoke with Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa — and the official who conducted the secret negotiations that led to my own release in 2016. What follows has been lightly edited for length.

Jason Rezaian: How did the Biden administration weigh its decision to make a deal with Iran for the release of the hostages?

Brett McGurk: Absent an arrangement to bring these people home, they would languish in one of the world’s worst prisons for many years to come. Some of our citizens had a potential death sentence hanging over them. All of them are now safely out of Iran.

We recognize there will be criticism of the deal, but the president ultimately needs to weigh the terms available through diplomacy, against leaving American citizens for years, or even decades, in Evin Prison. In this case, the president made the hard decision to move ahead.

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U.S. Economy, Jobs, Budgets, Crypto Currency

ny times logoNew York Times, Billions to Connect Everyone to High-Speed Internet Could Still Fall Short, Madeleine Ngo, Sept. 19, 2023. President Biden promised to provide every American access to high-speed internet. But some raised concerns about the funds.

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U.S. Military, Security, Intelligence, Foreign Policy

ny times logoNew York Times, Biden Officials Focus on African Crises at United Nations Gathering, Michael Crowley, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken met on Friday with African leaders in hopes of reversing a coup in Niger, as the U.S. tries to deliver on promises to the growing but troubled continent.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken met on Friday with African leaders seeking to restore Niger’s democratically elected government to power, capping a week at the United Nations in which the Biden administration worked to deliver on promises of support amid high-profile crises elsewhere, like the war in Ukraine.

In a sign of the instability threatening Africa’s potential for economic growth and independence, several of the leaders spoke about a scourge of coups that has spread across the continent — eight in the past three years — as President Biden has tried to promote democracy.

On Tuesday, Nigeria’s president, Bola Tinubu, told the annual gathering of the U.N. General Assembly that the military overthrows reflect widespread failures to improve African lives. “The wave crossing parts of Africa does not demonstrate favor towards coups,” he said. “It is a demand for solutions to perennial problems.”

Mindful of complaints on the continent that the United States is consumed by the war in Ukraine and competition with China, President Biden spent much of his speech to the U.N. on Tuesday addressing topics of particular interest to African leaders, including food security, development aid and climate change.

U.S. officials said Mr. Biden’s address drew an enthusiastic response from African leaders and diplomats in New York who appreciated his attention to their issues. That included Mr. Biden’s discussion of plans for a U.S.-sponsored corridor linking Angola with mineral-rich parts of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (a project in which the United States, dependent on rare-earth minerals, has a significant self-interest).

And recapping the week for reporters at a news conference on Friday, Mr. Blinken lingered on the details of his Africa diplomacy, noting U.S. progress on a joint program with the United Nations and African Union that helps “countries in Africa develop their own sustainable and effective sources of food,” including through what he called “climate-resistant” crops.

But officials from the 54-nation continent hardly speak from a unified pro-Western position. In remarks on Thursday, Col. Mamadi Doumbouya of Guinea, who announced himself as that country’s new leader after a coup in September 2021, condemned democratically elected African leaders “who cheat to manipulate the text of the constitution in order to stay in power eternally,” calling them “the real putschists.”

Directing his comments toward Western nations, Mr. Doumbouya complained that “this democratic model that you have so insidiously and skilfully imposed on us” was not working for his continent.

The discord reflected just one of the challenges facing the Biden administration’s effort to follow through on pledges to focus American foreign policy more on Africa.

In the near term, Biden officials are working to address several broiling crises in Niger, Sudan and elsewhere.

On Friday morning, Mr. Blinken met with the leaders of several nations that are members of the Economic Community of West African States, a regional group that has been pressuring Niger’s military leadership to relinquish power under the threat of a military intervention. The Biden administration hopes to avoid a conflict that could spill across the region.

In a readout following the meeting, the State Department said that attendees “were united in their position that the National Council for Safeguarding the Homeland in Niger” — the country’s ruling military junta — “must release President Mohamed Bazoum, his family, and all those unlawfully detained.”

Mr. Bazoum and his family have been detained since July.

In a side drama this week, representatives of Mr. Bazoum’s government and from the junta both sought to address the general assembly.

Bakary Yaou Sangaré, Niger’s permanent representative to the United Nations, who was appointed under Mr. Bazoum, would have had the right to do so — had he not thrown his allegiance with the generals who seized power and who named him the country’s new foreign minister.

  • Washington Post, U.S. plan envisions factories in Africa for surging EV battery demand, Sept. 23, 2023.

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More On U.S. Abortion, Family Planning, #MeToo

 

Jessica Burgess, center, alongside her attorney, Brad Ewalt, right, is escorted out of the Madison County District courtroom by Madison County Sheriff Todd Volk, in Madison, Neb., Friday, Sept. 22, 2023. Burgess, who pleaded guilty to giving her teenage daughter pills for an abortion and helping to burn and bury the fetus, was sentenced to two years in prison. (Norfolk Daily News photo by Austin Svehla via AP)

Jessica Burgess, center, alongside her attorney, Brad Ewalt, right, is escorted out of the Madison County District courtroom by Madison County Sheriff Todd Volk, in Madison, Neb., Friday, Sept. 22, 2023. Burgess, who pleaded guilty to giving her teenage daughter pills for an abortion and helping to burn and bury the fetus, was sentenced to two years in prison. (Norfolk Daily News photo by Austin Svehla via AP) 

ny times logoNew York Times, Mother Who Gave Abortion Pills to Teen Daughter Gets 2 Years in Prison, Jesus Jiménez, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Jessica Burgess had pleaded guilty to violating Nebraska’s abortion law. Her daughter, who was 17 when she ended her late-term pregnancy last year, was sentenced in July to 90 days in jail.

A Nebraska woman who acquired abortion pills that her teenage daughter used to end her pregnancy last year was sentenced on Friday to two years in prison.

The woman, Jessica Burgess, 42, was charged after the police found her private Facebook messages, which revealed plans she had with her daughter to end the pregnancy and “burn the evidence.”

nebraska mapProsecutors said that Ms. Burgess ordered the pills online and gave them to her daughter, Celeste Burgess, in April 2022, when her daughter was 17 and in the third trimester of her pregnancy. The Burgesses later buried the fetal remains, the authorities said.

Ms. Burgess pleaded guilty in July to violating Nebraska’s abortion law, furnishing false information to a law enforcement officer and removing or concealing human skeletal remains. Celeste Burgess was sentenced in July to 90 days in jail and two years of probation after she pleaded guilty in May to removing or concealing human skeletal remains.

Jessica Burgess, who faced up to five years in prison, was sentenced to two years, with her terms for false reporting and removal of skeletal remains running concurrently.

Brad Ewalt, a lawyer for Ms. Burgess, asked Judge Mark A. Johnson of Madison County District Court on Friday to sentence his client to probation. The judge denied the request, saying that Ms. Burgess had treated the fetal remains “like yesterday’s trash,” The Norfolk Daily News reported.

Celeste Burgess, who was released from jail on Sept. 11, sat near the back of the courtroom on Friday and wiped tears from her face when her mother was sentenced, The Daily News reported.

Mr. Ewalt and the Madison County prosecutor who tried the case did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.

A police investigation into the Burgesses began before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. The case has fueled fears that people who end their pregnancies in the post-Roe era, and those who help them, could be prosecuted for having abortions and that their private communications could be used as evidence against them.

The investigation began in late April 2022, when the police in Norfolk, Neb., began looking into whether a 17-year-old girl had given birth prematurely to a stillborn baby, and whether the girl and her mother had buried it, according to court documents.

At the time, abortion was banned in Nebraska after 20 weeks from conception. This May, Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, signed a 12-week ban into law.

The Burgesses were initially charged with concealing a stillbirth. But according to court documents, a detective later asked Celeste Burgess for the exact date her pregnancy ended. When she said she needed to check her Facebook messages to remember, the detective obtained a warrant for messages she had exchanged with her mother.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, complied with the warrant. The detective found evidence of a medically induced abortion, according to court documents, allowing the authorities to file additional charges.

 johnny hunt

southern baptist convention logo

Religion News Service via Washington Post, Is a pastor’s sin a private matter? Johnny Hunt’s lawsuit makes that claim, Bob Smietana, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). In the middle of 2010, not long after his term as Southern Baptist Convention president ended, Johnny Hunt, shown aboved in a file photo, took time off for his annual vacation.

washington post logoHe planned to return to the pulpit at First Baptist Church in Woodstock, Ga., in early August. But just before his first Sunday back, Hunt announced he was taking a leave of absence, citing his health and a sense of exhaustion.

What no one knew at the time was that Hunt had another reason for his leave.

On July 25, 2010, while vacationing in Florida, Hunt had kissed and fondled another pastor’s wife in what his attorneys would later call a “brief, consensual extramarital encounter.”

Then Hunt spent more than a decade covering the incident up.

Without telling his congregation — or the millions of Southern Baptists he had represented as their president — Hunt went through a secret restoration process that included counseling sessions with the woman he had fondled and her husband. He then returned to the pulpit.

southern baptist convention logo 2For a dozen years, no one was the wiser. Hunt retired from First Baptist in 2019 and took on a new role as a senior vice president for the SBC’s North American Mission Board and continued his busy and often lucrative career as a preacher and public speaker.

Then, in 2022, an investigation into how SBC leaders dealt with the issue of abuse was released, and his name was included in the report.

Over the course of their inquiry, investigators from Guidepost Solutions, the firm hired by the SBC, had heard about Hunt’s misconduct and learned that the woman involved in the incident — who has not been named publicly — described it as a sexual assault and as nonconsensual.

“We include this sexual assault allegation in the report because our investigators found the pastor and his wife to be credible; their report was corroborated in part by a counseling minister and three other credible witnesses; and our investigators did not find Dr. Hunt’s statements related to the sexual assault allegation to be credible,” investigators from Guidepost concluded.

When the report became public, Hunt first denied it and claimed the incident was consensual. He resigned from NAMB, went through another restoration process, then made a defiant return to the pulpit earlier this year.

This past spring Hunt filed suit against the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee and Guidepost, claiming they had ruined his life by revealing his misconduct and including him in an abuse report.

The heart of Hunt’s claim of invasion of privacy and defamation was summed up in a recent court filing submitted by his attorneys. Hunt’s sins, they wrote, were a private moral failing that should have been kept confidential.

“Pastor Johnny was not the president of the SBC or a member of the Executive Committee at the time of the incident,” they wrote in a memorandum, opposing the denomination’s attempts to have the case dismissed. “He was merely a private citizen whose marital fidelity was nobody else’s business.”

That claim raises a series of questions.

Can a pastor’s sins ever really be private? Can a pastor who has made a living urging others to follow a morality code then claim his own failings are no one else’s business? And was the harm done to Hunt’s reputation primarily due to his own acts — both the misconduct and the subsequent coverup?

George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center and a former assistant general counsel for the New York Times, said Hunt’s claim to privacy will probably go nowhere in court.

Hunt is undoubtedly angry and embarrassed that his personal failings have been publicized, which is understandable, said Freeman. But as a religious leader who was outspoken about family values and ethical living, his wrongdoings are a matter of public concern, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

 ny times logoNew York Times, Analysis: The Litany of #MeToo News Continues. Is Anything Really Changing? Amanda Taub, Updated Sept. 22, 2023. It can appear as though society is no closer to a future in which women can go about their ordinary lives without being harassed, assaulted and coerced into silence. A news investigation reported that women had accused Russell Brand of sexual assault and harassment, including one allegation of rape.

The endless, relentless eruptions of sexual abuse and harassment scandals can sometimes seem like a particularly grim form of Zeno’s dichotomy paradox.

Back in the 5th century B.C., the Greek philosopher described how a runner on the path to a particular destination must first traverse half the distance, and then half the remaining difference, and then half the remaining distance, and so on — to infinity. By that logic, the runner can take steps toward a goal but will never actually reach it.

Similarly, each time a powerful man is held accountable for sexual misconduct, it seems like progress. And yet, when the allegations reveal a similar pattern of institutional actions that allowed the abuse to go on for years, and they provoke the same reactions of denial and victim-blaming, it can appear as though society is no closer to a future in which women can go about their ordinary lives without being harassed, assaulted and coerced into silence.

Take the news from the past eight days. On Sept. 12, the British Journal of Surgery published a study that found that nearly a third of female surgeons in England reported being sexually assaulted by a colleague within the last five years, and 63 percent had experienced sexual harassment (23 percent of male surgeons also reported being sexually harassed). The same day, a ProPublica investigation showed that Columbia University failed to act on years of evidence that Robert Hadden, a gynecologist at the university’s affiliated hospital system, was sexually assaulting women and girls who came to him for treatment.

On Sept. 16, an investigation by The Times of London and the Channel 4 news program “Dispatches” reported that multiple women had accused Russell Brand, the comedian turned fringe political YouTuber, of sexual assault and harassment, including one allegation of rape. On Sept. 18, Vice News reported that Tim Ballard, the founder of Operation Underground Railroad, an anti-trafficking organization, had been ousted from that organization after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct. The following day, Vice also reported on law enforcement records describing video footage of Paul Hutchinson, a producer of a movie about Ballard’s life, groping the breasts of a young woman whom he believed to be a 16-year-old trafficking victim. (Brand, Ballard and Hutchinson have all denied the allegations against them.)

Much ink has been spilled on the actions and motivations of abusers. But I find that these stories raise a much bigger question: whether, after years of #MeToo revelations, the institutional responses that have long enabled abuse are starting to change.
Sexual Assault Allegations Against Russell Brand

What Happened: Three British media outlets published an investigation in which four women accused the comedian Russell Brand of sexual assault. Brand has denied the allegations.

Abuse ‘debts’ coming due?

The term “beautiful soul" is an Israeli slang term that translates roughly as a more pejorative version of “bleeding heart”: a person who refuses to make moral sacrifices, even when there are practical incentives for doing so. In a 2013 book of the same name, Eyal Press profiled four whistle-blowers and conscientious objectors who ended up being vilified and ostracized for opposing wrongdoing within their own organizations.

Unpack that a bit, and you come to the uncomfortable truth: that in coldly rational terms, there are often substantial benefits from turning a blind eye to wrongdoing, or even fostering it.

As Press writes, a beautiful soul is not just someone who refuses to conform, it’s someone who is willing to block the pursuit of material goals by demanding that an organization, or a society, adhere to its own stated values.

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Public Health, Pandemics, Privacy

Politico, Biden receives updated Covid shot amid rocky rollout, vaccine polarization, Olivia Alafriz, Sept. 23, 2023. The updated shot was approved by the FDA earlier this month and the CDC recommended it for all individuals six months and older.

politico CustomPresident Joe Biden received the updated Covid-19 vaccine, according to a memo from White House physician Kevin O’Connor released Saturday.

“As we enter the cold and flu season, the President encourages all Americans to follow his example and to check with their healthcare provider or pharmacist to assure that they are fully vaccinated,” O’Connor wrote in the memo.

The president received the Covid vaccine alongside the annual flu vaccine Friday, O’Connor wrote. First lady Jill Biden experienced “mild symptoms” when she contracted Covid earlier this month. The president tested negative.

The updated shot was approved by the FDA earlier this month and the CDC recommended it for all individuals six months and older — however, the rollout has been rocky.

With the federal government no longer purchasing and distributing the shot, logistical hiccups and confusion over insurance coverage have presented obstacles to people seeking the vaccine.

Covid hospitalization data published by the CDC show that virus levels have surged recently. However, the CDC stopped recording individual cases when the public health emergency ended in May, so the exact number of cases is uncertain.

The White House has also struggled to combat growing anti-vaccine sentiment in a polarized political environment.

Vaccine skepticism is increasingly pronounced in the GOP, polls show. A new Politico, | Morning Consult poll showed that Republican voters were less likely than Democrats or independents to say vaccines are safe for children and only 27 percent of Republicans said the Covid vaccine is “very safe” for adults — while nearly as many, 23 percent, said it’s “very unsafe.”

GOP presidential candidates, in contrast to Biden, have disavowed the vaccine. Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has said he regrets taking the vaccine (although his wife, a surgeon, has disagreed) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has leaned into Covid skepticism.

Biden’s primary challenger, Robert Kennedy, Jr., is also a prominent vaccine skeptic.

washington post logoWashington Post, Anyone 6 months or older should get updated coronavirus shot, CDC recommends, Lena H. Sun and Fenit, Sept. 13, 2023 (print ed.). The CDC’s director said the reformulated vaccines can restore protection and provide “enhanced protection” against variants currently responsible for most infections and hospitalizations in the United States.

cdc logo CustomTuesday, with the vaccine expected to become available within 48 hours — as the respiratory illness season looms.

covad 19 photo.jpg Custom 2Mandy Cohen, director of the CDC, advised that anyone 6 months and older should get at least one dose of an updated shot. Her broad recommendation came after the agency’s expert advisers voted for a universal approach to seasonal coronavirus vaccination. The shots are intended to bolster defenses as the nation heads into the fall and winter virus season, when influenza and RSV are also primed to be on the rise.

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U.S. Media, Education, Religion, Sports, High Tech

washington post logoWashington Post, Editorial: Even $500 million isn’t enough to save local journalism, Editorial Board, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.).  Books, op-eds, think pieces and conferences — many, many conferences: The plight of local journalism in the United States has received its share of attention. At a 2022 summit on this topic, an industry veteran said that there’s “probably more people trying to help the newspaper business than in the newspaper business.”

A large pile of cash is now sidling up to all the chatter. In an initiative announced this month, 22 donor organizations, including the Knight Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, are teaming up to provide more than $500 million to boost local news over five years — an undertaking called Press Forward.

Journalists and publishers on the local scene in markets across the country have worked nonstop to bring their neighbors important stories and experiment with ways of paying for the service. The injection of more than a half-billion dollars is sure to help the quest for a durable and replicable business model.

The even bigger imperative, however, is to elevate local news on the philanthropic food chain so that national and hometown funders prioritize this pivotal American institution. Failure on this front places more pressure on public policy solutions, and government activism mixes poorly with independent journalism.

There’s no shortage of need. According to 2022 research by Penny Abernathy, a visiting professor at Medill and a former executive at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, newspapers are closing at an average rate of more than two per week; since 2005, more than one-quarter of U.S. newspapers have vanished. Digital-only start-ups haven’t plugged the gap, leaving too many communities without pressing information about themselves. The contraction has led to the proliferation of “news deserts”; there are 200 counties, home to 70 million people, with no newspaper.

No surprise: It turns out that areas with thin and declining news coverage also have lower voter turnout, less robust political competition and declining civic engagement. Into the void have seeped misinformation and disinformation.

What’s more, local news stands as the industry’s front line against the erosion of public trust. News consumers, after all, needn’t venture far to judge the veracity of a report on a three-alarm blaze up on Main Street; nothing dispels “fake news” quite like a freshly charred facade.

Who’s to blame? The internet, mostly. Whereas deep-pocketed advertisers formerly relied on newspapers to reach their customers, they took to the audience-targeting capabilities of Facebook or Google. Web-based marketplaces also siphoned newspapers’ once-robust revenue from classified ads. Local news entrepreneurs these days attempt to get by with a mix of advertising (or “sponsorship,” in the case of nonprofit news organizations), subscriber revenue and grants from philanthropic institutions. “If you’re going to do a big mission, you’ve got to have multiple sources of revenue,” says Eric Barnes, CEO of the Daily Memphian.

washington post logoWashington Post, Misinformation research is buckling under GOP legal attacks, Naomi Nix, Cat Zakrzewski and Joseph Menn, Sept. 23, 2023. The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political disinformation but also the quality of medical information online.

Academics, universities and government agencies are overhauling or ending research programs designed to counter the spread of online misinformation amid a legal campaign from conservative politicians and activists who accuse them of colluding with tech companies to censor right-wing views.

The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans in Congress and state government — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political falsehoods but also the quality of medical information online.

Facing litigation, Stanford University officials are discussing how they can continue tracking election-related misinformation through the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a prominent consortium that flagged social media conspiracies about voting in 2020 and 2022, several participants told The Washington Post. The coalition of disinformation researchers may shrink and also may stop communicating with X and Facebook about their findings.

The National Institutes of Health froze a $150 million program intended to advance the communication of medical information, citing regulatory and legal threats. Physicians told The Post that they had planned to use the grants to fund projects on noncontroversial topics such as nutritional guidelines and not just politically charged issues such as vaccinations that have been the focus of the conservative allegations.

NIH officials sent a memo in July to some employees, warning them not to flag misleading social media posts to tech companies and to limit their communication with the public to answering medical questions.

 

President Ronald Reagan is shown in a 1980s White House meeting with key right wing media and political influencers Rupert Murdoch, Roy Cohn and Charles Wick (Photo via Reagan Presidential Library).

President Ronald Reagan is shown in a 1980s White House meeting with key right wing media and political influencers Rupert Murdoch, Roy Cohn (standing) and Charles Wick (Photo via Reagan Presidential Library).

ny times logoNew York Times, The Fox Titan Turned Passion and Grievance Into Money and Power, James Poniewozik, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Rupert Murdoch built a noise-and-propaganda machine by giving his people what they wanted — and sometimes by teaching them what to want, our critic writes.

The polite way to describe the legacy of a man like Rupert Murdoch is to leave aside whether his accomplishments were good or bad and simply focus on how big they were. It is to eulogize him like Kendall Roy memorializing his father, Logan, in “Succession,” the HBO corporate drama none too slightly based on the Murdochs, among other dynasties. Maybe he had “a terrible force,” as Kendall put it, but fox news logo Small“he built, and he acted. … He made life happen.”

But the polite way is exactly the wrong way to assess Mr. Murdoch, who on Thursday announced his retirement from the boards of Fox and News Corporation. Mr. Murdoch (whose biographers included Michael Wolff in a book whose rupert murdoch michael wolff covercover is shown at left) achieved nothing the polite way. His style and his work were direct and blunt. Let us take his measure his way.

Rupert Murdoch’s empire used passion and grievance as fuel and turned it into money and power.

His tabloids ran on the idea of publishing for readers as they were, not according to some platonic ideal of how one wished them to be. That meant pinups and prize giveaways and blaring scandal headlines.

Over years and decades, Mr. Murdoch’s properties shifted their definition of “elite” away from people with more money than you and toward people with more perceived cultural capital than you, something that would be essential to nationalist politics in the 21st century and Fox’s dominance. (He did all this while living the life of a jet-setting billionaire.)

ny times logoNew York Times, The Fox Titan Turned Passion and Grievance Into Money and Power, James Poniewozik, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Rupert Murdoch built a noise-and-propaganda machine by giving his people what they wanted — and sometimes by teaching them what to want, our critic writes.

rupert murdoch 2011 shankbone The polite way to describe the legacy of a man like Rupert Murdoch is to leave aside whether his accomplishments were good or bad and simply focus on how big they were. It is to eulogize him like Kendall Roy memorializing his father, Logan, in “Succession,” the HBO corporate drama none too slightly based on the Murdochs, among other dynasties. Maybe he had “a terrible force,” as Kendall put it, but “he built, and he acted. … He made life happen.”

But the polite way is exactly the wrong way to assess Mr. Murdoch, who on Thursday announced his retirement from the boards of Fox and News Corporation. Mr. Murdoch achieved nothing the polite way. His style and his work were direct and blunt. Let us take his measure his way.

Rupert Murdoch’s empire used passion and grievance as fuel and turned it into money and power.

His tabloids ran on the idea of publishing for readers as they were, not according to some platonic ideal of how one wished them to be. That meant pinups and prize giveaways and blaring scandal headlines.

Over years and decades, Mr. Murdoch’s properties shifted their definition of “elite” away from people with more money than you and toward people with more perceived cultural capital than you, something that would be essential to nationalist politics in the 21st century and Fox’s dominance. (He did all this while living the life of a jet-setting billionaire.)

 washington post logoWashington Post, Lachlan Murdoch will be fully in charge of Fox. Will viewers notice? Jeremy Barr, Sept. 22, 2023. When Rupert Murdoch hands over the reins of the family media empire to his son Lachlan, it’s unlikely that viewers of Fox News will notice much difference.

lachlan murdoch 2013When Rupert Murdoch formally hands over the reins of his media empire to his 52-year-old son Lachlan in November, die-hard Fox News viewers will hardly notice any difference.

Conservative-leaning Lachlan, shown in a 2013 photo, has controlled the cable-news giant’s parent company since 2019, when he was picked to serve as chief executive and his more liberal brother James left the family business, seemingly ending speculation that a new sensibility would arrive with the next generation of Murdochs.

“I’ve had a sense that Lachlan is at least as conservative as his father,” said Preston Padden, a former Fox executive who has since became a critic of the network (but described Lachlan as “a very nice guy” in their interactions back in the 1990s).

ny times logoNew York Times, Rupert Murdoch to Retire From Fox and News Corporation Boards, Jim Rutenberg, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). The move leaves his son Lachlan as the sole executive in charge of the global media empire.

rupert murdoch 2011 shankbone Rupert Murdoch, left, is retiring from the Fox and News Corporation boards, the company announced Thursday morning, making his son Lachlan the sole executive in charge of the global media empire he built from a small local newspaper concern in Australia starting 70 years ago.

fox news logo SmallThe elder Mr. Murdoch will become chairman emeritus of the two companies, the company said in a release.

Mr. Murdoch, 92, had shown no intention to step down or even slow down — even after he named Lachlan as the heir to his business empire in 2019, when he sold his vast entertainment holdings to the Walt Disney Company.

Even now, in his emeritus status, he will continue to offer counsel, Lachlan Murdoch said in a statement.

“We thank him for his vision, his pioneering spirit, his steadfast determination, and the enduring legacy he leaves to the companies he founded and countless people he has impacted,” Lachlan Murdoch, 52, said in a release the company put out Thursday morning.

washington post logoWashington Post, Her students reported her for a lesson on race. Can she trust them again? Hannah Natanson, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). Mary Wood’s school reprimanded her for teaching a book by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Now she hopes her bond with students can survive South Carolina’s new laws.

As gold sunlight filtered into her kitchen, English teacher Mary Wood shouldered a worn leather bag packed with first-day-of-school items: Three lesson-planning notebooks. Two peanut butter granola bars. An extra pair of socks, just in case.

Everything was ready, but Wood didn’t leave. For the first time since she started teaching 14 years ago, she was scared to go back to school.

Six months earlier, two of Wood’s Advanced Placement English Language and Composition students had reported her to the school board for teaching about race. Wood had assigned her all-White class readings from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a book that dissects what it means to be Black in America.

The students wrote in emails that the book — and accompanying videos that Wood, 47, played about systemic racism — made them ashamed to be White, violating a South Carolina proviso that forbids teachers from making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” on account of their race.

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gop house chairs 2023 ny times logoNew York Times, Analysis: The Wrecking-Ball Caucus: How the Far Right Brought Washington to Its Knees, Carl Hulse, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). Far-right Republicans are sowing mass dysfunction, and spoiling for a shutdown, an impeachment, a House coup and a military blockade.

djt maga hatWhen it comes to his view of the United States government, Representative Bob Good, a right-wing Republican who represents a Virginia district that was once the domain of Thomas Jefferson, doesn’t mince words.

“Most of what Congress does is not good for the American people,” Mr. Good declared in an interview off the House floor as the chamber descended into chaos last week. “Most of what we do as a Congress is totally unjustified.”

Though his harsh assessment is a minority opinion even among his Republican colleagues, it encapsulates the perspective that is animating the hard right on Capitol Hill and, increasingly, defining a historically dysfunctional moment in American politics.

republican elephant logoWith a disruptive government shutdown just days away, Washington is in the grip of an ultraconservative minority that sees the federal government as a threat to the republic, a dangerous monolith to be broken apart with little regard for the consequences. They have styled themselves as a wrecking crew aimed at the nation’s institutions on a variety of fronts.

They are eager to impeach the president and even oust their own speaker if he doesn’t accede to their every demand. They have refused to allow their own party to debate a Pentagon spending bill or approve routine military promotions — a striking posture given that unflinching support for the armed forces has long been a bedrock of Republican orthodoxy.

Defying the G.O.P.’s longstanding reputation as the party of law and order, they have pledged to handcuff the F.B.I. and throttle the Justice Department. Members of the party of Ronald Reagan refused to meet with a wartime ally, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, this week when he visited the Capitol and want to eliminate assistance to his country, a democratic nation under siege from an autocratic aggressor.

And they are unbowed by guardrails that in past decades forced consensus even in the most extreme of conflicts; this is the same bloc that balked at raising the debt ceiling in the spring to avert a federal debt default.

“There is a group of Republican members who seem to feel there is no limit at all as to how you can wreck the system,” said Ross K. President Donald Trump officialBaker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University. “There are no boundaries, no forbidden zones. They go where relatively junior members have feared to tread in the past.”

washington post logoWashington Post, As possible shutdown nears, a disconnect between political rhetoric and budget reality, Jeff Stein and Marianna Sotomayor, Sept. 24, 2023. Lawmakers in both parties have called for getting serious about the rising federal debt. The shutdown fight ignores its key drivers.

Time is running out for Congress to prevent a government shutdown, as Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) tries to defuse the demands of ultraconservatives in the House who are demanding aggressive spending cuts.

When lawmakers return Tuesday, both the House and the Senate will try different tactics to fund the government past the fast-approaching deadline — each looking to jam their preferred legislation through the other chamber in a risky game of brinkmanship. djt maga hatCurrent spending laws expire on Sept. 30, so the government will shut down at 12:01 a.m. on Oct. 1 without action.

U.S. braces for costly government shutdown in eight days

In the House, the GOP majority failed several times last week to reach consensus on a short-term funding bill, known as a continuing resolution. Most of the conference says they want to avert a shutdown, but a small group of far-right members who oppose a short-term extension have blocked that option. So Republicans will try to pass some separate bills that would fund the government for the fox news logo Smallfull fiscal year.

senate democrats logoThe Senate will begin work on its own short-term spending bill on Tuesday, aiming to send it to the House by the weekend with hours to go before a shutdown starts — where it would probably have enough votes to pass, but only with support from Democrats, a red line for many in the GOP.

But while the far-right rebels in McCarthy’s caucus say the rising national debt is such a threat that it’s worth forcing the government to close down in pursuit of spending cuts, the uncomfortable fiscal reality is that most of what is driving federal borrowing to record levels isn’t even up for discussion this week.

Conservatives want to pare federal discretionary spending back to 2022 levels, which would mean cutting more than $100 billion from agency budgets each year.

social security administrationThat’s a lot of money, but hitting the goal would require severe cuts to a small portion of the federal budget — mostly programs that provide services like education, medical research and aid for families in poverty. The government’s biggest annual expense, though, and the main projected drivers of U.S. debt, are the retirement programs Medicare and Social Security. The United States spends more than $6 trillion every year. McCarthy’s caucus is tying itself in knots over how to make cuts from domestic discretionary spending, which accounts for less than one-sixth of that total.

Looking at it another way, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that the annual federal deficit is expected to rise to nearly $3 trillion per year by next decade, up from roughly $2 trillion this year. If the conservatives in the House GOP get everything they’re seeking now, that number could drop to about $2.8 trillion per year.

“The people back in my district, they’re tired of the way this town works,” said Rep. Elijah Crane (R-Ariz.), who joined other conservatives in the last week to stymie McCarthy’s attempts to move spending bills. “They understand there’s no appetite to spend money we don’t have, and they expect me to do whatever I can to stop it, and to change how we do business. It’s not always the most comfortable thing.”

But the disconnect between the political rhetoric about the shutdown and the reality of the budget math underscores how little lawmakers are doing to try to rein in the long-term federal spending imbalance. Without a deal, the federal government will shut down, hurting economic growth and leading to the suspension of a wide range of essential public services.

ny times logoNew York Times, As Trump Prosecutions Move Forward, Threats and Concerns Increase, Michael S. Schmidt, Adam Goldman, Alan Feuer, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, Sept. 24, 2023. As criminal cases proceed against the former president, heated rhetoric and anger among his supporters have authorities worried about the risk of political dissent becoming deadly.

Justice Department log circularAt the federal courthouse in Washington, a woman called the chambers of the judge assigned to the election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump and said that if Mr. Trump were not re-elected next year, “we are coming to kill you.”

FBI logoAt the Federal Bureau of Investigation, agents have reported concerns about harassment and threats being directed at their families amid intensifying anger among Trump supporters about what they consider to be the weaponization of the Justice Department. “Their children didn’t sign up for this,” a senior F.B.I. supervisor recently testified to Congress.

And the top prosecutors on the four criminal cases against Mr. Trump — two brought by the Justice Department and one each in Georgia and New York — now require round-the-clock protection.

As the prosecutions of Mr. Trump have accelerated, so too have threats against law enforcement authorities, judges, elected officials and others. The threats, in turn, are prompting protective measures, a legal effort to curb his angry and sometimes incendiary public statements, and renewed concern about the potential for an election campaign in which Mr. Trump has promised “retribution” to produce violence.

Given the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, scholars, security experts, law enforcement officials and others are increasingly warning about the potential for lone-wolf attacks or riots by angry or troubled Americans who have taken in the heated rhetoric.

In April, before federal prosecutors indicted Mr. Trump, one survey showed that 4.5 percent of American adults agreed with the idea that the use of force was “justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.” Just two months later, after the first federal indictment of Mr. Trump, that figure surged to 7 percent.

ny times logoNew York Times, Blasting Bullhorns and Water Cannons, Chinese Ships Wall Off the South China Sea, Hannah Beech, Photographs and Video by Jes Aznar, Sept. 24, 2023. Traveling by boat, Times journalists saw firsthand how the world’s most brazen maritime militarization has transformed a major trade route.

China FlagThe world’s most brazen maritime militarization is gaining muscle in waters through which one-third of global ocean trade passes. Here, on underwater reefs that are known as the Dangerous Ground, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, or P.L.A., has fortified an archipelago of forward operating bases that have branded these waters as China’s despite having no international legal grounding. China’s coast guard, navy and a fleet of fishing trawlers harnessed into a militia are confronting other vessels, civilian and military alike.

The mounting Chinese military presence in waters that were long dominated by the U.S. fleet is sharpening the possibility of a showdown between superpowers at a moment when relations between them have greatly worsened. And as Beijing challenges a Western-driven security order that stood for nearly eight decades, regional countries are increasingly questioning the strength of the American commitment to the Pacific.

ny times logoNew York Times, Analysis: The Chinese coast guard has upended 200 years of global tradition. It has also set off an arms race, Damien Cave, Updated June 13, 2023. Beijing’s patrol vessels often resemble warships. Now other nations are trying to compete with tougher coast guards of their own.

 

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ny times logoNew York Times, Republicans may seize control of North Carolina’s state and local election boards, Michael Wines, Sept. 24, 2023. The G.O.P.-led legislature may seize control of state and local election boards from the Democratic governor, fueling a feud that could resonate in 2024.

Shortly before Gov. Roy Cooper, a North Carolina Democrat, began his first term in 2017, his rivals in the Republican-controlled legislature voted to strip the position of key powers, including the governor’s longstanding authority to appoint majorities to the state election board and local election boards in all 100 counties. After the state Supreme Court ruled that move illegal, the lawmakers put the idea on the ballot, but the state’s voters shot that down, too.

Now, seven years after their first try, the legislators appear on the verge of getting what they have long sought.

On Wednesday, the State House of Representatives followed the State Senate in passing legislation that would put the legislature in charge of all election board appointments. It would also change the number of positions on each board to split seats equally between Republican and Democratic members, eliminating the extra seat — controlled by the governor — that had served as a tiebreaker in disputes.

Under the newly passed bill, ties in local election boards would be addressed by the State Board of Elections — which, under the bill, would also have an equal number of members from each party.

Republicans still have to meld the House and Senate versions into a single measure and then override a certain veto by Governor Cooper. Neither appears to pose a problem, particularly after a Charlotte-area state representative defected from Democratic ranks to the Republican Party last spring, giving it a veto-proof majority in both houses of the legislature.

 

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washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: Trump isn’t as strong as he looks — his GOP rivals are letting him win, E.J. Dionne Jr., Sept. 24, 2023. To understand why Donald Trump is once again skipping a Republican presidential debate, realize that the conventional way of looking at the GOP’s nomination contest has things largely backward. Trump’s standing in the polls is less about his strength than about the weakness of the rest of the field — and the traditional Republican Party.

Trump wants his foes to stay weak. By not showing up, he reduces them to squabbling bit players trying to bring each other down while the major contenders offer pale imitations of his own message and values.

Republican voters once open to someone other than the former president are concluding that if they’re going to get Trumpism, they might as well go with the guy who invented it. And they’re getting little useful advice from party leaders who — as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told his biographer McKay Coppins — see Trump as a disaster but are too timid to say so publicly.

It didn’t have to be like this, because the strength of Trump’s lock on the party is vastly exaggerated.

Sure, Trump has an unshakable base, those who would stick with him if he were indicted a dozen more times. But that hard core accounts for no more than about 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate. There really is (or was) room for someone else to break through.

But not one of them has inspired real excitement, and the politician who once seemed best placed to take Trump on, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has had a miserable year.

As a result, Trump has been able to combine his base with a fair share of the largest group of Republicans: those with a more or less positive view of the former president but willing to support someone else.

Not so long ago, such Republicans were flocking to others, particularly DeSantis. Trump seemed anything but inevitable at the beginning of 2023. Many in the party blamed him (and the candidates he backed) for its disappointing showing in the 2022 midterms.

washington post logoWashington Post, Democrats embrace Biden’s upcoming visit to Michigan UAW picket lines, Lauren Kaori Gurley, Jeanne Whalen and Erica Werner, Sept. 24, 2023. As strikes against the Big Three Detroit automakers enter their 10th day Sunday, Democrats are praising a visit by President Biden to Michigan, scheduled for Tuesday, to show support for autoworkers on the picket lines.

The White House announced the news Friday, as United Auto Workers members walked out of 38 parts warehouses and distribution centers for General Motors and Stellantis in 20 states. The strike escalation, which spared Ford, added another 5,600 workers to the work stoppage for a total of 18,300 — about 12 percent of the union’s autoworker members.

Biden’s Michigan visit — which labor experts say is probably the first time a sitting president has visited a strike in at least 100 years — will come a day before his expected rival in the 2024 presidential race, former president Donald Trump, plans to deliver his own speech to hundreds of union members in Michigan.

“President Biden is doing what he has always done, which is to stand with American workers,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. Defending the president’s decision to visit, Buttigieg added that a strong deal would be a “win-win” for both parties: “Record profits should lead to record pay and record benefits for the workers.”

On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) also applauded Biden’s trip as a “historic event” warranted by the “crisis of inequality in our economy.”

Asked about UAW leadership’s decision to withhold an endorsement of Biden for now, Ocasio-Cortez said “it needs to be earned,” adding, “President Biden is working toward that, especially when he lands in Michigan on Tuesday to earn that.”

ny times logoNew York Times, Smithsonian’s Planned Latino Museum Is Embroiled in Partisan Battles, Jennifer Schuessler, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). Disputes over America’s past, and divisions among Latinos, are affecting the new National Mall institution before a brick is laid.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino, slated to rise on the National Mall in Washington, is meant to give a prominent presence to the story of America’s largest minority group. But the institution has already been caught up in the broader partisan battles over American history, before a single brick has been laid.

In July, a group of Latino Republican congressmen led a vote to eliminate the museum’s funding in next year’s budget, calling its view of Latinos insulting and inaccurate. Some conservative commentators have harshly criticized the museum’s preview exhibition, blasting it as a Marxist portrayal that paints Latinos as victims of an oppressive United States.

Then earlier this month, questions about the museum’s direction surged anew when Time magazine reported that the museum’s director had quietly halted work on a planned second exhibition, about the Latino civil rights movement of the 1960s. It is being replaced with a show about salsa music, a swap some involved with the museum say smacks of politics.

The director, Jorge Zamanillo, said that decision was not driven by politics.

“I realized I wanted to go in a different direction,” he said, noting that work on the civil rights show began before he arrived at the museum in May 2022. He prefers shows, he said, with “a bigger reach.” The dispute over the still-unbuilt museum echoes the broader debate about the political identity of Latinos, a group growing in size and power that still mostly votes Democratic but has shifted toward Republican candidates in recent elections. And the community is anything but monolithic, raising the question of whether it’s possible to talk about “the” American Latino at all.

“There are strong historic divisions, political and otherwise, that divide Latinos,” said Albert Camarillo, a retired historian at Stanford University who is not involved with the museum.

Controversy over the museum, Mr. Camarillo said, was inevitable. “But I think the political environment and the ‘anti-woke’ sentiment of late has provoked it beyond what any of us could have predicted,” he said.

  • New York Times, Jimmy Carter’s Final Chapter: Peanut Butter Ice Cream and His 99th Birthday, Sept. 24, 2023.

World Crisis Radio, Weekly Strategic Overview and Reform Agenda: Campaign by corrupt Wall Street media to foment Democratic defeatism webster tarpley 2007refuted by election returns! Webster G. Tarpley, right, historian and commentator, Sept. 23-24, 2023. Surveys of scores of 2023 state-level special elections show Democrats overperforming recent results by 8% to 10%; Tired demagogy of inflation and Biden’s age falls flat with voters: UNH-CNN poll shows Biden leading Trump 52% to 40% in New Hampshire, with 94% of Democrats committed to voting for Biden;

Garland’s duty is to defend US government against going fascist assault, not to curate his own inflated reputation for rectitude; Indictment of Hunter Biden reeks of dirty politics of both-sidesism Garland could stop if he wanted to;

Biden pledges vital ATACM missiles and $325 million to Zelensky; White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients must now assure rapid delivery; Ukraine hits Russian naval HQ for Crimea in Sevastopol; Is Russia on verge of a new warlord era?

After demanding end of US Constitution and pledging to have DoJ arrest opponents, Trump orders House MAGAts to paralyze government and stop his prosecution by Feds; reactionary anarchists rush to obey; Qevin sabotages support for Kyiv, but Ukrainian APCs are now operating south of Surovikhin line; Putin continues to bet everything on Trump’s return to power;

vivek ramaswamy linked inRamaswampy, left, demands scrapping of XIV Amendment, fruit of Union sacrifice in Civil War; Haley and Scott spearhead GOP scab attack on striking UAW; Don’t be a chump for Trump, no matter what he promises;

Musk probed by Senate committees over taxes and his Starlink sabotage of Ukraine’s defense measures in occupied Crimea; The erratic billionaire says he wants a modern American version of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the bloody-handed leader of the oligarchical party in the late Roman Republic c. 80 BC, who started and won a civil war, becoming the gravedigger of the republic; What are we to make of this strange remark?

