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A plan to assassinate Kim Jong Un and preparations for a potential nuclear showdown with North Korea were among the trove of South Korean military documents reportedly stolen by Hermit Kingdom hackers.

South Korea’s Defense Ministry did not comment on the alleged hack

South Korea announced in May a “large amount of data” was stolen during a cyber attack that was possibly orchestrated by Kim Jong Un’s rogue regime.

For me, the most disturbing thing about the Trump presidency is the way each week, like a steady drip of acid, Donald Trump tries to erode the thing that truly makes us great as a country and the envy of so many around the world — the independence and nonpartisan character of our courts, our military, our F.B.I., our Border Patrol and our whole federal bureaucracy.

Why is this so important? Because America’s core governing institutions were not built to be “conservative” or “liberal.” They were built to take our deepest values and our highest ideals and animate them, promote them and protect them — to bring them to life and to scale them.

They are the continuity that binds one generation of Americans to the next and the beacon for how we work together to build an ever more perfect union.

So we return to the question that vexes NeverTrumpers and Democrats: Why are Republicans such quivering sycophants, willing to lie and debase themselves in support of an unpopular president who is repudiating many of the principles they have spent their lives advancing?

I’d suggest there are three distinct groups of Republican grovelers. Some may fall into multiple categories

First are the cynics who know Trump is unfit, if not dangerous; however, they’ll get what they can (e.g., judges, tax cuts) and bolster their resumes (e.g., working for the administration, getting fawning Fox News coverage). When Trump bottoms out, they’ll move on

In the hierarchy of Donald Trump-era scandals, from the brazen to the boorish, pay raises in a low-level agency shouldn’t crack the top quartile. But on Thursday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt managed to spin his hiring practices into a cobweb beyond his control—leaving some reporters to question whether a low-stakes snafu could now be the “end of the line.”

In his hearing before the House energy panel, Pruitt struggled to answer questions about salary hikes given to two of Pruitt’s closest aides. As The Atlantic first reported earlier this month, Pruitt bypassed the White House to give raises of 33 percent and 52 percent to Millan Hupp and Sarah Greenwalt, respectively, both of whom had worked for Pruitt while he was attorney general of Oklahoma. At the time, Pruitt denied any knowledge of the raises, telling Fox News’s Ed Henry that he didn’t know who on his staff had authorized them. Democratic lawmakers quickly questioned Pruitt’s account, prompting the agency’s inspector general to start digging. Pruitt has also been under scrutiny for leasing a condo from the wife of a lobbyist and for spending more than $40,000 for a soundproof booth around his office.

This story should be familiar. In some ways, the pay-raise debacle calls to mind Rob Porter, the ex-White House staff secretary who was fired after allegations of abusive relationships surfaced in the media. In a rapid-fire news cycle, the Porter scandal commanded weeks of attention. This was not because of a pile-on from the press; rather, it was because the White House continued to douse the issue with gasoline, with top aides changing their stories of what they knew and when.

no one seems to know the reality of what happened between Donald Trump, Stormy Daniels, and Michael Cohen. The only thing that is proven beyond a reasonable doubt is that the White House is lying about it.

This particular drama began Wednesday evening, when Rudy Giuliani, a new addition to the president’s legal team, went on Sean Hannity’s TV show and said that Trump had personally repaid Cohen, his lawyer and sometimes-fixer, for the $130,000 Cohen paid to Daniels as hush money about her alleged affair with Trump some years earlier.

Giuliani said. “It’s not campaign money. No campaign-finance violation.”This had the potential to be clever and elegant or else legally suicidal.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will bring an immigration bill to the floor by the end of January if lawmakers and the White House can reach a compromise, he said in a statement Wednesday.

“If negotiators reach an agreement on these matters by the end of January, I will bring it to the Senate floor for a free-standing vote,” he said. “I encourage those working on such legislation to develop a compromise that can be widely supported by both political parties and actually become law.” McConnell’s promise to bring a bill to the floor sets the stage for an intense round of negotiations next year — and could help make it easier to pass a short-term spending deal this week.

hey were joined by fellow members of the working group, Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), James Lankford (R-Okla.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), as well as Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), and Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.). Flake said Wednesday that he’s confident the prospective immigration bill could muster the 60 votes needed to clear a filibuster in the Senate. “The meeting we had yesterday was a good step forward,” he said during an interview with POLITICO in his Senate office. “Our biggest concern moving ahead with the bipartisan group was that we were negotiating without really knowing what would be acceptable to the White House in terms of the border portion of this, and we got a good idea.”

Following days of heavy backlash for a string of controversial tweets, Roseanne Barr on Thursday said she “begged” ABC to give her a chance to “apologize & make amends.”“I begged Ben Sherwood at ABC 2 let me apologize & make amends,” the embattled TV star tweeted about the ABC president. “I begged them not to cancel the show. I told them I was willing to do anything & asked 4 help in making things right. I'd worked doing publicity4 them 4free for weeks, traveling, thru bronchitis. I begged4 ppls jobs.”

