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One in 10 people charged in the US Capitol insurrection are veterans or current servicemembers, according to a CNN review of court documents and Pentagon records.

A quarter of the defendants with military ties are also connected to right-wing extremist groups, like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. These groups had a big presence at the January 6 riot, and they've attracted significant attention from federal prosecutors investigating the attack and from Pentagon officials who are coming to grips with the problem of extremism in the military.

This is perhaps the most comprehensive analysis to date of the outsized role that veterans played in the insurrection. They represent 10% of all defendants charged in the riot, but only make up about 6% of the US adult population, according to government statistics from recent years.

On Wednesday, the Biden administration defended in federal court the Willow project, a huge oil drilling operation proposed on Alaska’s North Slope that was approved by the Trump administration and is being fought by environmentalists. Weeks earlier, it backed former President Donald J. Trump’s decision to grant oil and gas leases on federal land in Wyoming. Also this month, it declined to act when it had an opportunity to stop crude oil from continuing to flow through the bitterly contested, 2,700-mile Dakota Access pipeline, which lacks a federal permit.

The three decisions suggest the jagged road that Mr. Biden is following as he tries to balance his climate agenda against practical and political pressures.

As important, Mr. Biden is trying to avoid alienating a handful of moderate Republicans and Democrats from oil, gas and coal states who will decide the fate of his legislative agenda in Congress. Among them is Lisa Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska for whom the Willow project is a top priority and who grilled Deb Haaland about it during Ms. Haaland’s confirmation hearing for interior secretary in February.Editors’ PicksSummertime … and the Sloganeering Is a Little AwkwardThe Murky World of Private Spies and the Damage They May Be DoingThey’ve Given $6 Million to the Arts. No One Knew Them, Until Now.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story

President Joe Biden’s Justice Department is defending its use of an anti-riot statute that critics say is racist — a tool the Trump-era DOJ made aggressive use of to pursue some of those accused of violence in connection with last year’s racial justice protests.

“Constitutional statutory analysis begins with the statute’s plain language, not its provenance,” the brief prosecutors filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Portland, Ore., says. Spokespeople for the Justice Department could not say on Monday whether senior officials in Washington had approved the arguments submitted in Oregon late last week.

The government’s detailed new defense of the law came in the case against Kevin Phomma, an Oregon man charged with assaulting police officers last August during a protest outside a Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement building.

If Congress declines to impeach and convict the president for his actions on Wednesday, its failure to act will weaken the basic structure of the Constitution.

The key issue is this: One of the three branches of the federal government has just incited an armed attack against another branch. Beyond the threat to a peaceful transition, the incident was a fundamental violation of the separation of powers.

The president aimed to reverse the decision that Congress was making on a question that the Constitution expressly reserved for the legislature. The specifically anti-congressional animus is most obvious in the fact that the only other elected member of the executive branch, the vice president, was specifically targeted in his role as president of the Senate.

These three things are amazing beyond words:1) Mitt Romney has a lurker Twitter handle. 2) The handle name is "Pierre Delecto."3) "C'est Moi" is how Romney confirmed to a reporter that he was Delecto and Delecto was him.

"He explained that he uses a secret Twitter account — 'What do they call me, a lurker?' — to keep tabs on the political conversation. 'I won't give you the name of it,' he said, but 'I'm following 668 people.'"

By Feinberg's count, Pierre only ever tweeted 10 times (Romney -- or someone -- made the account private once its existence was revealed.) Which isn't a lot. (Good analysis!) But the nature of these tweets -- or, mostly, replies -- are interesting.

President Trump was forced to abandon his decision to host next year’s Group of Seven summit at his private golf club after it became clear the move had alienated Republicans and swiftly become part of the impeachment inquiry that threatens his presidency.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney tried to defend the decision during a news conference but caused a new controversy when he was asked about Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president that sparked the impeachment inquiry. Mulvaney told reporters that Trump had held up nearly $400 million in aid to push the foreign government to investigate Democrats, comments that undercut Trump’s central defense in the inquiry. When a journalist followed up, saying that Mulvaney seemed to be describing a quid pro quo, Mulvaney said “we do that all the time with foreign policy.”