 

US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, right, and his wife Nadine Arslanian, pose for a photo on Capitol Hill in Washington, December 20, 2022. (Associated Press file photo by Susan Walsh).

US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, right, and his wife Nadine Arslanian, pose for a photo on Capitol Hill in Washington, December 20, 2022. (Associated Press file photo by Susan Walsh).

ny times logoNew York Times, Senator Robert Menendez Is Indicted With His Wife and 3 Others, Benjamin Weiser, Tracey Tully and William K. Rashbaum, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). The indictment said the the New Jersey senator and his wife accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of robert menendez obribes, including cash and gold bars.

Robert Menendez of New Jersey, right, the powerful Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was charged on Friday with taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes — including gold bars — to wield influence abroad and at home, aiding the government of Egypt and businessmen in New Jersey.

democratic donkey logoThe three-count federal indictment, which also charges the senator’s wife and three New Jersey businessmen, accuses him of using his official position in a wide range of corrupt schemes. In one, he sought to secretly provide Egypt with sensitive U.S. government information, prosecutors said. In two others, he aimed to influence criminal investigations of two New Jersey businessmen, one of whom was a longtime fund-raiser for Mr. Menendez.

Toward that end, the senator recommended that President Biden nominate a lawyer, Philip R. Sellinger, to be U.S. attorney for New Jersey because Mr. Menendez believed he could influence Mr. Sellinger’s prosecution of the fund-raiser, the indictment said. Mr. Sellinger, who was ultimately confirmed for the post, was not accused of any wrongdoing.

senate democrats logoIn another scheme, Mr. Menendez used his position to try to disrupt an investigation and prosecution by the New Jersey State attorney general’s office, according to the indictment.

In exchange for all those actions, the indictment said, the senator and his wife, Nadine Menendez, accepted cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, a luxury vehicle and other valuable things.

“Constituent service is part of any legislator’s job — Senator Menendez is no different,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a news conference announcing the charges. He said that Mr. Menendez’s Senate website explicitly states the kinds of services he would not provide because they are be improper.

“Behind the scenes, Senator Menendez was doing those things for certain people — the people who were bribing him and his wife,” he said.

Damian Williams, US attorney for the Southern District of New York, talks about a display of photos of evidence in an indictment against Democratic Senator Bob Menendez during a news conference, September 22, 2023, in New York (Associated Press photo by Robert Bumsted).

Damian Williams, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, talks about a display of photos of evidence in an indictment against Democratic Senator Bob Menendez during a news conference, September 22, 2023, in New York (Associated Press photo by Robert Bumsted).

Soon after the news conference, Mr. Menendez issued a page-long denial, blaming the charges on “forces behind the scenes” that have “repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave.”

He said he was confident that this matter would be “successfully resolved once all of the facts are presented and my fellow New Jerseyans will see this for what it is.”

“The excesses of these prosecutors is apparent,” he added. “They have misrepresented the normal work of a Congressional office. On top of that, not content with making false claims against me, they have attacked my wife for the longstanding friendships she had before she and I even met.”

National Legal and Policy Center, Commentary: This Time, Jared Kushner Can’t Save Robert Menendez, Peter Flaherty (NLPC co-founder), Sept. 23, 2023. This Time, Jared Kushner Can’t Save Robert Menendez.

If Senator Robert Menendez is successfully prosecuted by a Democratic Justice Department, it will be an ironic twist for Menendez, whose career likely would have ended in 2017 had Jared Kushner not been the president’s son-in-law.

jared kushner head shotKushner, left, and his family are longtime donors to New Jersey Democrats, including Menendez, who was tried on bribery and related charges in 2017, along with his co-defendant and biggest campaign donor, Dr. Salomon Melgen. Menendez was represented by Abbe Lowell, who was also Kushner’s lawyer. (Lowell now represents Hunter Biden.)

The 2017 trial resulted in a mistrial because of a hung jury. Under circumstances that have yet to be explained, the Justice Department chose not to retry the duo.

Justice Department log circularAmong the allegations, the prosecution accused Menendez of pressuring U.S. officials to get the Dominican Republic government to honor a long-dormant port security deal with a company owned by Melgen.

The port security deal was uncovered by NLPC, and was the subject of a front-page New York Times story on February 1, 2013. NLPC provided information to the Times on an exclusive basis, apparently prompting, or at least expanding, the federal criminal investigation.

Aside from the Justice Department decision not to seek a retrial, the biggest mystery of the bribery prosecution was that Justice Department never flipped Melgen to testify against Menendez. The Doctor seemed to be a prime candidate to become a prosecution witness, already facing significant prison time for Medicare fraud.

Could it be that Melgen was told that if he served a couple years in prison, saving Menendez, that political efforts could be exerted later to free him? President Trump’s subsequent commutation of the balance of Melgen’s 17-year sentence during his last days in office confirmed to me that this is exactly what happened.

Melgen may have been the least deserving candidate for presidential clemency in history, and that is saying a lot when the competition is the likes of Marc Rich, pardoned by President Clinton in 2001.

More irony is in the fact that Menendez’ wife Nadine was also indicted. Their marriage in 2020 was cited as evidence that Menendez was cleaning up his personal life after allegations (to which NLPC was not a party) involving underage girls in the Dominican Republic. According to the Justice Department media release:

In June 2022, the FBI executed a search warrant at the New Jersey home of MENENDEZ and NADINE MENENDEZ. During that search, the FBI found many of the fruits of this bribery scheme, including cash, gold, the luxury convertible, and home furnishings. Over $480,000 in cash — much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe — was discovered in the home, as well as over $70,000 in cash in NADINE MENENDEZ’s safe deposit box, which was also searched pursuant to a separate search warrant.

Menendez has engaged in transactional politics his entire career, which should have been over long ago.

ny times logoNew York Times, Egypt found a key ally in Senator Robert Menendez when it came to obtaining billions in U.S. aid, Vivian Yee and Karoun Demirjian, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.).

washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: Democrats need to shove Menendez off the stage, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 22, 2023. In a statement that, frankly, jennifer rubin new headshotsounded Trumpian in its grievance and grandiosity, Menendez lashed out at prosecutors and shamefully played the discrimination card. (“Those behind this campaign simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a U.S. Senator and serve with honor and distinction.”) His outrageous accusation ignores five other Latino Americans in the Senate.

The Democratic senator’s indictment refutes the GOP’s enraged allegations — on full display Wednesday in House Republicans’ interrogation of Attorney General Merrick Garland over the indictment of Hunter Biden — that the Justice Department has been “weaponized” against Republicans.

Yet this is a moment of choosing for Democrats. Unlike their GOP counterparts, they should not feel compelled to cover their eyes and ears when one of their own appears to be caught red-handed.

 washington post logoWashington Post, N.J. governor calls on Menendez to resign from Senate after indictment, Marisa Iati and Isaac Stanley-Becker, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D), shown in an official photo, and two veteran New Jersey members of Congress on Friday called on Sen. Robert phil murphy o smile CustomMenendez (N.J.), a fellow Democrat, to resign after the senator was indicted on federal bribery charges, saying the “deeply disturbing” allegations “implicate national security.”

Menendez, an influential Democrat who has served in the Senate since 2006, already stepped down Friday — at least temporarily — as chair of the chamber’s Foreign Relations Committee, as the Senate Democratic Caucus’s rules require.

The call for Menendez to abdicate his seat was echoed by state Democratic Party Chairman LeRoy Jones Jr., who said urging the senator to step aside was a “tough decision.”

washington post logoWashington Post, Gen. Mark Milley, polarizing Joint Chiefs chairman, exits center stage, Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan and Karen DeYoung, mark milley army chief of staffSept. 24, 2023. Admirers say he helped save American democracy. Critics contend he dragged the military deeper into the toxic political fray.

As the war in Ukraine approached its first anniversary, the Pentagon’s top officer, Gen. Mark A. Milley, assessed the carnage that had followed Russia’s full-scale invasion: With more than than 100,000 soldiers likely killed or wounded on each side, he said, there was a “window of opportunity” for the combatants to hammer out a deal.

The declaration was classic Milley, according to colleagues and observers who have worked closely with him. The general, immersed in military history and alarmed by the potential for escalation with Russia, the largest nuclear power in the world, was publicly advocating a position the Biden administration had eschewed as the president and other top advisers sought to project unqualified support for Ukraine’s defense. It was a notion that unnerved America’s partners in Kyiv.

Milley, whose four-year tenure as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ends with his retirement this month, will exit center stage as one of the most consequential and polarizing military chiefs in recent memory, leading America’s armed forces through a fraught period that included the precarious final months of Donald Trump’s presidency, a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Washington’s high-stakes standoff with Moscow.

Admirers commend the brash Boston-area native for steering the military through Trump’s attempts to subvert democracy and the constitutional rule of law, keeping troops out of the 2020 election chaos and choreographing key aspects of the Pentagon’s support to Ukraine. Milley would say later he harbored concern that Trump might issue unlawful orders, and that, if he had, they “wouldn’t have been followed.”

Critics say the general stretched the bounds of what is expected to be a nonpartisan role, wading into hot-button debates again and again, and dragging the military farther into the political fray at a time when the institution’s public backing is already under strain. Some found him overly focused on his own legacy.

washington post logoWashington Post, After Florida restricts Black history, churches step up to teach it, Brittany Shammas, Sept. 24, 2023. More than 260 houses of worship have signed onto the effort. “We don’t want to whitewash anything,” one organizer says. “We want to tell the truth.”

washington post logoWashington Post, NASA capsule carrying pieces of an asteroid lands in Utah. Scientists will use them to study origins of life, Joel Achenbach, Sept. 24, 2023. A NASA spacecraft flung the capsule onto a bombing range, delivering safely to Earth a sample of the potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft flung a capsule the size of a car tire onto a bombing range in Utah on Sunday, delivering safely to Earth a sample of the intriguing and potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu.

The capsule, released four hours earlier by the spacecraft, parachuted onto the muddy Utah Test and Training Range. Recovery teams in four helicopters raced to the landing site in a carefully rehearsed effort designed to bag the capsule quickly to lower the risk of contamination and then spirit it to a hangar on a military base. It will be flown Monday to the NASA Johnson Space Center in Texas for future scientific study.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is about to fling asteroid sample to Earth

Mission managers, pleased with the trajectory of the spacecraft, voted early Sunday morning to proceed with releasing the capsule, which spent four hours nearing Earth before plunging into the atmosphere. The parent spacecraft then fired thrusters to ensure that it would not wind up in Utah, but would instead move on to another target, the asteroid Apophis, with a scheduled encounter in 2029.

washington post logoWashington Post, Editorial: The United States can prevent millions from starving in 2023, Editorial Board, Sept. 24, 2023. The children’s names rarely make the news. They are the millions of kids in Somalia, Libya, Mali, Haiti, Afghanistan, Yemen and other poor nations who don’t have enough to eat.

They were born into families that make less than $2.15 per person a day. Their plight has worsened as food prices around the world have soared because of global inflation, natural disasters and war, especially Russia’s unjust invasion of Ukraine, in which Russian President Vladimir Putin has attempted to block one of the world’s critical grain supplies from reaching many of the neediest nations.

The United States last year rallied other countries and wealthy families to ensure 160 million of the world’s neediest had enough to eat. The job needs doing again.

What sets the United States apart as a global leader is more than military might; it’s how this nation steps up in moments of global crisis, including times of hunger and famine. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this month, “The United States is the largest donor in the world to the U.N. World Food Program. We provide about 50 percent of its annual budget. Russia and China? Less than 1 percent each.”

This year brings another moment of crisis. Food prices remain high, Russia continues to thwart Ukrainian grain shipments, and a spate of earthquakes and severe floods have caused more nations than usual to request emergency assistance. Roughly 345 million people are in dire need of food aid, according to the U.N. World Food Program. That is virtually the same as the record set last year, yet funding has been slashed. There is no other way to say it: Millions will go hungry if the U.N. World Food Program does not get more funding. Its total budget for 2023 is $5 billion, the lowest since 2015 and less than half of the $14 billion the agency had last year as donors have become fatigued.

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washington post logoWashington Post, Deep Reads: ‘What does next look like?’ Gisele Fetterman is still finding out, Ruby Cramer, Photos by Demetrius Freeman, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). Half a year after Sen. John Fetterman’s mental health crisis, his wife navigates between worry and acceptance. The future senator is shown above in a file photo.

How many times had her husband taken this trip to Washington? More than a dozen by now. At first, during the campaign of 2022, a U.S. Senate seat had meant something different to the family, a chance to lead on gun violence, abortion, immigration. Then came the stroke, the auditory processing disorder, the depression that became severe depression. Then came the hospitalization, Building 10, Room 768, of the Walter Reed neuropsychology unit. Then an end date to inpatient treatment and a prognosis: “remission,” the doctors had said, though nothing had ended, really. The center of the Fetterman family, the thing their lives revolved around daily, was now mental health.

Second Lady Gisele Fetterman speaking with the press outside of the York County YMCA. Governor Tom Wolf, Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, Second Lady Gisele Fetterman and Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine visited the York County YMCA to announce the findings of the Wolf Administration’s COVID-19 Response Task Force for Health Disparity. The task force, created in April to investigate issues with how the pandemic is affecting the state’s minority and vulnerable populations, has compiled recommendations for steps the commonwealth can take to reduce health disparities and work to dismantle systemic racism. August 13, 2020 - York Pennsylvania“How are you?” people ask Gisele Fetterman, shown at right in a file photo, if they aren’t asking about John. They tell her how strong she is. They tell her how sorry they are. They say they can’t thank her enough. Some send messages mocking her husband’s speech, or to say he should resign.

But in a time when more Americans are being diagnosed with depression than ever before, there are people looking around for families like their own, and here are the Fettermans, in view and within reach. All day, more messages arrive — in emails, in tweets, on Instagram. People want to tell her about their own depression, about loved ones with schizophrenia and thoughts of suicide. A man wants her to know about the son he lost a year ago. Another about the brother he lost three weeks ago. A woman texts her to say she’s checking herself into the hospital right now. They tell her they are scared and worried — and they wonder if maybe Gisele is scared and worried, too.

washington post logoWashington Post, Dallas mayor switches to GOP, making city the largest led by a Republican, Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, Sept. 22, 2023. The mayor of Dallas is switching parties after serving in public office for years as a Democrat, making the north Texas city the country’s largest led by a Republican.

Eric Johnson, a former Democratic Texas state lawmaker, wrote in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on Friday that he was switching parties because “too many Democrats insist on virtue signaling,” and argued that Democratic policies have not sufficiently addressed crime and homelessness.

“Next spring, I will be voting in the Republican primary,” Johnson wrote in a piece with the headline “America’s cities need Republicans, and I’m becoming one.”

Johnson was elected to the nonpartisan office — meaning candidates don’t run as Democrats or Republicans — in 2019 and reelected in May, but said he will leave the position in 2027 as a member of the GOP.

“American cities need Republicans — and Republicans need American cities,” Johnson wrote.

He went on to say that he was switching because American cities are “in disarray,” as local Democratic leaders haven’t, in his view, made public safety a priority. He also claimed Democrats spent tax dollars in a way that made homelessness worse while “finding new ways to thumb their noses at Republicans,” rather than focusing on solving problems.

Johnson called for other mayors to stand up for law and order while reducing taxes.

Republicans across the country have in recent years attacked Democrats over public safety, even with the rise of tougher-on-crime Democrats who have vowed to address violence and fund police.

Some local Democratic leaders were not surprised by the move, saying the mayor had governed more toward the center than they felt Dallas voters wanted. Johnson recently voted against the city’s nearly $5 billion budget passed by the city council, citing insufficient cuts of the property tax rate, and has supported anti-crime initiatives.

“He’s proven to be what we thought he was,” Kardal Coleman, chair of the Dallas County Democratic Party, told The Washington Post. “It’s an insult to the voters in the city of Dallas, who were sold on a bait and switch. Mayor Johnson is abandoning his values and, unfortunately, the people and voters of Dallas.”

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Republican Threats To Shut U.S. Government

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washington post logoWashington Post, House Republicans eye long-term funding without deal yet to avert shutdown, Marianna Sotomayor and Leigh Ann Caldwell, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). House Republicans on Friday continued work on a plan that would move several long-term spending bills through the chamber next week, fulfilling a long-standing request by hard-right lawmakers with no guarantee it will break loose the necessary support for a short-term funding solution to avoid a government shutdown.

kevin mccarthyAfter a handful of House Republicans blocked their party from considering funding bills twice this week, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), right, continued to insist that his conference will find a solution to fund the government without relying on Democratic support.

“I believe we have a majority here and we can work together to solve this,” McCarthy told reporters Friday, roughly one week before the government will shut down if a deal isn’t reached. “It might take us a little longer.”

McCarthy’s latest proposal is for lawmakers returning Tuesday to begin the process of considering and amending bills that would fund four government departments for all of fiscal 2024. However, it remains unclear if Republicans have enough support to overcome a procedural vote to even start debate on these bills, which is the same hurdle that five Republicans blocked twice this week.

Leaders hope that by amending the Defense and Homeland Security Department bills on the floor, they can appease certain objectors with policy concerns. Most notably, McCarthy said the House would remove any funding for Ukraine from existing legislation and put it up as a separate vote, a singular concession to earn the support of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).

In a video posted Friday on X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter, Greene said she was mad at leadership because she has consistently said she would not support spending any money on Ukraine, only to be finally taken seriously after she voted against starting debate on the Defense Department bill Thursday.

The changes could be made if Republicans don’t block the procedural vote set for Tuesday. Rep. Marcus J. Molinaro (R-N.Y.), a moderate who has been involved in ongoing negotiations, suggested that there will be enough support to start debate on four appropriation bills if assurances could be made about the process, including the amendments process.

But just focusing on passing full-year appropriation bills next week does nothing to avert a shutdown by Sept. 30, when the current fiscal year funding runs out. While McCarthy and several other lawmakers have said they hope to find a compromise among Republicans to pass a short-term deal that averts a shutdown, two proposed pathways to do so were rejected this week by more than four Republicans, who say they will never vote for any stopgap bill.

washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: In a leaderless House, the ‘clowns’ stumble toward a shutdown, Dana Milbank, right, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). Martin Luther dana milbank newestnailed his theses to a church door. Matt Gaetz displayed his in the men’s room.

Specifically, the congressman (or somebody) left a draft of his “Motion to Vacate” on a baby changing table in a restroom downstairs from the House chamber, where it was found by journalist Matt Laslo. “H. Res. __,” it began. “Resolved, that the Office of Speaker of the House of Representatives is hereby declared to be vacant.”

But Gaetz (R-Fla.) doesn’t need a resolution to “vacate the chair,” as a motion to remove Kevin McCarthy as speaker is called. For all practical purposes, the chair is already vacant.

It should have been obvious to all this week, if it wasn’t already, that McCarthy (R-Calif.) is speaker in name only, as his leaderless Republican caucus stumbles toward a government shutdown. Review some of the labels House Republicans hurled at each other over the last few days:

“Clown show.” “Clowns.” “Foolishness.” “Weak.” “Terribly misguided.” “Selective amnesia.” “Stupidity.” “Failure to lead.” “Lunatics.” “Disgraceful.” “New low.” “Enabling Chairman Xi.” “People that have serious issues.” “Pathetic.”

washington post logoWashington Post, Prospect of government shutdown poses a new threat to U.S. economy, Abha Bhattarai, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). Economists say a shutdown, along with other disruptions — the ongoing autoworkers’ strike, rising borrowing costs and a drop-off in child-care funding — is likely to strain family budgets.

The looming federal shutdown poses a new threat to American households, whose budgets are already facing pressure from higher gas prices, imminent student loan payments and depleting pandemic savings.

Although any of those shocks on their own wouldn’t be enough to sink the economy, economists say a pileup of disruptions — including the ongoing autoworkers’ strike, rising borrowing costs and a drop-off in child-care funding — is likely to strain family budgets at a time when things are already slowing. Economists now expect growth to dip considerably in last three months of the year, as a confluence of challenges chip away at household and business spending.

“We’re approaching a period of uncertainty just at a time when it seemed like the economy was improving,” said Megan Way, an economics professor at Babson College in Massachusetts. “Between the almost inevitable government shutdown, [autoworkers’] strike and student loan repayments, there is so much uncertainty out there, which means consumers are going to be hesitant to spend.”

U.S. braces for costly government shutdown in days

Economic growth has defied expectations so far this year, with Americans shelling out for cars, international vacations and pricey concerts all summer long. That spending, which makes up two-thirds of the U.S. economy, has helped propel growth and keep the country out a much-anticipated recession. But experts, including the head of the Federal Reserve, have cited concerns about the latest wave of uncertainties, which could cause consumers to start pulling back even if the job market remains strong.

washington post logoWashington Post, Youngkin downplays shutdown threat, which hits just as Va. voting begins, Gregory S. Schneider, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) said Thursday that Virginians are “really suffering” at the prospect of a federal government shutdown but counseled patience as his fellow Republicans try to work out their differences in Congress, though earlier this week he blamed the situation on President Biden.

republican elephant logoA government shutdown would hit especially hard in Virginia, which has more than 140,000 federal civilian employees — trailing only California among states — as well as large military bases. With the current federal budget running out at the end of September, a shutdown seems increasingly probable as a few hard-right Republicans in the House of Representatives prevent GOP leadership from producing a spending plan.

A major shutdown in 2013 was also blamed on Republicans and widely said to have cost the GOP in Virginia elections that year, with Democrat Terry McAuliffe narrowly defeating Republican Ken Cuccinelli for governor. This year, the potential shutdown looms as Virginians begin early voting on Friday for Nov. 7 elections in which all 140 seats in the General Assembly are on the ballot. Youngkin is pulling out all the stops to try to gain Republican control of the legislature, which is currently split, with a GOP-run House and Democratic-controlled Senate.

Politico, McCarthy stares into the shutdown abyss, Sarah Ferris, Olivia Beavers and Jordain Carney, Sept. 23, 2023. The speaker has only one clear exit route away from a government closure: working with Democrats. It’s a path he still refuses to take.

politico CustomSpeaker Kevin McCarthy has only one way out of next week’s impending government shutdown: working with Democrats. It’s an exit he’s still refusing to take.

kevin mccarthyDuring the most tumultuous stretch of his speakership so far, McCarthy, right, hasn’t phoned a single member of the opposing party about a way to keep the lights on.

Instead, the speaker and his team will scramble this weekend to slash their own party’s spending bills in an effort to placate a handful of hard-liners who are threatening to eject him. Votes on some of those revised bills are now expected on Tuesday, four days before the Sept. 30 shutdown deadline. But even if they pass, that will move Congress no closer to a solution.

U.S. House logoMcCarthy’s central strategy remains the same; he wants to deliver a GOP opening bid to the Democratic Senate, while holding back a rebellion by his right flank — enough to hang on to his speakership after Democrats, by necessity, enter the talks. After his first two attempts at a short-term spending patch fell short, McCarthy is now trying to take up doomed full-year bills.

Some of McCarthy’s own allies fear that effort could prove futile as a shutdown fast approaches. These House Republicans worry that the Californian’s third attempt at a workable strategy, bringing spending measures to the floor next week, might also fail to get the votes they need and further humiliate the party.

“This is not checkers. This is chess. You got to understand that this next move by the House is not going to be the final answer,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) said. “Eventually, the Senate will weigh in … and it’s not going to be to our liking, and probably going to be pushed into our face and say: ‘Take it or leave it.’ And then the speaker will have a very difficult decision.”

The situation is getting worse still for McCarthy as he starts running out of room from his Senate allies. A group of conservatives across the Capitol, after days of deferring to the speaker, now want to see a vote on legislation that would automatically impose stopgap spending patches to permanently prevent shutdowns.

The House GOP is taking the opposite tack by resurrecting partisan spending bills that won’t do anything to prevent millions of U.S. workers — including the military and border patrol agents — from soon working without pay. At the same time, leadership is still trying to corral Republicans, so far unsuccessfully, behind passing a short-term conservative spending bill before Oct. 1.

But McCarthy allies also acknowledge the political reality could shift. Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) said questions about whether a bipartisan bill could pass in the final 48 hours before a shutdown weren’t yet “timely.”

Yet McCarthy knows he needs to ultimately strike a spending deal with the White House to avoid a government closure. He also knows, given how little political capital he has to spare, that decision could doom his gavel.

Hard-liners like Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) and other loud critics have made it obvious they won’t help dig the speaker out of the spending crisis, and they’re also most likely to trigger the first vote of no-confidence against a party leader in 113 years.

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) — who cautioned it was too soon to have a speakership discussion — warned that if Republicans worked with Democrats on funding the government “they are switching teams … They are going over to the Democratic side.”

“I understand their concerns. But, look, we are the Republican Party,” Norman added, predicting a shutdown.

Asked about the prospect of Democrats working with Republicans to keep the government open, hard-liner Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) said: “I remain concerned that any member of the Republican Conference would threaten to hijack or take hostage the Republican Conference.”

The stakes are high for House Republicans, who have barely nine months of power under their belts. They’re also 13 months away from an election in which the fate of their threadbare majority will rest on 18 incumbents sitting in turf friendly to President Joe Biden — where, unlike in deep-red districts, compromise to end a crisis is actually popular.

washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: Enough is enough. McCarthy must bring the GOP rebels to heel, Henry Olsen, right, Sept. 23, 2023. Ultra-MAGA henry olsenobstructionists once again humiliated House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) this week, defeating a rule to move the defense appropriations bill forward. The GOP defectors are surely chortling over their ability to control the chamber, albeit to no apparent end.

republican elephant logoEnough is enough. McCarthy has not used the full power of his office to bring the nihilist rebels to heel, nor has he tried to marshal his colleagues’ anger and frustration at these recalcitrant children. He should move to change House Republican rules to hit them where it hurts: their reelection prospects.

Current rules prevent McCarthy from doing that.

But this is no ordinary moment for the party. Time and again, the same group of malcontents have refused to demonstrate a shred of party loyalty. They demand things that cannot obtain the assent of their colleagues, much less Congress as a whole. They laugh in the face of their supposed friends by voting against what almost everyone in the party has agreed upon.

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More On 2024 Presidential Race

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ny times logoNew York Times, Investigation: Inside the Unfounded Claim That DeSantis Abused Guantánamo Detainees, Matthew Rosenberg and Carol Rosenberg, Sept. 24, 2023. A former prisoner’s story of mistreatment at the hands of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, made headlines. But The Times found no evidence to back it up.

Nearly a year ago, as Ron DeSantis’s political stock was rising, a former Guantánamo Bay detainee came forward with a stunning claim: Before he was Florida’s governor, as a young Navy lawyer, Mr. DeSantis had taken part in a forced feeding of a hunger striker at the notorious American prison, and laughed as he did so.

The detainee, Mansoor Adayfi, said he was tied to a chair, crying and screaming as tubes were shoved down his throat and cases of the dietary supplement Ensure were pumped into his stomach.

As the ordeal drew to an end, Mr. Adayfi added, he was approached by Mr. DeSantis and, “he said, ‘You should eat.’ I threw up in his face. Literally on his face.”

Mr. Adayfi told his story on a left-wing podcast, then in Harper’s Magazine and then again in mainstream media reports. He found other former detainees who also claimed to remember Mr. DeSantis and his cruelty. The accounts traveled quickly through the liberal media ecosystem, landing in Democratic opposition research and coalescing into a narrative that portrayed the Republican presidential candidate as an accessory to torture.

Yet, an examination of military records and interviews with detainees’ lawyers and service members who served at the same time as Mr. DeSantis found no evidence to back up the claims. The New York Times interviewed more than 40 people who served with Mr. DeSantis or around the same time and none recalled witnessing or even hearing of any episodes like the ones Mr. Adayfi described.

Instead, nearly all of those interviewed dismissed the story as highly improbable. Mr. DeSantis was a junior officer, who visited only for short stints and was tasked with what one fellow lawyer described as “scut work.” He would have had no reason to witness, and no power to authorize, a force feeding, according to the officer who supervised Mr. DeSantis at Guantánamo. Even senior lawyers were not allowed near force feedings, according to the commandant of the prison guards at the time.

“He was just too junior and too inexperienced and too green to have had any substantial role,” said Morris D. Davis, a retired Air Force colonel, who served as chief prosecutor of Guantánamo cases the year that Mr. DeSantis visited the prison.

ny times logoNew York Times, Opinion: What Really Happened at the Biden-Netanyahu Meeting, Thomas L. Friedman, right, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). In tom friedman twitterrecent weeks there has been a lot of discussion about Joe Biden’s age. He’s old.

But you know what comes with age besides a slower gait and forgetting words? Wisdom — in particular how to handle a high-stakes diplomatic encounter without blowing things up (or blowing things up before you want them to blow up). And that’s what I think I saw at the face-to-face meeting between Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Wednesday in New York.

A lot of Israeli reporters and people I know were left depressed by the meeting, because Netanyahu came out and told everyone how warm and friendly it was. And Biden spoke about the unbreakable bonds between America and the Jewish state. Many Israelis so detest Netanyahu that they wanted Biden to publicly rebuke him over the judicial coup that Bibi has mounted — and when that didn’t happen they thought the meeting was a huge missed opportunity.

I get it, I get it, I told them. But didn’t you see it, I asked?

See what, they responded?

While Biden was publicly putting his right arm around Netanyahu’s shoulder — precisely to defuse any attacks from Republicans for being too tough on Israel — I hear the president was, SO TO SPEAK, using his left hand to privately slip a homework assignment into Bibi’s pocket. It was like a magician at work; you’d need to find the instant replay in double slow-motion to see it.

It was a master class in how a U.S. president puts a fateful decision to an Israeli leader — one that poses to that Israeli leader the most excruciating challenge of his political career. That is: either blow up the extremist cabinet you’ve built to keep yourself out of jail — and replace it with a national unity coalition — or blow up the chance for peace with Saudi Arabia, which could pave the way for Israel’s acceptance across the whole Muslim world.

And Biden did it all by looking like what he actually is — one of Israel’s best friends ever — defusing any political blow back in America.

So, I’m not getting into the debate about whether Biden is too old to run for re-election. I’m just telling you that when it comes to diplomacy — age and experience are his greatest assets.

ny times logoNew York Times, Dana Perino of Fox News will moderate the next Republican debate and faces her biggest test as a journalist, Jeremy W. Peters, Sept. 24, 2023.  The former press secretary in the Bush White House will moderate the next Republican debate. She’s managed to rise at Fox without being a Trump supplicant.

It will be the biggest moment for Ms. Perino at Fox News since she began co-hosting “The Five” in 2011. Not known for being as provocative or partisan as many of her colleagues behind the desk, Ms. Perino, 51, has spent a good part of the last decade trying to thrive as a Bush Republican working for a network where loyalty to former President Donald J. Trump is often the ticket to high ratings and the career advancement that accompanies them.

Politico, Move over Dark Brandon, this group wants to make Joe Cool a new meme, Holly Otterbein, Sept. 24, 2023. ProgressNow is betting that improving Biden’s online presence — through memes, videos and other social media images — will help win over voters.

politico CustomA major liberal group has drawn up a multimillion dollar plan to make Joe Biden cooler online. And the initiative has the blessing of a top White House official.

The organization, ProgressNow, is launching a $70 million project to help the president and down-ballot Democrats win the war for voters’ digital attention. The idea is to create, in their own words, an “echo chamber” on the left. At its heart, it is an effort to compete with one they say already operates on all cylinders on the right.

More broadly, it represents an important test of whether Democrats can successfully market the oldest president ever to an electorate that has consistently expressed reservations about his age and wished that another person would be the party’s standard-bearer, according to polls.

The center of ProgressNow’s plan is an app that the group has developed called Megaphone. Users who download the app can scroll through a series of liberal memes, videos and graphics created by the organization, add their own captions, and then quickly share them on social media platforms.

“ProgressNow has become an important partner to the groups supporting the Biden-Harris agenda,” said Anita Dunn, a senior White House adviser and top 2020 Biden strategist who added she was providing her comment in a personal capacity. Ramping up “ensures they will be in an even stronger position to deliver compelling digital communications to people in their communities through a grassroots network that effectively complements efforts in 2024 and beyond.”

Inherent in the ProgressNow strategy is the fact that liberals have been outmaneuvered online by the conservative movement for years, something the group’s leaders readily admit — and that more than a decade after former President Barack Obama was supposed to have ushered in a new form of voter communication, the party has been uninventive under Biden.

To combat this, ProgressNow is hiring more than 65 new digital organizers across 10 battleground states to manage a band of volunteers who will be tasked with sharing the organization’s online content far and wide through Megaphone. By the fall of 2024, the group is looking to expand its grassroots army to 13,000 volunteers nationwide.

The group has already begun message-testing its efforts, revealing some unexpected details.

For example, the organization looked at a handful of social media graphics touting Biden’s handling of the economy, a critical weakness for him among voters. Staffers thought that a bright pink image that depicted a text message conversation — rather than graphics featuring photos of Biden himself — would perform better

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump’s Meet The Press interview was even more of a disaster behind the scenes, Bill Palmer, right, Sept. 24, bill palmer2023. Meet The Press host Kristen Welker went so soft on Donald Trump during their interview earlier this month, she might as well have handed him free ice cream. The fact that Trump incriminated himself during the interview, admitting that he wasn’t following his lawyers’ advice when he was committing his crimes, was merely a sign of just how mentally incompetent Trump is these days.

bill palmer report logo headerNow it turns out the Trump interview was even more of a debacle behind the scenes than we knew. Meet The Press reportedly had to lop off the first nine minutes of the pre-taped interview after Trump spent that entire time spewing crazed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

President Donald Trump officialWhen you’re interviewing someone who’s so unhinged that you have to cut out the first nine minutes of the conversation, it’s a good sign that you shouldn’t be putting that person on the air to begin with.

By interviewing Trump and then cutting out the most insane and dishonest parts, Meet The Press chose to falsely present viewers with a more sane and stable version of Trump. In that sense, Meet The Press essentially conspired with Trump to help him sell the false notion that he’s a coherent and viable candidate.

Given that Trump is currently awaiting criminal trial for fraud, it’s not much of a stretch to argue that – morally at least – Meet The Press and large chunks of the media are criminally conspiring with Trump at this point. The media’s dishonesty is becoming a crisis and we the public need to push for full scale ethical reforms within the media.

CBS Sunday Morning, Cassidy Hutchinson on fallout from her Trump testimony, Sept. 24, 2023. The former Trump loyalist and senior advisor to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said she was "disgusted" upon witnessing the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters over the lie of election fraud.

But after testifying to the January 6 Committee, Cassidy Hutchinson was forced into hiding. In her first TV interview she talks with correspondent Tracy Smith about the price of telling the truth, as detailed in her new book, "Enough."

 

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ny times logoNew York Times, Biden, Warning Trump Could ‘Destroy’ Democracy, Moves Past G.O.P. Primary, Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Months before the first Republican primaries, the president is turning his attention to his old adversary as he tries to re-energize his party’s voters and donors.

This spring, as the Republican presidential primary race was just beginning, the Democratic National Committee commissioned polling on how the leading Republicans — Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis — fared against President Biden in battleground states.

But now, as Mr. Trump’s lead in the primary has grown and hardened, the party has dropped Mr. DeSantis from such hypothetical matchups. And the Biden campaign’s polling on Republican candidates is now directed squarely at Mr. Trump, according to officials familiar with the surveys.

djt maga hatThe sharpened focus on Mr. Trump isn’t happening only behind the scenes. Facing waves of polls showing soft support for his re-election among Democrats, Mr. Biden and his advisers signaled this week that they were beginning to turn their full attention to his old rival, seeking to re-energize the party’s base and activate donors ahead of what is expected to be a long and grueling sequel.

On Sunday, after Mr. Trump sought to muddy the waters on his position on abortion, the Biden operation and its surrogates pushed back with uncommon intensity. On Monday, Mr. Biden told donors at a New York fund-raiser that Mr. Trump was out to “destroy” American democracy, in some of his most forceful language so far about the implications of a second Trump term. And on Wednesday, as the president spoke to donors at a Manhattan hotel, he acknowledged in the most explicit way yet that he now expected to be running against “the same fella.”

robert f kennedy jr gage skidmore

ny times logoNew York Times, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Flirts With the Libertarian Party, Nicholas Nehamas, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). Mr. Kennedy, shown in a Gage Skidmore photo, sat down with the party’s chair in July, a previously undisclosed meeting, as Democrats fret about a third party bid.

For months, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he plans to continue his long-shot challenge against President Biden in the Democratic primary rather than dropping out to launch a third-party bid.

But lately Mr. Kennedy’s message has seemed to shift, including publicly telling a voter who asked about his plans that he was keeping his “options open.”

If Mr. Kennedy does decide to leave the party of his famous father and uncles to run in the general election, one potential landing spot may be the Libertarian Party, which at the moment lacks a widely known candidate but has excelled at securing ballot access.

In July, Mr. Kennedy met privately with Angela McArdle, the chair of the Libertarian Party, at a conference they were both attending in Memphis — a meeting that has not previously been reported.

“He emphasized that he was committed to running as a Democrat but said that he considered himself very libertarian,” Ms. McArdle said in an interview, adding that they agreed on several positions, including the threat of the “deep state” and the need for populist messaging. “We’re aligned on a lot of issues.”

“My perspective is that we are going to stay in touch in case he does decide to run,” Ms. McArdle said. “And he can contact me at any time if that’s the case.”

In a June interview with the libertarian magazine Reason, Mr. Kennedy acknowledged his ideological disagreements with the party — including on issues like environmental protection, abortion and civil rights — while also saying, “I’ve always been aligned with libertarians on most issues.”

In a general election, Democrats worry that a third-party run by Mr. Kennedy could draw votes away from Mr. Biden and help elect former President Donald J. Trump. They have expressed similar concerns about No Labels, the bipartisan group trying to recruit a moderate candidate for a third-party run, and also about the progressive scholar Cornel West, who is already in the race to lead the Green Party’s ticket for 2024.

Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, has been helping coordinate Democratic efforts to stop the No Labels effort. He said the hope in the party has been that Mr. Kennedy would “go away” after losing primaries to Mr. Biden.

 

djt ron desantis cnn collage

ny times logoNew York Times, Urgency Grows for DeSantis in Iowa as Trump Looks to Finish Him Off, Nicholas Nehamas, Sept. 20, 2023 (print ed.).  Despite spending far more time campaigning across the must-win state, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida still trails former President Trump by double digits.

ny times logoNew York Times, Polls Show Ron DeSantis Sliding in the Republican Primary, Maggie Astor, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). Several recent surveys, nationally and in early-voting states, undermine the governor’s argument that the primary is a two-way race between him and former President Donald J. Trump.

Ron DeSantis is shown in the foreground through a camera as he speaks on stage in the background. His image is also reflected on a screen on the right side of the frame.

Several recent polls show Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida losing ground in the Republican presidential primary, both nationally and in early-voting states.

The numbers undermine an argument pushed by Mr. DeSantis’s campaign: that the primary is effectively a two-way race in which he is the only candidate who can consolidate support against former President Donald J. Trump.

A CNN/University of New Hampshire poll released Wednesday found that in New Hampshire, home to the first Republican primary, Mr. DeSantis had lost more than half of his support since the last U.N.H. poll two months ago. He had just 10 percent in the poll — not only far behind Mr. Trump (39 percent), but roughly tied with Vivek Ramaswamy (13 percent), Nikki Haley (12 percent) and Chris Christie (11 percent).

In Iowa, which will hold the first Republican caucus in January, a Fox Business poll released Wednesday showed him at 15 percent, more than 30 points behind Mr. Trump and not far from third place, with Ms. Haley at 11 percent. Unlike the New Hampshire poll, the Fox poll didn’t show Mr. DeSantis actively shedding support — he was down only one point compared with the outlet’s July survey, which is not significant. But it showed no progress for him as the time he has to make gains grows shorter.

The picture was similar in South Carolina, where another Fox Business poll found him at 10 percent, significantly behind not only Mr. Trump, who was at 46 percent, but also Ms. Haley, the state’s former governor, at 18 percent. In July, he had been roughly tied with Ms. Haley.

And nationally, a Quinnipiac University poll released last week showed Mr. DeSantis at 12 percent — a full 50 points behind Mr. Trump and six points below where he was in August.

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djt looking up

 

Ukraine-Russian War, Russian Leadership

 

President Biden met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office on Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023 (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

President Biden met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office on Thursday (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

ny times logoNew York Times, Russia-Ukraine War: Zelensky Thanks Americans in Emotional Speech to End Washington Visit, Karoun Demirjian and Ben Shpigel, Updated Sept. 22, 2023. “There is not a soul in Ukraine that does not feel gratitude to you, America,” the Ukrainian president said after a long day of lobbying Congress for more aid and a meeting with President Biden.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine finished a long day of lobbying in Washington at the White House, where he met Thursday with President Biden after receiving a $325 million air-defense package, but appeared to have made little immediate progress in persuading House leadership to approve another $24 billion in military and humanitarian aid.

ukraine flagMr. Zelensky, accompanied by his wife, Olena Zelenska, capped off his visit with an emotional speech at the National Archive on Thursday evening, during which he and his wife thanked Americans for their support.

Zelensky is working hard to highlight the values that bind the American and Ukrainian people, stressing a shared love of freedom. He says U.S. aid has saved millions of lives in Ukraine by keeping most of the country out of Russian hands.

Politico, Ukraine claims senior Russian navy officers killed, injured in Crimea missile strike, Carlo Martuscelli, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). A Ukrainian politico Custommissile attack on the Russian navy’s Black Sea fleet headquarters on Friday killed and injured “dozens” of Russian troops, including a number of senior officials, Ukraine’s armed forces claimed on Saturday.

The claim, which couldn’t be verified, came as another rocket attack was launched on the Crimean city of Sevastopol, where the fleet is based, on Saturday. The Russia-installed governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said on Telegram that debris from intercepted missiles fell near a pier during the latest assault.

Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces said on Telegram that more details of Friday’s missile attack would be communicated “when possible.”

Ukraine’s intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov told U.S. broadcaster Voice of America that at least nine people were killed and another 16 were injured in Friday’s attack.

According to Budanov, Russian Colonel-General Alexander Romanchuk was in “very serious condition,” while chief of staff Lieutenant General Oleg Tsekov was unconscious, Voice of America reported. Budanov didn’t, however, confirm reports that the Black Sea Admiral Viktor Sokolov had been killed in the attack, the broadcaster said. The claims could not be verified.