Earlier this week, Barr tweeted that Jarrett, who is African-American and born in Iran, is like the “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.” She also sent a politically charged tweet linking Chelsea Clinton to Soros.

Amid the ongoing fallback for her comments, Barr returned to Twitter and retweeted an unproved claim posted by a right-wing activist, which accused ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey of consulting the former first lady before canceling the reboot.

Australian police were shocked on Tuesday to discover a mummified body inside the home of a man who died last year.

Police said the body was in the home “for a considerable time” and were “treating the death as suspicious.” Investigators were working to identify the body and a postmortem was being conducted to determine the cause of death.

Another neighbor described Roberts as a "really solitary guy, he wore the same thing all the time and just walked up and down Greenwich Road".

United Airlines Holdings Inc and Delta Air Lines welcomed on Friday a $50 billion relief package they said would protect jobs through September but warned that the continued challenges facing the industry will require more action.

Before the global crisis, U.S. airlines were transporting a record 2.5 million passengers a day. Now planes are only 10% to 20% full and new bookings are showing 80% to 90% declines in traffic even after dramatic cuts in capacity, industry lobby Airlines for America said.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian told employees that the relief package was not “a cure” and urged workers to continue signing up for voluntary unpaid leaves of absence.

On March 1, Joe Joyce and his wife, Jane, set sail for Spain on a cruise, flying first to Florida. His adult children — Kevin, Eddie and Kristen Mider — suggested that the impending doom of the coronavirus made this a bad idea. Joe Joyce was 74, a nonsmoker, healthy; four years after he opened his bar he stopped drinking completely. He didn’t see the problem.“He watched Fox, and believed it was under control,’’ Kristen told me.

on March 27, when Kristen got off the phone with her father, she called an ambulance. He was wheezing. His oxygen level turned out to be a dangerously low 70 percent. On April 9, he died of Covid-19. The following day, Artie Nelson, one of his longtime bartenders at JJ Bubbles, and also in his 70s, died of the virus as well.

the combination of being on a cruise ship — a proven petri dish for infections — and visiting a country with a full-blown outbreak is hard to ignore. But there was a way he might have avoided the trip, his daughter speculated. “If Trump had gone on TV with a mask on and said, ‘Hey this is serious,’ I don’t think he would have gone.”

As another presidential election nears, with American demographics trending more and more nonwhite, one need only observe the transparent schemes of voter suppression or glance at Fox News or listen to talk radio to realize that the ruling white, conservative minority perceives itself as under dire and imminent threat.

It is thus easy to see why Mitch McConnell is so beloved on the right. He and his Republican colleagues are fighting not so much to keep Donald Trump in office as to shore up their reign, which, in their minds, might never be reclaimed once surrendered. They are all-too aware that Vice President Mike Pence simply does not evoke the passion that Donald Trump does, and the risk, if Trump were removed with the help of Republican senators, of that passion turning to rage against their own could easily cost Republicans both the presidency and the Senate.

Under these circumstances, asking McConnell and other Republicans to voluntarily cede power because of the inconvenience of a president violating the Constitution is a fantasy. Rather, they will overlook any crime, any abuse of power, lest their rule be lost.

Conventional wisdom says that Trump executed a hostile takeover of the GOP. What we have seen this week suggests a friendly merger has taken place. Talk radio hosts have been spouting misogyny and anti-immigrant hysteria for years; Trump is their ideal leader, not merely a flawed vehicle for their views. Fox News has been dabbling in conspiracy theories (e.g. birtherism, climate-change denial) for decades; now Republicans practice intellectual nihilism.

Nearly every point of criticism raised against the left — softness on foreign aggressors, irresponsible budgeting, identity politics, executive overreach, contempt for the rule of law, infantilizing voters — has become a defining feature of the right.

At the start of the 2016 presidential campaign, supporting trade deals was considered a strongly held Republican view. The year before, 49 out of 54 Republican Senators had voted to give President Obama the “fast-track” authority necessary to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) through Congress. In 2014, Republicans had told the Pew Research Center that free-trade deals benefited the United States by a margin of 19 points. Trump changed that. By the fall of 2016, by a whopping 44-point margin, Republicans told Pew that trade deals harmed the United States.

if Trump has moved the GOP toward nationalism and nativism, why can’t he—or a future Republican leader—move it back? They could, but it won’t be easy because the Republican coalition has changed.

Between 1992 and 2016, the percentage of whites with college degrees that identified as Republicans dropped five points. Over that same period, the percentage of whites with a high-school degree or less who identified as Republicans rose 18 points.

Hillary Clinton because he was interested in any information on the Democratic candidate’s “fitness, character or

"I did not collude with any foreign government and do not know of anyone who did," he said. 

had no way to gauge the reliability, credibility or accuracy of any of the things he was saying. As it later turned out, my skepticism was justified,” Trump Jr. said