Trump blamed his G-7 reversal on critics, saying on Twitter that his decision to scrap plans for a summit at the Doral club was “based on both Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility.”AD

If Congress declines to impeach and convict the president for his actions on Wednesday, its failure to act will weaken the basic structure of the Constitution.

The key issue is this: One of the three branches of the federal government has just incited an armed attack against another branch

Beyond the threat to a peaceful transition, the incident was a fundamental violation of the separation of powers.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday fired top cybersecurity official Chris Krebs in a message on Twitter, accusing him without evidence of making a “highly inaccurate” statement affirming the Nov. 3 election was secure and rejecting claims of fraud.

Krebs’ work in protecting the election from hackers and combating disinformation about the vote won praise from lawmakers of both parties as well as state and election officials around the country.

Reuters reported last week that Krebs had told associates he expected to be fired.

WASHINGTON — The bulk of the Affordable Care Act, the sprawling 2010 health care law that is President Barack Obama’s defining domestic legacy, appeared likely to survive its latest encounter with the Supreme Court in arguments on Tuesday.

“It does seem fairly clear that the proper remedy would be to sever the mandate provision and leave the rest of the law in place,” said Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. made a similar point. “Congress left the rest of the law intact when it lowered the penalty to zero,” he said.

When then-President Donald Trump released his updated list of potential Supreme Court nominees in September 2020, one name that garnered attention was that of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron

The case, Cameron v. EMW Women’s Surgical Center, arises from a challenge to a Kentucky law, H.B. 454, that generally makes it a crime for doctors to use the “dilation and evacuation” method, the procedure most commonly employed to end a pregnancy during the second trimester.

They argued that, because the law effectively outlaws the most common procedure used during the second trimester, it imposes an undue burden on the right to an abortion before the fetus becomes viable – normally somewhere between 22 and 24 weeks.

the most sustained line of response has been from my friend Eric Schnurer, a writer and long-time advisor to state and local governments.

In his first installment, in the fall of 2019, Schnurer emphasized the parts of the America-and-Rome comparison he thought were most significant—and worrisome. Then last summer, during the election campaign and the pandemic lockdown, he extended the comparison in an even-less-cheering way. In a third and more cautionary extension of his argument this summer, he concentrated on the U.S. Senate.

Now, chapter four:

BRANDON TERRY: Well, there’s this puzzle when we think about somebody like Martin Luther King Jr. And it’s that on the one hand, we have a national holiday devoted to him, an imposing monument on the hallowed space of the National Mall; he’s invoked in all manner of political speeches from across the political spectrum, probably the most famous African American of the 20th century.

But at the same time, if you ask even really well-educated people, they often don’t know that he’d written five major books, that he’s a systematic theologian with sustained interest in political philosophy who’s written lots and lots of things, incisive things, on some of the most pressing political and ethical matters.

King wants to say something different, I think. He wants to say that we are both of these things. We are a society with what he called the congenital deformity of racism — that it’s shot through many of our deepest institutions and structural arrangements, and because it has not been redressed on the scale that it would have to be to achieve true justice, it festers. It’s a rot. It’s a challenge that every generation is called on to pick up and try to do better than their forebears.

Taiwan is now on pace to spend more than $19 billion on defense in 2023. But China spends more than $200 billion a year

Instead of building large, conventional hardware (airplanes, tanks, submarines), military experts have urged Taiwan to focus on so-called asymmetric capabilities (anti-ship weapons, surface-to-air missiles, stockpiles of small arms and ammunition), which have served Ukraine well in repelling a larger invader. That, combined with a bigger force of civilian reserves, could make the cost of an invasion too high for China. This approach has earned a nickname in global defense circles: “the porcupine strategy.”