Crimea, which extends into the Black Sea, was occupied illegally by Russia in 2014.

ny times logoNew York Times, Europe Pledged Ammunition for Ukraine. Providing It Is Another Challenge, Lara Jakes, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). After 30 years of atrophy, experts say, Europe’s shrunken defense industry will struggle to provide the Ukrainians with a million artillery shells by next March.

The pledge last March sounded as catchy as it was ambitious: European Union states would deliver a million rounds of 155-millimeter ammunition to Ukraine within a year.

Now, at a critical moment in the war and with Ukraine running short of artillery shells to drive its counteroffensive, experts, weapons manufacturers and even some government officials are expressing growing doubts. Europe’s shrunken military sector, they say, may simply be unable to ramp up production fast enough to achieve the million-shell goal.

Since March, governments across Europe have become more aggressive about assessing — and replenishing — ammunition needs, not just for Ukraine, but also for their own military stockpiles.

Manufacturers are building 155-millimeter rounds even before being fully paid. And European Union officials have fast-tracked at least eight contracts with producers on the continent to supply and reimburse states that jointly procure artillery ammunition instead of competing for it.

ny times logoNew York Times, Ukrainian forces targeted occupied Crimea with an air attack on Saturday, the second in two days, Russia said, Constant Méheut, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). Russian-installed authorities in the occupied peninsula said debris from a downed rocket fell in the Sevastopol bay, where Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet is based.

ukraine flagUkrainian forces targeted the peninsula with another air attack on Saturday, the second in two days as Kyiv increasingly takes aim at the region in an effort to disrupt Moscow’s military operations.

Mikhail Razvozhayev, the governor of Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city and the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, said that air defenses had been activated in the area and that debris from a downed rocket fell in the bay. The local authorities issued several warnings about possible air assaults on Saturday morning, urging residents to stay calm and seek shelter.

Saturday’s attack, which was not immediately confirmed by Ukraine’s military, came a day after Ukrainian forces launched a missile strike that damaged the Black Sea Fleet’s headquarters. Russia’s Defense Ministry said that a serviceman was missing after that attack.

The back-to-back assaults on Crimea, which the Kremlin illegally annexed in 2014, are part of a Ukrainian campaign to hit deep behind Russian lines in an effort to sever Moscow’s battlefield supply chain and undermine Russia’s ability to hit Ukrainian territory from afar. In recent weeks, Ukraine has sharply accelerated the pace of strikes on the peninsula, hitting air-defense systems, a submarine and a command post.

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President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday and said Russia had weaponized essentials like food and energy (Reuters photo).

 President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday and said Russia had weaponized essentials like food and energy (Reuters photo).

 

Canada Accuses India of Sikh Leader's Assassination

 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada during a frosty meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India during the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi earlier in September 2023 (Canadian Press photo by Sean Kilpatrick via Associated Press).

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada during a frosty meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India during the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi earlier this month, in September 2023 (Canadian Press photo by Sean Kilpatrick via Associated Press).

ny times logoNew York Times, Uncertainty ‘Is Killing Us’: Sikhs in India Are in Limbo Amid Canada Dispute, Suhasini Raj, Sept. 24, 2023. Canada is home to the largest Sikh population outside India, where many people are now caught in a diplomatic firestorm over the death of a separatist.

Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh from Punjab who championed the creation of a separate state for Sikhs, was shot dead in June by hooded assailants. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government considered him a terrorist, and he was on a wanted list, but Indian officials deny accusations made last week by the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, which have caused a firestorm.

One result: The Indian government has temporarily put on hold visas to citizens of Canada, which has a large Indian diaspora. Both countries also expelled diplomats in a tit-for-tat response, and trade talks are frozen.

ny times logoNew York Times, U.S. Provided Canada With Intelligence on Killing of Sikh Leader, Julian E. Barnes and Ian Austen, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.). U.S. intelligence gave assistance, but communications intercepted by Canada were more definitive in linking India to the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

canadian flagAmerican spy agencies provided information to Ottawa after the killing of a Sikh separatist leader in the Vancouver area, but Canada developed the most definitive intelligence that led it to accuse India of orchestrating the plot, according to Western allied officials.

In the aftermath of the killing, U.S. intelligence agencies offered their Canadian counterparts context that helped Canada conclude that India had been involved. Yet what appears to be the “smoking gun,” intercepted communications of Indian diplomats in Canada indicating involvement in the plot, was gathered by Canadian officials, allied officials said.

While Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has called on India to cooperate with the Canadian investigation, American officials have largely tried to avoid triggering any diplomatic blowback from India. But the disclosure of the involvement of U.S. intelligence risks ensnaring Washington in the diplomatic battle between Canada and India at a time when it is keen to develop New Delhi as a closer hardeep singh nijjarpartner.

The United States did not learn about the plot, or evidence pointing to India’s involvement in it, until after operatives had killed the Sikh leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, right, allied officials said.

ny times logoNew York Times, India Suspends Visas for Canadians, Escalating Clash Over Sikh’s Killing, Suhasini Raj and Yan Zhuang, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). The suspension came after Canada claimed that India was involved in the assassination of a Canadian citizen who supported a separatist cause.

india flag mapIndia has suspended visa applications by Canadian nationals, a sharp escalation in the diplomatic conflict that has followed Canada’s claim that Indian agents were behind an assassination in June on Canadian soil.

Arindam Bagchi, the Indian foreign ministry spokesman, described the move as a technical and security issue, saying on Thursday that the country’s high commission and consulates in Canada were “temporarily unable” to process visas because of safety threats.

“This has disrupted their normal function,” Mr. Bagchi said during a regularly scheduled news briefing, adding: “We will be reviewing the situation on a regular basis.”

canadian flagBut the suspension came as tensions between India and Canada have soared in the days since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in Parliament that Canada’s intelligence services had information linking the Indian government to the killing of a Sikh separatist in British Columbia on June 18.

The Indian government on Tuesday forcefully rejected the claim that it had been involved in the assassination of the Sikh Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, and accused Canada of harboring terrorists who are seeking to carve a Sikh homeland out of India’s territory.

India then moved to expel a high-ranking Canadian diplomat from New Delhi. Canada had expelled an Indian diplomat — described as the head of New Delhi’s intelligence agency in Canada — the day before.

On Thursday, Mr. Bagchi signaled that more Canadian diplomats could soon leave India, in what he called a step to ensure “parity” between the two countries’ diplomatic presences.

ny times logoNew York Times, Analysis: Biden Is Caught Between Allies as Canada Accuses India of Assassination, Peter Baker, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). President Biden has prioritized bolstering partnerships over full-throated advocacy for democracy among American allies.

washington post logoWashington Post, Masked gunmen, an ambush, a chase: The execution of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, Samantha Schmidt, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). From the outset, the Sikh leader’s community in Surrey, British Columbia, believed the Indian government of Narendra Modi was behind his death.

Hardeep Singh Nijjar was in a hurry to leave the temple. It was Father’s Day, and his wife and two sons were waiting for him.

On his way out of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara, Nijjar’s Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia, he called his 21-year-old son. The family had made pizza, Balraj Singh Nijjar told his father, and had prepared the sweet pudding seviyan, his favorite dessert.

“Have dinner ready,” Nijjar told his son. “I’m coming home.”

But outside the gurdwara, three men were waiting. They had masks. They were armed.

Less than 10 minutes later, the phone at the Nijjar home rang again.

“Did you hear?” a family friend asked the son. “Something happened at the gurdwara. Your dad was shot.”

No arrests have been made in the brazen June 18 killing of Nijjar, the 45-year-old president of the temple. But from the outset, his family and friends in the local Sikh community were all but certain who was behind the brazen attack: the Indian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Nijjar was an outspoken leader of the separatist Khalistan movement, which aims to establish an independent Sikh state in the Punjab region of India. The movement is outlawed in India.

On Monday, precisely three months after Nijjar’s killing, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the House of Commons that investigators were pursuing “credible allegations” linking Nijjar’s slaying to agents of the Indian government.

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 U.S. Auto Workers Strike

ny times logoNew York Times, U.A.W. Extends Walkouts to More Plants, but Cites Progress in Ford Talks, Neal E. Boudette, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). The union designated 38 parts distribution factories as additional strike targets at G.M. and Stellantis.

uaw logoThe United Automobile Workers union on Friday significantly raised the pressure on General Motors and Stellantis, the parent of Jeep and Ram, by expanding its strike against the companies to include all the spare parts distribution centers of the two companies.

By widening the strike to the distribution centers, which supply parts to dealerships for repairs, the union is effectively taking its case to consumers, some of whom might find it difficult or impossible to have their cars and trucks fixed. The strategy could pressure the automakers to make more concessions to the union but it could backfire on the union by frustrating car owners and turning them against the U.A.W.

Shawn Fain, the union’s president, said Friday that workers at 38 distribution centers at the two companies would walk off the job. He said talks with two companies had not progressed significantly, contrasting them with Ford Motor, which he said had done more to meet the union’s demands.

Here’s what to know about the expanded strikes by autoworkers.

The president of the United Automobile Workers publicly invited President Biden to join workers on the picket lines.

 

GM Ford

 washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: The UAW might be demanding too big a slice of a soon-to-shrink pie, Catherine Rampell, right, Sept. 20, 2023 (print ed.). catherine rampellLabor leaders might be setting union expectations too high given the boom time for U.S. automakers might not last.

Rank-and-file autoworkers are absolutely overdue for a big pay hike. But the demands they’re making go far beyond that. In fact, labor and political leaders are doing workers no favors by setting expectations so sky-high that, if they actually get everything they want, they might end up putting their employers out of business — especially since those employers might already be in a more precarious position than recent profit levels suggest.

ny times logoNew York Times, U.A.W. Strike: Biden Will Join Autoworkers on the Picket Line in Michigan on Tuesday, Reid J. Epstein, Katie Rogers and Shane Goldmacher, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). President Biden’s move is one of the most significant displays of presidential support for striking workers in decades.

President Biden announced that he would travel to Michigan on Tuesday to “join the picket line” with members of the United Automobile Workers who are on strike against the nation’s leading automakers, in one of the most significant displays of presidential support for striking workers in decades.

“Tuesday, I’ll go to Michigan to join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of U.A.W. as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create,” Mr. Biden wrote on Friday on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

The trip is set to come a day before Mr. Biden’s leading rival in the 2024 campaign, Donald J. Trump, has planned his own speech in Michigan, and was announced hours after Shawn Fain, the union’s president, escalated pressure on the White House with a public invitation to Mr. Biden.

“We invite and encourage everyone who supports our cause to join us on the picket lines, from our friends and family all the way to the president of the United States,” Mr. Fain said in a Friday morning speech streamed online.

It was not immediately clear where Mr. Biden would go in Michigan. The White House had already announced plans for Mr. Biden to fly to California on Tuesday as part of a three-day trip to the West Coast. Mr. Biden made the decision on Friday, after Mr. Fain’s public invitation, according to two people familiar with the White House deliberations.

Mr. Fain on Friday announced the expansion of the U.A.W.’s work stoppage from three facilities to 38 assembly plants and distribution centers in 20 states, including six — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia — that are expected to be presidential battlegrounds in next year’s election.

Michigan, the home of the American automotive industry, is home to the bulk of the facilities and striking workers.

There is little to no precedent for a sitting president joining striking workers on a picket line.

Seth Harris, a former top labor policy adviser for Mr. Biden, said he was not aware of any president walking a picket line before.

“This president takes seriously his role as the most pro-union president in history,” Mr. Harris said. “Sometimes that means breaking precedent.”

 ny times logoNew York Times, Little Progress in Talks to End Strike Against 3 Detroit Automakers, Ivan Penn, Sept. 18, 2023 (print ed.). The U.A.W. returned to the bargaining table on Sunday after its president warned, “We’re going to amp this thing up” if the car companies don’t improve their offers. The United Auto Workers and the big three Detroit automakers largely held their ground on Sunday, seemingly no closer to reaching deals than they were when the autoworkers went on strike on Friday.

uaw logo“If we don’t get better offers and we don’t get down to taking care of the members’ needs, then we’re going to amp this thing up even more,” Shawn Fain, the president of the U.A.W., which has 150,000 members, said in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. Asked about an offer by one of the automakers, Stellantis, for a 21 percent pay increase over four years, Mr. Fain said, “It’s definitely a no-go.”

In a separate interview on MSNBC, Mr. Fain said that progress in the negotiations had been slow.

The union had talks with Ford on Saturday. It was going back to the bargaining table on Sunday with General Motors and planned talks with Stellantis — the parent of Chrysler, Jeep and Ram — on Monday, a spokesman said.

The union has been pushing for a 40 percent wage increase over four years, improved retiree benefits and shorter work hours as well as an end to a tiered wage system that starts new hires at much lower wages than the top U.A.W. pay of $32 an hour.

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U.S. Immigration Crisis

 

ICE logo

ny times logoNew York Times, U.S. Will Allow Nearly 500,000 Venezuelan Migrants to Work Legally, Nicholas Fandos, Updated Sept. 21, 2023. The move, announced late Wednesday, followed intense lobbying by New York Democrats before and during President Biden’s visit to New York City this week.

The Biden administration said late Wednesday that it would allow hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans already in the United States to live and work legally in the country for 18 months.

The decision followed intense advocacy by top New York Democrats, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, Mayor Eric Adams and party leaders in Congress. It will affect about 472,000 Venezuelans who arrived in the country before July 31, temporarily protecting them from removal and waiving a monthslong waiting period for them to seek employment authorization.

In an unusual break with a president of their party, the New York Democrats had argued that the city’s social safety net would tear under the weight of more than 110,000 recently arrived migrants unless they were allowed to work and support themselves more quickly.

Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, said that he made the decision because conditions in Venezuela “prevent their safe return” but stressed that immigrants who had entered the country since August were not protected and would be “removed when they are found to not have a legal basis to stay.”

ny times logoNew York Times, One Day on the Border: 8,900 Migrants Arrested, and More on the Way, Miriam Jordan, Jack Healy and Eileen Sullivan, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). A sudden surge of people is arriving at the southern border, despite danger. “If you don’t take risks, you cannot win,” said one man who traveled from Peru.

They come from Brazil, Burkina Faso, Uzbekistan, India and dozens of other countries, a moving global village of hundreds of thousands of people crossing the Rio Grande and slipping through gaps in the border wall at a pace of nearly 9,000 people a day, one of the highest rates of unlawful crossings in months.

Despite new border barriers and thickets of razor wire, risk of deportation and pleas for patience, a resurgent tide of men, women and children is not waiting. Driven by desperation, families and individuals are pushing across the southern border and past new efforts by the Biden administration to keep migrants waiting until they secure hard-to-get appointments to enter the nation with permission.

The influx is creating a humanitarian and political crisis that stretches from packed migrant processing facilities in border states to major American cities struggling to house and educate the new families. Though many get through, thousands are being sent back across the border or on flights to their home countries. But from Texas to California, more than two dozen migrants who have entered illegally in recent days said they could not afford to wait.

“If you don’t take risks, you cannot win,” said Daniel Soto, 35, who crossed with his mother on Tuesday after they sold their car, restaurant and house in Lima, Peru, betting their entire fortune of $25,000 on a weeklong journey to the border near Tijuana.

Surges in migration at the southern border, while motivated by poverty, violence and hunger, are also tied to weather patterns, policy changes and personal circumstances. The pace of unlawful crossings dropped sharply in the spring amid uncertainty surrounding the end of a pandemic-era measure that allowed the government to quickly deport migrants. But numbers rebounded over the summer, and are now nearly double the 4,900 unlawful crossings a day that were recorded in mid-April.

ny times logoNew York Times, U.S. Wants to Keep Migrants Away From the Border by Moving Checkpoints South, Genevieve Glatsky and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). By opening migration processing centers in three Latin American countries, the Biden administration is trying to coax people not to trek to the border.

As the Biden administration struggles to tackle a humanitarian and political crisis at America’s doorstep, it is focusing increasingly on keeping migrants far from the U.S.-Mexico border by establishing migration processing centers in Central and South America.

But the program is off to a rocky start, with demand for appointments far outstripping supply, leading to periodic shutdowns of the online portal, and some countries’ limiting applicants over concerns that the centers will cause migrants to overwhelm their own borders.

The centers, in Colombia, Costa Rica and others planned in Guatemala, have become a primary focus of the president’s migration strategy, U.S. officials said, and the administration is already exploring expanding the program to other nations in the region, including opening a similar office in Mexico.

The program, known as the safe mobility initiative, is “the most ambitious plan I’ve seen,” said Sean Garcia, the deputy refugee coordinator for the U.S. Embassy in Colombia, who has worked on migration for over a decade.

ny times logoNew York Times, Officials scrambled to respond as migrants overwhelmed Eagle Pass, Texas, J. David Goodman, Edgar Sandoval, Miriam Jordan and Eileen Sullivan, Sept. 21, 2023 (print ed.). The mayor of Eagle Pass said 2,500 migrants arrived in one day, part of a recent surge in crossings along the border that has taxed local, state and federal resources.

Thousands of migrants crossed into the small city of Eagle Pass, Texas, from Mexico on Wednesday, crowding onto the banks of the Rio Grande and under an international bridge in what officials described as an unfolding crisis.

The mayor, Rolando Salinas Jr., declared a state of emergency, seeking additional support to respond to an influx of migrants that reached 2,500 on Wednesday, overwhelming the city of 28,000 that has been a focal point of efforts by the state of Texas to deter illegal crossings.

The arrivals, including a large number of people from Venezuela, were part of a substantial increase in recent crossings along the southern border. The number of arrivals has reached levels not seen in months, taxing local governments in California, Arizona and Texas as large numbers of people claiming asylum have been released by Border Patrol agents directly into border communities.

That was the case in Eagle Pass, officials said, where the city’s lone shelter provider strained to accommodate the sudden arrival of so many people. Many were released onto the streets of the city.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Mass south-to-north migration: It's because of climate change and it will get worse, wayne madsen may 29 2015 cropped SmallWayne Madsen, left, Sept. 18-19, 2023. From the United Nations to the world's leading climate scientists, the verdict is in: Our planet has reached and exceeded the tipping points for climate collapse and the mass migration of those affected and who live in the equatorial zones of the Americas, Asia, and Africa is a direct result of rising temperatures and multi-year drought.

wayne madesen report logoClimate change refugees from Sub-Saharan Africa and Central America and the Caribbean littoral of South America may find temporary respite from unbearable temperatures and drought by moving north into Europe and North America, but massive fires, powerful storms, and record floods will result in an inability of national and sub-national governments and assistance organizations to provide them much in the way of relief.

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U.S. Courts, Crime, Guns, Civil Rights, Immigration

washington post logoWashington Post, Justice Clarence Thomas reportedly attended Koch network donor events, Amy B Wang and Ann E. Marimow,  Sept. 22, 2023. New report comes as some justices have suggested the Supreme Court should act on ethics issues.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas flew on a private jet in 2018 to speak at the annual winter donor summit of the Koch network — a trip that was intended to be a fundraising draw for the influential conservative political organization with interests before the court, according to a report published Friday by ProPublica.

At the summit, held in Palm Springs, Calif., Thomas attended a private dinner for the Koch network’s donors, ProPublica reported. According to the outlet, it was at least the second time Thomas had attended a meeting of the network founded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and his brother, David Koch, who died in 2019. Thomas did not disclose the 2018 trip, ProPublica reported.

The revelation adds to the controversies facing Thomas and the court more broadly that have led Democrats and court transparency advocates to call for the nine justices to adopt a binding code of ethics.

In recent weeks, at least two of the justices have publicly suggested the court should act. Justice Elena Kagan on Friday said she and her colleagues could adapt the policy that governs all lower court judges to reflect the unique structure of the Supreme Court.

“I think it would be a good thing for the court to do,” Kagan said during a live-streamed conversation with the dean of Notre Dame’s law school. “It would help in our own compliance with the rules, and it would, I think, go far in persuading other people that we were adhering to highest standards of conduct.”

Kagan noted that Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh had also recently said he hoped the court would soon take steps to address ethics issues.

The latest ProPublica report focused on Thomas’s interactions with the Koch network, which has given millions of dollars to a conservative legal organization behind one of the Supreme Court’s biggest cases of the term that begins in October. The group, Cause of Action Institute, is asking the justices to overturn a decades-old precedent long targeted by conservatives concerned about the power of federal government agencies. The precedent has been used extensively by the government to defend environmental, financial and consumer protection regulations.

In response to the report, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) called for Thomas to recuse himself from the case, questioning whether the justice could be impartial because of his previously undisclosed involvement with the Koch network.

ny times logoNew York Times, New Jersey Governor Calls on Menendez to Resign Over Bribery Charges, Benjamin Weiser, Tracey Tully and William K. Rashbaum, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Senator Robert Menendez was charged with taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes. He stepped down from his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was charged on Friday with taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, including bars of gold bullion, to wield his power abroad and at home.

The three-count federal indictment depicted a brazen plan hatched during furtive dinners, in text messages and on encrypted calls — much of it aimed at increasing U.S. assistance to Egypt and aiding businessmen in New Jersey.

Mr. Menendez’s wife, Nadine Menendez, is accused of acting as a go-between, passing messages to an American-Egyptian businessman, Wael Hana, who maintained close connections with Egyptian military and intelligence officials, the indictment said. In one text, to an Egyptian general, Mr. Hana referred to the senator, who held sway over military sales, financing and other aid, as “our man.”

Mr. Menendez, in a strongly worded rebuke to prosecutors, said that he was confident the matter would be “successfully resolved once all of the facts are presented.”

 ny times logoNew York Times, Incarcerated for Life, an Inmate Is Left Behind by Prison Reforms, Sept. 24, 2023. A disabled Black man who has served 39 years could not benefit from “compassionate release.” His former lawyer voted against the new law in Congress.

ny times logoNew York Times, A Day Care Death and the Dilemma Over How to Crack Down on Drugs, Sept. 24, 2023. Fentanyl use is increasingly out in the open, and increasingly fatal. But New Yorkers are divided over what to do: decriminalize it, or make more arrests?

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Oath Keeper Ray Epps and his wife Robyn Epps (New York Times photo by Alan Feuer).

Oath Keeper Ray Epps and his wife Robyn Epps (New York Times photo by Alan Feuer).

 

Prosecutions Of Trump, Allies

 

djt indicted proof

ny times logoNew York Times, Analysis: Request for Gag Order on Trump Raises Free Speech Dilemma, Charlie Savage, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Federal prosecutors are putting the prospect of political violence at the heart of their argument to limit Donald Trump’s statements about the election case.

The request by prosecutors that a judge impose a gag order on former President Donald J. Trump in the federal election-subversion case presents a thorny conflict between the scope of his First Amendment rights and fears that he could — intentionally or not — spur his supporters to violence.

Justice Department log circularThere is little precedent for how the judge overseeing the case, Tanya S. Chutkan, should think about how to weigh strong constitutional protections for political speech against ensuring the functioning of the judicial process and the safety of the people participating in it.

It is one more example of the challenges of seeking to hold to account a norm-shattering former president who is being prosecuted in four cases as he makes another bid for the White House with a message that his opponents have weaponized the criminal justice system against him.

“Everything about these cases is making new law because there are so many gaps in the law,” said Paul F. Rothstein, a Georgetown University law professor and a criminal procedure specialist. “The system is held together by people doing the right thing according to tradition, and Trump doesn’t — he jumps into every gap.”

Citing threats inspired by the federal indictments of Mr. Trump, a recently unsealed motion by the special counsel, Jack Smith, has asked Judge Chutkan to order the former president to cease his near-daily habit of making “disparaging and inflammatory or intimidating” public statements about witnesses, the District of Columbia jury pool, the judge and prosecutors.

A proposed order drafted by Mr. Smith’s team would also bar Mr. Trump and his lawyers from making — or causing surrogates to make — public statements “regarding the identity, testimony or credibility of prospective witnesses.” It would allow Mr. Trump to say he denies the charges but “without further comment.”

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More On Climate, Environment, Transportation

 

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washington post logoWashington Post, Perspective: How the dream of air conditioning turned into the dark future of climate change, Philip Kennicott, Sept. 21, 2023. This summer, all across the torrid globe, air conditioning was a necessity for billions of people, though less than a third of households have it. In the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, it offered defense against not just the heat but also the eerie orange smoke from Canadian wildfires exacerbated by climate change.

In Phoenix, where the temperature rose above 110 degrees for weeks on end, temporary cooling centers were a lifesaver for homeless people, though hundreds of heat-related deaths were confirmed or suspected throughout the metropolitan area. In Europe, where air conditioning is evolving from an eccentric, American-style indulgence to a standard amenity, AC offered a critical defense against a heat wave so powerful and persistent that the Europeans gave the high-pressure system causing it a name, “Cerberus,” after the mythological three-headed hellhound who guards the gates of Hades.

As temperature records were broken across the planet this summer, you could sense something shift in our relationship to air conditioning. Billions of people in the Global South and other hot zones still live without household air conditioning. And the cost of remedying that is staggering. But it isn’t just the financial challenge of manufacturing and distributing more cooling systems. The environmental costs are terrifying, too. Making internal spaces cooler for humans means making external environments hotter for all living things, with more industrial production, shipping and energy consumption, all of which contribute to the buildup of greenhouse gases.

ny times logoNew York Times, Gold’s Deadly Truth: Much Is Mined With Mercury, Fabian Federl and Jack Nicas, Photographs by Ian Cheibub, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Jeovane de Jesus Aguiar was knee-deep in mud in the 100-yard gash he had cut into the Amazon rainforest, filtering brown water out of a pan, when he found the small, shiny flake he was looking for: a mixture of gold and mercury.

Mr. Aguiar had drizzled liquid mercury into the ground in his makeshift gold mine on the eastern edge of the small South American nation of Suriname, just as he had every few days.

The toxic element mixes with gold dust and forms an amalgam he can pluck out of the sludge. Then he sets the mixture aflame, burning off the mercury into the air, where winds spread it across the forest and across borders, poisoning the plants, animals and people it finds.

Left behind is the gold. That part usually ends up in Europe, the United States and the Persian Gulf, most often as expensive jewelry.

Ten years after an international treaty to ban mercury, the toxic metal continues to poison. The reason might have to do with your wedding ring.

 

An aerial view of Derna, Libya, on Thursday, Sept. 14, 2023. Thousands of people were killed or are missing after massive floods destroyed the city (Washington Post photo by Alice Martins)An aerial view of Derna, Libya, on Thursday, Sept. 14, 2023. Thousands of people were killed or are missing after massive floods destroyed the city (Washington Post photo by Alice Martins).

ny times logoNew York Times, East Libya Strongman Keeps Tight Control Over Aid After Floods, Ben Hubbard, Sept. 20, 2023 (print ed.). Khalifa Hifter, who oversees a military dictatorship that rules the eastern half nation, could use the response to the disaster to entrench his power.

Days after a torrential downpour collapsed two aging dams and unleashed a rushing wall of water that swept parts of the Libyan city of Derna and thousands of its people into the sea, the military strongman who rules the area came for a quick visit.

Khalifa Hifter, the 79-year-old renegade commander and longtime C.I.A. asset shook hands with soldiers, took a brief drive through Derna’s muddy streets and flew off in a helicopter.

The disaster that struck Derna on Sept. 11 has drawn renewed international attention to Mr. Hifter and his so-called Libyan National Army, a military coalition that controls the eastern half of the divided North African nation with an iron fist.

More than a week after the disaster, as rescue efforts shift to the long and costly work of caring for the displaced and helping the city recover, Mr. Hifter’s tight hold over eastern Libya has made it clear that he will be the overall arbiter of the aid operation in the oil-rich country.

ny times logoNew York Times, Opinion: Is the Disaster in Libya Coming Soon to an Aging Dam Near You? Josh Klemm and Isabella Winkler (co-directors of International Rivers, a group that advocates for healthy rivers and the rights of river communities), Sept. 18, 2023 (print ed.).

libya flag mapThe collapse of two dams in Libya, unleashing torrential floodwaters that left at least 3,000 people dead and over 4,200 still missing, was both predicted and preventable.

And they won’t be the last big dams to collapse unless we remove and repair some of the aging and obsolete structures that are long past their expiration date.

Like many dams around the world, the Wadi Derna dams in Libya were built in the 1970s during the era of peak global dam construction, when 1,000 large dams were installed each year. Now most of these dams are reaching the end of their life spans.

Details are still emerging, but the Libya dam collapses appear to have been caused by poor maintenance, and by poor monitoring of reservoirs that were overwhelmed by a huge rainstorm. Critical warnings were issued last year about the dams’ deteriorated state and the repairs needed to avert such a scenario, yet no action was taken.

Similar disasters are waiting to happen around the world. The biggest danger is in India and China, where the 28,000 large dams built in the mid-20th century are now nearing obsolescence. Mullaperiyar Dam in Kerala, India is over 100 years old, visibly damaged and located in a region prone to earthquakes. Its collapse would harm 3.5 million people downstream.

An aerial view of Derna, Libya, on Thursday. Torrential rains burst through two dams near Derna, on Libya’s northeastern coast, destroying much of the city (Reuters photo b

An aerial view of Derna, Libya, on Thursday. Torrential rains burst through two dams near Derna, on Libya’s northeastern coast, destroying much of the city (Reuters photo by Ayman Al-Sahili).

ny times logoNew York Times, Dire Warnings About Libya Dams Went Unheeded, Aaron Boxerman and James Glanz, Sept. 17, 2023 (print ed.). “The state wasn’t interested,” said an engineer who published a paper on why Derna’s ill-maintained dams might fail under the stress of a powerful storm.

It had been clear for years that the dams protecting Derna, on Libya’s Mediterranean coast, were in danger of giving way.

Torrential rains were not new. Decade after decade, they had pounded the area, washing away the soil that helped soak up water as it ran down from the dry hills above town.

Climate change had also changed the land, making it drier, harder and increasingly shorn of vegetation, less able to absorb the water before it pooled up dangerously behind the dams.

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More Global News

ny times logoNew York Times, Star Uyghur Scholar Who Vanished Was Sentenced to Life in China, Tiffany May, Sept. 24, 2023. Rahile Dawut, who recorded her people’s traditions, disappeared in 2017. New information indicates that she faces decades in prison. Star Uyghur Scholar Who Vanished Was Sentenced to Life in China.

China FlagShe was a trailblazing professor and ethnographer from the Uyghur ethnic group in far-western China who documented the religious and cultural traditions of her people. She was at the height of a career that the Chinese government had once recognized with awards and research grants. But it was not enough to keep her safe.

Rahile Dawut, who nurtured a generation of academics and scholars, disappeared in 2017, along with other prominent intellectuals and academics targeted by the Chinese government in its campaign to crush the Uyghur cultural identity. Details about her case were shrouded in secrecy for years, leaving her family and friends to wonder about her fate.

On Thursday, the Dui Hua Foundation, a group that campaigns on behalf of political prisoners held in China, said that it had seen a document written by a senior Chinese official stating that Dr. Rahile Dawut had been sentenced to life in prison on charges of endangering national security.

“For the Chinese government to strike her is really to strike at the heart of Uyghur culture,” John Kamm, the group’s founder and chairman, said in a phone interview. “It’s appalling.”

Mr. Kamm added that the official also wrote that Dr. Rahile Dawut had attempted to appeal her sentence after she was first tried in 2018, but that her appeal was rejected. The Chinese government has applied a sweeping definition of “endangering national security” to detain and often imprison Uyghurs deemed to oppose or even question official policies.

Her daughter, Akeda Pulati, who lives in Seattle, said that the prospect of never again seeing her mother was deeply painful. “I felt very angry and devastated,” at learning of the sentence, she said in a phone interview, “even though I was already devastated for several years.” She added, “I couldn’t accept the news when I heard it.”

ny times logoNew York Times, Refugees Flee to Armenia as Breakaway Enclave Comes Under Azerbaijan’s Control, Ivan Nechepurenko, Sept. 24, 2023. More than 1,000 ethnic Armenians fleeing the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh crossed the border into Armenia on Sunday, days after a military offensive brought the enclave firmly back under Azerbaijan’s control.

More refugees are expected to follow in the coming days, according to the refugees and their relatives waiting for them near the border. They took with them little but the most basic necessities, leaving behind their homes and possessions with little prospects of return.

“The past two days were the most horrific in my life,” said Meline Hakobyan, 23, a law student who left Yeghtsahogh, a village in Nagorno-Karabakh. “My wish is that the feeling we have now, nobody goes through it.”

Azerbaijan was emboldened to take military action last week because of the region’s shifting geopolitics as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Russia, Armenia’s traditional security guarantor, appeared less inclined to intervene this time, given its increasing reliance on trade with Turkey, Azerbaijan’s principal ally.

Over 1,000 people crossed the border from Nagorno-Karabakh, days after a military offensive returned the ethnic Armenian enclave to Azerbaijan’s control.

Politico, France withdraws troops from Niger, Clea Caulcutt, Sept. 24, 2023. Troops involved in anti-terror operations are coming home, Macron announced. 1,500 French troops are stationed in several bases across Niger.

politico CustomFrench President Emmanuel Macron announced Sunday that French troops would be withdrawn from Niger in the next couple of months, in the wake of a coup d’état in the Western African country this summer.

The military withdrawal from Niger comes after French troops were ousted from neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali, amid growing anti-French sentiment across the continent and military failures in containing jihadist terrorism in the Sahel region.

Macron also said France would imminently withdraw its ambassador, who had been living under effective house arrest in the French embassy in the capital Niamey, according to French authorities.

“France has decided to withdraw its ambassador. In the next hours, our ambassador and several diplomats will return to France,” Macron said during an interview with French TV channels.

Macron also said the military cooperation between France and Niger was “over” and that French troops would return before the end of the year. “In the weeks and months to come, we will consult with the putschists, because we want this to be done peacefully,” he added.

The military junta, which came to power in July, had set France an ultimatum to withdraw its troops that were involved in anti-terrorist operations in North Africa. France at the time pledged not to withdraw troops unless requested by the deposed Nigerien President Mohamed Bazoum.

 

moldova map

ny times logoNew York Times, Cash, Mules and Paid Protests: How a Fraudster Seized an Ethnic Enclave, Andrew Higgins, Sept. 24, 2023. The war in Ukraine has intensifed frictions in Moldova’s Gagauzia region. A man convicted of plundering his country’s central bank saw an opportunity.

Less than a decade after Moldova’s financial system almost collapsed following the theft of nearly $1 billion from major banks, the architect of that catastrophe, the Israeli-born Moldovan businessman Ilan Shor, had somehow seized an entire region.

Worse still, lamented Moldova’s president, Maia Sandu, Mr. Shor, who was convicted in 2017 for his role in ransacking Moldova’s banking system, was working in the interests of Russia, meaning that Gagauzia had “fallen into the hands of pro-Russian criminal groups.”

Bundles of cash arriving on flights from Russia via Armenia provided an early sign of mischief in a tiny Eastern European enclave. Then came a wave of noisy street demonstrations featuring destitute pensioners paid to chant for the removal of their country’s pro-Western president.

But events in that enclave, Gagauzia, in the Republic of Moldova, took their most bizarre turn this summer when — at an outdoor meeting of officials and journalists next to a statue of Lenin — a fugitive convicted criminal announced the members of a new regional government.

They were, the fugitive fraudster declared while speaking by video link from Israel, a “dream team.”

However, for the central government of Moldova, one of Europe’s poorest and most fragile nations, the drama unfolding in Gagauzia was more of a nightmare.

marin le pen franciya

ny times logoNew York Times, French Far-Right Leader May Face Trial on Embezzlement Charges, Roger Cohen, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Prosecutors recommended charges against Marine Le Pen, shown above, that could potentially bring a 10-year jail term and a 10-year ban from public office.

After a seven-year investigation, the Paris prosecutor’s office requested on Friday that the far-right leader Marine Le Pen and more than 20 other members of her National Rally party stand trial for embezzlement of funds from the European Parliament between 2004 and 2016.

The case has centered on whether party members who were representatives in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, along with their assistants, used money allocated to cover expenses at the assembly for party costs that had nothing to do with their european union logo rectangleparliamentary functions.

The request from the prosecutor’s office does not mean the case will go to trial. That decision will be made by Paris magistrates, probably within the next several weeks. Ms. Le Pen faces a possible 10-year prison sentence, a fine of one million euros ($1.1 million) and 10 years of ineligibility for public office, the prosecutor’s office said.

The decision comes as the jostling begins over a successor to President Emmanuel Macron, who must leave office under term limits in 2027, and nine months before European Parliament elections. It is a blow to Ms. Le Pen, a perennial candidate for the presidency who has increased her vote share but has always fallen short.

ny times logoNew York Times, Darfur’s New Generation, Once Full of Promise, Now Suffers ‘Fire of War,’ Abdi Latif Dahir, Sept. 21, 2023. In a Sudanese region with a history of genocide, weeks of intense fighting between rival military factions have left hundreds dead and sent thousands fleeing.

Five months after a devastating war began in Sudan between rival military forces, the western region of Darfur has quickly become one of the hardest hit in the nation. People in Darfur have already suffered genocidal violence over the past two decades that has left as many as 300,000 people dead.

Now Darfur, which had been edging toward relative stability, is being torn apart by a nationwide war between the Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The Rapid Support Forces and its allies, predominantly Arab militias, have assumed control of large parts of Darfur, while the regular army mostly operates from garrisons in major cities, residents and observers said.
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ny times logoNew York Times, Delegations from Armenia and Azerbaijan met to discuss the fate of the breakaway region Nagorno-Karabakh, Ivan Nechepurenko, Sept. 21, 2023. Officials of the breakaway region met with representatives of Azerbaijan to talk about the future of its residents, many of whom strongly resist the idea of coming under Azerbaijani rule.

One day after Azerbaijan used force to assert its authority over a mountainous breakaway region in the South Caucasus, its officials met with representatives of the pro-Armenian enclave on Thursday to discuss the future of the residents there under new rule.

Escorted by Russian peacekeepers, a delegation of the government of Nagorno-Karabakh arrived in the town of Yevlakh in Azerbaijan to meet with representatives of the Azerbaijani government.

Azerbaijan’s brisk military recapture of Nagorno-Karabakh — a strategic slice of land slightly bigger than Rhode Island that is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan — could further alter power dynamics in the combustible region where interests of Russia, Turkey and Western states collide.

Azerbaijan’s victory also posed a humanitarian challenge for tens of thousands of Armenians living there. Citing multiple historic grievances, many Armenians have been adamantly opposed to coming under Azerbaijani rule.

washington post logoWashington Post, Fighting flares between Azerbaijan and Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh, Mary Ilyushina, Sept. 20, 2023 (print ed.).  Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry on Tuesday declared an “anti-terrorist” campaign in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region under Armenian control, as Armenian media reported air raid sirens and mortar fire in the regional capital of Stepanakert.

Azerbaijan and Armenia have repeatedly clashed over Nagorno-Karabakh, which is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but largely populated by ethnic Armenians and largely governed by the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh.

The two nations fought two wars over the region: one in the early 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, and another in 2020 when Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, regained territories bordering Karabakh from Armenia, which had held them since 1994. The six-week-long hostilities ended after a truce brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin was signed in November 2020, but a full peace agreement remained elusive.

washington post logoWashington Post, In Wagner’s largest African outpost, Russia looks to tighten its grip, Rachel Chason and Barbara Debout, Sept. 19, 2023 (print ed.). Since the mercenaries of Russia’s notorious Wagner Group first arrived here [in the Central African Republic] five years ago, they have embedded themselves in the security operations and economy of this impoverished but resource-rich country. While operating largely independently of Moscow, the group helped project Russian influence deep into Africa.

wagner group logoNow, after the death of Wagner boss Yevgeniy Prigozhin last month in a suspicious plane crash, officials in the Central African Republic say the Russian government is moving to take direct control over the more than 1,000 mercenaries here.

President Faustin-Archange Touadéra said in an interview at the presidential palace that Russian fighters would remain in his country under his agreement with Moscow and continue to provide security at a “difficult moment,” as the Central African Republic continues to struggle with rebel groups that have been attacking soldiers and civilians in the countryside.

“It has always been the Russian government with which we contracted,” said Touadéra, whose security detail included Wagner fighters in khakis standing guard outside his office.

This month, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov and Maj. Gen. Andrei Averyanov of the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU, visited Bangui and informed Touadéra and other top CAR officials that the Russian presence would continue but under the command of the Russian Defense Ministry, according to Central African and Western officials. The president confirmed the meeting, saying, “We have state-to-state relations with Russia, so it is normal that the vice minister visited us in the context of our security relationship.”

Fidele Gouandjika, an adviser to Touadéra, said that if the fighters don’t want to obey Russia’s Defense Ministry, they will have no choice but to depart. “It is Russia that sent them and armed them,” Gouandjika said, “and Russia that will decide when Wagner leaves.”

The Central African Republic has historically represented Wagner’s largest outpost on the continent, though the group has been active in at least four African countries and set its sights on multiple others, provoking growing concern in Western capitals.

The Africa tour by Yevkurov and Averyanov also included stops in Mali, where Wagner has a substantial presence, and Burkina Faso, where Wagner leaders had previously offered their services. A Western official said the trip was intended to send a clear message: Prigozhin’s sprawling empire is now under government control.

washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: A top NSC official explains why Biden moved ahead with the Iran hostage deal, Jason Rezaian, Sept. 19, 2023 (print ed.). Five Americans who have been held hostage in Iran are flying to freedom right now, accompanied by two of their spouses. Three of them — Siamak Namazi, Morad Tahbaz and Emad Shargi — had for years languished in the notorious Evin Prison.

Their release brings the number of wrongfully detained Americans brought home under President Biden to 35. This demonstrates both the high priority this White House has put on freeing unjustly imprisoned citizens and the reality that hostage-taking by state actors is spiraling out of control. Two more U.S. residents, Shahab Dalili and Jamshid Sharmahd, remain imprisoned in Iran.

In exchange, the United States will release five Iranian citizens either sentenced or with trials pending. And South Korea will transfer to banks in Qatar $6 billion owed to Iran for the purchase of crude oil. Some critics call this transaction a ransom payment. The reality, as usual, is far more complex.

To unpack the details of the deal, I spoke with Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa — and the official who conducted the secret negotiations that led to my own release in 2016. What follows has been lightly edited for length.

Jason Rezaian: How did the Biden administration weigh its decision to make a deal with Iran for the release of the hostages?

