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In the years before Hillary Clinton announced she would run again for president, her top aides expressed profound concerns in internal emails about how foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton’s own moneymaking ventures would affect Mrs. Clinton’s political future.

The emails, obtained by hackers and being gradually released by WikiLeaks this month,

personal income from some foundation donors and “gets many expensive gifts from them.”

Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro just increased the nation's minimum wage by 40%.

inflation is expected to soar by nearly 500% this year and 1,660% next year

Venezuela's minimum wage, including food subsidies, is rising to 90,812 bolivars a month.

JERUSALEM — On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day last week, a top Israeli general gave a speech saying he saw “revolting trends” in today’s Israel that he compared to Nazi-era Germany and Europe in the 1930s.

His speech comes amid revelations that an Israeli soldier shot and killed a wounded Palestinian attacker in the head,

The general’s speech may have sparked reflection in some sectors, but mostly it inspired criticism — and calls for his head.

Maj-Gen Yair Golan said on the eve of Thursday's annual Holocaust Day that he detected trends in Israeli society suggestive of "nauseating processes" that occurred in 1930s Nazi Germany.

Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said he had "total confidence" in Gen Golan.

"There is, after all, nothing easier and simpler than hating the foreigner... arousing fears and terrifying."

Sometime early last fall, John Dean says he began having nightmares about a Trump presidency. He would wake in the middle of the night, agitated and alarmed, struggling to calm his nerves

Few people are more intimately acquainted than Dean with the consequences of an American presidency gone awry. As White House counsel under President Richard Nixon from 1970 to 1973, he was a key figure in the Watergate saga—participating in, and then helping to expose, the most iconic political scandal in modern U.S. history.

“The American presidency has never been at the whims of an authoritarian personality like Donald Trump,” Dean, who is now 78, told me. “He is going to test our democracy as it has never been tested.”

The Ukraine has banned Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, after he came out in support of Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Gorbachev's comments on Crimea are the latest wedge between Ukraine and Russia.

Ukraine's Security Service told CNN the ban was because of Gorbachev's "public support of military annexation of Crimea."

leaders are also uncertain how to deal with a society that is rapidly changing. Many of them are still the members of an old elite, mostly secular and aligned with the Labor Party, that is losing power to more right-wing, more religious Israelis. These leaders feel that part of their sacred mission of guarding the country involves maintaining the standards of morality and integrity that they were taught.

The I.D.F.’s top brass is troubled by signs that the Israeli public is less committed to keeping a high moral standard when fighting battles than it used to be

In remarks on Holocaust Remembrance Day, General Golan said that he sees similarities between Nazi Germany of the 1930s and Israel today when it comes to “signs of intolerance and violence.”

The people have spoken. What to do?

First, dare to say that the people aren’t always right. Surely Republicans admit the possibility. Or do they believe the people chose rightly in electing Obama? Twice. Historical examples of other countries choosing even more wrongly are numerous and tragic. The people’s will deserves respect, not necessarily affirmation.

In the end, Ryan called an armistice. What was he to do? Oppose and resign? And then what? What would remain of conservative leadership in the GOP? And if he created a permanent split in the party, he’d be setting up the GOP’s entire conservative wing as scapegoat if Trump lost in November.

Sen. John McCain slammed President Donald Trump's attacks on the media this week by noting dictators "get started by suppressing free press."

CNN contributor Carl Bernstein, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, called Trump's words "treacherous."

"The most dangerous 'enemy of the people' is presidential lying -- always," he tweeted. "Attacks on press by @realDonaldTrump more treacherous than Nixon's."

In requesting the resignation of his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, however, Mr. Trump made his first public concession to political expectations. Hypocrisy has scored a minor victory in America. This is a good thing.

Mr. Trump wasn’t just breaking the rules of political conduct: He was destroying them. He was openly claiming that he abused the system to benefit himself. If he didn’t pay his taxes and got away with it, this made him a good businessman. If he could force himself on women, that made him more of a man. He acted as though this primitive logic were obvious and shared by all.

Fascists the world over have gained popularity by calling forth the idea that the world is rotten to the core. In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt described how fascism invites people to “throw off the mask of hypocrisy” and adopt the worldview that there is no right and wrong, only winners and losers.

President Trump’s mental state is like a train that long ago left freewheeling and iconoclastic, has raced through indulgent, chaotic and unnerving, and is now careening past unhinged, unmoored and unglued.

Trump’s White House staff is at war with itself. His poll ratings are falling at unprecedented speed. His policy agenda is stalled. F.B.I. investigations are just beginning. This does not feel like a sustainable operation.

On the other hand, I have trouble seeing exactly how this administration ends. Many of the institutions that would normally ease out or remove a failing president no longer exist.

“Were the United States and China to wage war on one another, the whole world would divide itself,” the People’s Daily newspaper argued in a commentary, paraphrasing Henry Kissinger

Fears of a potentially calamitous trade war, or even a military clash between the two nuclear powers, have been building since Trump’s shock election win last November.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s influential chief strategist, was last week reported to have warned last year that war between the US and China in the resource-rich waterway was inevitable.

Sergey Kislyak, Russian Envoy, Cultivated Powerful Network in U.S.

Sergey I. Kislyak, the longtime Russian ambassador to the United States, hosted a dazzling dinner in his three-story, Beaux-Arts mansion four blocks north of the White House to toast Michael A. McFaul just weeks before he took up his post as the American envoy to Russia.

Mr. Kislyak’s networking success has landed him at the center of a sprawling controversy and made him the most prominent, if politically radioactive, ambassador in Washington. Two advisers to President Trump have run into trouble for not being more candid about contacts with Mr. Kislyak: Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as national security adviser, and now Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who admitted two previously undisclosed conversations. Mr. Kislyak also met during the transition with Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner.

serving in the minority on the Governmental Affairs Committee as the Republican-led panel exhaustively examined claims of an insidious Chinese plot to help President Bill Clinton in the 1996 elections.

Being in the majority matters, both in starting an investigation and, sometimes as important, in stopping one.

From the McCarthy hearings through Watergate, Iran-contra and the Clinton impeachment, the American public has become quite familiar with the tableaux of the congressional investigation and the serious business that can be involved.