China now has the world’s largest navy, with more than 350 ships and submarines. Its rocket force maintains the world’s largest arsenal of land-based missiles, which would feature in any war with Taiwan.

In May 1945 a lone Russian soldier approached the Brinnlitz Nazi labour camp on a horse. He had come to tell the inmates they were free. Delighted as they were — the soldier was rewarded with hugs — the newly liberated men and women were also bewildered. Where would they go now?Realising that their liberator was, like them, a Jew, the former prisoners peppered him with questions. “Have you been in Poland?” they asked, since that was where most of them had come from. “Yes,” replied the officer, “I’ve just come from Poland.” “Are there any Jews left up there?” The officer told them what was simply the truth: “I saw none.”So where should they go? The officer looked them in the face: “I don’t know where you ought to go. Don’t go east — that much I can tell you. But don’t go west either.” He paused and added: “They don’t like us anywhere.”

My mother’s father, Alfred Wiener, had been one of the leaders of Germany’s Jews in the 1920s and 1930s and articulated the view of most German Jews at that time, though by no means all of them. He supported those Jews who wanted to settle in Palestine, but he didn’t support the creation of a Jewish state there.

As I relate in my recent family memoir, Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, in 1927 Alfred published a highly successful book based on his travels in Palestine. He argued strongly against the Zionist project. There were, he said, too many Jews in Europe to fit into such a tiny area, the economic ideas of the settlers were utopian, and (he was a considerable Arabic scholar) peace with Palestinian Arabs would be hard to come by. His critics said that his survey of the area was biased and described him as “one of the leaders of German anti-Zionism”.

This meme conflates the modern state of Israel with the Jewish people, which is of course the central rhetorical move of contemporary Zionism

All of this is bound up with a flagrantly false concept of Zionism that people who know better allow to spread because it’s politically convenient. When I argue about these topics, I constantly encounter people who think that the history of the Jews simply is the history of Zionism - that since 70 AD, when the Romans destroyed the second temple, all of worldwide Jewry has been involved in an effort to rebuild a Jewish state in Palestine. This is totally, historically, factually false.

It simply is not the case that Zionism has been an assumed part of Jewish identity historically, anti-Zionist Jews have been common, and the modern Zionist project is less than 150 years old.

European elites are right to worry. But the focus on divisions within the bloc obscures a much more disturbing development taking place beneath the surface: a coming together of the center right and the far right, especially on questions around identity, immigration and Islam.

With European parliamentary elections next year, this convergence is bringing into clearer view the possibility of something like a far-right European Union. Until recently, such a thing would have seemed unthinkable. Now it’s distinctly plausible.

Since then, the convergence between the center right and the far right in Europe has gone further. The lesson that center-right parties drew from the rise of right-wing populism was that they needed to adopt some of its rhetoric and policies. Conversely, some far-right parties have become more moderate, albeit in a selective way. At a national level, parties from the two camps have governed together, both formally, as in Austria and Finland, and informally, as in Sweden.

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah lawmakers voted Friday to override GOP Gov. Spencer Cox's veto of legislation banning transgender youth athletes from playing on girls teams — a move that comes amid a nationwide culture war over transgender issues. Before the veto, the ban received support from a majority of Utah lawmakers, but fell short of the two-thirds needed to override it. Its sponsors on Friday successfully flipped 10 Republicans in the House and five in the Senate who had previously voted against the proposal.

Salt Lake City is set to host the NBA All-Star game in February 2023. League spokesman Mike Bass has said the league is "working closely" with the Jazz on the matter.

I cannot support this bill. I cannot support the veto override and if it costs me my seat so be it. I will do the right thing, as I always do," said Republican Sen. Daniel Thatcher. With the override of Cox's veto, Utah becomes the 12th state to enact some sort of ban on transgender kids in school sports. The state's law takes effect July 1.

Donald J. Trump has polarized men and women, with the sexes parting ways to such a degree that Election Day could produce the biggest gender gap in decades.

gender war in the Republican Party itself.