Brett McGurk: Absent an arrangement to bring these people home, they would languish in one of the world’s worst prisons for many years to come. Some of our citizens had a potential death sentence hanging over them. All of them are now safely out of Iran.

We recognize there will be criticism of the deal, but the president ultimately needs to weigh the terms available through diplomacy, against leaving American citizens for years, or even decades, in Evin Prison. In this case, the president made the hard decision to move ahead.

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U.S. Economy, Jobs, Budgets, Crypto Currency

ny times logoNew York Times, Billions to Connect Everyone to High-Speed Internet Could Still Fall Short, Madeleine Ngo, Sept. 19, 2023. President Biden promised to provide every American access to high-speed internet. But some raised concerns about the funds.

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U.S. Military, Security, Intelligence, Foreign Policy

ny times logoNew York Times, Biden Officials Focus on African Crises at United Nations Gathering, Michael Crowley, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken met on Friday with African leaders in hopes of reversing a coup in Niger, as the U.S. tries to deliver on promises to the growing but troubled continent.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken met on Friday with African leaders seeking to restore Niger’s democratically elected government to power, capping a week at the United Nations in which the Biden administration worked to deliver on promises of support amid high-profile crises elsewhere, like the war in Ukraine.

In a sign of the instability threatening Africa’s potential for economic growth and independence, several of the leaders spoke about a scourge of coups that has spread across the continent — eight in the past three years — as President Biden has tried to promote democracy.

On Tuesday, Nigeria’s president, Bola Tinubu, told the annual gathering of the U.N. General Assembly that the military overthrows reflect widespread failures to improve African lives. “The wave crossing parts of Africa does not demonstrate favor towards coups,” he said. “It is a demand for solutions to perennial problems.”

Mindful of complaints on the continent that the United States is consumed by the war in Ukraine and competition with China, President Biden spent much of his speech to the U.N. on Tuesday addressing topics of particular interest to African leaders, including food security, development aid and climate change.

U.S. officials said Mr. Biden’s address drew an enthusiastic response from African leaders and diplomats in New York who appreciated his attention to their issues. That included Mr. Biden’s discussion of plans for a U.S.-sponsored corridor linking Angola with mineral-rich parts of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (a project in which the United States, dependent on rare-earth minerals, has a significant self-interest).

And recapping the week for reporters at a news conference on Friday, Mr. Blinken lingered on the details of his Africa diplomacy, noting U.S. progress on a joint program with the United Nations and African Union that helps “countries in Africa develop their own sustainable and effective sources of food,” including through what he called “climate-resistant” crops.

But officials from the 54-nation continent hardly speak from a unified pro-Western position. In remarks on Thursday, Col. Mamadi Doumbouya of Guinea, who announced himself as that country’s new leader after a coup in September 2021, condemned democratically elected African leaders “who cheat to manipulate the text of the constitution in order to stay in power eternally,” calling them “the real putschists.”

Directing his comments toward Western nations, Mr. Doumbouya complained that “this democratic model that you have so insidiously and skilfully imposed on us” was not working for his continent.

The discord reflected just one of the challenges facing the Biden administration’s effort to follow through on pledges to focus American foreign policy more on Africa.

In the near term, Biden officials are working to address several broiling crises in Niger, Sudan and elsewhere.

On Friday morning, Mr. Blinken met with the leaders of several nations that are members of the Economic Community of West African States, a regional group that has been pressuring Niger’s military leadership to relinquish power under the threat of a military intervention. The Biden administration hopes to avoid a conflict that could spill across the region.

In a readout following the meeting, the State Department said that attendees “were united in their position that the National Council for Safeguarding the Homeland in Niger” — the country’s ruling military junta — “must release President Mohamed Bazoum, his family, and all those unlawfully detained.”

Mr. Bazoum and his family have been detained since July.

In a side drama this week, representatives of Mr. Bazoum’s government and from the junta both sought to address the general assembly.

Bakary Yaou Sangaré, Niger’s permanent representative to the United Nations, who was appointed under Mr. Bazoum, would have had the right to do so — had he not thrown his allegiance with the generals who seized power and who named him the country’s new foreign minister.

  • Washington Post, U.S. plan envisions factories in Africa for surging EV battery demand, Sept. 23, 2023.

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More On U.S. Abortion, Family Planning, #MeToo

 

Jessica Burgess, center, alongside her attorney, Brad Ewalt, right, is escorted out of the Madison County District courtroom by Madison County Sheriff Todd Volk, in Madison, Neb., Friday, Sept. 22, 2023. Burgess, who pleaded guilty to giving her teenage daughter pills for an abortion and helping to burn and bury the fetus, was sentenced to two years in prison. (Norfolk Daily News photo by Austin Svehla via AP)

Jessica Burgess, center, alongside her attorney, Brad Ewalt, right, is escorted out of the Madison County District courtroom by Madison County Sheriff Todd Volk, in Madison, Neb., Friday, Sept. 22, 2023. Burgess, who pleaded guilty to giving her teenage daughter pills for an abortion and helping to burn and bury the fetus, was sentenced to two years in prison. (Norfolk Daily News photo by Austin Svehla via AP) 

ny times logoNew York Times, Mother Who Gave Abortion Pills to Teen Daughter Gets 2 Years in Prison, Jesus Jiménez, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Jessica Burgess had pleaded guilty to violating Nebraska’s abortion law. Her daughter, who was 17 when she ended her late-term pregnancy last year, was sentenced in July to 90 days in jail.

A Nebraska woman who acquired abortion pills that her teenage daughter used to end her pregnancy last year was sentenced on Friday to two years in prison.

The woman, Jessica Burgess, 42, was charged after the police found her private Facebook messages, which revealed plans she had with her daughter to end the pregnancy and “burn the evidence.”

nebraska mapProsecutors said that Ms. Burgess ordered the pills online and gave them to her daughter, Celeste Burgess, in April 2022, when her daughter was 17 and in the third trimester of her pregnancy. The Burgesses later buried the fetal remains, the authorities said.

Ms. Burgess pleaded guilty in July to violating Nebraska’s abortion law, furnishing false information to a law enforcement officer and removing or concealing human skeletal remains. Celeste Burgess was sentenced in July to 90 days in jail and two years of probation after she pleaded guilty in May to removing or concealing human skeletal remains.

Jessica Burgess, who faced up to five years in prison, was sentenced to two years, with her terms for false reporting and removal of skeletal remains running concurrently.

Brad Ewalt, a lawyer for Ms. Burgess, asked Judge Mark A. Johnson of Madison County District Court on Friday to sentence his client to probation. The judge denied the request, saying that Ms. Burgess had treated the fetal remains “like yesterday’s trash,” The Norfolk Daily News reported.

Celeste Burgess, who was released from jail on Sept. 11, sat near the back of the courtroom on Friday and wiped tears from her face when her mother was sentenced, The Daily News reported.

Mr. Ewalt and the Madison County prosecutor who tried the case did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.

A police investigation into the Burgesses began before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. The case has fueled fears that people who end their pregnancies in the post-Roe era, and those who help them, could be prosecuted for having abortions and that their private communications could be used as evidence against them.

The investigation began in late April 2022, when the police in Norfolk, Neb., began looking into whether a 17-year-old girl had given birth prematurely to a stillborn baby, and whether the girl and her mother had buried it, according to court documents.

At the time, abortion was banned in Nebraska after 20 weeks from conception. This May, Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, signed a 12-week ban into law.

The Burgesses were initially charged with concealing a stillbirth. But according to court documents, a detective later asked Celeste Burgess for the exact date her pregnancy ended. When she said she needed to check her Facebook messages to remember, the detective obtained a warrant for messages she had exchanged with her mother.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, complied with the warrant. The detective found evidence of a medically induced abortion, according to court documents, allowing the authorities to file additional charges.

 johnny hunt

southern baptist convention logo

Religion News Service via Washington Post, Is a pastor’s sin a private matter? Johnny Hunt’s lawsuit makes that claim, Bob Smietana, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). In the middle of 2010, not long after his term as Southern Baptist Convention president ended, Johnny Hunt, shown aboved in a file photo, took time off for his annual vacation.

washington post logoHe planned to return to the pulpit at First Baptist Church in Woodstock, Ga., in early August. But just before his first Sunday back, Hunt announced he was taking a leave of absence, citing his health and a sense of exhaustion.

What no one knew at the time was that Hunt had another reason for his leave.

On July 25, 2010, while vacationing in Florida, Hunt had kissed and fondled another pastor’s wife in what his attorneys would later call a “brief, consensual extramarital encounter.”

Then Hunt spent more than a decade covering the incident up.

Without telling his congregation — or the millions of Southern Baptists he had represented as their president — Hunt went through a secret restoration process that included counseling sessions with the woman he had fondled and her husband. He then returned to the pulpit.

southern baptist convention logo 2For a dozen years, no one was the wiser. Hunt retired from First Baptist in 2019 and took on a new role as a senior vice president for the SBC’s North American Mission Board and continued his busy and often lucrative career as a preacher and public speaker.

Then, in 2022, an investigation into how SBC leaders dealt with the issue of abuse was released, and his name was included in the report.

Over the course of their inquiry, investigators from Guidepost Solutions, the firm hired by the SBC, had heard about Hunt’s misconduct and learned that the woman involved in the incident — who has not been named publicly — described it as a sexual assault and as nonconsensual.

“We include this sexual assault allegation in the report because our investigators found the pastor and his wife to be credible; their report was corroborated in part by a counseling minister and three other credible witnesses; and our investigators did not find Dr. Hunt’s statements related to the sexual assault allegation to be credible,” investigators from Guidepost concluded.

When the report became public, Hunt first denied it and claimed the incident was consensual. He resigned from NAMB, went through another restoration process, then made a defiant return to the pulpit earlier this year.

This past spring Hunt filed suit against the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee and Guidepost, claiming they had ruined his life by revealing his misconduct and including him in an abuse report.

The heart of Hunt’s claim of invasion of privacy and defamation was summed up in a recent court filing submitted by his attorneys. Hunt’s sins, they wrote, were a private moral failing that should have been kept confidential.

“Pastor Johnny was not the president of the SBC or a member of the Executive Committee at the time of the incident,” they wrote in a memorandum, opposing the denomination’s attempts to have the case dismissed. “He was merely a private citizen whose marital fidelity was nobody else’s business.”

That claim raises a series of questions.

Can a pastor’s sins ever really be private? Can a pastor who has made a living urging others to follow a morality code then claim his own failings are no one else’s business? And was the harm done to Hunt’s reputation primarily due to his own acts — both the misconduct and the subsequent coverup?

George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center and a former assistant general counsel for the New York Times, said Hunt’s claim to privacy will probably go nowhere in court.

Hunt is undoubtedly angry and embarrassed that his personal failings have been publicized, which is understandable, said Freeman. But as a religious leader who was outspoken about family values and ethical living, his wrongdoings are a matter of public concern, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

 ny times logoNew York Times, Analysis: The Litany of #MeToo News Continues. Is Anything Really Changing? Amanda Taub, Updated Sept. 22, 2023. It can appear as though society is no closer to a future in which women can go about their ordinary lives without being harassed, assaulted and coerced into silence. A news investigation reported that women had accused Russell Brand of sexual assault and harassment, including one allegation of rape.

The endless, relentless eruptions of sexual abuse and harassment scandals can sometimes seem like a particularly grim form of Zeno’s dichotomy paradox.

Back in the 5th century B.C., the Greek philosopher described how a runner on the path to a particular destination must first traverse half the distance, and then half the remaining difference, and then half the remaining distance, and so on — to infinity. By that logic, the runner can take steps toward a goal but will never actually reach it.

Similarly, each time a powerful man is held accountable for sexual misconduct, it seems like progress. And yet, when the allegations reveal a similar pattern of institutional actions that allowed the abuse to go on for years, and they provoke the same reactions of denial and victim-blaming, it can appear as though society is no closer to a future in which women can go about their ordinary lives without being harassed, assaulted and coerced into silence.

Take the news from the past eight days. On Sept. 12, the British Journal of Surgery published a study that found that nearly a third of female surgeons in England reported being sexually assaulted by a colleague within the last five years, and 63 percent had experienced sexual harassment (23 percent of male surgeons also reported being sexually harassed). The same day, a ProPublica investigation showed that Columbia University failed to act on years of evidence that Robert Hadden, a gynecologist at the university’s affiliated hospital system, was sexually assaulting women and girls who came to him for treatment.

On Sept. 16, an investigation by The Times of London and the Channel 4 news program “Dispatches” reported that multiple women had accused Russell Brand, the comedian turned fringe political YouTuber, of sexual assault and harassment, including one allegation of rape. On Sept. 18, Vice News reported that Tim Ballard, the founder of Operation Underground Railroad, an anti-trafficking organization, had been ousted from that organization after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct. The following day, Vice also reported on law enforcement records describing video footage of Paul Hutchinson, a producer of a movie about Ballard’s life, groping the breasts of a young woman whom he believed to be a 16-year-old trafficking victim. (Brand, Ballard and Hutchinson have all denied the allegations against them.)

Much ink has been spilled on the actions and motivations of abusers. But I find that these stories raise a much bigger question: whether, after years of #MeToo revelations, the institutional responses that have long enabled abuse are starting to change.
Sexual Assault Allegations Against Russell Brand

What Happened: Three British media outlets published an investigation in which four women accused the comedian Russell Brand of sexual assault. Brand has denied the allegations.

Abuse ‘debts’ coming due?

The term “beautiful soul" is an Israeli slang term that translates roughly as a more pejorative version of “bleeding heart”: a person who refuses to make moral sacrifices, even when there are practical incentives for doing so. In a 2013 book of the same name, Eyal Press profiled four whistle-blowers and conscientious objectors who ended up being vilified and ostracized for opposing wrongdoing within their own organizations.

Unpack that a bit, and you come to the uncomfortable truth: that in coldly rational terms, there are often substantial benefits from turning a blind eye to wrongdoing, or even fostering it.

As Press writes, a beautiful soul is not just someone who refuses to conform, it’s someone who is willing to block the pursuit of material goals by demanding that an organization, or a society, adhere to its own stated values.

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Public Health, Pandemics, Privacy

Politico, Biden receives updated Covid shot amid rocky rollout, vaccine polarization, Olivia Alafriz, Sept. 23, 2023. The updated shot was approved by the FDA earlier this month and the CDC recommended it for all individuals six months and older.

politico CustomPresident Joe Biden received the updated Covid-19 vaccine, according to a memo from White House physician Kevin O’Connor released Saturday.

“As we enter the cold and flu season, the President encourages all Americans to follow his example and to check with their healthcare provider or pharmacist to assure that they are fully vaccinated,” O’Connor wrote in the memo.

The president received the Covid vaccine alongside the annual flu vaccine Friday, O’Connor wrote. First lady Jill Biden experienced “mild symptoms” when she contracted Covid earlier this month. The president tested negative.

The updated shot was approved by the FDA earlier this month and the CDC recommended it for all individuals six months and older — however, the rollout has been rocky.

With the federal government no longer purchasing and distributing the shot, logistical hiccups and confusion over insurance coverage have presented obstacles to people seeking the vaccine.

Covid hospitalization data published by the CDC show that virus levels have surged recently. However, the CDC stopped recording individual cases when the public health emergency ended in May, so the exact number of cases is uncertain.

The White House has also struggled to combat growing anti-vaccine sentiment in a polarized political environment.

Vaccine skepticism is increasingly pronounced in the GOP, polls show. A new Politico, | Morning Consult poll showed that Republican voters were less likely than Democrats or independents to say vaccines are safe for children and only 27 percent of Republicans said the Covid vaccine is “very safe” for adults — while nearly as many, 23 percent, said it’s “very unsafe.”

GOP presidential candidates, in contrast to Biden, have disavowed the vaccine. Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has said he regrets taking the vaccine (although his wife, a surgeon, has disagreed) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has leaned into Covid skepticism.

Biden’s primary challenger, Robert Kennedy, Jr., is also a prominent vaccine skeptic.

 

washington post logoWashington Post, Anyone 6 months or older should get updated coronavirus shot, CDC recommends, Lena H. Sun and Fenit, Sept. 13, 2023 (print ed.). The CDC’s director said the reformulated vaccines can restore protection and provide “enhanced protection” against variants currently responsible for most infections and hospitalizations in the United States.

cdc logo CustomTuesday, with the vaccine expected to become available within 48 hours — as the respiratory illness season looms.

covad 19 photo.jpg Custom 2Mandy Cohen, director of the CDC, advised that anyone 6 months and older should get at least one dose of an updated shot. Her broad recommendation came after the agency’s expert advisers voted for a universal approach to seasonal coronavirus vaccination. The shots are intended to bolster defenses as the nation heads into the fall and winter virus season, when influenza and RSV are also primed to be on the rise.

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U.S. Media, Education, Religion, Sports, High Tech

washington post logoWashington Post, Editorial: Even $500 million isn’t enough to save local journalism, Editorial Board, Sept. 24, 2023 (print ed.).  Books, op-eds, think pieces and conferences — many, many conferences: The plight of local journalism in the United States has received its share of attention. At a 2022 summit on this topic, an industry veteran said that there’s “probably more people trying to help the newspaper business than in the newspaper business.”

A large pile of cash is now sidling up to all the chatter. In an initiative announced this month, 22 donor organizations, including the Knight Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, are teaming up to provide more than $500 million to boost local news over five years — an undertaking called Press Forward.

Journalists and publishers on the local scene in markets across the country have worked nonstop to bring their neighbors important stories and experiment with ways of paying for the service. The injection of more than a half-billion dollars is sure to help the quest for a durable and replicable business model.

The even bigger imperative, however, is to elevate local news on the philanthropic food chain so that national and hometown funders prioritize this pivotal American institution. Failure on this front places more pressure on public policy solutions, and government activism mixes poorly with independent journalism.

There’s no shortage of need. According to 2022 research by Penny Abernathy, a visiting professor at Medill and a former executive at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, newspapers are closing at an average rate of more than two per week; since 2005, more than one-quarter of U.S. newspapers have vanished. Digital-only start-ups haven’t plugged the gap, leaving too many communities without pressing information about themselves. The contraction has led to the proliferation of “news deserts”; there are 200 counties, home to 70 million people, with no newspaper.

No surprise: It turns out that areas with thin and declining news coverage also have lower voter turnout, less robust political competition and declining civic engagement. Into the void have seeped misinformation and disinformation.

What’s more, local news stands as the industry’s front line against the erosion of public trust. News consumers, after all, needn’t venture far to judge the veracity of a report on a three-alarm blaze up on Main Street; nothing dispels “fake news” quite like a freshly charred facade.

Who’s to blame? The internet, mostly. Whereas deep-pocketed advertisers formerly relied on newspapers to reach their customers, they took to the audience-targeting capabilities of Facebook or Google. Web-based marketplaces also siphoned newspapers’ once-robust revenue from classified ads. Local news entrepreneurs these days attempt to get by with a mix of advertising (or “sponsorship,” in the case of nonprofit news organizations), subscriber revenue and grants from philanthropic institutions. “If you’re going to do a big mission, you’ve got to have multiple sources of revenue,” says Eric Barnes, CEO of the Daily Memphian.

washington post logoWashington Post, Misinformation research is buckling under GOP legal attacks, Naomi Nix, Cat Zakrzewski and Joseph Menn, Sept. 23, 2023. The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political disinformation but also the quality of medical information online.

Academics, universities and government agencies are overhauling or ending research programs designed to counter the spread of online misinformation amid a legal campaign from conservative politicians and activists who accuse them of colluding with tech companies to censor right-wing views.

The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans in Congress and state government — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political falsehoods but also the quality of medical information online.

Facing litigation, Stanford University officials are discussing how they can continue tracking election-related misinformation through the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a prominent consortium that flagged social media conspiracies about voting in 2020 and 2022, several participants told The Washington Post. The coalition of disinformation researchers may shrink and also may stop communicating with X and Facebook about their findings.

The National Institutes of Health froze a $150 million program intended to advance the communication of medical information, citing regulatory and legal threats. Physicians told The Post that they had planned to use the grants to fund projects on noncontroversial topics such as nutritional guidelines and not just politically charged issues such as vaccinations that have been the focus of the conservative allegations.

NIH officials sent a memo in July to some employees, warning them not to flag misleading social media posts to tech companies and to limit their communication with the public to answering medical questions.

 

President Ronald Reagan is shown in a 1980s White House meeting with key right wing media and political influencers Rupert Murdoch, Roy Cohn and Charles Wick (Photo via Reagan Presidential Library).

President Ronald Reagan is shown in a 1980s White House meeting with key right wing media and political influencers Rupert Murdoch, Roy Cohn (standing) and Charles Wick (Photo via Reagan Presidential Library).

ny times logoNew York Times, The Fox Titan Turned Passion and Grievance Into Money and Power, James Poniewozik, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Rupert Murdoch built a noise-and-propaganda machine by giving his people what they wanted — and sometimes by teaching them what to want, our critic writes.

The polite way to describe the legacy of a man like Rupert Murdoch is to leave aside whether his accomplishments were good or bad and simply focus on how big they were. It is to eulogize him like Kendall Roy memorializing his father, Logan, in “Succession,” the HBO corporate drama none too slightly based on the Murdochs, among other dynasties. Maybe he had “a terrible force,” as Kendall put it, but fox news logo Small“he built, and he acted. … He made life happen.”

But the polite way is exactly the wrong way to assess Mr. Murdoch, who on Thursday announced his retirement from the boards of Fox and News Corporation. Mr. Murdoch (whose biographers included Michael Wolff in a book whose rupert murdoch michael wolff covercover is shown at left) achieved nothing the polite way. His style and his work were direct and blunt. Let us take his measure his way.

Rupert Murdoch’s empire used passion and grievance as fuel and turned it into money and power.

His tabloids ran on the idea of publishing for readers as they were, not according to some platonic ideal of how one wished them to be. That meant pinups and prize giveaways and blaring scandal headlines.

Over years and decades, Mr. Murdoch’s properties shifted their definition of “elite” away from people with more money than you and toward people with more perceived cultural capital than you, something that would be essential to nationalist politics in the 21st century and Fox’s dominance. (He did all this while living the life of a jet-setting billionaire.)

ny times logoNew York Times, The Fox Titan Turned Passion and Grievance Into Money and Power, James Poniewozik, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Rupert Murdoch built a noise-and-propaganda machine by giving his people what they wanted — and sometimes by teaching them what to want, our critic writes.

rupert murdoch 2011 shankbone The polite way to describe the legacy of a man like Rupert Murdoch is to leave aside whether his accomplishments were good or bad and simply focus on how big they were. It is to eulogize him like Kendall Roy memorializing his father, Logan, in “Succession,” the HBO corporate drama none too slightly based on the Murdochs, among other dynasties. Maybe he had “a terrible force,” as Kendall put it, but “he built, and he acted. … He made life happen.”

But the polite way is exactly the wrong way to assess Mr. Murdoch, who on Thursday announced his retirement from the boards of Fox and News Corporation. Mr. Murdoch achieved nothing the polite way. His style and his work were direct and blunt. Let us take his measure his way.

Rupert Murdoch’s empire used passion and grievance as fuel and turned it into money and power.

His tabloids ran on the idea of publishing for readers as they were, not according to some platonic ideal of how one wished them to be. That meant pinups and prize giveaways and blaring scandal headlines.

Over years and decades, Mr. Murdoch’s properties shifted their definition of “elite” away from people with more money than you and toward people with more perceived cultural capital than you, something that would be essential to nationalist politics in the 21st century and Fox’s dominance. (He did all this while living the life of a jet-setting billionaire.)

 washington post logoWashington Post, Lachlan Murdoch will be fully in charge of Fox. Will viewers notice? Jeremy Barr, Sept. 22, 2023. When Rupert Murdoch hands over the reins of the family media empire to his son Lachlan, it’s unlikely that viewers of Fox News will notice much difference.

lachlan murdoch 2013When Rupert Murdoch formally hands over the reins of his media empire to his 52-year-old son Lachlan in November, die-hard Fox News viewers will hardly notice any difference.

Conservative-leaning Lachlan, shown in a 2013 photo, has controlled the cable-news giant’s parent company since 2019, when he was picked to serve as chief executive and his more liberal brother James left the family business, seemingly ending speculation that a new sensibility would arrive with the next generation of Murdochs.

“I’ve had a sense that Lachlan is at least as conservative as his father,” said Preston Padden, a former Fox executive who has since became a critic of the network (but described Lachlan as “a very nice guy” in their interactions back in the 1990s).

ny times logoNew York Times, Rupert Murdoch to Retire From Fox and News Corporation Boards, Jim Rutenberg, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). The move leaves his son Lachlan as the sole executive in charge of the global media empire.

rupert murdoch 2011 shankbone Rupert Murdoch, left, is retiring from the Fox and News Corporation boards, the company announced Thursday morning, making his son Lachlan the sole executive in charge of the global media empire he built from a small local newspaper concern in Australia starting 70 years ago.

fox news logo SmallThe elder Mr. Murdoch will become chairman emeritus of the two companies, the company said in a release.

Mr. Murdoch, 92, had shown no intention to step down or even slow down — even after he named Lachlan as the heir to his business empire in 2019, when he sold his vast entertainment holdings to the Walt Disney Company.

Even now, in his emeritus status, he will continue to offer counsel, Lachlan Murdoch said in a statement.

“We thank him for his vision, his pioneering spirit, his steadfast determination, and the enduring legacy he leaves to the companies he founded and countless people he has impacted,” Lachlan Murdoch, 52, said in a release the company put out Thursday morning.

washington post logoWashington Post, Her students reported her for a lesson on race. Can she trust them again? Hannah Natanson, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). Mary Wood’s school reprimanded her for teaching a book by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Now she hopes her bond with students can survive South Carolina’s new laws.

As gold sunlight filtered into her kitchen, English teacher Mary Wood shouldered a worn leather bag packed with first-day-of-school items: Three lesson-planning notebooks. Two peanut butter granola bars. An extra pair of socks, just in case.

Everything was ready, but Wood didn’t leave. For the first time since she started teaching 14 years ago, she was scared to go back to school.

Six months earlier, two of Wood’s Advanced Placement English Language and Composition students had reported her to the school board for teaching about race. Wood had assigned her all-White class readings from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a book that dissects what it means to be Black in America.

The students wrote in emails that the book — and accompanying videos that Wood, 47, played about systemic racism — made them ashamed to be White, violating a South Carolina proviso that forbids teachers from making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” on account of their race.

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada during a frosty meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India during the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi earlier in September 2023 (Canadian Press photo by Sean Kilpatrick via Associated Press).


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ny times logoNew York Times, Biden, Warning Trump Could ‘Destroy’ Democracy, Moves Past G.O.P. Primary, Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Months before the first Republican primaries, the president is turning his attention to his old adversary as he tries to re-energize his party’s voters and donors.

President Donald Trump officialThis spring, as the Republican presidential primary race was just beginning, the Democratic National Committee commissioned polling on how the leading Republicans — Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis — fared against President Biden in battleground states.

But now, as Mr. Trump’s lead in the primary has grown and hardened, the party has dropped Mr. DeSantis from such hypothetical matchups. And the Biden campaign’s polling on Republican candidates is now directed squarely at Mr. Trump, according to officials familiar with the surveys.

djt maga hatThe sharpened focus on Mr. Trump isn’t happening only behind the scenes. Facing waves of polls showing soft support for his re-election among Democrats, Mr. Biden and his advisers signaled this week that they were beginning to turn their full attention to his old rival, seeking to re-energize the party’s base and activate donors ahead of what is expected to be a long and grueling sequel.

On Sunday, after Mr. Trump sought to muddy the waters on his position on abortion, the Biden operation and its surrogates pushed back with uncommon intensity. On Monday, Mr. Biden told donors at a New York fund-raiser that Mr. Trump was out to “destroy” American democracy, in some of his most forceful language so far about the implications of a second Trump term. And on Wednesday, as the president spoke to donors at a Manhattan hotel, he acknowledged in the most explicit way yet that he now expected to be running against “the same fella.”

Politico, McCarthy stares into the shutdown abyss, Sarah Ferris, Olivia Beavers and Jordain Carney, Sept. 23, 2023. The speaker has only one clear exit route away from a government closure: working with Democrats. It’s a path he still refuses to take.

politico CustomSpeaker Kevin McCarthy has only one way out of next week’s impending government shutdown: working with Democrats. It’s an exit he’s still refusing to take.

kevin mccarthyDuring the most tumultuous stretch of his speakership so far, McCarthy, right, hasn’t phoned a single member of the opposing party about a way to keep the lights on.

Instead, the speaker and his team will scramble this weekend to slash their own party’s spending bills in an effort to placate a handful of hard-liners who are threatening to eject him. Votes on some of those revised bills are now expected on Tuesday, four days before the Sept. 30 shutdown deadline. But even if they pass, that will move Congress no closer to a solution.

U.S. House logoMcCarthy’s central strategy remains the same; he wants to deliver a GOP opening bid to the Democratic Senate, while holding back a rebellion by his right flank — enough to hang on to his speakership after Democrats, by necessity, enter the talks. After his first two attempts at a short-term spending patch fell short, McCarthy is now trying to take up doomed full-year bills.

Some of McCarthy’s own allies fear that effort could prove futile as a shutdown fast approaches. These House Republicans worry that the Californian’s third attempt at a workable strategy, bringing spending measures to the floor next week, might also fail to get the votes they need and further humiliate the party.

“This is not checkers. This is chess. You got to understand that this next move by the House is not going to be the final answer,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) said. “Eventually, the Senate will weigh in … and it’s not going to be to our liking, and probably going to be pushed into our face and say: ‘Take it or leave it.’ And then the speaker will have a very difficult decision.”

The situation is getting worse still for McCarthy as he starts running out of room from his Senate allies. A group of conservatives across the Capitol, after days of deferring to the speaker, now want to see a vote on legislation that would automatically impose stopgap spending patches to permanently prevent shutdowns.

The House GOP is taking the opposite tack by resurrecting partisan spending bills that won’t do anything to prevent millions of U.S. workers — including the military and border patrol agents — from soon working without pay. At the same time, leadership is still trying to corral Republicans, so far unsuccessfully, behind passing a short-term conservative spending bill before Oct. 1.

But McCarthy allies also acknowledge the political reality could shift. Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) said questions about whether a bipartisan bill could pass in the final 48 hours before a shutdown weren’t yet “timely.”

Yet McCarthy knows he needs to ultimately strike a spending deal with the White House to avoid a government closure. He also knows, given how little political capital he has to spare, that decision could doom his gavel.

Hard-liners like Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) and other loud critics have made it obvious they won’t help dig the speaker out of the spending crisis, and they’re also most likely to trigger the first vote of no-confidence against a party leader in 113 years.

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) — who cautioned it was too soon to have a speakership discussion — warned that if Republicans worked with Democrats on funding the government “they are switching teams … They are going over to the Democratic side.”

“I understand their concerns. But, look, we are the Republican Party,” Norman added, predicting a shutdown.

Asked about the prospect of Democrats working with Republicans to keep the government open, hard-liner Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) said: “I remain concerned that any member of the Republican Conference would threaten to hijack or take hostage the Republican Conference.”

The stakes are high for House Republicans, who have barely nine months of power under their belts. They’re also 13 months away from an election in which the fate of their threadbare majority will rest on 18 incumbents sitting in turf friendly to President Joe Biden — where, unlike in deep-red districts, compromise to end a crisis is actually popular.

ny times logoNew York Times, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Flirts With the Libertarian Party, Nicholas Nehamas, Sept. 23, 2023. Mr. Kennedy sat down with the party’s chair in July, a previously undisclosed meeting, as Democrats fret about a third party bid.

For months, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he plans to continue his long-shot challenge against President Biden in the Democratic primary rather than dropping out to launch a third-party bid.

But lately Mr. Kennedy’s message has seemed to shift, including publicly telling a voter who asked about his plans that he was keeping his “options open.”

If Mr. Kennedy does decide to leave the party of his famous father and uncles to run in the general election, one potential landing spot may be the Libertarian Party, which at the moment lacks a widely known candidate but has excelled at securing ballot access.

In July, Mr. Kennedy met privately with Angela McArdle, the chair of the Libertarian Party, at a conference they were both attending in Memphis — a meeting that has not previously been reported.

“He emphasized that he was committed to running as a Democrat but said that he considered himself very libertarian,” Ms. McArdle said in an interview, adding that they agreed on several positions, including the threat of the “deep state” and the need for populist messaging. “We’re aligned on a lot of issues.”

“My perspective is that we are going to stay in touch in case he does decide to run,” Ms. McArdle said. “And he can contact me at any time if that’s the case.”

In a June interview with the libertarian magazine Reason, Mr. Kennedy acknowledged his ideological disagreements with the party — including on issues like environmental protection, abortion and civil rights — while also saying, “I’ve always been aligned with libertarians on most issues.”

In a general election, Democrats worry that a third-party run by Mr. Kennedy could draw votes away from Mr. Biden and help elect former President Donald J. Trump. They have expressed similar concerns about No Labels, the bipartisan group trying to recruit a moderate candidate for a third-party run, and also about the progressive scholar Cornel West, who is already in the race to lead the Green Party’s ticket for 2024.

Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, has been helping coordinate Democratic efforts to stop the No Labels effort. He said the hope in the party has been that Mr. Kennedy would “go away” after losing primaries to Mr. Biden.

ap logoAssociated Press, Hard-right Republicans push dangerously closer to a disruptive federal shutdown, Lisa Mascaro and Stephen Groves, Sept. 21-22, 2023. With House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s latest funding plan in ruins and lawmakers leaving town for the weekend, there’s no endgame in sight as hard-right Republicans push dangerously closer to a disruptive federal shutdown.

The White House will tell federal agencies on Friday to prepare for a shutdown, according to an official with the Office of Management and Budget who insisted on anonymity to discuss the upcoming instructions. That’s standard seven days out from a federal disruption.

The Republican McCarthy, right,  has repeatedly tried to appease his hard-right flank by agreeing to the steep spending cuts they are demanding to keep government open. But cheered on by Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner for president in 2024, the conservatives have all but seized control in dramatic fashion.

In a crushing defeat Thursday, a handful of Republican hardliners blocked a typically popular defense bill from advancing — the second time this week it was set back, an unheard-of loss for a House speaker.

djt maga hatSpeaker McCarthy is running out of options to stop a shutdown as conservatives balk at a new plan

Even a stopgap bill to keep government funding past the Sept. 30 deadline, called a continuing resolution or CR, is a non-starter for some on the right flank who have essentially seized control of the House.

“This is a whole new concept of individuals who just want to burn the whole place down,” McCarthy said after Thursday’s vote, acknowledging he was frustrated. “It doesn’t work.”

republican elephant logoThe open revolt was further evidence that McCarthy’s strategy of repeatedly giving in to the conservatives is seemingly only emboldening them, allowing them to run roughshod over their own House majority. Their conservative bills have almost no chances in the Senate.

Trump urged the conservatives to hold the line against the higher funding levels McCarthy had agreed to with President Joe Biden earlier this year and to end the federal criminal indictments against him.

“This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots,” Trump wrote on social media.

“They failed on the debt limit, but they must not fail now. Use the power of the purse and defend the Country!” the former president wrote.

The White House and Democrats, along with some Republicans, warn that a shutdown would be devastating for people who rely on their government for everyday services and would undermine America’s standing in the world.

ny times logoNew York Times, Analysis: The Wrecking-Ball Caucus: How the Far Right Brought Washington to Its Knees, Carl Hulse, Sept. 23, 2023.  Far-right Republicans are sowing mass dysfunction, and spoiling for a shutdown, an impeachment, a House coup and a military blockade.

djt maga hatWhen it comes to his view of the United States government, Representative Bob Good, a right-wing Republican who represents a Virginia district that was once the domain of Thomas Jefferson, doesn’t mince words.

“Most of what Congress does is not good for the American people,” Mr. Good declared in an interview off the House floor as the chamber descended into chaos last week. “Most of what we do as a Congress is totally unjustified.”

Though his harsh assessment is a minority opinion even among his Republican colleagues, it encapsulates the perspective that is animating the hard right on Capitol Hill and, increasingly, defining a historically dysfunctional moment in American politics.

republican elephant logoWith a disruptive government shutdown just days away, Washington is in the grip of an ultraconservative minority that sees the federal government as a threat to the republic, a dangerous monolith to be broken apart with little regard for the consequences. They have styled themselves as a wrecking crew aimed at the nation’s institutions on a variety of fronts.

They are eager to impeach the president and even oust their own speaker if he doesn’t accede to their every demand. They have refused to allow their own party to debate a Pentagon spending bill or approve routine military promotions — a striking posture given that unflinching support for the armed forces has long been a bedrock of Republican orthodoxy.

Defying the G.O.P.’s longstanding reputation as the party of law and order, they have pledged to handcuff the F.B.I. and throttle the Justice Department. Members of the party of Ronald Reagan refused to meet with a wartime ally, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, this week when he visited the Capitol and want to eliminate assistance to his country, a democratic nation under siege from an autocratic aggressor.

And they are unbowed by guardrails that in past decades forced consensus even in the most extreme of conflicts; this is the same bloc that balked at raising the debt ceiling in the spring to avert a federal debt default.

“There is a group of Republican members who seem to feel there is no limit at all as to how you can wreck the system,” said Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University. “There are no boundaries, no forbidden zones. They go where relatively junior members have feared to tread in the past.”

President Ronald Reagan is shown in a 1980s White House meeting with key right wing media and political influencers Rupert Murdoch, Roy Cohn and Charles Wick (Photo via Reagan Presidential Library).

President Ronald Reagan is shown in a 1980s White House meeting with key right wing media and political influencers Rupert Murdoch, Roy Cohn (standing) and Charles Wick (Photo via Reagan Presidential Library).

ny times logoNew York Times, The Fox Titan Turned Passion and Grievance Into Money and Power, James Poniewozik, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Rupert Murdoch built a noise-and-propaganda machine by giving his people what they wanted — and sometimes by teaching them what to want, our critic writes.

The polite way to describe the legacy of a man like Rupert Murdoch is to leave aside whether his accomplishments were good or bad and simply focus on how big they were. It is to eulogize him like Kendall Roy memorializing his father, Logan, in “Succession,” the HBO corporate drama none too slightly based on the Murdochs, among other dynasties. Maybe he had “a terrible force,” as Kendall put it, but fox news logo Small“he built, and he acted. … He made life happen.”

But the polite way is exactly the wrong way to assess Mr. Murdoch, who on Thursday announced his retirement from the boards of Fox and News Corporation. Mr. Murdoch (whose biographers included Michael Wolff in a book whose rupert murdoch michael wolff covercover is shown at left) achieved nothing the polite way. His style and his work were direct and blunt. Let us take his measure his way.

Rupert Murdoch’s empire used passion and grievance as fuel and turned it into money and power.

His tabloids ran on the idea of publishing for readers as they were, not according to some platonic ideal of how one wished them to be. That meant pinups and prize giveaways and blaring scandal headlines.

Over years and decades, Mr. Murdoch’s properties shifted their definition of “elite” away from people with more money than you and toward people with more perceived cultural capital than you, something that would be essential to nationalist politics in the 21st century and Fox’s dominance. (He did all this while living the life of a jet-setting billionaire.)

US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, right, and his wife Nadine Arslanian, pose for a photo on Capitol Hill in Washington, December 20, 2022. (Associated Press file photo by Susan Walsh).

US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, right, and his wife Nadine Arslanian, pose for a photo on Capitol Hill in Washington, December 20, 2022. (Associated Press file photo by Susan Walsh).

ny times logoNew York Times, Senator Robert Menendez Is Indicted With His Wife and 3 Others, Benjamin Weiser, Tracey Tully and William K. Rashbaum, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). The indictment said the the New Jersey senator and his wife accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of robert menendez obribes, including cash and gold bars.

Robert Menendez of New Jersey, right, the powerful Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was charged on Friday with taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes — including gold bars — to wield influence abroad and at home, aiding the government of Egypt and businessmen in New Jersey.

democratic donkey logoThe three-count federal indictment, which also charges the senator’s wife and three New Jersey businessmen, accuses him of using his official position in a wide range of corrupt schemes. In one, he sought to secretly provide Egypt with sensitive U.S. government information, prosecutors said. In two others, he aimed to influence criminal investigations of two New Jersey businessmen, one of whom was a longtime fund-raiser for Mr. Menendez.

Toward that end, the senator recommended that President Biden nominate a lawyer, Philip R. Sellinger, to be U.S. attorney for New Jersey because Mr. Menendez believed he could influence Mr. Sellinger’s prosecution of the fund-raiser, the indictment said. Mr. Sellinger, who was ultimately confirmed for the post, was not accused of any wrongdoing.

senate democrats logoIn another scheme, Mr. Menendez used his position to try to disrupt an investigation and prosecution by the New Jersey State attorney general’s office, according to the indictment.

In exchange for all those actions, the indictment said, the senator and his wife, Nadine Menendez, accepted cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, a luxury vehicle and other valuable things.

“Constituent service is part of any legislator’s job — Senator Menendez is no different,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a news conference announcing the charges. He said that Mr. Menendez’s Senate website explicitly states the kinds of services he would not provide because they are be improper.

“Behind the scenes, Senator Menendez was doing those things for certain people — the people who were bribing him and his wife,” he said.

Damian Williams, US attorney for the Southern District of New York, talks about a display of photos of evidence in an indictment against Democratic Senator Bob Menendez during a news conference, September 22, 2023, in New York (Associated Press photo by Robert Bumsted).

Damian Williams, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, talks about a display of photos of evidence in an indictment against Democratic Senator Bob Menendez during a news conference, September 22, 2023, in New York (Associated Press photo by Robert Bumsted).

Soon after the news conference, Mr. Menendez issued a page-long denial, blaming the charges on “forces behind the scenes” that have “repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave.”

He said he was confident that this matter would be “successfully resolved once all of the facts are presented and my fellow New Jerseyans will see this for what it is.”

“The excesses of these prosecutors is apparent,” he added. “They have misrepresented the normal work of a Congressional office. On top of that, not content with making false claims against me, they have attacked my wife for the longstanding friendships she had before she and I even met.”

National Legal and Policy Center, Commentary: This Time, Jared Kushner Can’t Save Robert Menendez, Peter Flaherty (NLPC co-founder), Sept. 23, 2023. This Time, Jared Kushner Can’t Save Robert Menendez.

If Senator Robert Menendez is successfully prosecuted by a Democratic Justice Department, it will be an ironic twist for Menendez, whose career likely would have ended in 2017 had Jared Kushner not been the president’s son-in-law.

Justice Department log circularKushner and his family are longtime donors to New Jersey Democrats, including Menendez, who was tried on bribery and related charges in 2017, along with his co-defendant and biggest campaign donor, Dr. Salomon Melgen. Menendez was represented by Abbe Lowell, who was also Kushner’s lawyer. (Lowell now represents Hunter Biden.)

The 2017 trial resulted in a mistrial because of a hung jury. Under circumstances that have yet to be explained, the Justice Department chose not to retry the duo.

Among the allegations, the prosecution accused Menendez of pressuring U.S. officials to get the Dominican Republic government to honor a long-dormant port security deal with a company owned by Melgen.

The port security deal was uncovered by NLPC, and was the subject of a front-page New York Times story on February 1, 2013. NLPC provided information to the Times on an exclusive basis, apparently prompting, or at least expanding, the federal criminal investigation.

Aside from the Justice Department decision not to seek a retrial, the biggest mystery of the bribery prosecution was that Justice Department never flipped Melgen to testify against Menendez. The Doctor seemed to be a prime candidate to become a prosecution witness, already facing significant prison time for Medicare fraud.

Could it be that Melgen was told that if he served a couple years in prison, saving Menendez, that political efforts could be exerted later to free him? President Trump’s subsequent commutation of the balance of Melgen’s 17-year sentence during his last days in office confirmed to me that this is exactly what happened.

Melgen may have been the least deserving candidate for presidential clemency in history, and that is saying a lot when the competition is the likes of Marc Rich, pardoned by President Clinton in 2001.

More irony is in the fact that Menendez’ wife Nadine was also indicted. Their marriage in 2020 was cited as evidence that Menendez was cleaning up his personal life after allegations (to which NLPC was not a party) involving underage girls in the Dominican Republic. According to the Justice Department media release:

In June 2022, the FBI executed a search warrant at the New Jersey home of MENENDEZ and NADINE MENENDEZ. During that search, the FBI found many of the fruits of this bribery scheme, including cash, gold, the luxury convertible, and home furnishings. Over $480,000 in cash — much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe — was discovered in the home, as well as over $70,000 in cash in NADINE MENENDEZ’s safe deposit box, which was also searched pursuant to a separate search warrant.

Menendez has engaged in transactional politics his entire career, which should have been over long ago.

ny times logoNew York Times, Egypt found a key ally in Senator Robert Menendez when it came to obtaining billions in U.S. aid, Vivian Yee and Karoun Demirjian, Sept. 23, 2023.

washington post logoWashington Post, Prospect of government shutdown poses a new threat to U.S. economy, Abha Bhattarai, Sept. 23, 2023. Economists say a shutdown, along with other disruptions — the ongoing autoworkers’ strike, rising borrowing costs and a drop-off in child-care funding — is likely to strain family budgets.

The looming federal shutdown poses a new threat to American households, whose budgets are already facing pressure from higher gas prices, imminent student loan payments and depleting pandemic savings.

Although any of those shocks on their own wouldn’t be enough to sink the economy, economists say a pileup of disruptions — including the ongoing autoworkers’ strike, rising borrowing costs and a drop-off in child-care funding — is likely to strain family budgets at a time when things are already slowing. Economists now expect growth to dip considerably in last three months of the year, as a confluence of challenges chip away at household and business spending.
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“We’re approaching a period of uncertainty just at a time when it seemed like the economy was improving,” said Megan Way, an economics professor at Babson College in Massachusetts. “Between the almost inevitable government shutdown, [autoworkers’] strike and student loan repayments, there is so much uncertainty out there, which means consumers are going to be hesitant to spend.”

U.S. braces for costly government shutdown in days

Economic growth has defied expectations so far this year, with Americans shelling out for cars, international vacations and pricey concerts all summer long. That spending, which makes up two-thirds of the U.S. economy, has helped propel growth and keep the country out a much-anticipated recession. But experts, including the head of the Federal Reserve, have cited concerns about the latest wave of uncertainties, which could cause consumers to start pulling back even if the job market remains strong.

washington post logoWashington Post, Youngkin downplays shutdown threat, which hits just as Va. voting begins, Gregory S. Schneider, Sept. 23, 2023. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) said Thursday that Virginians are “really suffering” at the prospect of a federal government shutdown but counseled patience as his fellow Republicans try to work out their differences in Congress, though earlier this week he blamed the situation on President Biden.

republican elephant logoA government shutdown would hit especially hard in Virginia, which has more than 140,000 federal civilian employees — trailing only California among states — as well as large military bases. With the current federal budget running out at the end of September, a shutdown seems increasingly probable as a few hard-right Republicans in the House of Representatives prevent GOP leadership from producing a spending plan.

A major shutdown in 2013 was also blamed on Republicans and widely said to have cost the GOP in Virginia elections that year, with Democrat Terry McAuliffe narrowly defeating Republican Ken Cuccinelli for governor. This year, the potential shutdown looms as Virginians begin early voting on Friday for Nov. 7 elections in which all 140 seats in the General Assembly are on the ballot. Youngkin is pulling out all the stops to try to gain Republican control of the legislature, which is currently split, with a GOP-run House and Democratic-controlled Senate.

 

Jessica Burgess, center, alongside her attorney, Brad Ewalt, right, is escorted out of the Madison County District courtroom by Madison County Sheriff Todd Volk, in Madison, Neb., Friday, Sept. 22, 2023. Burgess, who pleaded guilty to giving her teenage daughter pills for an abortion and helping to burn and bury the fetus, was sentenced to two years in prison. (Norfolk Daily News photo by Austin Svehla via AP)

Jessica Burgess, center, alongside her attorney, Brad Ewalt, right, is escorted out of the Madison County District courtroom by Madison County Sheriff Todd Volk, in Madison, Neb., Friday, Sept. 22, 2023. Burgess, who pleaded guilty to giving her teenage daughter pills for an abortion and helping to burn and bury the fetus, was sentenced to two years in prison. (Norfolk Daily News photo by Austin Svehla via AP) 

ny times logoNew York Times, Mother Who Gave Abortion Pills to Teen Daughter Gets 2 Years in Prison, Jesus Jiménez, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Jessica Burgess had pleaded guilty to violating Nebraska’s abortion law. Her daughter, who was 17 when she ended her late-term pregnancy last year, was sentenced in July to 90 days in jail.

A Nebraska woman who acquired abortion pills that her teenage daughter used to end her pregnancy last year was sentenced on Friday to two years in prison.

The woman, Jessica Burgess, 42, was charged after the police found her private Facebook messages, which revealed plans she had with her daughter to end the pregnancy and “burn the evidence.”

nebraska mapProsecutors said that Ms. Burgess ordered the pills online and gave them to her daughter, Celeste Burgess, in April 2022, when her daughter was 17 and in the third trimester of her pregnancy. The Burgesses later buried the fetal remains, the authorities said.

Ms. Burgess pleaded guilty in July to violating Nebraska’s abortion law, furnishing false information to a law enforcement officer and removing or concealing human skeletal remains. Celeste Burgess was sentenced in July to 90 days in jail and two years of probation after she pleaded guilty in May to removing or concealing human skeletal remains.

Jessica Burgess, who faced up to five years in prison, was sentenced to two years, with her terms for false reporting and removal of skeletal remains running concurrently.

Brad Ewalt, a lawyer for Ms. Burgess, asked Judge Mark A. Johnson of Madison County District Court on Friday to sentence his client to probation. The judge denied the request, saying that Ms. Burgess had treated the fetal remains “like yesterday’s trash,” The Norfolk Daily News reported.

Celeste Burgess, who was released from jail on Sept. 11, sat near the back of the courtroom on Friday and wiped tears from her face when her mother was sentenced, The Daily News reported.

Mr. Ewalt and the Madison County prosecutor who tried the case did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.

A police investigation into the Burgesses began before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. The case has fueled fears that people who end their pregnancies in the post-Roe era, and those who help them, could be prosecuted for having abortions and that their private communications could be used as evidence against them.

The investigation began in late April 2022, when the police in Norfolk, Neb., began looking into whether a 17-year-old girl had given birth prematurely to a stillborn baby, and whether the girl and her mother had buried it, according to court documents.

At the time, abortion was banned in Nebraska after 20 weeks from conception. This May, Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, signed a 12-week ban into law.

The Burgesses were initially charged with concealing a stillbirth. But according to court documents, a detective later asked Celeste Burgess for the exact date her pregnancy ended. When she said she needed to check her Facebook messages to remember, the detective obtained a warrant for messages she had exchanged with her mother.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, complied with the warrant. The detective found evidence of a medically induced abortion, according to court documents, allowing the authorities to file additional charges.

ny times logoNew York Times, U.A.W. Extends Walkouts to More Plants, but Cites Progress in Ford Talks, Neal E. Boudette, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). The union designated 38 parts distribution factories as additional strike targets at G.M. and Stellantis.

uaw logoThe United Automobile Workers union on Friday significantly raised the pressure on General Motors and Stellantis, the parent of Jeep and Ram, by expanding its strike against the companies to include all the spare parts distribution centers of the two companies.

By widening the strike to the distribution centers, which supply parts to dealerships for repairs, the union is effectively taking its case to consumers, some of whom might find it difficult or impossible to have their cars and trucks fixed. The strategy could pressure the automakers to make more concessions to the union but it could backfire on the union by frustrating car owners and turning them against the U.A.W.

Shawn Fain, the union’s president, said Friday that workers at 38 distribution centers at the two companies would walk off the job. He said talks with two companies had not progressed significantly, contrasting them with Ford Motor, which he said had done more to meet the union’s demands.

Here’s what to know about the expanded strikes by autoworkers.

The president of the United Automobile Workers publicly invited President Biden to join workers on the picket lines.

ny times logoNew York Times, U.S. Provided Canada With Intelligence on Killing of Sikh Leader, Julian E. Barnes and Ian Austen, Sept. 23, 2023. U.S. intelligence gave assistance, but communications intercepted by Canada were more definitive in linking India to the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

canadian flagAmerican spy agencies provided information to Ottawa after the killing of a Sikh separatist leader in the Vancouver area, but Canada developed the most definitive intelligence that led it to accuse India of orchestrating the plot, according to Western allied officials.

In the aftermath of the killing, U.S. intelligence agencies offered their Canadian counterparts context that helped Canada conclude that India had been involved. Yet what appears to be the “smoking gun,” intercepted communications of Indian diplomats in Canada indicating involvement in the plot, was gathered by Canadian officials, allied officials said.

While Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has called on India to cooperate with the Canadian investigation, American officials have largely tried to avoid triggering any diplomatic blowback from India. But the disclosure of the involvement of U.S. intelligence risks ensnaring Washington in the diplomatic battle between Canada and India at a time when it is keen to develop New Delhi as a closer hardeep singh nijjarpartner.

The United States did not learn about the plot, or evidence pointing to India’s involvement in it, until after operatives had killed the Sikh leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, right, allied officials said.

 

More On U.S. Politics, Governance, Elections

World Crisis Radio, Weekly Strategic Overview and Reform Agenda: Campaign by corrupt Wall Street media to foment Democratic defeatism webster tarpley 2007refuted by election returns! Webster G. Tarpley, right, historian and commentator, Sept. 23, 2023. Surveys of scores of 2023 state-level special elections show Democrats overperforming recent results by 8% to 10%; Tired demagogy of inflation and Biden’s age falls flat with voters: UNH-CNN poll shows Biden leading Trump 52% to 40% in New Hampshire, with 94% of Democrats committed to voting for Biden;

Garland’s duty is to defend US government against going fascist assault, not to curate his own inflated reputation for rectitude; Indictment of Hunter Biden reeks of dirty politics of both-sidesism Garland could stop if he wanted to;

Biden pledges vital ATACM missiles and $325 million to Zelensky; White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients must now assure rapid delivery; Ukraine hits Russian naval HQ for Crimea in Sevastopol; Is Russia on verge of a new warlord era?

After demanding end of US Constitution and pledging to have DoJ arrest opponents, Trump orders House MAGAts to paralyze government and stop his prosecution by Feds; reactionary anarchists rush to obey; Qevin sabotages support for Kyiv, but Ukrainian APCs are now operating south of Surovikhin line; Putin continues to bet everything on Trump’s return to power;

vivek ramaswamy linked inRamaswampy, left, demands scrapping of XIV Amendment, fruit of Union sacrifice in Civil War; Haley and Scott spearhead GOP scab attack on striking UAW; Don’t be a chump for Trump, no matter what he promises;

Musk probed by Senate committees over taxes and his Starlink sabotage of Ukraine’s defense measures in occupied Crimea; The erratic billionaire says he wants a modern American version of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the bloody-handed leader of the oligarchical party in the late Roman Republic c. 80 BC, who started and won a civil war, becoming the gravedigger of the republic; What are we to make of this strange remark?

washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: Democrats need to shove Menendez off the stage, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 22, 2023. In a statement that, frankly, jennifer rubin new headshotsounded Trumpian in its grievance and grandiosity, Menendez lashed out at prosecutors and shamefully played the discrimination card. (“Those behind this campaign simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a U.S. Senator and serve with honor and distinction.”) His outrageous accusation ignores five other Latino Americans in the Senate.

The Democratic senator’s indictment refutes the GOP’s enraged allegations — on full display Wednesday in House Republicans’ interrogation of Attorney General Merrick Garland over the indictment of Hunter Biden — that the Justice Department has been “weaponized” against Republicans.

Yet this is a moment of choosing for Democrats. Unlike their GOP counterparts, they should not feel compelled to cover their eyes and ears when one of their own appears to be caught red-handed.

Democrats, the only party still adhering to minimal standards expected in a democracy, should not stand by Menendez silently. Let him fight the charges, as he clearly intends to, but not from a perch on Capitol Hill.

 washington post logoWashington Post, N.J. governor calls on Menendez to resign from Senate after indictment, Marisa Iati and Isaac Stanley-Becker, Sept. 23, 2023. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D), shown in an official photo, and two veteran New Jersey members of Congress on Friday called on Sen. Robert phil murphy o smile CustomMenendez (N.J.), a fellow Democrat, to resign after the senator was indicted on federal bribery charges, saying the “deeply disturbing” allegations “implicate national security.”

Menendez, an influential Democrat who has served in the Senate since 2006, already stepped down Friday — at least temporarily — as chair of the chamber’s Foreign Relations Committee, as the Senate Democratic Caucus’s rules require.

The call for Menendez to abdicate his seat was echoed by state Democratic Party Chairman LeRoy Jones Jr., who said urging the senator to step aside was a “tough decision.”

“But to read the indictment is to see that these allegations are serious,” Jones said in an interview. “It just leaves people like myself and other elected leaders no choice but to call for his resignation.”

Politico, Biden receives updated Covid shot amid rocky rollout, vaccine polarization, Olivia Alafriz, Sept. 23, 2023. The updated shot was approved by the FDA earlier this month and the CDC recommended it for all individuals six months and older.

politico CustomPresident Joe Biden received the updated Covid-19 vaccine, according to a memo from White House physician Kevin O’Connor released Saturday.

“As we enter the cold and flu season, the President encourages all Americans to follow his example and to check with their healthcare provider or pharmacist to assure that they are fully vaccinated,” O’Connor wrote in the memo.

The president received the Covid vaccine alongside the annual flu vaccine Friday, O’Connor wrote. First lady Jill Biden experienced “mild symptoms” when she contracted Covid earlier this month. The president tested negative.

The updated shot was approved by the FDA earlier this month and the CDC recommended it for all individuals six months and older — however, the rollout has been rocky.

With the federal government no longer purchasing and distributing the shot, logistical hiccups and confusion over insurance coverage have presented obstacles to people seeking the vaccine.

Covid hospitalization data published by the CDC show that virus levels have surged recently. However, the CDC stopped recording individual cases when the public health emergency ended in May, so the exact number of cases is uncertain.

The White House has also struggled to combat growing anti-vaccine sentiment in a polarized political environment.

Vaccine skepticism is increasingly pronounced in the GOP, polls show. A new Politico, | Morning Consult poll showed that Republican voters were less likely than Democrats or independents to say vaccines are safe for children and only 27 percent of Republicans said the Covid vaccine is “very safe” for adults — while nearly as many, 23 percent, said it’s “very unsafe.”

GOP presidential candidates, in contrast to Biden, have disavowed the vaccine. Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has said he regrets taking the vaccine (although his wife, a surgeon, has disagreed) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has leaned into Covid skepticism.

Biden’s primary challenger, Robert Kennedy, Jr., is also a prominent vaccine skeptic.

washington post logoWashington Post, Deep Reads: ‘What does next look like?’ Gisele Fetterman is still finding out, Ruby Cramer, Photos by Demetrius Freeman, Sept. 23, 2023. Half a year after Sen. John Fetterman’s mental health crisis, his wife navigates between worry and acceptance.

How many times had her husband taken this trip to Washington? More than a dozen by now. At first, during the campaign of 2022, a U.S. Senate seat had meant something different to the family, a chance to lead on gun violence, abortion, immigration. Then came the stroke, the auditory processing disorder, the depression that became severe depression. Then came the hospitalization, Building 10, Room 768, of the Walter Reed neuropsychology unit. Then an end date to inpatient treatment and a prognosis: “remission,” the doctors had said, though nothing had ended, really. The center of the Fetterman family, the thing their lives revolved around daily, was now mental health.

“How are you?” people ask Gisele, if they aren’t asking about John. They tell her how strong she is. They tell her how sorry they are. They say they can’t thank her enough. Some send messages mocking her husband’s speech, or to say he should resign. But in a time when more Americans are being diagnosed with depression than ever before, there are people looking around for families like their own, and here are the Fettermans, in view and within reach. All day, more messages arrive — in emails, in tweets, on Instagram. People want to tell her about their own depression, about loved ones with schizophrenia and thoughts of suicide. A man wants her to know about the son he lost a year ago. Another about the brother he lost three weeks ago. A woman texts her to say she’s checking herself into the hospital right now. They tell her they are scared and worried — and they wonder if maybe Gisele is scared and worried, too.

washington post logoWashington Post, Dallas mayor switches to GOP, making city the largest led by a Republican, Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, Sept. 22, 2023. The mayor of Dallas is switching parties after serving in public office for years as a Democrat, making the north Texas city the country’s largest led by a Republican.

Eric Johnson, a former Democratic Texas state lawmaker, wrote in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on Friday that he was switching parties because “too many Democrats insist on virtue signaling,” and argued that Democratic policies have not sufficiently addressed crime and homelessness.

“Next spring, I will be voting in the Republican primary,” Johnson wrote in a piece with the headline “America’s cities need Republicans, and I’m becoming one.”

Johnson was elected to the nonpartisan office — meaning candidates don’t run as Democrats or Republicans — in 2019 and reelected in May, but said he will leave the position in 2027 as a member of the GOP.

“American cities need Republicans — and Republicans need American cities,” Johnson wrote.

He went on to say that he was switching because American cities are “in disarray,” as local Democratic leaders haven’t, in his view, made public safety a priority. He also claimed Democrats spent tax dollars in a way that made homelessness worse while “finding new ways to thumb their noses at Republicans,” rather than focusing on solving problems.

Johnson called for other mayors to stand up for law and order while reducing taxes.

Republicans across the country have in recent years attacked Democrats over public safety, even with the rise of tougher-on-crime Democrats who have vowed to address violence and fund police.

Some local Democratic leaders were not surprised by the move, saying the mayor had governed more toward the center than they felt Dallas voters wanted. Johnson recently voted against the city’s nearly $5 billion budget passed by the city council, citing insufficient cuts of the property tax rate, and has supported anti-crime initiatives.

“He’s proven to be what we thought he was,” Kardal Coleman, chair of the Dallas County Democratic Party, told The Washington Post. “It’s an insult to the voters in the city of Dallas, who were sold on a bait and switch. Mayor Johnson is abandoning his values and, unfortunately, the people and voters of Dallas.”

ny times logoNew York Times, In Three Southern States, a Legal Battle Over Political Maps and Black Voters, Michael Wines, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). G.O.P. legislatures in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana are contesting federal orders to redraw congressional maps.

Democratic-Republican Campaign logosThe Republican-led legislatures of Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama find themselves backed against courtroom walls this month in strikingly similar circumstances, defending congressional maps that federal judges have said appear to discriminate against Black voters.

It is a familiar position. Last year, the same judges said that, even before full trials were held, the same maps were so likely illegal that replacements should be used for the 2022 elections. That did not happen: Thanks to a once-obscure Supreme Court rule that outlaws election-law changes close to campaign season, the disputed maps were used anyway.

With an electorate so deeply split along partisan lines that few House races are competitive, the significance last November was glaring. Republicans took control of the House of Representatives by a bare five seats, three of them from districts they were poised to lose had new maps been used in the three states.

Now the revived litigation is again churning through the courts — at least six of them, at last count — with the same political stakes and a sharply divided view of the likely outcomes.

 

 

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH).

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH).

ny times logoNew York Times, Attorney General Rebuffs Efforts to Reveal Details on Hunter Biden Inquiry, Glenn Thrush, Sept. 21, 2023 (print ed.). Attorney General Merrick Garland struck a sharp tone at a House hearing, saying prosecutors would not be “intimidated” by threats from Donald Trump’s allies.

merrick garlandAttorney General Merrick B. Garland offered a fiery defense of the Justice Department’s investigation of Hunter Biden on Wednesday, telling a House committee he was “not Congress’s prosecutor” — and would not reveal details of the U.S. House logoinquiry no matter how much pressure lawmakers applied.

During a grueling hearing before the House Judiciary Committee that foreshadowed a bruising impeachment fight ahead, Mr. Garland repeatedly refused to answer questions about internal deliberations or offer explanations for decision-making in the investigation, or the two federal indictments of former President Donald J. Trump.

Justice Department log circularHouse Republicans view Mr. Garland as a linchpin as they seek to bolster an impeachment inquiry into President Biden that is grounded, thus far, in inconclusive evidence that he profited from the business dealings of his son, Hunter. They have suggested Mr. Garland also might face impeachment, or contempt charges, for not fully answering their questions or providing access to documents and witnesses they have demanded.

Many of the claims and insinuations they leveled against Mr. Garland — that he is part of a coordinated Democratic effort to shield the Bidens and persecute Mr. Trump — were not supported by fact. And much of the specific evidence presented, particularly the testimony of an investigator who questioned key decisions in the Hunter Biden investigation, was given without context or acknowledgment of contradictory information.

Mr. Garland, a former federal appellate judge known for his circumspect and soft-spoken demeanor, took a more aggressive approach than during past hearings, alarmed by relentless attacks against his department. Countering their claims, he denounced escalating threats Trump supporters have directed against prosecutors, including the special counsel Jack Smith, and F.B.I. agents, prompting significant increases in security.

“Singling out individual career public servants who are just doing their jobs is dangerous — particularly at a time of increased threats to the safety of public servants and their families,” said Mr. Garland, who later reacted angrily when a Republican committee member called out a career prosecutor by name.

“We will not be intimidated,” he added. “We will do our jobs free from outside influence. And we will not back down from defending our democracy.”

It was Mr. Garland’s first appearance before the committee — stocked with far-right Trump stalwarts — since Mr. Smith brought two criminal indictments against Mr. Trump and a plea deal for Hunter Biden collapsed over the summer.

Mr. Garland’s testimony took place at what had been, in years past, a routine oversight hearing that would typically center on policy, crime, law enforcement initiatives and civil rights — issues that were largely jettisoned for attacks by Republicans and counterattacks by Democrats.

Over the past week, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has increased the pace and scope of his demand for access to documents and officials, including Mr. Weiss and his deputies, claiming they are fundamentally necessary for his committee to fulfill its oversight function.

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Republican Threats To Shut U.S. Government

 gop house chairs 2023

washington post logoWashington Post, House Republicans eye long-term funding without deal yet to avert shutdown, Marianna Sotomayor and Leigh Ann Caldwell, Sept. 23, 2023. House Republicans on Friday continued work on a plan that would move several long-term spending bills through the chamber next week, fulfilling a long-standing request by hard-right lawmakers with no guarantee it will break loose the necessary support for a short-term funding solution to avoid a government shutdown.

kevin mccarthyAfter a handful of House Republicans blocked their party from considering funding bills twice this week, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), right, continued to insist that his conference will find a solution to fund the government without relying on Democratic support.

“I believe we have a majority here and we can work together to solve this,” McCarthy told reporters Friday, roughly one week before the government will shut down if a deal isn’t reached. “It might take us a little longer.”

McCarthy’s latest proposal is for lawmakers returning Tuesday to begin the process of considering and amending bills that would fund four government departments for all of fiscal 2024. However, it remains unclear if Republicans have enough support to overcome a procedural vote to even start debate on these bills, which is the same hurdle that five Republicans blocked twice this week.

Leaders hope that by amending the Defense and Homeland Security Department bills on the floor, they can appease certain objectors with policy concerns. Most notably, McCarthy said the House would remove any funding for Ukraine from existing legislation and put it up as a separate vote, a singular concession to earn the support of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).

In a video posted Friday on X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter, Greene said she was mad at leadership because she has consistently said she would not support spending any money on Ukraine, only to be finally taken seriously after she voted against starting debate on the Defense Department bill Thursday.

The changes could be made if Republicans don’t block the procedural vote set for Tuesday. Rep. Marcus J. Molinaro (R-N.Y.), a moderate who has been involved in ongoing negotiations, suggested that there will be enough support to start debate on four appropriation bills if assurances could be made about the process, including the amendments process.

But just focusing on passing full-year appropriation bills next week does nothing to avert a shutdown by Sept. 30, when the current fiscal year funding runs out. While McCarthy and several other lawmakers have said they hope to find a compromise among Republicans to pass a short-term deal that averts a shutdown, two proposed pathways to do so were rejected this week by more than four Republicans, who say they will never vote for any stopgap bill.

washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: In a leaderless House, the ‘clowns’ stumble toward a shutdown, Dana Milbank, right, Sept. 22, 2023. Martin Luther dana milbank newestnailed his theses to a church door. Matt Gaetz displayed his in the men’s room.

Specifically, the congressman (or somebody) left a draft of his “Motion to Vacate” on a baby changing table in a restroom downstairs from the House chamber, where it was found by journalist Matt Laslo. “H. Res. __,” it began. “Resolved, that the Office of Speaker of the House of Representatives is hereby declared to be vacant.”

But Gaetz (R-Fla.) doesn’t need a resolution to “vacate the chair,” as a motion to remove Kevin McCarthy as speaker is called. For all practical purposes, the chair is already vacant.

It should have been obvious to all this week, if it wasn’t already, that McCarthy (R-Calif.) is speaker in name only, as his leaderless Republican caucus stumbles toward a government shutdown. Review some of the labels House Republicans hurled at each other over the last few days:

“Clown show.” “Clowns.” “Foolishness.” “Weak.” “Terribly misguided.” “Selective amnesia.” “Stupidity.” “Failure to lead.” “Lunatics.” “Disgraceful.” “New low.” “Enabling Chairman Xi.” “People that have serious issues.” “Pathetic.”

washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: Enough is enough. McCarthy must bring the GOP rebels to heel, Henry Olsen, right, Sept. 23, 2023. Ultra-MAGA henry olsenobstructionists once again humiliated House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) this week, defeating a rule to move the defense appropriations bill forward. The GOP defectors are surely chortling over their ability to control the chamber, albeit to no apparent end.

republican elephant logoEnough is enough. McCarthy has not used the full power of his office to bring the nihilist rebels to heel, nor has he tried to marshal his colleagues’ anger and frustration at these recalcitrant children. He should move to change House Republican rules to hit them where it hurts: their reelection prospects.

Current rules prevent McCarthy from doing that.

But this is no ordinary moment for the party. Time and again, the same group of malcontents have refused to demonstrate a shred of party loyalty. They demand things that cannot obtain the assent of their colleagues, much less Congress as a whole. They laugh in the face of their supposed friends by voting against what almost everyone in the party has agreed upon.

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Pushback To GOP Hunter Biden Attacks, Impeachment Threats 

ny times logoNew York Times, Opinion: The Borking of Joe Biden, Pamela Paul, right, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). If there was any doubt that the Republican pamela paul 2019House was no more sophisticated than a preschool playground, last week’s opening of an impeachment inquiry into President Biden settled it with a nasty kick of sand in Democrats’ face.

How else can you describe the pretext for this fishing expedition other than “You started it”? If our guy got embroiled in impeachment and protracted legal proceedings during election season, well then, damn it, so will yours.

Whereas Democrats began the first Trump impeachment inquiry after it was revealed that he tried to extort a political favor from the president of Ukraine in exchange for military aid, and the second impeachment after an insurrection, the Biden inquiry is proceeding with no clear evidence of any misdeeds by the president.

This is just the latest asymmetric tit-for-tat by Republicans.

Even many Republicans in Congress don’t buy into this kind of baloney, as we’ve learned from a series of Washington confessionals and from several Republicans who have questioned whether their side has the goods or if this is the best use of their time. As Kevin McCarthy announced the impeachment inquiry, you could almost see his wispy soul sucked out Dementor-style, joining whatever ghostly remains of Paul Ryan’s abandoned integrity still wander the halls of Congress.

But this isn’t the first time we’ve witnessed this kind of sorry perversion of Democratic precedent. What Democrats do first in good faith, Republicans repeat in bad faith. Time and again, partisan steps that Democrats take with caution are transmogrified into extraordinary retaliation by Republicans.

And so, Al Gore’s challenge of the 2000 election results, ending in his decorous acceptance of the results after a bitter court ruling, is reincarnated as an unhinged insurrection at the Capitol in 2021.

In exchange for the brief moment after the 2004 election when some Democrats claimed irregularities with the Ohio ballot process, we get Republicans taking baseless claims of voter fraud in 2020 to thermonuclear level.

In June 1992, Biden, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called on President George H.W. Bush not to nominate any candidate for the Supreme Court until after the fall election, saying it was “fair” and “essential” to keep what could be a sharp political conflict out of the campaign’s final days — as well as the nomination process itself. Of course, with no vacancy at hand, the stakes in that instance were nonexistent. But just after Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Mitch McConnell took the extraordinary position that he would not submit any Supreme Court nominee from President Barack Obama for Senate consideration in an election year. By ignoring that nominee, Merrick Garland, Republicans maintained a conservative majority on the court. McConnell, of course, disingenuously cited the “Biden rule” in his decision.

It is a bitter paradox that Biden, long a careful moderate, has suffered the brunt of this vindictive one-upmanship. The trouble with being around for so long, as Biden has been, is that there is always someone who remembers “the time when you” and holds a grudge.

ny times logoNew York Times, First Batch of Biden Emails Undercuts G.O.P. Claims, Luke Broadwater, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). House Republicans have suggested that President Biden used an email alias to abuse his office and cover it up, but an initial tranche of the messages reveals banal content and personal information.

When House Republicans pressing to impeach President Biden discovered that the government had redacted emails in which he had used aliases to communicate while he was vice president, they demanded to see the full copies, alleging a cover-up of explosive evidence of wrongdoing.

Even Democrats were alarmed about the content of the correspondence, Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky and the chairman of the Oversight Committee, claimed in media interviews, saying they might link the president to Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine.

“They fear there are many more emails sitting in the National Archives that had been redacted with Hunter Biden’s name on it,” Mr. Comer told Newsmax, “and I think you’re going to see a lot of Democrats hit the panic button when we get those emails that haven’t been redacted.”

In fact, the first 14 pages of unredacted material yielded little for Democrats to panic about. The redactions were to black out personal information — things like Mr. Biden’s 8 a.m. appointment with his personal trainer and a lunch with his grandchildren — according to people familiar with the emails turned over to the oversight panel this week by the National Archives.

The emails are only a fraction of the more than 5,000 the Archives say exist in which Mr. Biden used a series of aliases — “Robin Ware,” “Robert L. Peters” and “JRB Ware” — to communicate, and Republicans say they may yet uncover the evidence they are seeking that he abused his office. Their existence had been known for two years, but it was not until the Archives revealed that they included redactions that Mr. Comer began publicly demanding their full release.

Emptywheel, Analysis: What If Journalists Actually Read Gary Shapley Rather Than Parroting His Testimony? Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Sept. 21, 2023. There was a really depressing House Judiciary Committee Hearing with Merrick Garland yesterday.

Republicans relentlessly claimed that Hunter Biden was getting special treatment because the U.S. Attorney investigating him, who wanted more leverage to force a plea deal, had been granted Special Counsel status — which should prove, instead, that DOJ was deploying extraordinary prosecutorial resources against a private citizen. Republicans relentlessly complained that Garland hadn’t interfered in Weiss’ investigation — at all! — to make him charge Hunter Biden more quickly or more aggressively when the entire point was he had agreed in his confirmation hearing not to interfere.

Republicans also repeated, over and over, two claims that Gary Shapley — the so-called whistleblower all these Republicans claim to trust implicitly — had already addressed in his notes. Those two claims are that David Weiss “let” statutes of limitation on the two Burisma years Republicans believe include the most corruption expire, and that he couldn’t get authority to charge Hunter in the venue — Los Angeles — where more recent tax years had venue.

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Ukraine-Russian War, Russian Leadership

 

President Biden met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office on Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023 (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

President Biden met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office on Thursday (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

ny times logoNew York Times, Russia-Ukraine War: Zelensky Thanks Americans in Emotional Speech to End Washington Visit, Karoun Demirjian and Ben Shpigel, Updated Sept. 22, 2023. “There is not a soul in Ukraine that does not feel gratitude to you, America,” the Ukrainian president said after a long day of lobbying Congress for more aid and a meeting with President Biden.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine finished a long day of lobbying in Washington at the White House, where he met Thursday with President Biden after receiving a $325 million air-defense package, but appeared to have made little immediate progress in persuading House leadership to approve another $24 billion in military and humanitarian aid.

ukraine flagMr. Zelensky, accompanied by his wife, Olena Zelenska, capped off his visit with an emotional speech at the National Archive on Thursday evening, during which he and his wife thanked Americans for their support.

Zelensky is working hard to highlight the values that bind the American and Ukrainian people, stressing a shared love of freedom. He says U.S. aid has saved millions of lives in Ukraine by keeping most of the country out of Russian hands.

Politico, Ukraine claims senior Russian navy officers killed, injured in Crimea missile strike, Carlo Martuscelli, Sept. 23, 2023. A Ukrainian politico Custommissile attack on the Russian navy’s Black Sea fleet headquarters on Friday killed and injured “dozens” of Russian troops, including a number of senior officials, Ukraine’s armed forces claimed on Saturday.

The claim, which couldn’t be verified, came as another rocket attack was launched on the Crimean city of Sevastopol, where the fleet is based, on Saturday. The Russia-installed governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said on Telegram that debris from intercepted missiles fell near a pier during the latest assault.

Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces said on Telegram that more details of Friday’s missile attack would be communicated “when possible.”

Ukraine’s intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov told U.S. broadcaster Voice of America that at least nine people were killed and another 16 were injured in Friday’s attack.

According to Budanov, Russian Colonel-General Alexander Romanchuk was in “very serious condition,” while chief of staff Lieutenant General Oleg Tsekov was unconscious, Voice of America reported. Budanov didn’t, however, confirm reports that the Black Sea Admiral Viktor Sokolov had been killed in the attack, the broadcaster said. The claims could not be verified.

Crimea, which extends into the Black Sea, was occupied illegally by Russia in 2014.

ny times logoNew York Times, Europe Pledged Ammunition for Ukraine. Providing It Is Another Challenge, Lara Jakes, Sept. 23, 2023. After 30 years of atrophy, experts say, Europe’s shrunken defense industry will struggle to provide the Ukrainians with a million artillery shells by next March.

The pledge last March sounded as catchy as it was ambitious: European Union states would deliver a million rounds of 155-millimeter ammunition to Ukraine within a year.

Now, at a critical moment in the war and with Ukraine running short of artillery shells to drive its counteroffensive, experts, weapons manufacturers and even some government officials are expressing growing doubts. Europe’s shrunken military sector, they say, may simply be unable to ramp up production fast enough to achieve the million-shell goal.

Since March, governments across Europe have become more aggressive about assessing — and replenishing — ammunition needs, not just for Ukraine, but also for their own military stockpiles.

Manufacturers are building 155-millimeter rounds even before being fully paid. And European Union officials have fast-tracked at least eight contracts with producers on the continent to supply and reimburse states that jointly procure artillery ammunition instead of competing for it.

ny times logoNew York Times, Ukrainian forces targeted occupied Crimea with an air attack on Saturday, the second in two days, Russia said, Constant Méheut, Sept. 23, 2023. Russian-installed authorities in the occupied peninsula said debris from a downed rocket fell in the Sevastopol bay, where Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet is based.

ukraine flagUkrainian forces targeted the peninsula with another air attack on Saturday, the second in two days as Kyiv increasingly takes aim at the region in an effort to disrupt Moscow’s military operations.

Mikhail Razvozhayev, the governor of Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city and the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, said that air defenses had been activated in the area and that debris from a downed rocket fell in the bay. The local authorities issued several warnings about possible air assaults on Saturday morning, urging residents to stay calm and seek shelter.

Saturday’s attack, which was not immediately confirmed by Ukraine’s military, came a day after Ukrainian forces launched a missile strike that damaged the Black Sea Fleet’s headquarters. Russia’s Defense Ministry said that a serviceman was missing after that attack.

The back-to-back assaults on Crimea, which the Kremlin illegally annexed in 2014, are part of a Ukrainian campaign to hit deep behind Russian lines in an effort to sever Moscow’s battlefield supply chain and undermine Russia’s ability to hit Ukrainian territory from afar. In recent weeks, Ukraine has sharply accelerated the pace of strikes on the peninsula, hitting air-defense systems, a submarine and a command post.

ny times logoNew York Times, Budget Drones Prove Their Value in a Billion-Dollar War, Andrew E. Kramer, Photographs by Lynsey Addario, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). A fleet of inexpensive, mostly off-the-shelf drones is helping Ukrainian forces evade and target sophisticated Russian air defense systems.

ukraine flagThey are made of plastic or plastic foam, weigh only a few pounds and are often launched simply by having a soldier throw them into the air, as if tossing a javelin.

In a slow-moving counteroffensive against Russian forces that has been reliant at times on the smallest advantages, a fleet of cheap, mostly off-the-shelf drones is providing one for the Ukrainians.

The drones have begun to make a difference in one corner of a stagnant war, soldiers, commanders and pilots said in interviews, because their different materials and variable frequencies can evade enemy jamming systems. That has allowed them to venture farther in searches for enemy artillery positions and multimillion-dollar air defense systems, all while risking aircraft worth only a few thousand dollars apiece.

Along one of their two main Ukrainian lines of advance in the south, they say, the Russian Army has been forced to move its howitzers out of range of Ukraine’s guns, as drone pilots have adapted well enough to regularly evade Russian electronic jamming systems that had been spotting them reliably earlier in the war.

ny times logoNew York Times, Russia Says Ukrainian Strike Targeted Black Sea Fleet’s Headquarters, Constant Méheut, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). The fleet’s headquarters were damaged in the attack, which was the latest on occupied Crimea as Kyiv sought to disrupt Moscow’s military operations.

Russian FlagUkraine launched a missile attack on the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea on Friday, Russian and Ukrainian authorities said, the latest strike on the illegally occupied peninsula as Kyiv seeks to disrupt Moscow’s military operations.

Russia’s defense ministry said that air defenses had shot down five missiles but that the Black Sea Fleet’s headquarters in the city of Sevastopol had sustained damage. One service member was missing after the attack, it added in a statement.

Video footage posted on social networks showed thick black smoke billowing from what appeared to be the headquarters. It was not immediately known whether the building was hit in a direct strike that had evaded air defenses or by fragments of an intercepted missile. The Russian state news agency Tass reported that debris was “scattered hundreds of meters away after the missile strike” and that ambulances were heading to the scene.

The headquarters was damaged in the attack, the latest on the illegally occupied peninsula as Kyiv seeks to disrupt Moscow’s military operations.

Here’s what we’re covering:

  • Here are some of the highlights of President Zelensky’s trip to the U.S.
  • The U.S. is expanding F-16 patrols over Romania amid concerns about drone debris.
  • A cargo ship departs a Ukrainian port with grain, again testing the Black Sea route.

ny times logoNew York Times, Zelensky meets with Trudeau before addressing Canada’s Parliament, Ian Austen, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was holding meetings with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada on Friday morning before addressing the country’s Parliament on his first trip to the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

canadian flagMr. Trudeau has been a particularly strong supporter of Ukraine, reflecting a consensus among Canadians. His country has the largest population of expatriate Ukrainians and Mr. Trudeau’s government has provided about $3.7 billion in financial assistance to Ukraine and an additional $1.3 billion in military aid.

The Canadian prime minister greeted Mr. Zelensky at a 19th-century building in Canada’s Parliamentary complex that has become the temporary home of the House of Commons, which is being renovated. Early Friday afternoon, Mr. Zelensky is scheduled to address the House and Canada’s unelected Senate in a joint session in the chamber.

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President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday and said Russia had weaponized essentials like food and energy (Reuters photo).

 President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday and said Russia had weaponized essentials like food and energy (Reuters photo).

 

Canada Accuses India of Sikh Leader's Assassination

 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada during a frosty meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India during the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi earlier in September 2023 (Canadian Press photo by Sean Kilpatrick via Associated Press).

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada during a frosty meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India during the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi earlier this month, in September 2023 (Canadian Press photo by Sean Kilpatrick via Associated Press).

ny times logoNew York Times, India Suspends Visas for Canadians, Escalating Clash Over Sikh’s Killing, Suhasini Raj and Yan Zhuang, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). The suspension came after Canada claimed that India was involved in the assassination of a Canadian citizen who supported a separatist cause.

india flag mapIndia has suspended visa applications by Canadian nationals, a sharp escalation in the diplomatic conflict that has followed Canada’s claim that Indian agents were behind an assassination in June on Canadian soil.

Arindam Bagchi, the Indian foreign ministry spokesman, described the move as a technical and security issue, saying on Thursday that the country’s high commission and consulates in Canada were “temporarily unable” to process visas because of safety threats.

“This has disrupted their normal function,” Mr. Bagchi said during a regularly scheduled news briefing, adding: “We will be reviewing the situation on a regular basis.”

canadian flagBut the suspension came as tensions between India and Canada have soared in the days since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in Parliament that Canada’s intelligence services had information linking the Indian government to the killing of a Sikh separatist in British Columbia on June 18.

The Indian government on Tuesday forcefully rejected the claim that it had been involved in the assassination of the Sikh Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, and accused Canada of harboring terrorists who are seeking to carve a Sikh homeland out of India’s territory.

India then moved to expel a high-ranking Canadian diplomat from New Delhi. Canada had expelled an Indian diplomat — described as the head of New Delhi’s intelligence agency in Canada — the day before.

On Thursday, Mr. Bagchi signaled that more Canadian diplomats could soon leave India, in what he called a step to ensure “parity” between the two countries’ diplomatic presences.

“Their numbers here are very much higher than ours in Canada,” he said. “The details of this are being worked out, but I assume there will be a reduction from the Canadian side.”

Canadians have voiced outrage at the possibility that the Indian government had played a role in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. In July, protesters outside the Indian Consulate General in Toronto promoted the Sikh secessionist cause with signs that accused Indian diplomats of being behind Mr. Nijjar’s death.

ny times logoNew York Times, Analysis: Biden Is Caught Between Allies as Canada Accuses India of Assassination, Peter Baker, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). President Biden has prioritized bolstering partnerships over full-throated advocacy for democracy among American allies.

A day after promising to “defend democracy,” President Biden brought up India and Saudi Arabia on Wednesday during a round of meetings at the United Nations — not to raise concerns about repression by either, but to hail them for helping establish a new economic corridor. “I think it’s a big deal,” he said.

Perhaps no two countries reflect the difficult and delicate trade-offs in Mr. Biden’s foreign policy at the moment more than India and Saudi Arabia. He has made it a priority to court both nations as part of his effort to counter Russia and China, even as India has been backsliding in its democracy and Saudi Arabia never had one to begin with.

The news of the week illustrated just how acute that tension really is. India’s government was accused of orchestrating the assassination of a political opponent on Canadian soil, leaving Mr. Biden caught between one of America’s oldest friends and the newer friend he has been cultivating. And word emerged that Mr. Biden’s envoys are negotiating a new defense treaty with Saudi Arabia, putting aside its own history of extraterritorial killing.

While Mr. Biden did not address either subject, the White House responded to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s accusations against India on Wednesday with studied judiciousness. John F. Kirby, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s National Security Council, pronounced the administration “deeply concerned” about the allegations and said that “the facts should take the investigators where they may and that the perpetrators of this attack need to be brought to justice.”

washington post logoWashington Post, Masked gunmen, an ambush, a chase: The execution of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, Samantha Schmidt, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). From the outset, the Sikh leader’s community in Surrey, British Columbia, believed the Indian government of Narendra Modi was behind his death.

Hardeep Singh Nijjar was in a hurry to leave the temple. It was Father’s Day, and his wife and two sons were waiting for him.

On his way out of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara, Nijjar’s Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia, he called his 21-year-old son. The family had made pizza, Balraj Singh Nijjar told his father, and had prepared the sweet pudding seviyan, his favorite dessert.

“Have dinner ready,” Nijjar told his son. “I’m coming home.”

But outside the gurdwara, three men were waiting. They had masks. They were armed.

Less than 10 minutes later, the phone at the Nijjar home rang again.

“Did you hear?” a family friend asked the son. “Something happened at the gurdwara. Your dad was shot.”

No arrests have been made in the brazen June 18 killing of Nijjar, the 45-year-old president of the temple. But from the outset, his family and friends in the local Sikh community were all but certain who was behind the brazen attack: the Indian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Nijjar was an outspoken leader of the separatist Khalistan movement, which aims to establish an independent Sikh state in the Punjab region of India. The movement is outlawed in India.

On Monday, precisely three months after Nijjar’s killing, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the House of Commons that investigators were pursuing “credible allegations” linking Nijjar’s slaying to agents of the Indian government.

washington post logoWashington Post, How Canada got caught up in the Sikh struggle in India, Bryan Pietsch, Sept. 21, 2023 (print ed.). Canada has found itself embroiled in tensions between the Indian government and Sikhs over the Khalistan movement, which seeks an independent Sikh state.

canadian flagThe struggles in Punjab, the birthplace of the Sikh faith that historically straddled an area now split by the border between Pakistan and India, has been mired in decades of violence, political chaos and migration that have now enmeshed Canada, a nation thousands of miles away.

Canada’s place in the middle of tensions surrounding the Khalistan movement, which supports the creation of an independent state in Punjab for members of the Sikh faith, came into sharp focus this week following revelations that India may have been involved in the assassination of a prominent Sikh separatist in British Columbia. 

 

Libya Flood, Morocco Quake Tolls, Reactions 

 

An aerial view of Derna, Libya, on Thursday, Sept. 14, 2023. Thousands of people were killed or are missing after massive floods destroyed the city (Washington Post photo by Alice Martins)An aerial view of Derna, Libya, on Thursday, Sept. 14, 2023. Thousands of people were killed or are missing after massive floods destroyed the city (Washington Post photo by Alice Martins).

ny times logoNew York Times, East Libya Strongman Keeps Tight Control Over Aid After Floods, Ben Hubbard, Sept. 20, 2023 (print ed.). Khalifa Hifter, who oversees a military dictatorship that rules the eastern half nation, could use the response to the disaster to entrench his power.

Days after a torrential downpour collapsed two aging dams and unleashed a rushing wall of water that swept parts of the Libyan city of Derna and thousands of its people into the sea, the military strongman who rules the area came for a quick visit.

Khalifa Hifter, the 79-year-old renegade commander and longtime C.I.A. asset shook hands with soldiers, took a brief drive through Derna’s muddy streets and flew off in a helicopter.

The disaster that struck Derna on Sept. 11 has drawn renewed international attention to Mr. Hifter and his so-called Libyan National Army, a military coalition that controls the eastern half of the divided North African nation with an iron fist.

More than a week after the disaster, as rescue efforts shift to the long and costly work of caring for the displaced and helping the city recover, Mr. Hifter’s tight hold over eastern Libya has made it clear that he will be the overall arbiter of the aid operation in the oil-rich country.

washington post logoWashington Post, Libyan officials limit media and aid groups in Derna, Sarah Dadouch, Sept. 20, 2023 (print ed.). Libyan officials have begun to restrict access among reporters and aid groups to rescue and relief operations in Derna, following protests over the response by authorities to violent floods that swept away entire neighborhoods and left thousands of people dead.

Journalists and aid organizations objected Tuesday to official demands that they stay back, amid a general sense of confusion over what degree of access would continue to be permitted.

ny times logoNew York Times, Opinion: Is the Disaster in Libya Coming Soon to an Aging Dam Near You? Josh Klemm and Isabella Winkler (co-directors of International Rivers, a group that advocates for healthy rivers and the rights of river communities), Sept. 18, 2023 (print ed.).

libya flag mapThe collapse of two dams in Libya, unleashing torrential floodwaters that left at least 3,000 people dead and over 4,200 still missing, was both predicted and preventable.

And they won’t be the last big dams to collapse unless we remove and repair some of the aging and obsolete structures that are long past their expiration date.

Like many dams around the world, the Wadi Derna dams in Libya were built in the 1970s during the era of peak global dam construction, when 1,000 large dams were installed each year. Now most of these dams are reaching the end of their life spans.

Details are still emerging, but the Libya dam collapses appear to have been caused by poor maintenance, and by poor monitoring of reservoirs that were overwhelmed by a huge rainstorm. Critical warnings were issued last year about the dams’ deteriorated state and the repairs needed to avert such a scenario, yet no action was taken.

Similar disasters are waiting to happen around the world. The biggest danger is in India and China, where the 28,000 large dams built in the mid-20th century are now nearing obsolescence. Mullaperiyar Dam in Kerala, India is over 100 years old, visibly damaged and located in a region prone to earthquakes. Its collapse would harm 3.5 million people downstream.

An aerial view of Derna, Libya, on Thursday. Torrential rains burst through two dams near Derna, on Libya’s northeastern coast, destroying much of the city (Reuters photo b

An aerial view of Derna, Libya, on Thursday. Torrential rains burst through two dams near Derna, on Libya’s northeastern coast, destroying much of the city (Reuters photo by Ayman Al-Sahili).

ny times logoNew York Times, Dire Warnings About Libya Dams Went Unheeded, Aaron Boxerman and James Glanz, Sept. 17, 2023 (print ed.). “The state wasn’t interested,” said an engineer who published a paper on why Derna’s ill-maintained dams might fail under the stress of a powerful storm.

It had been clear for years that the dams protecting Derna, on Libya’s Mediterranean coast, were in danger of giving way.

Torrential rains were not new. Decade after decade, they had pounded the area, washing away the soil that helped soak up water as it ran down from the dry hills above town.

Climate change had also changed the land, making it drier, harder and increasingly shorn of vegetation, less able to absorb the water before it pooled up dangerously behind the dams.

Then, there were the decades of neglect by officials — who knew the dams needed repairs — in a country so torn by years of civil war that it still has two opposing governments: one in the west and another in the east, where Derna lies.

Academics had warned that it would not require a storm of biblical proportions to overwhelm the dams.

The residents of Derna are “extremely vulnerable to flood risk,” wrote Abdelwanees Ashoor, a hydraulic engineer at Omar Al-Mukhtar University in Libya, in a paper he published in 2022.

The kind of storms that had hit the area in recent decades — he cited a damaging flood in 1959 — could bring down the dams and inundate Derna, he warned, calling the situation “dangerous.”

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U.S. Auto Workers Strike

 

GM Ford

 washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: The UAW might be demanding too big a slice of a soon-to-shrink pie, Catherine Rampell, right, Sept. 20, 2023 (print ed.). catherine rampellLabor leaders might be setting union expectations too high given the boom time for U.S. automakers might not last.

Rank-and-file autoworkers are absolutely overdue for a big pay hike. But the demands they’re making go far beyond that. In fact, labor and political leaders are doing workers no favors by setting expectations so sky-high that, if they actually get everything they want, they might end up putting their employers out of business — especially since those employers might already be in a more precarious position than recent profit levels suggest.

ny times logoNew York Times, U.A.W. Strike: Biden Will Join Autoworkers on the Picket Line in Michigan on Tuesday, Reid J. Epstein, Katie Rogers and Shane Goldmacher, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). President Biden’s move is one of the most significant displays of presidential support for striking workers in decades.

President Biden announced that he would travel to Michigan on Tuesday to “join the picket line” with members of the United Automobile Workers who are on strike against the nation’s leading automakers, in one of the most significant displays of presidential support for striking workers in decades.

“Tuesday, I’ll go to Michigan to join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of U.A.W. as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create,” Mr. Biden wrote on Friday on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

The trip is set to come a day before Mr. Biden’s leading rival in the 2024 campaign, Donald J. Trump, has planned his own speech in Michigan, and was announced hours after Shawn Fain, the union’s president, escalated pressure on the White House with a public invitation to Mr. Biden.

“We invite and encourage everyone who supports our cause to join us on the picket lines, from our friends and family all the way to the president of the United States,” Mr. Fain said in a Friday morning speech streamed online.

It was not immediately clear where Mr. Biden would go in Michigan. The White House had already announced plans for Mr. Biden to fly to California on Tuesday as part of a three-day trip to the West Coast. Mr. Biden made the decision on Friday, after Mr. Fain’s public invitation, according to two people familiar with the White House deliberations.

Mr. Fain on Friday announced the expansion of the U.A.W.’s work stoppage from three facilities to 38 assembly plants and distribution centers in 20 states, including six — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia — that are expected to be presidential battlegrounds in next year’s election.

Michigan, the home of the American automotive industry, is home to the bulk of the facilities and striking workers.

There is little to no precedent for a sitting president joining striking workers on a picket line.

Seth Harris, a former top labor policy adviser for Mr. Biden, said he was not aware of any president walking a picket line before.

“This president takes seriously his role as the most pro-union president in history,” Mr. Harris said. “Sometimes that means breaking precedent.”

 ny times logoNew York Times, Little Progress in Talks to End Strike Against 3 Detroit Automakers, Ivan Penn, Sept. 18, 2023 (print ed.). The U.A.W. returned to the bargaining table on Sunday after its president warned, “We’re going to amp this thing up” if the car companies don’t improve their offers. The United Auto Workers and the big three Detroit automakers largely held their ground on Sunday, seemingly no closer to reaching deals than they were when the autoworkers went on strike on Friday.

uaw logo“If we don’t get better offers and we don’t get down to taking care of the members’ needs, then we’re going to amp this thing up even more,” Shawn Fain, the president of the U.A.W., which has 150,000 members, said in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. Asked about an offer by one of the automakers, Stellantis, for a 21 percent pay increase over four years, Mr. Fain said, “It’s definitely a no-go.”

In a separate interview on MSNBC, Mr. Fain said that progress in the negotiations had been slow.

The union had talks with Ford on Saturday. It was going back to the bargaining table on Sunday with General Motors and planned talks with Stellantis — the parent of Chrysler, Jeep and Ram — on Monday, a spokesman said.

The union has been pushing for a 40 percent wage increase over four years, improved retiree benefits and shorter work hours as well as an end to a tiered wage system that starts new hires at much lower wages than the top U.A.W. pay of $32 an hour.

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U.S. Immigration Crisis

 

ICE logo

ny times logoNew York Times, U.S. Will Allow Nearly 500,000 Venezuelan Migrants to Work Legally, Nicholas Fandos, Updated Sept. 21, 2023. The move, announced late Wednesday, followed intense lobbying by New York Democrats before and during President Biden’s visit to New York City this week.

The Biden administration said late Wednesday that it would allow hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans already in the United States to live and work legally in the country for 18 months.

The decision followed intense advocacy by top New York Democrats, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, Mayor Eric Adams and party leaders in Congress. It will affect about 472,000 Venezuelans who arrived in the country before July 31, temporarily protecting them from removal and waiving a monthslong waiting period for them to seek employment authorization.

In an unusual break with a president of their party, the New York Democrats had argued that the city’s social safety net would tear under the weight of more than 110,000 recently arrived migrants unless they were allowed to work and support themselves more quickly.

Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, said that he made the decision because conditions in Venezuela “prevent their safe return” but stressed that immigrants who had entered the country since August were not protected and would be “removed when they are found to not have a legal basis to stay.”

ny times logoNew York Times, One Day on the Border: 8,900 Migrants Arrested, and More on the Way, Miriam Jordan, Jack Healy and Eileen Sullivan, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). A sudden surge of people is arriving at the southern border, despite danger. “If you don’t take risks, you cannot win,” said one man who traveled from Peru.

They come from Brazil, Burkina Faso, Uzbekistan, India and dozens of other countries, a moving global village of hundreds of thousands of people crossing the Rio Grande and slipping through gaps in the border wall at a pace of nearly 9,000 people a day, one of the highest rates of unlawful crossings in months.

Despite new border barriers and thickets of razor wire, risk of deportation and pleas for patience, a resurgent tide of men, women and children is not waiting. Driven by desperation, families and individuals are pushing across the southern border and past new efforts by the Biden administration to keep migrants waiting until they secure hard-to-get appointments to enter the nation with permission.

The influx is creating a humanitarian and political crisis that stretches from packed migrant processing facilities in border states to major American cities struggling to house and educate the new families. Though many get through, thousands are being sent back across the border or on flights to their home countries. But from Texas to California, more than two dozen migrants who have entered illegally in recent days said they could not afford to wait.

“If you don’t take risks, you cannot win,” said Daniel Soto, 35, who crossed with his mother on Tuesday after they sold their car, restaurant and house in Lima, Peru, betting their entire fortune of $25,000 on a weeklong journey to the border near Tijuana.

Surges in migration at the southern border, while motivated by poverty, violence and hunger, are also tied to weather patterns, policy changes and personal circumstances. The pace of unlawful crossings dropped sharply in the spring amid uncertainty surrounding the end of a pandemic-era measure that allowed the government to quickly deport migrants. But numbers rebounded over the summer, and are now nearly double the 4,900 unlawful crossings a day that were recorded in mid-April.

ny times logoNew York Times, U.S. Wants to Keep Migrants Away From the Border by Moving Checkpoints South, Genevieve Glatsky and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). By opening migration processing centers in three Latin American countries, the Biden administration is trying to coax people not to trek to the border.

As the Biden administration struggles to tackle a humanitarian and political crisis at America’s doorstep, it is focusing increasingly on keeping migrants far from the U.S.-Mexico border by establishing migration processing centers in Central and South America.

But the program is off to a rocky start, with demand for appointments far outstripping supply, leading to periodic shutdowns of the online portal, and some countries’ limiting applicants over concerns that the centers will cause migrants to overwhelm their own borders.

The centers, in Colombia, Costa Rica and others planned in Guatemala, have become a primary focus of the president’s migration strategy, U.S. officials said, and the administration is already exploring expanding the program to other nations in the region, including opening a similar office in Mexico.

The program, known as the safe mobility initiative, is “the most ambitious plan I’ve seen,” said Sean Garcia, the deputy refugee coordinator for the U.S. Embassy in Colombia, who has worked on migration for over a decade.

ny times logoNew York Times, Officials scrambled to respond as migrants overwhelmed Eagle Pass, Texas, J. David Goodman, Edgar Sandoval, Miriam Jordan and Eileen Sullivan, Sept. 21, 2023 (print ed.). The mayor of Eagle Pass said 2,500 migrants arrived in one day, part of a recent surge in crossings along the border that has taxed local, state and federal resources.

Thousands of migrants crossed into the small city of Eagle Pass, Texas, from Mexico on Wednesday, crowding onto the banks of the Rio Grande and under an international bridge in what officials described as an unfolding crisis.

The mayor, Rolando Salinas Jr., declared a state of emergency, seeking additional support to respond to an influx of migrants that reached 2,500 on Wednesday, overwhelming the city of 28,000 that has been a focal point of efforts by the state of Texas to deter illegal crossings.

The arrivals, including a large number of people from Venezuela, were part of a substantial increase in recent crossings along the southern border. The number of arrivals has reached levels not seen in months, taxing local governments in California, Arizona and Texas as large numbers of people claiming asylum have been released by Border Patrol agents directly into border communities.

That was the case in Eagle Pass, officials said, where the city’s lone shelter provider strained to accommodate the sudden arrival of so many people. Many were released onto the streets of the city.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Mass south-to-north migration: It's because of climate change and it will get worse, wayne madsen may 29 2015 cropped SmallWayne Madsen, left, Sept. 18-19, 2023. From the United Nations to the world's leading climate scientists, the verdict is in: Our planet has reached and exceeded the tipping points for climate collapse and the mass migration of those affected and who live in the equatorial zones of the Americas, Asia, and Africa is a direct result of rising temperatures and multi-year drought.

wayne madesen report logoClimate change refugees from Sub-Saharan Africa and Central America and the Caribbean littoral of South America may find temporary respite from unbearable temperatures and drought by moving north into Europe and North America, but massive fires, powerful storms, and record floods will result in an inability of national and sub-national governments and assistance organizations to provide them much in the way of relief.

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U.S. Courts, Crime, Guns, Civil Rights, Immigration

washington post logoWashington Post, Justice Clarence Thomas reportedly attended Koch network donor events, Amy B Wang and Ann E. Marimow,  Sept. 22, 2023. New report comes as some justices have suggested the Supreme Court should act on ethics issues.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas flew on a private jet in 2018 to speak at the annual winter donor summit of the Koch network — a trip that was intended to be a fundraising draw for the influential conservative political organization with interests before the court, according to a report published Friday by ProPublica.

At the summit, held in Palm Springs, Calif., Thomas attended a private dinner for the Koch network’s donors, ProPublica reported. According to the outlet, it was at least the second time Thomas had attended a meeting of the network founded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and his brother, David Koch, who died in 2019. Thomas did not disclose the 2018 trip, ProPublica reported.

The revelation adds to the controversies facing Thomas and the court more broadly that have led Democrats and court transparency advocates to call for the nine justices to adopt a binding code of ethics.

In recent weeks, at least two of the justices have publicly suggested the court should act. Justice Elena Kagan on Friday said she and her colleagues could adapt the policy that governs all lower court judges to reflect the unique structure of the Supreme Court.

“I think it would be a good thing for the court to do,” Kagan said during a live-streamed conversation with the dean of Notre Dame’s law school. “It would help in our own compliance with the rules, and it would, I think, go far in persuading other people that we were adhering to highest standards of conduct.”

Kagan noted that Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh had also recently said he hoped the court would soon take steps to address ethics issues.

The latest ProPublica report focused on Thomas’s interactions with the Koch network, which has given millions of dollars to a conservative legal organization behind one of the Supreme Court’s biggest cases of the term that begins in October. The group, Cause of Action Institute, is asking the justices to overturn a decades-old precedent long targeted by conservatives concerned about the power of federal government agencies. The precedent has been used extensively by the government to defend environmental, financial and consumer protection regulations.

In response to the report, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) called for Thomas to recuse himself from the case, questioning whether the justice could be impartial because of his previously undisclosed involvement with the Koch network.

ny times logoNew York Times, New Jersey Governor Calls on Menendez to Resign Over Bribery Charges, Benjamin Weiser, Tracey Tully and William K. Rashbaum, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Senator Robert Menendez was charged with taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes. He stepped down from his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was charged on Friday with taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, including bars of gold bullion, to wield his power abroad and at home.

The three-count federal indictment depicted a brazen plan hatched during furtive dinners, in text messages and on encrypted calls — much of it aimed at increasing U.S. assistance to Egypt and aiding businessmen in New Jersey.

Mr. Menendez’s wife, Nadine Menendez, is accused of acting as a go-between, passing messages to an American-Egyptian businessman, Wael Hana, who maintained close connections with Egyptian military and intelligence officials, the indictment said. In one text, to an Egyptian general, Mr. Hana referred to the senator, who held sway over military sales, financing and other aid, as “our man.”

Mr. Menendez, in a strongly worded rebuke to prosecutors, said that he was confident the matter would be “successfully resolved once all of the facts are presented.”

washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: Pinto’s big D.C. public safety plan is going to touch off a grand fight, Colbert I. King, right, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). colbert king newestD.C.’s entire court system, including the Court of Appeals, Superior Court and various court-related operations, is federally funded and controlled. The overburdened Superior Court has 11 judicial vacancies. Trial schedules — and justice itself — are being disrupted because of those empty benches. There’s nothing the city can do about it. Only the president and Senate can fill D.C.’s vacancies.

Even the incarceration of D.C.’s felony offenders is out of the city’s hands. By law, D.C.’s felons are dispatched to Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities across the United States. When they return, the city isn’t even notified.

This fairest city in the greatest land of all might have more authority over selected local affairs, but political autonomy is only an aspiration, not a reality.

Once again, reality is about to hit the city in the face when the mayor and council, and ultimately Congress, come to grips with the “Secure D.C. Plan” — a package of bills and other initiatives proposed by Council member Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2), who chairs the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety. To Pinto’s credit, her proposal takes a deep dive into virtually all aspects of the city’s justice system. And her plan is going to make waves. For example: Pinto’s legislation would require that judges condition the release of someone charged with violent or dangerous offenses upon the consent of the alleged offenders to be searched at any time “with or without a search warrant or with or without cause” when outside their property or place of business. Judges on the D.C. Court of Appeals and Superior Court have already warned that warrantless searches without probable cause could violate the Fourth Amendment.

U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves comes down hard on the other side, contending that the measure focuses on a limited category of people — i.e., those charged with gun offenses who might be carrying weapons in public in violation of their conditions of release. Graves maintains that court decisions have confirmed the constitutionality of similar legislation in California and other states. But Patrice Sutton, executive director of the DC Justice Lab, denounced the measure in a statement as intended to “hunt and hold people who look like they’ve been hunted and held before. In D.C. that’s exclusively Black people, poor people, and native Washingtonians.”

And thus the “Secure D.C. Plan” is teed up for a storm.

Watching and waiting to have the last word under a flying Red, White and Blue? Congress.

MSNBC, Former Prosecutor Says She Quit Trump-Russia Probe Over Concerns With Barr, Nicolle Wallace, Sept. 21, 2023. 'Simply couldn't be part of it': Fmr. prosecutor breaks silence on quitting Trump-Russia probe.

Former top official at the DOJ Andrew Weissmann and former FBI Counterintelligence Agent Pete Strzok join Nicolle Wallace to discuss federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy comments about her departure from the Durham investigation for the first time since resigning three years ago, confirming it was the politically-driven handling of this investigation that drove her to leave.

Alternet, Durham deputy who helped lead Trump-Russia probe says she left DOJ over concerns with Barr, Elizabeth Preza, Sept. 22, 2023. Nora Dannehy, a former federal prosecutor who helped lead the Department of Justice investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, "broke her long silence” on her abrupt 2020 departure from the DOJ, testifying Wednesday that concerns about former Attorney General Bill Barr’s handling of the case prompted her to quit, The Connecticut Mirror and Associated Press report.

“My conscience did not allow me to remain,” Dannehy said during her confirmation hearing before the Connecticut Judiciary Committee of the General Assembly. State legislatures are currently mulling Dannehy’s nomination for the Connecticut Supreme Court.

Dannehy, who was deputy to former DOJ special counsel John Durham, was on the team “tasked with investigating whether intelligence agencies or the FBI were guilty of wrongdoing in examining whether Russia colluded with the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump in 2016,” the Connecticut Mirror reports.

Per the AP:

Trump expected the investigation to expose what he and his supporters alleged was a “deep state” conspiracy to undermine his campaign, but the slow pace of the probe – and the lack of blockbuster findings – contributed to a deep wedge between the president and Barr by the time the attorney general resigned in December 2020.

The investigation concluded last May with underwhelming results: A single guilty plea from a little-known FBI lawyer, resulting in probation, and two acquittals at trial by juries.

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Oath Keeper Ray Epps and his wife Robyn Epps (New York Times photo by Alan Feuer).

Oath Keeper Ray Epps and his wife Robyn Epps (New York Times photo by Alan Feuer).

 

More On 2024 Presidential Race

djt ron desantis cnn collage

ny times logoNew York Times, Urgency Grows for DeSantis in Iowa as Trump Looks to Finish Him Off, Nicholas Nehamas, Sept. 20, 2023 (print ed.).  Despite spending far more time campaigning across the must-win state, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida still trails former President Trump by double digits.

ny times logoNew York Times, Polls Show Ron DeSantis Sliding in the Republican Primary, Maggie Astor, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). Several recent surveys, nationally and in early-voting states, undermine the governor’s argument that the primary is a two-way race between him and former President Donald J. Trump.

Ron DeSantis is shown in the foreground through a camera as he speaks on stage in the background. His image is also reflected on a screen on the right side of the frame.

Several recent polls show Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida losing ground in the Republican presidential primary, both nationally and in early-voting states.

The numbers undermine an argument pushed by Mr. DeSantis’s campaign: that the primary is effectively a two-way race in which he is the only candidate who can consolidate support against former President Donald J. Trump.

A CNN/University of New Hampshire poll released Wednesday found that in New Hampshire, home to the first Republican primary, Mr. DeSantis had lost more than half of his support since the last U.N.H. poll two months ago. He had just 10 percent in the poll — not only far behind Mr. Trump (39 percent), but roughly tied with Vivek Ramaswamy (13 percent), Nikki Haley (12 percent) and Chris Christie (11 percent).

In Iowa, which will hold the first Republican caucus in January, a Fox Business poll released Wednesday showed him at 15 percent, more than 30 points behind Mr. Trump and not far from third place, with Ms. Haley at 11 percent. Unlike the New Hampshire poll, the Fox poll didn’t show Mr. DeSantis actively shedding support — he was down only one point compared with the outlet’s July survey, which is not significant. But it showed no progress for him as the time he has to make gains grows shorter.

The picture was similar in South Carolina, where another Fox Business poll found him at 10 percent, significantly behind not only Mr. Trump, who was at 46 percent, but also Ms. Haley, the state’s former governor, at 18 percent. In July, he had been roughly tied with Ms. Haley.

And nationally, a Quinnipiac University poll released last week showed Mr. DeSantis at 12 percent — a full 50 points behind Mr. Trump and six points below where he was in August.

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djt looking up

 

Prosecutions Of Trump, Allies

 

djt indicted proof

ny times logoNew York Times, Analysis: Request for Gag Order on Trump Raises Free Speech Dilemma, Charlie Savage, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Federal prosecutors are putting the prospect of political violence at the heart of their argument to limit Donald Trump’s statements about the election case.

The request by prosecutors that a judge impose a gag order on former President Donald J. Trump in the federal election-subversion case presents a thorny conflict between the scope of his First Amendment rights and fears that he could — intentionally or not — spur his supporters to violence.

Justice Department log circularThere is little precedent for how the judge overseeing the case, Tanya S. Chutkan, should think about how to weigh strong constitutional protections for political speech against ensuring the functioning of the judicial process and the safety of the people participating in it.

It is one more example of the challenges of seeking to hold to account a norm-shattering former president who is being prosecuted in four cases as he makes another bid for the White House with a message that his opponents have weaponized the criminal justice system against him.

“Everything about these cases is making new law because there are so many gaps in the law,” said Paul F. Rothstein, a Georgetown University law professor and a criminal procedure specialist. “The system is held together by people doing the right thing according to tradition, and Trump doesn’t — he jumps into every gap.”

Citing threats inspired by the federal indictments of Mr. Trump, a recently unsealed motion by the special counsel, Jack Smith, has asked Judge Chutkan to order the former president to cease his near-daily habit of making “disparaging and inflammatory or intimidating” public statements about witnesses, the District of Columbia jury pool, the judge and prosecutors.

A proposed order drafted by Mr. Smith’s team would also bar Mr. Trump and his lawyers from making — or causing surrogates to make — public statements “regarding the identity, testimony or credibility of prospective witnesses.” It would allow Mr. Trump to say he denies the charges but “without further comment.”


Donald Trump (Defense Department photo by Dominique Pineiro)Meidas Touch Network, Analysis: First Trump RICO Trial Could be FATAL for Trump, Michael Popok, Sept. 23, 2023. What does it really mean that Trump lawyers Ken Chesebro and Sydney Powell have their case Georgia Election interference case TRIED FIRST on October 23?

How does a WIN by Fulton County DA Fani Willis impact the other 17 trials and amount of cooperating witnesses, including in Trump’s case. How does a LOSS in any way impact the other 17 cases. Michael Popok of Legal AF gets to the nitty gritty of how much is riding on the outcome of next month’s trial, and what Trump and the Judge is watching for as the burden shifts to Fani.

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More On Climate, Environment, Transportation

 

climate change photo

washington post logoWashington Post, Perspective: How the dream of air conditioning turned into the dark future of climate change, Philip Kennicott, Sept. 21, 2023. This summer, all across the torrid globe, air conditioning was a necessity for billions of people, though less than a third of households have it. In the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, it offered defense against not just the heat but also the eerie orange smoke from Canadian wildfires exacerbated by climate change.

In Phoenix, where the temperature rose above 110 degrees for weeks on end, temporary cooling centers were a lifesaver for homeless people, though hundreds of heat-related deaths were confirmed or suspected throughout the metropolitan area. In Europe, where air conditioning is evolving from an eccentric, American-style indulgence to a standard amenity, AC offered a critical defense against a heat wave so powerful and persistent that the Europeans gave the high-pressure system causing it a name, “Cerberus,” after the mythological three-headed hellhound who guards the gates of Hades.

As temperature records were broken across the planet this summer, you could sense something shift in our relationship to air conditioning. Billions of people in the Global South and other hot zones still live without household air conditioning. And the cost of remedying that is staggering. But it isn’t just the financial challenge of manufacturing and distributing more cooling systems. The environmental costs are terrifying, too. Making internal spaces cooler for humans means making external environments hotter for all living things, with more industrial production, shipping and energy consumption, all of which contribute to the buildup of greenhouse gases.

ny times logoNew York Times, Gold’s Deadly Truth: Much Is Mined With Mercury, Fabian Federl and Jack Nicas, Photographs by Ian Cheibub, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Jeovane de Jesus Aguiar was knee-deep in mud in the 100-yard gash he had cut into the Amazon rainforest, filtering brown water out of a pan, when he found the small, shiny flake he was looking for: a mixture of gold and mercury.

Mr. Aguiar had drizzled liquid mercury into the ground in his makeshift gold mine on the eastern edge of the small South American nation of Suriname, just as he had every few days.

The toxic element mixes with gold dust and forms an amalgam he can pluck out of the sludge. Then he sets the mixture aflame, burning off the mercury into the air, where winds spread it across the forest and across borders, poisoning the plants, animals and people it finds.

Left behind is the gold. That part usually ends up in Europe, the United States and the Persian Gulf, most often as expensive jewelry.

Ten years after an international treaty to ban mercury, the toxic metal continues to poison. The reason might have to do with your wedding ring.

washington post logoWashington Post, America passed the EV ‘tipping point’ — but many buyers still want gas, Shannon Osaka and Emily Guskin, Sept. 19, 2023 (print ed.). Once EVs cross 5 percent of new sales, they generally take over. U.S. hesitation could hinder that.

There is a theoretical, magic tipping point for adoption of electric vehicles. Once somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of new car sales are all-electric, some researchers say, huge numbers of drivers will follow. They predict that electric car sales will then soar — to 25 percent, 50 percent and eventually to close to 80 percent of new sales. Early adopters who love shiny new technologies will be replaced by mainstream consumers just looking for a good deal.
10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint

Last year, the United States finally passed that elusive mark — 5 percent of all new cars sold in the fourth quarter were fully electric. And earlier this year, all-electric vehicles made up about 7 percent of new car sales.

But even as the nation’s EV market appears to be teetering on the edge of an electric takeover, a hesitant American public — and a still-subpar charging infrastructure — could still hold the country back. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll shows the current limits of U.S. enthusiasm for the new vehicles, with nearly half of adults (46 percent) saying they prefer to own a gas-powered car or truck. That compares with 19 percent who want a full-electric vehicle, 13 percent who want a plug-in hybrid and 22 percent who want a traditional hybrid vehicle.

ny times logoNew York Times, Climate Protesters March on New York, Calling for End to Fossil Fuels, Somini Sengupta, Hilary Howard and Delger Erdenesanaa, Updated Sept. 18, 2023. Ahead of U.N. meetings this week, thousands gathered in Midtown to demand that President Biden and other world leaders stop new oil and gas drilling.

Tens of thousands of people, young and old, filled the streets of Midtown Manhattan under blazing sunshine on Sunday to demand that world leaders quickly pivot away from fossil fuels dangerously heating the Earth.

Their ire was sharply directed at President Biden, who arrived in New York Sunday night for several fund-raisers this week and to speak before the United Nations General Assembly session that begins Tuesday.

“Biden, you should be scared of us,” Emma Buretta, 17, a New York City high school student and an organizer with the Fridays for Future movement, shouted at a rally ahead of the march. “If you want our vote, if you don’t want the blood of our generations to be on your hands, end fossil fuels.”

The Biden administration has shepherded through the United States’ most ambitious climate law and is working to transition the country to wind, solar and other renewable energy. But it has also continued to approve permits for new oil and gas drilling, in most instances because it was required by law.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Mass south-to-north migration: It's because of climate change and it will get worse, wayne madsen may 29 2015 cropped SmallWayne Madsen, left, Sept. 18-19, 2023. From the United Nations to the world's leading climate scientists, the verdict is in: Our planet has reached and exceeded the tipping points for climate collapse and the mass migration of those affected and who live in the equatorial zones of the Americas, Asia, and Africa is a direct result of rising temperatures and multi-year drought.

wayne madesen report logoClimate change refugees from Sub-Saharan Africa and Central America and the Caribbean littoral of South America may find temporary respite from unbearable temperatures and drought by moving north into Europe and North America, but massive fires, powerful storms, and record floods will result in an inability of national and sub-national governments and assistance organizations to provide them much in the way of relief.

ny times logoNew York Times, Biden to Target Industrial Pollution in a 2nd Term, if He Gets One, Coral Davenport, Sept. 17, 2023 (print ed.). If President Biden wins re-election, his climate team is likely to try to cut greenhouse gases from steel, cement and other hard-to-clean-up manufacturing.

If President Biden wins a second term, his climate policies would take aim at steel and cement plants, factories and oil refineries — heavily polluting industries that have never before had to rein in their heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

New controls on industrial facilities, which his advisers have begun to map out and described in recent interviews, could combine with actions taken on power plants and vehicles during his first term to help meet the president’s goal of eliminating fossil fuel pollution by 2050, analysts said. Industrialized nations must hit that target if the world has any hope to avoid the most catastrophic impacts from climate change, according to scientists.

“If people look at what this administration has done on climate and say ‘This is enough,’ this country is not going to get to our goals,” said John Larsen, a partner at Rhodium Group, a nonpartisan energy research firm whose analyses are regularly consulted by the White House.

But talking about more regulations at the start of what promises to be a bruising election cycle is perilous, strategists said. In particular, the prospect of new mandates from Washington regarding steel and cement, the bedrock materials of American construction, could sour the swing-state union workers courted by Mr. Biden.

ny times logoNew York Times, California Governor to Sign Landmark Climate Disclosure Bill, Coral Davenport, Sept. 18, 2023 (print ed.). The first-in-the-nation law will compel major companies to publicly disclose their carbon dioxide emissions and could have national repercussions.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said on Sunday that he would sign a landmark climate bill that passed the state’s legislature last week requiring major companies to publicly disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, a move with national and global repercussions.

The new law will require about 5,000 companies to report the amount of greenhouse gas pollution that is directly emitted by their operations and also the amount of indirect emissions from things like employee travel, waste disposal and supply chains.

Climate policy advocates have long argued that such disclosures are an essential first step in efforts to harness financial markets to rein in planet-warming pollution. For example, when investors are made aware of the climate-warming impacts of a company, they may choose to steer their money elsewhere.

The law would apply to public and private businesses that make more than $1 billion annually and operate in California. But because the state is the world’s fifth-largest economy, California often sets the trend for the nation, and many of the affected businesses are global corporations.

ny times logoNew York Times, California is suing giant oil companies, citing decades of deception, David Gelles, Updated Sept. 16, 2023. Launching one of the most prominent climate lawsuits in the nation, the state claims Exxon, Shell, BP and others misled the public and seeks creation of a special fund to pay for recovery.

companies on Friday, claiming their actions have caused tens of billions of dollars in damage and that they deceived the public by downplaying the risks posed by fossil fuels.

The civil case, filed in superior court in San Francisco, is the latest and most significant lawsuit to target oil, gas and coal companies over their role in causing climate change. It seeks creation of an abatement fund to pay for the future damages caused by climate related disasters in the state.

The lawsuit targets five companies: Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron, which is headquartered in San Ramon, Calif. The American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group based in Washington, is also listed as a defendant.

Seven other states and dozens of municipalities have filed similar lawsuits in recent years. But the California lawsuit immediately becomes one of the most significant legal challenges facing the fossil fuel industry.

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ny times logoNew York Times, French Far-Right Leader May Face Trial on Embezzlement Charges, Roger Cohen, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Prosecutors recommended charges against Marine Le Pen that could potentially bring a 10-year jail term and a 10-year ban from public office.

After a seven-year investigation, the Paris prosecutor’s office requested on Friday that the far-right leader Marine Le Pen and more than 20 other members of her National Rally party stand trial for embezzlement of funds from the European Parliament between 2004 and 2016.

The case has centered on whether party members who were representatives in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, along with their assistants, used money allocated to cover expenses at the assembly for party costs that had nothing to do with their european union logo rectangleparliamentary functions.

The request from the prosecutor’s office does not mean the case will go to trial. That decision will be made by Paris magistrates, probably within the next several weeks. Ms. Le Pen faces a possible 10-year prison sentence, a fine of one million euros ($1.1 million) and 10 years of ineligibility for public office, the prosecutor’s office said.

The decision comes as the jostling begins over a successor to President Emmanuel Macron, who must leave office under term limits in 2027, and nine months before European Parliament elections. It is a blow to Ms. Le Pen, a perennial candidate for the presidency who has increased her vote share but has always fallen short.

ny times logoNew York Times, Darfur’s New Generation, Once Full of Promise, Now Suffers ‘Fire of War,’ Abdi Latif Dahir, Sept. 21, 2023. In a Sudanese region with a history of genocide, weeks of intense fighting between rival military factions have left hundreds dead and sent thousands fleeing.

Five months after a devastating war began in Sudan between rival military forces, the western region of Darfur has quickly become one of the hardest hit in the nation. People in Darfur have already suffered genocidal violence over the past two decades that has left as many as 300,000 people dead.

Now Darfur, which had been edging toward relative stability, is being torn apart by a nationwide war between the Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The Rapid Support Forces and its allies, predominantly Arab militias, have assumed control of large parts of Darfur, while the regular army mostly operates from garrisons in major cities, residents and observers said.
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ny times logoNew York Times, Delegations from Armenia and Azerbaijan met to discuss the fate of the breakaway region Nagorno-Karabakh, Ivan Nechepurenko, Sept. 21, 2023. Officials of the breakaway region met with representatives of Azerbaijan to talk about the future of its residents, many of whom strongly resist the idea of coming under Azerbaijani rule.

One day after Azerbaijan used force to assert its authority over a mountainous breakaway region in the South Caucasus, its officials met with representatives of the pro-Armenian enclave on Thursday to discuss the future of the residents there under new rule.

Escorted by Russian peacekeepers, a delegation of the government of Nagorno-Karabakh arrived in the town of Yevlakh in Azerbaijan to meet with representatives of the Azerbaijani government.

Azerbaijan’s brisk military recapture of Nagorno-Karabakh — a strategic slice of land slightly bigger than Rhode Island that is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan — could further alter power dynamics in the combustible region where interests of Russia, Turkey and Western states collide.

Azerbaijan’s victory also posed a humanitarian challenge for tens of thousands of Armenians living there. Citing multiple historic grievances, many Armenians have been adamantly opposed to coming under Azerbaijani rule.

washington post logoWashington Post, Fighting flares between Azerbaijan and Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh, Mary Ilyushina, Sept. 20, 2023 (print ed.).  Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry on Tuesday declared an “anti-terrorist” campaign in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region under Armenian control, as Armenian media reported air raid sirens and mortar fire in the regional capital of Stepanakert.

Azerbaijan and Armenia have repeatedly clashed over Nagorno-Karabakh, which is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but largely populated by ethnic Armenians and largely governed by the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh.

The two nations fought two wars over the region: one in the early 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, and another in 2020 when Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, regained territories bordering Karabakh from Armenia, which had held them since 1994. The six-week-long hostilities ended after a truce brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin was signed in November 2020, but a full peace agreement remained elusive.

washington post logoWashington Post, In Wagner’s largest African outpost, Russia looks to tighten its grip, Rachel Chason and Barbara Debout, Sept. 19, 2023 (print ed.). Since the mercenaries of Russia’s notorious Wagner Group first arrived here [in the Central African Republic] five years ago, they have embedded themselves in the security operations and economy of this impoverished but resource-rich country. While operating largely independently of Moscow, the group helped project Russian influence deep into Africa.

wagner group logoNow, after the death of Wagner boss Yevgeniy Prigozhin last month in a suspicious plane crash, officials in the Central African Republic say the Russian government is moving to take direct control over the more than 1,000 mercenaries here.

President Faustin-Archange Touadéra said in an interview at the presidential palace that Russian fighters would remain in his country under his agreement with Moscow and continue to provide security at a “difficult moment,” as the Central African Republic continues to struggle with rebel groups that have been attacking soldiers and civilians in the countryside.

“It has always been the Russian government with which we contracted,” said Touadéra, whose security detail included Wagner fighters in khakis standing guard outside his office.

This month, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov and Maj. Gen. Andrei Averyanov of the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU, visited Bangui and informed Touadéra and other top CAR officials that the Russian presence would continue but under the command of the Russian Defense Ministry, according to Central African and Western officials. The president confirmed the meeting, saying, “We have state-to-state relations with Russia, so it is normal that the vice minister visited us in the context of our security relationship.”

Fidele Gouandjika, an adviser to Touadéra, said that if the fighters don’t want to obey Russia’s Defense Ministry, they will have no choice but to depart. “It is Russia that sent them and armed them,” Gouandjika said, “and Russia that will decide when Wagner leaves.”

The Central African Republic has historically represented Wagner’s largest outpost on the continent, though the group has been active in at least four African countries and set its sights on multiple others, provoking growing concern in Western capitals.

The Africa tour by Yevkurov and Averyanov also included stops in Mali, where Wagner has a substantial presence, and Burkina Faso, where Wagner leaders had previously offered their services. A Western official said the trip was intended to send a clear message: Prigozhin’s sprawling empire is now under government control.

washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: A top NSC official explains why Biden moved ahead with the Iran hostage deal, Jason Rezaian, Sept. 19, 2023 (print ed.). Five Americans who have been held hostage in Iran are flying to freedom right now, accompanied by two of their spouses. Three of them — Siamak Namazi, Morad Tahbaz and Emad Shargi — had for years languished in the notorious Evin Prison.

Their release brings the number of wrongfully detained Americans brought home under President Biden to 35. This demonstrates both the high priority this White House has put on freeing unjustly imprisoned citizens and the reality that hostage-taking by state actors is spiraling out of control. Two more U.S. residents, Shahab Dalili and Jamshid Sharmahd, remain imprisoned in Iran.

In exchange, the United States will release five Iranian citizens either sentenced or with trials pending. And South Korea will transfer to banks in Qatar $6 billion owed to Iran for the purchase of crude oil. Some critics call this transaction a ransom payment. The reality, as usual, is far more complex.

To unpack the details of the deal, I spoke with Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa — and the official who conducted the secret negotiations that led to my own release in 2016. What follows has been lightly edited for length.

Jason Rezaian: How did the Biden administration weigh its decision to make a deal with Iran for the release of the hostages?

Brett McGurk: Absent an arrangement to bring these people home, they would languish in one of the world’s worst prisons for many years to come. Some of our citizens had a potential death sentence hanging over them. All of them are now safely out of Iran.

We recognize there will be criticism of the deal, but the president ultimately needs to weigh the terms available through diplomacy, against leaving American citizens for years, or even decades, in Evin Prison. In this case, the president made the hard decision to move ahead.

ny times logoNew York Times, World’s Largest ‘Baby Exporter’ Confronts Its Painful Past, Choe Sang-Hun, Sept. 19, 2023 (print ed.). South Korean adoptees have been pushing for accountability for what they call a corrupt adoption system that went largely unchanged until recent decades.

Mia Lee Sorensen’s Danish parents used to tell her that her birth family in South Korea had put her up for adoption. According to her adoption papers, she was born prematurely in 1987 to a family that could not afford her medical bills and wished for her to have a “good future” abroad.

But when Ms. Sorensen found her birth parents in South Korea last year, they could not believe she was alive. They told her that her mother had passed out during labor and that when she woke up, the clinic told her that the baby had died.

South Korea has the world’s largest diaspora of intercountry adoptees, with more foreign adoptions overall than any other nation. About 200,000 children have been sent abroad since the end of the Korean War in 1953, mostly to the United States and Europe.

Those adoptions have continued today, even as the country suffers one of the world’s lowest birthrates. In 2021, the top intercountry adoption hubs were Colombia, India, Ukraine and South Korea. (Before the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020, China had topped the list.)

ap logoAssociated Press, China flies 103 military planes toward Taiwan in a new spike of activity, Sept. 18, 2023. China's military sent 103 warplanes toward Taiwan in a 24-hour period in what the island’s defense ministry called a recent new high.

The planes were detected between 6 a.m. on Sunday and 6 a.m. on Monday, the ministry said. As is customary, they turned back before reaching Taiwan. Chinese warplanes fly toward the self-governing island on a near-daily basis but typically in smaller numbers. The Taiwan ministry didn’t explain what time period it meant by a “recent” high.

China, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory, has conducted increas

China’s military sent 103 warplanes toward Taiwan in a 24-hour period in what the island’s defense ministry said was a daily record. The planes were detected between 6 a.m. on Sunday and 6 a.m. on Monday, the ministry said. As is customary, they turned back before reaching Taiwan.

Politico, Erdoğan threatens to 'part ways' from EU after critical European Parliament report, Camille Gijs, Sept. 15, 2023. Turkey’s EU accession bid has stagnated for years amid the Turkish leader’s increasingly autocratic behavior.

politico CustomTurkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Saturday slammed a report from the European Parliament on the country’s EU accession talks and threatened to “part ways” from the bloc.

Questioned by journalists about the report, Erdoğan said that “the EU is trying to break away from Turkey,” according to Turkish state media Anadolu Agency.

“We will make our evaluations against these developments and if necessary, we can part ways with the EU,” Erdoğan said ahead of a trip to attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

The European Parliament report, adopted this week in Strasbourg, said talks over Ankara’s accession to the bloc should not be resumed in current circumstances, voicing the EU’s concerns about human rights and rule of law violations. Instead, European lawmakers advocated finding “a parallel and realistic framework” for relations between Brussels and Ankara.

“We have recently seen a renewed interest from the Turkish government in reviving the EU accession process,” said the lead lawmaker on the file, Spanish Socialist Nacho Sánchez Amor, upon adoption of the report on Wednesday.

“This will not happen because of geopolitical bargaining, but only when the Turkish authorities show real interest in stopping the continuing backsliding in fundamental freedoms and rule of law in the country,” Sánchez Amor said.

Tukrey-EU ties have deteriorated amid Erdoğan’s increasingly autocratic behavior following a failed coup attempt in 2016.

washington post logoWashington Post, U.S. cuts military aid to Egypt, sends money instead to Taiwan, Karen DeYoung, Sept. 16, 2023 (print ed.). The Biden administration is withholding $85 million from Cairo over human rights concerns.

The Biden administration this week told Congress that it intends to withhold $85 million designated for U.S. security assistance to Egypt this year, and instead provide the bulk of the money to Taiwan.

The decision brought immediate criticism from lawmakers that the reprogrammed amount either wasn’t enough to punish Egypt for ongoing detentions of political prisoners and other human rights abuses, or that it was a paltry offering to Taiwan given the urgency of China’s aggressive behavior.

The decision to redirect $55 million from Egypt to “strengthen Taiwan’s defense capabilities” is the second time in recent weeks the administration has authorized money to Taipei under the Foreign Military Financing program that previously was reserved for sovereign nations.

In late August, the State Department notified Congress of plans to provide $80 million in the form of aid, rather than sales, of military equipment to Taiwan. China immediately charged it was a violation of U.S. recognition of the “One China” policy and Beijing’s claimed sovereignty over the self-governing island.

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U.S. Economy, Jobs, Budgets, Crypto Currency

ny times logoNew York Times, Billions to Connect Everyone to High-Speed Internet Could Still Fall Short, Madeleine Ngo, Sept. 19, 2023. President Biden promised to provide every American access to high-speed internet. But some raised concerns about the funds.

ny times logopaul krugmanNew York Times, Opinion: Inflation Is Down, Disinflation Denial Is Soaring, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 19, 2023. A funny thing happened to me on the internet the other day.

Like many economists, I’ve been looking at various measures of underlying inflation to try to peer through the economic fog, and I thought I should post an update on one measure that I’ve emphasized in the past: consumer prices excluding food, energy, used cars and shelter. To my surprise, my dry technical post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, drew a huge number of mostly hostile comments.

The gist of most of this outburst was that I was trying to hide the problems facing Americans by using a measure that excluded much or most of what real people worry about.

Hey, if you never want to get anyone angry, don’t enter public discourse. But this was a revealing moment. Inflation has, by almost any measure, been coming down remarkably quickly and painlessly. But a lot of people aren’t having it; disinflation denial is soaring.

Before I get to that, a few facts.

ny times logoNew York Times, Some Businesses Make ‘Woke Free’ a Selling Point, Santul Nerkar, Sept. 19, 2023 (print ed.). A number of companies are trying to appeal to customers who think corporate America is pushing a progressive, liberal agenda.

Jonathan Isaac is a forward for the National Basketball Association’s Orlando Magic, but he is perhaps better known as someone who chose not to protest police brutality against Black Americans during a summer of widespread activism involving racial injustice.

Mr. Isaac, who is Black, turned that singular moment in July 2020 — when he decided not to join many other N.B.A. players in kneeling during the national anthem as the league restarted in a Covid “bubble” setting in Orlando, Fla. — into a platform as a conservative political activist. In 2022, he spoke at a rally of Christian nationalists and anti-vaccine Americans and wrote a book about why he did not join the protest. This year, he started Unitus, an apparel company centered on “faith, family and freedom.”

“I wanted my values to be represented in the marketplace, especially when it came to sports and leisure wear,” Mr. Isaac said in an interview.

Most companies used to do everything they could to avoid political controversies and, by extension, risk alienating potential customers. No longer. Seemingly everything in the United States is political now, including where you shop for socks and leggings.

Companies like Anheuser-Busch and Target have recently faced backlash from the right over marketing and advertising decisions that were seen as a liberal Trojan horse: Anheuser-Busch for a transgender influencer’s promotion of Bud Light and Target for its Pride Month displays.

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U.S. Military, Security, Intelligence, Foreign Policy

ny times logoNew York Times, Biden Officials Focus on African Crises at United Nations Gathering, Michael Crowley, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken met on Friday with African leaders in hopes of reversing a coup in Niger, as the U.S. tries to deliver on promises to the growing but troubled continent.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken met on Friday with African leaders seeking to restore Niger’s democratically elected government to power, capping a week at the United Nations in which the Biden administration worked to deliver on promises of support amid high-profile crises elsewhere, like the war in Ukraine.

In a sign of the instability threatening Africa’s potential for economic growth and independence, several of the leaders spoke about a scourge of coups that has spread across the continent — eight in the past three years — as President Biden has tried to promote democracy.

On Tuesday, Nigeria’s president, Bola Tinubu, told the annual gathering of the U.N. General Assembly that the military overthrows reflect widespread failures to improve African lives. “The wave crossing parts of Africa does not demonstrate favor towards coups,” he said. “It is a demand for solutions to perennial problems.”

Mindful of complaints on the continent that the United States is consumed by the war in Ukraine and competition with China, President Biden spent much of his speech to the U.N. on Tuesday addressing topics of particular interest to African leaders, including food security, development aid and climate change.

U.S. officials said Mr. Biden’s address drew an enthusiastic response from African leaders and diplomats in New York who appreciated his attention to their issues. That included Mr. Biden’s discussion of plans for a U.S.-sponsored corridor linking Angola with mineral-rich parts of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (a project in which the United States, dependent on rare-earth minerals, has a significant self-interest).

And recapping the week for reporters at a news conference on Friday, Mr. Blinken lingered on the details of his Africa diplomacy, noting U.S. progress on a joint program with the United Nations and African Union that helps “countries in Africa develop their own sustainable and effective sources of food,” including through what he called “climate-resistant” crops.

But officials from the 54-nation continent hardly speak from a unified pro-Western position. In remarks on Thursday, Col. Mamadi Doumbouya of Guinea, who announced himself as that country’s new leader after a coup in September 2021, condemned democratically elected African leaders “who cheat to manipulate the text of the constitution in order to stay in power eternally,” calling them “the real putschists.”

Directing his comments toward Western nations, Mr. Doumbouya complained that “this democratic model that you have so insidiously and skilfully imposed on us” was not working for his continent.

The discord reflected just one of the challenges facing the Biden administration’s effort to follow through on pledges to focus American foreign policy more on Africa.

In the near term, Biden officials are working to address several broiling crises in Niger, Sudan and elsewhere.

On Friday morning, Mr. Blinken met with the leaders of several nations that are members of the Economic Community of West African States, a regional group that has been pressuring Niger’s military leadership to relinquish power under the threat of a military intervention. The Biden administration hopes to avoid a conflict that could spill across the region.

In a readout following the meeting, the State Department said that attendees “were united in their position that the National Council for Safeguarding the Homeland in Niger” — the country’s ruling military junta — “must release President Mohamed Bazoum, his family, and all those unlawfully detained.”

Mr. Bazoum and his family have been detained since July.

In a side drama this week, representatives of Mr. Bazoum’s government and from the junta both sought to address the general assembly.

Bakary Yaou Sangaré, Niger’s permanent representative to the United Nations, who was appointed under Mr. Bazoum, would have had the right to do so — had he not thrown his allegiance with the generals who seized power and who named him the country’s new foreign minister.

  • Washington Post, U.S. plan envisions factories in Africa for surging EV battery demand, Sept. 23, 2023.

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Religion News Service via Washington Post, Is a pastor’s sin a private matter? Johnny Hunt’s lawsuit makes that claim, Bob Smietana, Sept. 23, 2023. In the middle of 2010, not long after his term as Southern Baptist Convention president ended, Johnny Hunt took time off for his annual vacation.

washington post logoHe planned to return to the pulpit at First Baptist Church in Woodstock, Ga., in early August. But just before his first Sunday back, Hunt announced he was taking a leave of absence, citing his health and a sense of exhaustion.

What no one knew at the time was that Hunt had another reason for his leave.

On July 25, 2010, while vacationing in Florida, Hunt had kissed and fondled another pastor’s wife in what his attorneys would later call a “brief, consensual extramarital encounter.”

Then Hunt spent more than a decade covering the incident up.

Without telling his congregation — or the millions of Southern Baptists he had represented as their president — Hunt went through a secret restoration process that included counseling sessions with the woman he had fondled and her husband. He then returned to the pulpit.

southern baptist convention logo 2For a dozen years, no one was the wiser. Hunt retired from First Baptist in 2019 and took on a new role as a senior vice president for the SBC’s North American Mission Board and continued his busy and often lucrative career as a preacher and public speaker.

Then, in 2022, an investigation into how SBC leaders dealt with the issue of abuse was released, and his name was included in the report.

Over the course of their inquiry, investigators from Guidepost Solutions, the firm hired by the SBC, had heard about Hunt’s misconduct and learned that the woman involved in the incident — who has not been named publicly — described it as a sexual assault and as nonconsensual.

“We include this sexual assault allegation in the report because our investigators found the pastor and his wife to be credible; their report was corroborated in part by a counseling minister and three other credible witnesses; and our investigators did not find Dr. Hunt’s statements related to the sexual assault allegation to be credible,” investigators from Guidepost concluded.

When the report became public, Hunt first denied it and claimed the incident was consensual. He resigned from NAMB, went through another restoration process, then made a defiant return to the pulpit earlier this year.

This past spring Hunt filed suit against the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee and Guidepost, claiming they had ruined his life by revealing his misconduct and including him in an abuse report.

The heart of Hunt’s claim of invasion of privacy and defamation was summed up in a recent court filing submitted by his attorneys. Hunt’s sins, they wrote, were a private moral failing that should have been kept confidential.

“Pastor Johnny was not the president of the SBC or a member of the Executive Committee at the time of the incident,” they wrote in a memorandum, opposing the denomination’s attempts to have the case dismissed. “He was merely a private citizen whose marital fidelity was nobody else’s business.”

That claim raises a series of questions.

Can a pastor’s sins ever really be private? Can a pastor who has made a living urging others to follow a morality code then claim his own failings are no one else’s business? And was the harm done to Hunt’s reputation primarily due to his own acts — both the misconduct and the subsequent coverup?

George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center and a former assistant general counsel for the New York Times, said Hunt’s claim to privacy will probably go nowhere in court.

Hunt is undoubtedly angry and embarrassed that his personal failings have been publicized, which is understandable, said Freeman. But as a religious leader who was outspoken about family values and ethical living, his wrongdoings are a matter of public concern, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

 ny times logoNew York Times, Analysis: The Litany of #MeToo News Continues. Is Anything Really Changing? Amanda Taub, Updated Sept. 22, 2023. It can appear as though society is no closer to a future in which women can go about their ordinary lives without being harassed, assaulted and coerced into silence. A news investigation reported that women had accused Russell Brand of sexual assault and harassment, including one allegation of rape.

The endless, relentless eruptions of sexual abuse and harassment scandals can sometimes seem like a particularly grim form of Zeno’s dichotomy paradox.

Back in the 5th century B.C., the Greek philosopher described how a runner on the path to a particular destination must first traverse half the distance, and then half the remaining difference, and then half the remaining distance, and so on — to infinity. By that logic, the runner can take steps toward a goal but will never actually reach it.

Similarly, each time a powerful man is held accountable for sexual misconduct, it seems like progress. And yet, when the allegations reveal a similar pattern of institutional actions that allowed the abuse to go on for years, and they provoke the same reactions of denial and victim-blaming, it can appear as though society is no closer to a future in which women can go about their ordinary lives without being harassed, assaulted and coerced into silence.

Take the news from the past eight days. On Sept. 12, the British Journal of Surgery published a study that found that nearly a third of female surgeons in England reported being sexually assaulted by a colleague within the last five years, and 63 percent had experienced sexual harassment (23 percent of male surgeons also reported being sexually harassed). The same day, a ProPublica investigation showed that Columbia University failed to act on years of evidence that Robert Hadden, a gynecologist at the university’s affiliated hospital system, was sexually assaulting women and girls who came to him for treatment.

On Sept. 16, an investigation by The Times of London and the Channel 4 news program “Dispatches” reported that multiple women had accused Russell Brand, the comedian turned fringe political YouTuber, of sexual assault and harassment, including one allegation of rape. On Sept. 18, Vice News reported that Tim Ballard, the founder of Operation Underground Railroad, an anti-trafficking organization, had been ousted from that organization after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct. The following day, Vice also reported on law enforcement records describing video footage of Paul Hutchinson, a producer of a movie about Ballard’s life, groping the breasts of a young woman whom he believed to be a 16-year-old trafficking victim. (Brand, Ballard and Hutchinson have all denied the allegations against them.)

Much ink has been spilled on the actions and motivations of abusers. But I find that these stories raise a much bigger question: whether, after years of #MeToo revelations, the institutional responses that have long enabled abuse are starting to change.
Sexual Assault Allegations Against Russell Brand

What Happened: Three British media outlets published an investigation in which four women accused the comedian Russell Brand of sexual assault. Brand has denied the allegations.

Abuse ‘debts’ coming due?

The term “beautiful soul" is an Israeli slang term that translates roughly as a more pejorative version of “bleeding heart”: a person who refuses to make moral sacrifices, even when there are practical incentives for doing so. In a 2013 book of the same name, Eyal Press profiled four whistle-blowers and conscientious objectors who ended up being vilified and ostracized for opposing wrongdoing within their own organizations.

Unpack that a bit, and you come to the uncomfortable truth: that in coldly rational terms, there are often substantial benefits from turning a blind eye to wrongdoing, or even fostering it.

As Press writes, a beautiful soul is not just someone who refuses to conform, it’s someone who is willing to block the pursuit of material goals by demanding that an organization, or a society, adhere to its own stated values.

 washington post logoWashington Post, Indiana AG sues hospital over abortion for 10-year-old who was raped, Ben Brasch, Sept. 19, 2023 (print ed.). Indiana’s attorney general is suing the state’s largest health-care system for allegedly mishandling the case of a doctor who spoke out about performing an abortion for 10-year-old girl who was raped last summer.

The procedure came days after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, which helped turn the girl’s case into a national story that quickly became politicized.

Attorney General Todd Rokita (R) claims that Indiana University Health improperly prioritized its physician, Caitlin Bernard, instead of the patient’s right to confidentiality, according to the lawsuit filed Friday.

The lawsuit is not even the most recent volley in the back-and-forth. Rokita violated professional conduct rules in speaking about this case, according to a ruling Monday from the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission, days after the lawsuit was filed.

“Patients should be able to trust their doctors because trust is the foundation of a patient-doctor relationship. Without trust, we do not have reliable, honest health care,” Rokita said in a recorded statement announcing the suit.

States where abortion is legal, banned or under threat

A statement provided by an IU Health spokeswoman said the hospital system holds itself accountable every day for securing the privacy of its patients. “We continue to be disappointed the Indiana Attorney General’s office persists in putting the state’s limited resources toward this matter,” she said. “We will respond directly to the AG’s office on the filing.”

The lawsuit centers on Bernard publicly talking about, but not naming the patient in, the procedure she performed in late June 2022.

Bernard told the Indianapolis Star about the girl, who crossed state lines for an abortion because of Ohio’s trigger law. The trigger law implemented a ban on abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy as soon as Roe was struck down. (The girl was 9 when she was raped and turned 10 before having the abortion, according to the Associated Press. Indiana’s legislature was the first post-Roe to effectively ban all abortions.)

Though an internal IU Health review cleared Bernard of wrongdoing, Indiana’s medical license board deemed she had violated state and federal privacy laws — including The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, HIPAA — by discussing the girl’s case publicly. The board fined her $3,000. Rokita, who appeared on Fox News talking about the case, opened an inquiry into her actions. Bernard at one point considered filing a defamation suit.

President Biden said the situation underscored that no child should have to cross state lines for an abortion. Some right-wing commentators and news outlets called Bernard’s story a hoax. But reporters at the Indianapolis Star and Columbus Dispatch proved the story was true.

The girl identified Gerson Fuentes in a police interview, and investigators arrested him July 12 — the same day Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) told Gannett’s Ohio bureau that “I know the cops and prosecutors in this state” and “there is not a damn scintilla of evidence” the investigation existed.

ny times logoNew York Times, How a Yale Student’s Rape Accusation Exposed Her to a Defamation Lawsuit, Vimal Patel, Sept. 19, 2023.  The woman’s allegation led to the expulsion of Saifullah Khan, who was acquitted in a criminal trial. His lawsuit is now challenging these disciplinary hearings. That lawsuit, filed in 2019, is challenging the way universities across the country have adjudicated such sexual assault hearings.

In a 2018 disciplinary hearing at Yale University, Saifullah Khan listened as a woman accused him of raping her after a Halloween party.

lauren boerbert Beetlejuice

The Independent, Lauren Boebert changes her tune on Beetlejuice behaviour as new video reveals heavy petting with date, Oliver O'Connell, Sept. 16, 2023. Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert has issued an apology for not telling the truth about an incident that saw her thrown out of a production of Beetlejuice.

The apology comes as new footage from security cameras at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts shows that Rep Boebert was not just vaping, singing, and taking flash photos during the performance, but also appeared to engage in heavy petting with her male companion.

Her latest statement reads: “The past few days have been difficult and humbling, and I’m truly sorry for the unwanted attention my Sunday evening in Denver has brought to the community. While none of my actions or words as a private citizen that night were intended to be malicious or meant to cause harm, the reality is they did and I regret that.

“There’s no perfect blueprint for going through a public and difficult divorce, which over the past few months has made for a challenging personal time for me and my entire family. I’ve tried to handle it with strength and grace as best I can, but I simply fell short of my values on Sunday. That’s unacceptable and I’m sorry.”

In April Ms Boebert filed for divorce from her husband of 18 years, Jayson Boebert, and in June she announced she became a grandmother at the age of 36 after her 17-year-old son had a baby with his girlfriend.

The statement continues: “Whether it was the excitement of seeing a much-anticipated production or the natural anxiety of being in a new environment, I genuinely did not recall vaping that evening when I discussed the night’s events with my campaign team while confirming my enthusiasm for the musical. Regardless of my belief, it’s clear now that was not accurate; it was not my or my campaign’s intention to mislead, but we do understand the nature of how this looks. We know we will have to work to earn your trust back and it may not happen overnight, but we will do it.

“I’m deeply thankful to those in the 3rd District who have defended me and reached out this week and offered grace and support when I needed it the most. l’ve learned some humbling lessons these past few days but I vow moving forward, I will make you proud.”

The Colorado lawmaker has also previously accused the left of “grooming” children and railed against drag shows, tweeting in June 2022: “Take your children to CHURCH, not drag bars.”

The hypocrisy of her apparent public sexual behaviour in a theatre versus her criticism of drag and attacks on the LGBTQ+ community did not go unnoticed, with Clara Jeffery of Mother Jones tweeting: “You do have to watch what you take your kids to, lest they sit next to a Congressperson ‘vaping’ and engaging in sex acts.”

Journalist John Harwood similarly wrote: “Republican extremist in Congress engaging in wildly-inappropriate sexual behavior in crowded public theater explains that she’s trying to handle her divorce ‘with strength and grace as best i can’.”

washington post logoWashington Post, Planned Parenthood in Wisconsin will resume offering abortions, Patrick Marley and Caroline Kitchener, Sept. 16, 2023 (print ed.). Planned Parenthood plans to resume offering abortions in Wisconsin next week, more than a year after it stopped providing the service because of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning the right to abortion.

wisconsin map with largest cities CustomPlanned Parenthood and others stopped providing abortions after the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization because of an 1849 law that was broadly viewed as banning nearly all abortions.

The Wisconsin attorney general, a Democrat, sued in state court to try to overturn that law. A judge in July issued an initial ruling that concluded the 1849 law did not ban anyone from seeking abortions but rather barred someone from battering a pregnant woman and killing her unborn child. The judge is expected to issue a final ruling in the case soon, but Planned Parenthood announced Thursday it was not waiting for that ruling and instead would resume offering services on Monday at clinics in Milwaukee and Madison.

The case before the Dane County judge is expected to continue and other lawsuits could be filed in response to Planned Parenthood’s resumption of abortion services.

Kristin Lyerly, an OB/GYN who performed abortions in Wisconsin before Roe v. Wade was overturned, said she will immediately return to providing abortions in her home state.

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washington post logoWashington Post, Anyone 6 months or older should get updated coronavirus shot, CDC recommends, Lena H. Sun and Fenit, Sept. 13, 2023 (print ed.). The CDC’s director said the reformulated vaccines can restore protection and provide “enhanced protection” against variants currently responsible for most infections and hospitalizations in the United States.

cdc logo CustomTuesday, with the vaccine expected to become available within 48 hours — as the respiratory illness season looms.

covad 19 photo.jpg Custom 2Mandy Cohen, director of the CDC, advised that anyone 6 months and older should get at least one dose of an updated shot. Her broad recommendation came after the agency’s expert advisers voted for a universal approach to seasonal coronavirus vaccination. The shots are intended to bolster defenses as the nation heads into the fall and winter virus season, when influenza and RSV are also primed to be on the rise.

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U.S. Media, Education, Religion, Sports, High Tech

washington post logoWashington Post, Editorial: Even $500 million isn’t enough to save local journalism, Editorial Board, Sept. 22, 2023. Books, op-eds, think pieces and conferences — many, many conferences: The plight of local journalism in the United States has received its share of attention. At a 2022 summit on this topic, an industry veteran said that there’s “probably more people trying to help the newspaper business than in the newspaper business.”

A large pile of cash is now sidling up to all the chatter. In an initiative announced this month, 22 donor organizations, including the Knight Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, are teaming up to provide more than $500 million to boost local news over five years — an undertaking called Press Forward.

Journalists and publishers on the local scene in markets across the country have worked nonstop to bring their neighbors important stories and experiment with ways of paying for the service. The injection of more than a half-billion dollars is sure to help the quest for a durable and replicable business model.

The even bigger imperative, however, is to elevate local news on the philanthropic food chain so that national and hometown funders prioritize this pivotal American institution. Failure on this front places more pressure on public policy solutions, and government activism mixes poorly with independent journalism.

There’s no shortage of need. According to 2022 research by Penny Abernathy, a visiting professor at Medill and a former executive at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, newspapers are closing at an average rate of more than two per week; since 2005, more than one-quarter of U.S. newspapers have vanished. Digital-only start-ups haven’t plugged the gap, leaving too many communities without pressing information about themselves. The contraction has led to the proliferation of “news deserts”; there are 200 counties, home to 70 million people, with no newspaper.

No surprise: It turns out that areas with thin and declining news coverage also have lower voter turnout, less robust political competition and declining civic engagement. Into the void have seeped misinformation and disinformation.

What’s more, local news stands as the industry’s front line against the erosion of public trust. News consumers, after all, needn’t venture far to judge the veracity of a report on a three-alarm blaze up on Main Street; nothing dispels “fake news” quite like a freshly charred facade.

Who’s to blame? The internet, mostly. Whereas deep-pocketed advertisers formerly relied on newspapers to reach their customers, they took to the audience-targeting capabilities of Facebook or Google. Web-based marketplaces also siphoned newspapers’ once-robust revenue from classified ads. Local news entrepreneurs these days attempt to get by with a mix of advertising (or “sponsorship,” in the case of nonprofit news organizations), subscriber revenue and grants from philanthropic institutions. “If you’re going to do a big mission, you’ve got to have multiple sources of revenue,” says Eric Barnes, CEO of the Daily Memphian.

washington post logoWashington Post, Misinformation research is buckling under GOP legal attacks, Naomi Nix, Cat Zakrzewski and Joseph Menn, Sept. 23, 2023. The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political disinformation but also the quality of medical information online.

Academics, universities and government agencies are overhauling or ending research programs designed to counter the spread of online misinformation amid a legal campaign from conservative politicians and activists who accuse them of colluding with tech companies to censor right-wing views.

The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans in Congress and state government — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political falsehoods but also the quality of medical information online.

Facing litigation, Stanford University officials are discussing how they can continue tracking election-related misinformation through the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a prominent consortium that flagged social media conspiracies about voting in 2020 and 2022, several participants told The Washington Post. The coalition of disinformation researchers may shrink and also may stop communicating with X and Facebook about their findings.

The National Institutes of Health froze a $150 million program intended to advance the communication of medical information, citing regulatory and legal threats. Physicians told The Post that they had planned to use the grants to fund projects on noncontroversial topics such as nutritional guidelines and not just politically charged issues such as vaccinations that have been the focus of the conservative allegations.

NIH officials sent a memo in July to some employees, warning them not to flag misleading social media posts to tech companies and to limit their communication with the public to answering medical questions.

ny times logoNew York Times, The Fox Titan Turned Passion and Grievance Into Money and Power, James Poniewozik, Sept. 23, 2023 (print ed.). Rupert Murdoch built a noise-and-propaganda machine by giving his people what they wanted — and sometimes by teaching them what to want, our critic writes.

rupert murdoch 2011 shankbone The polite way to describe the legacy of a man like Rupert Murdoch is to leave aside whether his accomplishments were good or bad and simply focus on how big they were. It is to eulogize him like Kendall Roy memorializing his father, Logan, in “Succession,” the HBO corporate drama none too slightly based on the Murdochs, among other dynasties. Maybe he had “a terrible force,” as Kendall put it, but “he built, and he acted. … He made life happen.”

But the polite way is exactly the wrong way to assess Mr. Murdoch, who on Thursday announced his retirement from the boards of Fox and News Corporation. Mr. Murdoch achieved nothing the polite way. His style and his work were direct and blunt. Let us take his measure his way.

Rupert Murdoch’s empire used passion and grievance as fuel and turned it into money and power.

His tabloids ran on the idea of publishing for readers as they were, not according to some platonic ideal of how one wished them to be. That meant pinups and prize giveaways and blaring scandal headlines.

Over years and decades, Mr. Murdoch’s properties shifted their definition of “elite” away from people with more money than you and toward people with more perceived cultural capital than you, something that would be essential to nationalist politics in the 21st century and Fox’s dominance. (He did all this while living the life of a jet-setting billionaire.)

 washington post logoWashington Post, Lachlan Murdoch will be fully in charge of Fox. Will viewers notice? Jeremy Barr, Sept. 22, 2023. When Rupert Murdoch hands over the reins of the family media empire to his son Lachlan, it’s unlikely that viewers of Fox News will notice much difference.

lachlan murdoch 2013When Rupert Murdoch formally hands over the reins of his media empire to his 52-year-old son Lachlan in November, die-hard Fox News viewers will hardly notice any difference.

Conservative-leaning Lachlan, shown in a 2013 photo, has controlled the cable-news giant’s parent company since 2019, when he was picked to serve as chief executive and his more liberal brother James left the family business, seemingly ending speculation that a new sensibility would arrive with the next generation of Murdochs.

“I’ve had a sense that Lachlan is at least as conservative as his father,” said Preston Padden, a former Fox executive who has since became a critic of the network (but described Lachlan as “a very nice guy” in their interactions back in the 1990s).

ny times logoNew York Times, Rupert Murdoch to Retire From Fox and News Corporation Boards, Jim Rutenberg, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). The move leaves his son Lachlan as the sole executive in charge of the global media empire.

rupert murdoch 2011 shankbone Rupert Murdoch, left, is retiring from the Fox and News Corporation boards, the company announced Thursday morning, making his son Lachlan the sole executive in charge of the global media empire he built from a small local newspaper concern in Australia starting 70 years ago.

fox news logo SmallThe elder Mr. Murdoch will become chairman emeritus of the two companies, the company said in a release.

Mr. Murdoch, 92, had shown no intention to step down or even slow down — even after he named Lachlan as the heir to his business empire in 2019, when he sold his vast entertainment holdings to the Walt Disney Company.

Even now, in his emeritus status, he will continue to offer counsel, Lachlan Murdoch said in a statement.

“We thank him for his vision, his pioneering spirit, his steadfast determination, and the enduring legacy he leaves to the companies he founded and countless people he has impacted,” Lachlan Murdoch, 52, said in a release the company put out Thursday morning.

washington post logoWashington Post, Her students reported her for a lesson on race. Can she trust them again? Hannah Natanson, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). Mary Wood’s school reprimanded her for teaching a book by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Now she hopes her bond with students can survive South Carolina’s new laws.

As gold sunlight filtered into her kitchen, English teacher Mary Wood shouldered a worn leather bag packed with first-day-of-school items: Three lesson-planning notebooks. Two peanut butter granola bars. An extra pair of socks, just in case.

Everything was ready, but Wood didn’t leave. For the first time since she started teaching 14 years ago, she was scared to go back to school.

Six months earlier, two of Wood’s Advanced Placement English Language and Composition students had reported her to the school board for teaching about race. Wood had assigned her all-White class readings from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a book that dissects what it means to be Black in America.

The students wrote in emails that the book — and accompanying videos that Wood, 47, played about systemic racism — made them ashamed to be White, violating a South Carolina proviso that forbids teachers from making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” on account of their race.

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada during a frosty meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India during the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi earlier in September 2023 (Canadian Press photo by Sean Kilpatrick via Associated Press).


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ny times logoNew York Times, Biden, Warning Trump Could ‘Destroy’ Democracy, Moves Past G.O.P. Primary, Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein, Sept. 22, 2023. Months before the first Republican primaries, the president is turning his attention to his old adversary as he tries to re-energize his party’s voters and donors.

President Donald Trump officialThis spring, as the Republican presidential primary race was just beginning, the Democratic National Committee commissioned polling on how the leading Republicans — Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis — fared against President Biden in battleground states.

But now, as Mr. Trump’s lead in the primary has grown and hardened, the party has dropped Mr. DeSantis from such hypothetical matchups. And the Biden campaign’s polling on Republican candidates is now directed squarely at Mr. Trump, according to officials familiar with the surveys.

djt maga hatThe sharpened focus on Mr. Trump isn’t happening only behind the scenes. Facing waves of polls showing soft support for his re-election among Democrats, Mr. Biden and his advisers signaled this week that they were beginning to turn their full attention to his old rival, seeking to re-energize the party’s base and activate donors ahead of what is expected to be a long and grueling sequel.

On Sunday, after Mr. Trump sought to muddy the waters on his position on abortion, the Biden operation and its surrogates pushed back with uncommon intensity. On Monday, Mr. Biden told donors at a New York fund-raiser that Mr. Trump was out to “destroy” American democracy, in some of his most forceful language so far about the implications of a second Trump term. And on Wednesday, as the president spoke to donors at a Manhattan hotel, he acknowledged in the most explicit way yet that he now expected to be running against “the same fella.”

ny times logoNew York Times, With a Huge Lead in the GOP Polls, Trump Is in Rarified Territory, Nate Cohn, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). Donald Trump is polling about as well as any candidate in the modern era of contested presidential primaries.

Donald J. Trump’s lead in the Republican primary just keeps growing.

He breached 60 percent of the vote in Fox News and Quinnipiac polls last week, including 60-13 and 62-12 leads over his nearest rival, the not-so-near Ron DeSantis.

Even more notable: His gains follow what would be considered a disastrous 50-day stretch for any other campaign. Since early August, he has faced new federal and state criminal indictments for attempting to subvert the 2020 election. He skipped the first presidential debate, which was nonetheless watched by over 10 million people. Not only did it not hurt him, but he came out stronger.

With these latest gains, Mr. Trump is inching into rarefied territory. The latest surveys show him polling about as well as any candidate in the history of modern contested presidential primaries. He’s approaching the position of George W. Bush, who led John McCain by a similar margin at this stage of the 2000 race. And in the two aforementioned polls, he’s matching Mr. Bush’s position.

The 2000 election is a helpful reminder that the race might still become more competitive. Mr. Bush skipped the first two debates, but Mr. McCain ultimately won New Hampshire, cleared the field of significant opponents, and ultimately won six more contests. He didn’t win, of course. He didn’t come close. But it was at least a race. That’s more than can be said right now for Mr. Trump’s competition, which would probably go 0 for 50 if states voted today.

ap logoAssociated Press, Hard-right Republicans push dangerously closer to a disruptive federal shutdown, Lisa Mascaro and Stephen Groves, Sept. 21-22, 2023. With House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s latest funding plan in ruins and lawmakers leaving town for the weekend, there’s no endgame in sight as hard-right Republicans push dangerously closer to a disruptive federal shutdown.

U.S. House logoThe White House will tell federal agencies on Friday to prepare for a shutdown, according to an official with the Office of Management and Budget who insisted on anonymity to discuss the upcoming instructions. That’s standard seven days out from a federal disruption.

kevin mccarthyThe Republican McCarthy, right,  has repeatedly tried to appease his hard-right flank by agreeing to the steep spending cuts they are demanding to keep government open. But cheered on by Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner for president in 2024, the conservatives have all but seized control in dramatic fashion.

In a crushing defeat Thursday, a handful of Republican hardliners blocked a typically popular defense bill from advancing — the second time this week it was set back, an unheard-of loss for a House speaker.

djt maga hatSpeaker McCarthy is running out of options to stop a shutdown as conservatives balk at a new plan

Even a stopgap bill to keep government funding past the Sept. 30 deadline, called a continuing resolution or CR, is a non-starter for some on the right flank who have essentially seized control of the House.

“This is a whole new concept of individuals who just want to burn the whole place down,” McCarthy said after Thursday’s vote, acknowledging he was frustrated. “It doesn’t work.”

republican elephant logoThe open revolt was further evidence that McCarthy’s strategy of repeatedly giving in to the conservatives is seemingly only emboldening them, allowing them to run roughshod over their own House majority. Their conservative bills have almost no chances in the Senate.

Trump urged the conservatives to hold the line against the higher funding levels McCarthy had agreed to with President Joe Biden earlier this year and to end the federal criminal indictments against him.

“This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots,” Trump wrote on social media.

“They failed on the debt limit, but they must not fail now. Use the power of the purse and defend the Country!” the former president wrote.

The White House and Democrats, along with some Republicans, warn that a shutdown would be devastating for people who rely on their government for everyday services and would undermine America’s standing in the world.

ny times logoNew York Times, Rupert Murdoch to Retire From Fox and News Corporation Boards, Jim Rutenberg, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). The move leaves his son Lachlan as the sole executive in charge of the global media empire.

rupert murdoch 2011 shankbone Rupert Murdoch, left, is retiring from the Fox and News Corporation boards, the company announced Thursday morning, making his son Lachlan the sole executive in charge of the global media empire he built from a small local newspaper concern in Australia starting 70 years ago.

fox news logo SmallThe elder Mr. Murdoch will become chairman emeritus of the two companies, the company said in a release.

Mr. Murdoch, 92, had shown no intention to step down or even slow down — even after he named Lachlan as the heir to his business empire in 2019, when he sold his vast entertainment holdings to the Walt Disney Company.

Even now, in his emeritus status, he will continue to offer counsel, Lachlan Murdoch said in a statement.

“We thank him for his vision, his pioneering spirit, his steadfast determination, and the enduring legacy he leaves to the companies he founded and countless people he has impacted,” Lachlan Murdoch, 52, said in a release the company put out Thursday morning.

MSNBC, Former Prosecutor Says She Quit Trump-Russia Probe Over Concerns With Barr, Nicolle Wallace, Sept. 21, 2023. 'Simply couldn't be part of it': Fmr. prosecutor breaks silence on quitting Trump-Russia probe.

Former top official at the DOJ Andrew Weissmann and former FBI Counterintelligence Agent Pete Strzok join Nicolle Wallace to discuss federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy comments about her departure from the Durham investigation for the first time since resigning three years ago, confirming it was the politically-driven handling of this investigation that drove her to leave.

Alternet, Durham deputy who helped lead Trump-Russia probe says she left DOJ over concerns with Barr, Elizabeth Preza, Sept. 22, 2023. Nora Dannehy, a former federal prosecutor who helped lead the Department of Justice investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, "broke her long silence” on her abrupt 2020 departure from the DOJ, testifying Wednesday that concerns about former Attorney General Bill Barr’s handling of the case prompted her to quit, The Connecticut Mirror and Associated Press report.

“My conscience did not allow me to remain,” Dannehy said during her confirmation hearing before the Connecticut Judiciary Committee of the General Assembly. State legislatures are currently mulling Dannehy’s nomination for the Connecticut Supreme Court.

Dannehy, who was deputy to former DOJ special counsel John Durham, was on the team “tasked with investigating whether intelligence agencies or the FBI were guilty of wrongdoing in examining whether Russia colluded with the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump in 2016,” the Connecticut Mirror reports.

Per the AP:

Trump expected the investigation to expose what he and his supporters alleged was a “deep state” conspiracy to undermine his campaign, but the slow pace of the probe – and the lack of blockbuster findings – contributed to a deep wedge between the president and Barr by the time the attorney general resigned in December 2020.

The investigation concluded last May with underwhelming results: A single guilty plea from a little-known FBI lawyer, resulting in probation, and two acquittals at trial by juries.

ny times logoNew York Times, Analysis: Request for Gag Order on Trump Raises Free Speech Dilemma, Charlie Savage, Sept. 22, 2023. Federal prosecutors are putting the prospect of political violence at the heart of their argument to limit Donald Trump’s statements about the election case.

The request by prosecutors that a judge impose a gag order on former President Donald J. Trump in the federal election-subversion case presents a thorny conflict between the scope of his First Amendment rights and fears that he could — intentionally or not — spur his supporters to violence.

Justice Department log circularThere is little precedent for how the judge overseeing the case, Tanya S. Chutkan, should think about how to weigh strong constitutional protections for political speech against ensuring the functioning of the judicial process and the safety of the people participating in it.

It is one more example of the challenges of seeking to hold to account a norm-shattering former president who is being prosecuted in four cases as he makes another bid for the White House with a message that his opponents have weaponized the criminal justice system against him.

“Everything about these cases is making new law because there are so many gaps in the law,” said Paul F. Rothstein, a Georgetown University law professor and a criminal procedure specialist. “The system is held together by people doing the right thing according to tradition, and Trump doesn’t — he jumps into every gap.”

Citing threats inspired by the federal indictments of Mr. Trump, a recently unsealed motion by the special counsel, Jack Smith, has asked Judge Chutkan to order the former president to cease his near-daily habit of making “disparaging and inflammatory or intimidating” public statements about witnesses, the District of Columbia jury pool, the judge and prosecutors.

A proposed order drafted by Mr. Smith’s team would also bar Mr. Trump and his lawyers from making — or causing surrogates to make — public statements “regarding the identity, testimony or credibility of prospective witnesses.” It would allow Mr. Trump to say he denies the charges but “without further comment.”

 

President Biden met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office on Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023 (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

President Biden met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office on Thursday (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

ny times logoNew York Times, Russia-Ukraine War: Zelensky Thanks Americans in Emotional Speech to End Washington Visit, Karoun Demirjian and Ben Shpigel, Updated Sept. 22, 2023. “There is not a soul in Ukraine that does not feel gratitude to you, America,” the Ukrainian president said after a long day of lobbying Congress for more aid and a meeting with President Biden.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine finished a long day of lobbying in Washington at the White House, where he met Thursday with President Biden after receiving a $325 million air-defense package, but appeared to have made little immediate progress in persuading House leadership to approve another $24 billion in military and humanitarian aid.

ukraine flagMr. Zelensky, accompanied by his wife, Olena Zelenska, capped off his visit with an emotional speech at the National Archive on Thursday evening, during which he and his wife thanked Americans for their support.

Zelensky is working hard to highlight the values that bind the American and Ukrainian people, stressing a shared love of freedom. He says U.S. aid has saved millions of lives in Ukraine by keeping most of the country out of Russian hands.

 New York Times, Senator Robert Menendez Is Indicted With His Wife and 3 Others, Benjamin Weiser, Tracey Tully and William K. Rashbaum, Sept. 22, 2023. The indictment said the the New Jersey senator and his wife accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of robert menendez obribes, including cash and gold bars.

Robert Menendez of New Jersey, right, the powerful Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was charged on Friday with taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes — including gold bars — to wield influence abroad and at home, aiding the government of Egypt and businessmen in New Jersey.

democratic donkey logoThe three-count federal indictment, which also charges the senator’s wife and three New Jersey businessmen, accuses him of using his official position in a wide range of corrupt schemes. In one, he sought to secretly provide Egypt with sensitive U.S. government information, prosecutors said. In two others, he aimed to influence criminal investigations of two New Jersey businessmen, one of whom was a longtime fund-raiser for Mr. Menendez.

Toward that end, the senator recommended that President Biden nominate a lawyer, Philip R. Sellinger, to be U.S. attorney for New Jersey because Mr. Menendez believed he could influence Mr. Sellinger’s prosecution of the fund-raiser, the indictment said. Mr. Sellinger, who was ultimately confirmed for the post, was not accused of any wrongdoing.

senate democrats logoIn another scheme, Mr. Menendez used his position to try to disrupt an investigation and prosecution by the New Jersey State attorney general’s office, according to the indictment.

In exchange for all those actions, the indictment said, the senator and his wife, Nadine Menendez, accepted cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, a luxury vehicle and other valuable things.

“Constituent service is part of any legislator’s job — Senator Menendez is no different,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a news conference announcing the charges. He said that Mr. Menendez’s Senate website explicitly states the kinds of services he would not provide because they are be improper.

“Behind the scenes, Senator Menendez was doing those things for certain people — the people who were bribing him and his wife,” he said.

Soon after the news conference, Mr. Menendez issued a page-long denial, blaming the charges on “forces behind the scenes” that have “repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave.”

He said he was confident that this matter would be “successfully resolved once all of the facts are presented and my fellow New Jerseyans will see this for what it is.”

“The excesses of these prosecutors is apparent,” he added. “They have misrepresented the normal work of a Congressional office. On top of that, not content with making false claims against me, they have attacked my wife for the longstanding friendships she had before she and I even met.”

ny times logoNew York Times, U.A.W. Extends Walkouts to More Plants, but Cites Progress in Ford Talks, Neal E. Boudette, Sept. 22, 2023. The union designated 38 parts distribution factories as additional strike targets at G.M. and Stellantis.

The United Automobile Workers union on Friday significantly raised the pressure on General Motors and Stellantis, the parent of Jeep and Ram, by expanding its strike against the companies to include all the spare parts distribution centers of the two companies.

By widening the strike to the distribution centers, which supply parts to dealerships for repairs, the union is effectively taking its case to consumers, some of whom might find it difficult or impossible to have their cars and trucks fixed. The strategy could pressure the automakers to make more concessions to the union but it could backfire on the union by frustrating car owners and turning them against the U.A.W.

Shawn Fain, the union’s president, said Friday that workers at 38 distribution centers at the two companies would walk off the job. He said talks with two companies had not progressed significantly, contrasting them with Ford Motor, which he said had done more to meet the union’s demands.

Here’s what to know about the expanded strikes by autoworkers.

The president of the United Automobile Workers publicly invited President Biden to join workers on the picket lines.

 

Ukraine-Russian War, Russian Leadership

ny times logoNew York Times, Budget Drones Prove Their Value in a Billion-Dollar War, Andrew E. Kramer, Photographs by Lynsey Addario, Sept. 22, 2023. A fleet of inexpensive, mostly off-the-shelf drones is helping Ukrainian forces evade and target sophisticated Russian air defense systems.

ukraine flagThey are made of plastic or plastic foam, weigh only a few pounds and are often launched simply by having a soldier throw them into the air, as if tossing a javelin.

In a slow-moving counteroffensive against Russian forces that has been reliant at times on the smallest advantages, a fleet of cheap, mostly off-the-shelf drones is providing one for the Ukrainians.

The drones have begun to make a difference in one corner of a stagnant war, soldiers, commanders and pilots said in interviews, because their different materials and variable frequencies can evade enemy jamming systems. That has allowed them to venture farther in searches for enemy artillery positions and multimillion-dollar air defense systems, all while risking aircraft worth only a few thousand dollars apiece.

Along one of their two main Ukrainian lines of advance in the south, they say, the Russian Army has been forced to move its howitzers out of range of Ukraine’s guns, as drone pilots have adapted well enough to regularly evade Russian electronic jamming systems that had been spotting them reliably earlier in the war.

ny times logoNew York Times, Russia Says Ukrainian Strike Targeted Black Sea Fleet’s Headquarters, Constant Méheut, Sept. 22, 2023. The fleet’s headquarters were damaged in the attack, which was the latest on occupied Crimea as Kyiv sought to disrupt Moscow’s military operations.

Russian FlagUkraine launched a missile attack on the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea on Friday, Russian and Ukrainian authorities said, the latest strike on the illegally occupied peninsula as Kyiv seeks to disrupt Moscow’s military operations.

Russia’s defense ministry said that air defenses had shot down five missiles but that the Black Sea Fleet’s headquarters in the city of Sevastopol had sustained damage. One service member was missing after the attack, it added in a statement.

Video footage posted on social networks showed thick black smoke billowing from what appeared to be the headquarters. It was not immediately known whether the building was hit in a direct strike that had evaded air defenses or by fragments of an intercepted missile. The Russian state news agency Tass reported that debris was “scattered hundreds of meters away after the missile strike” and that ambulances were heading to the scene.

The headquarters was damaged in the attack, the latest on the illegally occupied peninsula as Kyiv seeks to disrupt Moscow’s military operations.

Here’s what we’re covering:

  • One soldier is missing after the attack on Sevastopol, Russia says.
  • Zelensky meets with Trudeau before addressing Canada’s Parliament.
  • Zelensky predicts during U.S. visit that Ukraine will win back Bakhmut.
  • Ukrainian armored vehicles breach some Russian defenses, reflecting slight progress a halting counteroffensive.
  • Here are some of the highlights of President Zelensky’s trip to the U.S.
  • The U.S. is expanding F-16 patrols over Romania amid concerns about drone debris.
  • A cargo ship departs a Ukrainian port with grain, again testing the Black Sea route.

ny times logoNew York Times, Zelensky meets with Trudeau before addressing Canada’s Parliament, Ian Austen, Sept. 22, 2023. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was holding meetings with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada on Friday morning before addressing the country’s Parliament on his first trip to the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Mr. Trudeau has been a particularly strong supporter of Ukraine, reflecting a consensus among Canadians. His country has the largest population of expatriate Ukrainians and Mr. Trudeau’s government has provided about $3.7 billion in financial assistance to Ukraine and an additional $1.3 billion in military aid.

The Canadian prime minister greeted Mr. Zelensky at a 19th-century building in Canada’s Parliamentary complex that has become the temporary home of the House of Commons, which is being renovated. Early Friday afternoon, Mr. Zelensky is scheduled to address the House and Canada’s unelected Senate in a joint session in the chamber.

New York Times, Ukrainian armored vehicles breached some Russian defenses in the southeast, Sept. 22, 2023.

washington post logoWashington Post, Opinion: Ukraine aid is hanging by a thread, Josh Rogin, right, Sept. 21, 2023  As Washington turns its focus toward the josh rogin2024 presidential campaign, U.S. aid to Ukraine is becoming increasingly vulnerable to partisan politics and the culture wars.

When the next tranche comes up for a vote in Congress, the number of Republicans voting “no” will be high. If the Biden administration wants to preserve the flow of support to Kyiv, it will need to mount a more robust, more honest case about the expected costs and length of the war effort to lawmakers and the American people.

 

United Nations

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday and said Russia had weaponized essentials like food and energy (Reuters photo).

 President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday and said Russia had weaponized essentials like food and energy (Reuters photo).

ny times logoNew York Times, Ukraine’s Fight Is the World’s, Zelensky Tells U.N. Assembly, Richard Pérez-Peña, Andrew E. Kramer and Farnaz Fassihi, Sept. 20, 2023 (print ed.). The entire world has a vested interest in helping defeat the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President charles blow CustomVolodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine told the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, casting his appeal for more allies and aid as a matter of security — even survival — for many other nations.

ukraine flagDelivering one of the most anticipated speeches of the annual gathering of world leaders, Mr. Zelensky painted Russia as a habitual aggressor, citing Moscow’s military interventions in Moldova, Georgia and Syria, its increased control over Belarus and its threats against the Baltic States.

“The goal of the present war against Ukraine is to turn our land, our people, our lives, our resources, into a weapon against you, against the international rules-based order,” he said.

Almost 19 months into a war with no end in sight, U.N. leaders had signaled that they wanted this year’s General Assembly, which began on Tuesday, to center on global warming and the sustainable development of poorer countries. They were hoping for less of a focus on Ukraine than last year, when Mr. Zelensky addressed the gathering by video.

ny times logoNew York Times, In his U.N. speech, President Biden called for collective action on Ukraine, climate change and other major crises, Michael D. Shear and Peter Baker, Sept. 20, 2023 (print ed.). President Biden sought to rally the world on Tuesday to stick joe biden resized owith Ukraine and warned against appeasing Moscow in a way that would reward its aggression and encourage the further use of force to redraw the global map.

The president used his annual address to the United Nations General Assembly to try to counter war fatigue both at home and abroad even as House Republicans back in Washington hold up further military aid to Ukraine and key nations around the globe remain on the sidelines or even facilitate the Kremlin’s war.

washington post logoWashington Post, Zelensky to speak at U.N. Security Council in potential showdown with Russia’s Lavrov, Sept. 20, 2023. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is set to take part in a special Security Council session Wednesday at the United Nations on the war ukraine flagravaging his country, in the hope of solidifying support from Western allies and beyond.

Russian FlagRussian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is also scheduled to attend the meeting, Russian state media reported, setting up a potentially dramatic encounter between the pair — 19 months after Moscow launched its invasion.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: New Russian ideology emerges under Putin -- National Bolshevism, Wayne Madsen, left, Sept. wayne madsen may 29 2015 cropped Small21, 2023. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin has unveiled a new political ideology that he hopes will outlast him long after his death.

wayne madesen report logoKnown as National Bolshevism, the ideology enshrines as political godfathers both Joseph Stalin and Putin. A new history textbook has been unveiled for mandatory use in Russian schools that praises National Bolshevism and Stalinism as twin pillars of the Kremlin's state ideology. The textbook is the brainchild of Vladimir Medinsky, Russia's Culture Minister from 2012 to 2020 and a current General Councillor of Putin's United Russia party.

The textbook condemns every Soviet and Russian leader between Stalin and Putin as betrayers of Russia's "golden age" under Stalin. Medinsky's textbook also condemns Vladimir Lenin, particularly his granting of self-governance to the former Russian Empire's vast number of conquered non-Russian peoples. Medinsky favors restoring statues of Stalin around Russia and disinterring Lenin's body from his mausoleum on Red Square. It is troubling that imprisoned opposition leader Alexey Navalny shares Putin's belief in the primacy of Russian over non-Russian nationalities, religions, and languages. That is why Navalny's street protests often featured National Bolshevik signs and banners.

The Medinsky textbook praises Putin as the restorer of the Stalin era golden age. National Bolshevism, which uses as its symbol a black hammer and sickle in a white circle centered on a red flag has been likened to Adolf Hitler's National Socialism. [left] In fact, a September 21, 1930 New York Times article characterized Hitler's Nazi ideology as "national bolshevism" because it combined German nationalism and opposition to the "big industrialist capitalism of Germany."

Medinsky's book stipulates that there is only one Russian ethnicity and one true Russian religion, Russian Orthodoxy. Medinsky opposes multiculturalism in all forms and he does not consider Ukrainians, Tatars, and the over 80 other Russian "Federation" ethnic groups to be separate ethnicities. In Medinsky's view, they are Russians, should speak only Russian, and practice Russian Orthodoxy. This viewpoint is, of course, shared by Putin.

In 2017, Russia's top academic council recommended that Medinsky's doctoral degree be revoked after it was discovered that he has committed several acts of plagiarism, including in two doctoral dissertations. Later that year, under pressure from Putin, the Russian agency overseeing the awarding doctoral degrees voted against revoking Medinsky's degree.

Putin's and Medinsky's restoration of Stalinism as Russia's state ideology comes at a time when mass protests are sweeping across the eleven time zones of the country. In addition to non-Russian ethnic protests in the Republics and regions of Dagestan, Udmurtia, Mari El, Sakha, Buryatia, Tuva, Ingushetia, Kalmykia, and Nenetsia protests are also being reported from the majority Russian regions of Ulyanov, Leningrad, Krasnodar, Penza, Belgorod, Oryol, Krasnoyarsk, and Chelyabinsk. Responding to protests in Buryatia, earlier this month the Kremlin banned the NGO Free Buryatia.

Even among smaller population non-Russian groups, there is growing opposition to Russian colonization and the re-writing of history books. The Tkhansom, the council of the Itelmen peoples native to Kamchatka, argue that Russian history books calling the Russian annexation of Kamchatka "peaceful" and "voluntary" ignore the fact that it was a violent invasion and occupation. Speaking on September 20 to the plenary session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics underscored the feeling of many when he said Russia's expansionist policies are "a reminder of the struggle of a colonial empire to keep its territories.”

Those who have criticized Putin as a new "Hitler" bent on expanding Russia's borders now have a Nazi-like ideology, National Bolshevism, to bolster their belief.

Sidebar: There is a similarity between the newly-unveiled state ideology of Russia and that of Donald Trump's MAGA movement. Implicit in both are the re-writing of history books to favor the dominant ethnic group, downplay multiculturalism, and eliminate the underpinnings of democracy.

ny times logoNew York Times, Regulators Charge Money Manager Tied to Russian Oligarch, Matthew Goldstein, Sept. 20, 2023 (print ed.). U.S. securities regulators on Tuesday charged a small Westchester County, N.Y., firm that managed billions in hedge fund and private equity investments for the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich with operating as an unregistered investment adviser.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said in a lawsuit filed in federal court in New York that Concord Management and its owner, Michael Matlin, had earned tens of millions dollars in fees for providing investment advice to an individual it identified only as a “wealthy former Russian official widely regarded as having political connections to the Russian Federation.”

A person familiar with the matter confirmed that the individual is Mr. Abramovich, who was a governor of the Chukotka region in eastern Russia.

The New York Times reported in March 2022 that Concord, with an office in Tarrytown, N.Y., had managed dozens of investments for Mr. Abramovich. Weeks earlier, Russia had invaded Ukraine, and international authorities had begun to issue sanctions against Russian oligarchs close to President Vladimir V. Putin. The United States never imposed sanctions on Mr. Abramovich, but Britain and the European Union did.

The sanctions forced Mr. Abramovich to sell the Chelsea Football Club, the famed London soccer team. Authorities also froze more than $13 billion in assets held by financial institutions in Britain, the Cayman Islands, the Isle of Jersey and the British Virgin Islands. Some of those assets were believed to be investments that Concord had made for Mr. Abramovich with U.S. financial firms that managed offshore funds.

ny times logoNew York Times, All six of Ukraine’s deputy defense ministers were dismissed on Monday, a senior government official said, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Sept. 19, 2023 (print ed.). Ukraine has dismissed all six of its deputy defense ministers, it said on Monday, a shuffling of the senior ranks weeks after the defense minister was replaced.

ukraine flagThe government has been investigating accusations of corruption associated with the ministry, which has become the main conduit for billions of dollars of Western military aid since Russia launched its full-scale invasion nearly 19 months ago.

Earlier this month, President Volodymyr Zelensky replaced Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov with Rustem Umerov, citing the need for “new approaches.”

The government did not give a reason for Monday’s decision, and it was not immediately clear whether the decisions were related.

The deputy ministers included Hanna Maliar, who has emerged in recent months as one of the most prominent officials giving information on the daily progress of Ukraine’s counteroffensive. Three months into the assault, Kyiv is yet to achieve a decisive breakthrough.

Monday’s decision was made at a cabinet meeting, according to a cabinet announcement on the Telegram messaging app.

Here’s what we’re covering:

  • Ukraine gave no reason for dismissing all six of its deputy defense ministers.
  • White House meeting and Gershkovich appeal: What to watch for this week.
  • Zelensky warns Russia about attacks on power plants.
  • North Korea’s leader leaves Russia after meeting with Putin and touring factories.

 

 A photograph released by North Korean state media showing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia on Wednesday.Credit...Korean Central News Agency, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A photograph released by North Korean state media showing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia on Wednesday (Photo via Korean Central News Agency and Agence France-Presse).

ny times logoNew York Times, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un’s Embrace May Place Xi Jinping in a Bind, David Pierson, Sept. 17, 2023 (print ed.). Closer ties between Russia and North Korea could weaken Beijing’s leverage over both countries and set back China’s efforts with the West.

To challenge the power of his chief rival, the United States, China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has linked arms with two anti-Western states, declaring a “no limits” partnership with Russia and pledging “unswerving” support for North Korea.

But the specter of a budding bromance between President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, after their meeting this week in eastern Russia, may not be as welcome a development for Mr. Xi as it might initially seem.

Closer ties between Pyongyang and Moscow could result in both countries being less reliant on Beijing. That might diminish China’s perceived clout in global negotiations over ending Russia’s war in Ukraine and curtailing North Korea’s nuclear program.

“I doubt Xi is overjoyed to see the Kim-Putin love-fest unfolding across China’s border,” said John Delury, a professor of Chinese studies at Yonsei University in Seoul. Mr. Kim and Mr. Putin, he said, have reasons to seek more autonomy and leverage from China, the “dominant power in the triangle,” by strengthening their bilateral ties.

Russia could conceivably gain more weaponry from North Korea to intensify its war in Ukraine. North Korea could garner aid or technological assistance from Russia and ramp up its nuclear weapons program.

“All this activity would come on Beijing’s doorstep but outside its control or influence,” Mr. Delury said.

ny times logoNew York Times, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia said they would ban Ukrainian grain exports, reviving an issue that has threatened E.U. solidarity, Mike Ives, Sept. 17, 2023 (print ed.). Hours after the European Union ended a temporary ban on exports of Ukrainian grain and other products to five member nations, three of them — Poland, Hungary and Slovakia — defied the bloc and said they would continue to bar Ukrainian grain from being sold within their borders.

As Ukraine, one of the world’s largest grain exporters, has struggled to ship its grain because of Russia’s invasion, the European Union has opened up to tariff-free food imports from the country, a move that had the unintended consequence of undercutting prices in several eastern E.U. member states. As part of a deal meant to protect those countries, the European Union allowed some grain to transit through them, but prohibited domestic sales.

Brussels’ decision to let that deal expire at midnight on Friday revived an issue that has threatened European Union unity on support for Ukraine. The Hungarian agriculture minister, Istvan Nagy, announced an extended ban that would include more products in a Facebook post early Saturday morning, saying that “we will protect the interests of the farmers.” Poland and Slovakia announced their bans on Friday.

Lawmakers in Bulgaria went in the other direction, agreeing on Thursday to resume imports of Ukrainian agricultural products, The Associated Press reported, saying the ban had cut into tax revenue.

ny times logoNew York Times, In Moscow, the War Is Background Noise, but Ever-Present, Valerie Hopkins, Photographs by Nanna Heitmann, Sept. 17, 2023 (print ed.). Muscovites are going about their daily lives. But the war’s effects are evident — in the stores, at the movies and in the increasingly repressive environment.

washington post logoWashington Post, Kim pledges to back Putin’s ‘sacred struggle’ during rare summit, Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Mary Ilyushina, Sept. 14, 2023 (print ed.). Korean leader Kim Jong Un called his country’s relations with Russia his top priority and pledged full support to President Vladimir Putin and his government amid the war in Ukraine, as the leaders met Wednesday for the first time in four years at a space facility in Russia’s far east.

Their remarks underscored the apparent message of the meeting: The two leaders, regarded as outcasts by the West, will back each other to the hilt, in a rebuff to U.S.-led efforts to isolate Putin over his invasion of Ukraine and Kim over his pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

ny times logoNew York Times, Analysis: History Turns Upside Down in a War Where the Koreas Are Suppliers, Choe Sang-Hun, Sept. 14, 2023. For help in Ukraine, the U.S. and Russia have turned to South and North Korea, which kept stockpiling arms for decades after their own conflict.

North Korean flagWashington and Moscow flooded the Korean Peninsula with arms and aid as they fueled the war between South and North seven decades ago. Now, in a fateful moment of history turning back on itself, Russia and the United States are reaching out to those same allies to supply badly needed munitions as the powers face each other down again, this time on the other side of the globe, in Ukraine.

When President Vladimir V. Putin met North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, in Russia’s far east on Wednesday, they struck what North Korea called “a satisfactory agreement​” on “the immediate cooperation matters​” between the two states, which have found common interests in opposing the United States and its allies. If any specific arms deal was struck, neither Moscow nor Pyongyang was expected to announce it. Buying weapons from North Korea or providing help for its weapons programs are violations of United Nations Security Council resolutions that Russia itself voted for.

politico CustomPolitico, Zelenskyy to visit Washington after U.N. appearance, Olivia Alafriz, Sept. 15, 2023 (print ed.). The Ukrainian president will meet with President Joe Biden and key members of Congress, a person familiar with the plans confirmed.

 

vladimir putin cbs 5 13 2022

washington post logoWashington Post, Shuffle of Russian military chiefs preceded death of Wagner boss Prigozhin, Francesca Ebel, Sept. 15, 2023. A day before the airplane disaster that killed Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, a Prigozhin ally known as “General Armageddon,” was removed as head of Russia’s air force.

Surovikin’s ouster was not the only hint that a consolidation was underway among the commanders of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

valery gerasimov o 2017Four days earlier, the Kremlin announced that President Vladimir Putin, shown above, had visited the main headquarters for the war along with Gen. Valery Gerasimov, left, the chief of the general staff. For months, Gerasimov had rarely been seen in public and, along with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, had been a frequent target of Prigozhin’s scathing public tirades accusing Russia’s regular military leadership of incompetence.

At the headquarters in Rostov-on-Don — the same one that Prigozhin and Wagner fighters seized during a brief, extraordinary rebellion in June — Putin shook Gerasimov’s hand and they walked together past a wall of portraits of decorated officers. With a smile, Putin greeted his “comrade officers” before attending a closed meeting with soldiers.

The message was clear: Shoigu and Gerasimov remain in charge, serving at Putin’s pleasure. Meanwhile, their external critics and internal rivals were being silenced or sidelined.

Some 96 hours after the Rostov visit, Prigozhin, who achieved Russia’s only significant territorial gain so far this year by capturing the city of Bakhmut, was dead, thus eliminating the most prominent pro-war critic of the Russian military’s failures in Ukraine.

The Wagner plane crash remains shrouded in mystery. A Prigozhin confidant who spoke out has raised two theories: that Prigozhin and two top deputies were assassinated by the Russian government, meaning that no one from Putin on down could be trusted; or that their deaths were orchestrated by outside actors, in which case the Russian security services failed to protect them.

 Relevant Recent Headlines

 

More On U.S. Politics, Governance, Elections

ny times logoNew York Times, In Three Southern States, a Legal Battle Over Political Maps and Black Voters, Michael Wines, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). G.O.P. legislatures in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana are contesting federal orders to redraw congressional maps.

Democratic-Republican Campaign logosThe Republican-led legislatures of Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama find themselves backed against courtroom walls this month in strikingly similar circumstances, defending congressional maps that federal judges have said appear to discriminate against Black voters.

It is a familiar position. Last year, the same judges said that, even before full trials were held, the same maps were so likely illegal that replacements should be used for the 2022 elections. That did not happen: Thanks to a once-obscure Supreme Court rule that outlaws election-law changes close to campaign season, the disputed maps were used anyway.

With an electorate so deeply split along partisan lines that few House races are competitive, the significance last November was glaring. Republicans took control of the House of Representatives by a bare five seats, three of them from districts they were poised to lose had new maps been used in the three states.

Now the revived litigation is again churning through the courts — at least six of them, at last count — with the same political stakes and a sharply divided view of the likely outcomes.

ny times logoNew York Times, Opinion: Young Voters Are Frustrated. They’re Staying Engaged ‘Out of Sheer Self-Defense,’ Charles M. Blow, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). A Pew Research Center report released this week called Americans’ views of our politics “dismal.” That might be too kind a word.

On metric after metric, the report ticked through markers of our persistent pessimism. In 1994, it says, “just 6 percent” of Americans viewed both political parties negatively. That number has now more than quadrupled to 28 percent. The percentage who believe our political system is working “extremely or very well”: just 4 percent.

And on many measures, younger people are the most frustrated, and supportive of disruptive change as a remedy.

Younger voters recognize that our political system is broken, and they have little nostalgia about a less broken time. They have almost no memory of an era when government was less partisan and less gridlocked. Their instincts are to fix the system they’ve inherited, not to wind back the clock to a yesteryear.

 

charles q brown jr. air force

washington post logoWashington Post, Senate confirms Joint Chiefs chair in respite from Tuberville blockade, Mariana Alfaro, Dan Lamothe and Abigail Hauslohner, Sept. 21, 2023 (print ed.). With Wednesday's confirmation vote in the Senate, Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. (shown above in an Air Force photo) becomes the second African American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Democrats briefly relenting in their ongoing feud with Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) to push through President Biden’s nominee for the military’s top job.

The 83-11 vote avoids what had been the embarrassing prospect of a temporary administrator filling the Pentagon’s most prestigious post. Yet it leaves about 300 other senior officers ensnared in Tuberville’s months-long hold on military promotions with no clear path to advancement, as the underlying political standoff over the Defense Department’s abortion policy exhibits no signs of abating.

Department of Defense SealBrown, who becomes only the second African American, after Gen. Colin Powell, to ascend to the chairman’s post, was confirmed after Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) chose to peel away the nomination for an individual vote. Senior officer promotions are typically approved by the Senate through unanimous consent to avoid lengthy floor debates and the politicization of votes around military commanders.

Schumer also moved forward with what could be individual confirmation votes on Marine Corps Gen. Eric M. Smith and Army Gen. Randy George to lead their respective services, appearing to leave open the possibility that the Senate will move to install new heads of the Navy and Air Force once their nominations clear scrutiny from the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The 11 senators voting against Brown were all Republicans: Mike Braun (Ind.), Ted Cruz (Tex.), Josh Hawley (Mo.), Mike Lee (Utah), Roger Marshall (Kan.), Eric Schmitt (Mo.), J.D. Vance (Ohio), Ron Johnson (Wis.), Cynthia M. Lummis (Wyo.), Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Tuberville.

In a statement congratulating Brown, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called him “a tremendous leader” and said “it is well past time” to confirm the other military nominees. “The brave men and women of the U.S. military deserve to be led by highly-qualified general and flag officers at this critical moment for our national security,” he added.

Tuberville imposed his hold on all senior military nominations in February, staging a dramatic protest of the financial assistance rendered to service members and their dependents who must leave the state where they are stationed to obtain an abortion. The Biden administration established the travel-reimbursement policy after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, as Republican-led states began to ban or severely restrict access to reproductive health care.

Until Wednesday, Democrats had refused to vote on the nominations individually, as Tuberville suggested they should. Schumer and other Democrats had long argued that to deviate from the Senate’s standard procedure of approving noncontroversial military nominations in large batches would serve only to encourage other lawmakers with political grievances to attempt a similar gambit, but they reversed course with Brown’s soon-to-be predecessor, Gen. Mark A. Milley, approaching his Sept. 30 legal deadline to step down from the chairman’s post.

An independent assessment by the Congressional Research Service last month found that working on all frozen nominations one-by-one would take months, even if the Senate focused on virtually nothing else.

After Brown’s confirmation vote, the Senate late Wednesday approved a motion to advance George’s nomination to lead the Army, with a final confirmation vote expected sometime Thursday. Efforts to advance Smith’s nomination to take over the Marines also should take place Thursday.

In a statement attacking Tuberville as “the sole cause of this crisis,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that Democrats “have no problem with voting on the most senior military officers” instead of the usual process of unanimous consent.

“We are disturbed, however, by Republicans’ interest in voting exclusively on a few select officers while hundreds of other officers and their families are punished,” he added. “Democrats pursued every opportunity we could before taking this route, and I hope Republicans understand the terrible message they are sending to the force.”

Earlier Wednesday, after Schumer threatened to keep lawmakers in the Senate over the weekend, they voted overwhelmingly — 89-8 — to advance Brown’s nomination for a final vote. Tuberville voted against doing so.

Tuberville did not object to the votes. But moments after the Senate moved to advance Brown’s nomination for final consideration, the freshman senator cast blame on Democrats for the state of play and vowed to continue his hold on the other military nominations unless the Pentagon changes its abortion policy.

While for now about 300 high-level military positions have been affected by Tuberville’s hold, the number is expected to rise sharply by the end of the year, impacting about 650 of the Defense Department’s 852 generals and admirals, officials have said.

 

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH).

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH).

ny times logoNew York Times, Attorney General Rebuffs Efforts to Reveal Details on Hunter Biden Inquiry, Glenn Thrush, Sept. 21, 2023 (print ed.). Attorney General Merrick Garland struck a sharp tone at a House hearing, saying prosecutors would not be “intimidated” by threats from Donald Trump’s allies.

merrick garlandAttorney General Merrick B. Garland offered a fiery defense of the Justice Department’s investigation of Hunter Biden on Wednesday, telling a House committee he was “not Congress’s prosecutor” — and would not reveal details of the U.S. House logoinquiry no matter how much pressure lawmakers applied.

During a grueling hearing before the House Judiciary Committee that foreshadowed a bruising impeachment fight ahead, Mr. Garland repeatedly refused to answer questions about internal deliberations or offer explanations for decision-making in the investigation, or the two federal indictments of former President Donald J. Trump.

Justice Department log circularHouse Republicans view Mr. Garland as a linchpin as they seek to bolster an impeachment inquiry into President Biden that is grounded, thus far, in inconclusive evidence that he profited from the business dealings of his son, Hunter. They have suggested Mr. Garland also might face impeachment, or contempt charges, for not fully answering their questions or providing access to documents and witnesses they have demanded.

Many of the claims and insinuations they leveled against Mr. Garland — that he is part of a coordinated Democratic effort to shield the Bidens and persecute Mr. Trump — were not supported by fact. And much of the specific evidence presented, particularly the testimony of an investigator who questioned key decisions in the Hunter Biden investigation, was given without context or acknowledgment of contradictory information.

Mr. Garland, a former federal appellate judge known for his circumspect and soft-spoken demeanor, took a more aggressive approach than during past hearings, alarmed by relentless attacks against his department. Countering their claims, he denounced escalating threats Trump supporters have directed against prosecutors, including the special counsel Jack Smith, and F.B.I. agents, prompting significant increases in security.

“Singling out individual career public servants who are just doing their jobs is dangerous — particularly at a time of increased threats to the safety of public servants and their families,” said Mr. Garland, who later reacted angrily when a Republican committee member called out a career prosecutor by name.

“We will not be intimidated,” he added. “We will do our jobs free from outside influence. And we will not back down from defending our democracy.”

It was Mr. Garland’s first appearance before the committee — stocked with far-right Trump stalwarts — since Mr. Smith brought two criminal indictments against Mr. Trump and a plea deal for Hunter Biden collapsed over the summer.

Mr. Garland’s testimony took place at what had been, in years past, a routine oversight hearing that would typically center on policy, crime, law enforcement initiatives and civil rights — issues that were largely jettisoned for attacks by Republicans and counterattacks by Democrats.

Over the past week, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has increased the pace and scope of his demand for access to documents and officials, including Mr. Weiss and his deputies, claiming they are fundamentally necessary for his committee to fulfill its oversight function.

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Republican Threats To Shut U.S. Government

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washington post logoWashington Post, House Republicans fail to break logjam on Pentagon funding bill, Marianna Sotomayor, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). House Republicans on Thursday failed to advance a Defense Department appropriations bill, a stunning defeat after leaders believed they had swayed enough votes to move the bill forward.

republican elephant logoIt was the second time in a week that a vote on the rule, needed to advance the bill, was defeated.

The failed vote came after an almost three-hour meeting Wednesday that focused both on long-term spending bills and the more immediate task of avoiding a government shutdown after Sept. 30. During the closed-door meeting, a majority of the House Republican conference found consensus around more than $1.5 trillion in discretionary spending for the upcoming fiscal year. And while they reported progress on a bill to keep the government open in the short term, a plan to avoid a shutdown was not finalized.

But any good feelings out of that meeting crumbled Thursday morning, when five Republicans — Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Dan Bishop (N.C.), Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Eli Crane (Ariz.) and Matthew M. Rosendale (Mont.) — voted against advancing the measure to a final vote. Rules Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) switched his vote from a “yes” to “no,” which allows Republicans to bring up the motion again at a later date if they have the votes.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) indicated he was not aware that Greene and Crane were going to flip their votes to a “no” on the rule.

“Two people flipped, so I got to figure out how to fix that,” he said as he left the House chamber. He said he didn’t have the “impression” that the two would change their votes. “We have five people, if they don’t want to even vote to allow us to bring the bills up, how does anybody complain?”

Crane, after casting his vote against the Defense appropriations rule, said “there’s nothing” that would get him to vote “yes” on it. Crane said his vote was in protest of the way Republican leadership is attempting to pass a short-term government funding bill.

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Pushback To GOP Hunter Biden Attacks, Impeachment Threats 

ny times logoNew York Times, Opinion: The Borking of Joe Biden, Pamela Paul, right, Sept. 22, 2023 (print ed.). If there was any doubt that the Republican pamela paul 2019House was no more sophisticated than a preschool playground, last week’s opening of an impeachment inquiry into President Biden settled it with a nasty kick of sand in Democrats’ face.

How else can you describe the pretext for this fishing expedition other than “You started it”? If our guy got embroiled in impeachment and protracted legal proceedings during election season, well then, damn it, so will yours.

Whereas Democrats began the first Trump impeachment inquiry after it was revealed that he tried to extort a political favor from the president of Ukraine in exchange for military aid, and the second impeachment after an insurrection, the Biden inquiry is proceeding with no clear evidence of any misdeeds by the president.

This is just the latest asymmetric tit-for-tat by Republicans.

Even many Republicans in Congress don’t buy into this kind of baloney, as we’ve learned from a series of Washington confessionals and from several Republicans who have questioned whether their side has the goods or if this is the best use of their time. As Kevin McCarthy announced the impeachment inquiry, you could almost see his wispy soul sucked out Dementor-style, joining whatever ghostly remains of Paul Ryan’s abandoned integrity still wander the halls of Congress.

But this isn’t the first time we’ve witnessed this kind of sorry perversion of Democratic precedent. What Democrats do first in good faith, Republicans repeat in bad faith. Time and again, partisan steps that Democrats take with caution are transmogrified into extraordinary retaliation by Republicans.

And so, Al Gore’s challenge of the 2000 election results, ending in his decorous acceptance of the results after a bitter court ruling, is reincarnated as an unhinged insurrection at the Capitol in 2021.

In exchange for the brief moment after the 2004 election when some Democrats claimed irregularities with the Ohio ballot process, we get Republicans taking baseless claims of voter fraud in 2020 to thermonuclear level.

In June 1992, Biden, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called on President George H.W. Bush not to nominate any candidate for the Supreme Court until after the fall election, saying it was “fair” and “essential” to keep what could be a sharp political conflict out of the campaign’s final days — as well as the nomination process itself. Of course, with no vacancy at hand, the stakes in that instance were nonexistent. But just after Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Mitch McConnell took the extraordinary position that he would not submit any Supreme Court nominee from President Barack Obama for Senate consideration in an election year. By ignoring that nominee, Merrick Garland, Republicans maintained a conservative majority on the court. McConnell, of course, disingenuously cited the “Biden rule” in his decision.

It is a bitter paradox that Biden, long a careful moderate, has suffered the brunt of this vindictive one-upmanship. The trouble with being around for so long, as Biden has been, is that there is always someone who remembers “the time when you” and holds a grudge.

ny times logoNew York Times, First Batch of Biden Emails Undercuts G.O.P. Claims, Luke Broadwater, Sept. 22, 2023. House Republicans have suggested that President Biden used an email alias to abuse his office and cover it up, but an initial tranche of the messages reveals banal content and personal information.

When House Republicans pressing to impeach President Biden discovered that the government had redacted emails in which he had used aliases to communicate while he was vice president, they demanded to see the full copies, alleging a cover-up of explosive evidence of wrongdoing.

Even Democrats were alarmed about the content of the correspondence, Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky and the chairman of the Oversight Committee, claimed in media interviews, saying they might link the president to Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine.

“They fear there are many more emails sitting in the National Archives that had been redacted with Hunter Biden’s name on it,” Mr. Comer told Newsmax, “and I think you’re going to see a lot of Democrats hit the panic button when we get those emails that haven’t been redacted.”

In fact, the first 14 pages of unredacted material yielded little for Democrats to panic about. The redactions were to black out personal information — things like Mr. Biden’s 8 a.m. appointment with his personal trainer and a lunch with his grandchildren — according to people familiar with the emails turned over to the oversight panel this week by the National Archives.

The emails are only a fraction of the more than 5,000 the Archives say exist in which Mr. Biden used a series of aliases — “Robin Ware,” “Robert L. Peters” and “JRB Ware” — to communicate, and Republicans say they may yet uncover the evidence they are seeking that he abused his office. Their existence had been known for two years, but it was not until the Archives revealed that they included redactions that Mr. Comer began publicly demanding their full release.

Emptywheel, Analysis: What If Journalists Actually Read Gary Shapley Rather Than Parroting His Testimony? Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Sept. 21, 2023. There was a really depressing House Judiciary Committee Hearing with Merrick Garland yesterday.

Republicans relentlessly claimed that Hunter Biden was getting special treatment because the U.S. Attorney investigating him, who wanted more leverage to force a plea deal, had been granted Special Counsel status — which should prove, instead, that DOJ was deploying extraordinary prosecutorial resources against a private citizen. Republicans relentlessly complained that Garland hadn’t interfered in Weiss’ investigation — at all! — to make him charge Hunter Biden more quickly or more aggressively when the entire point was he had agreed in his confirmation hearing not to interfere.

Republicans also repeated, over and over, two claims that Gary Shapley — the so-called whistleblower all these Republicans claim to trust implicitly — had already addressed in his notes. Those two claims are that David Weiss “let” statutes of limitation on the two Burisma years Republicans believe include the most corruption expire, and that he couldn’t get authority to charge Hunter in the venue — Los Angeles — where more recent tax years had venue.

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