Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Federal agencies have also begun to identify those captured on video at the Capitol with weapons or engaging in violence and putting them on a “no-fly” list aimed at preventing suspected terrorists from boarding flights, according to an administration official.

Federal law enforcement officials have said they continue to be alarmed by an increase in chatter from groups like the boogaloo, a far-right group that aims to start a second civil war, and other racist extremists threatening to target the nation’s capital to protest Mr. Biden’s decisive victory in the popular vote and Electoral College.

Defense Department and National Guard officials said on Friday that they were pressing governors of all 50 states for reservists to fill a growing demand for security.

National Guard officials said they would most likely need at least 25,000 troops in Washington, 5,000 more than they projected this week, for duties ranging from traffic control to security in and around the Capitol itself. That number, roughly more than three times the number of American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria, could still grow.

Children turn to screens because they say they have no alternative activities or entertainment — this is where they hang out with friends and go to school — all while the technology platforms profit by seducing loyalty through tactics like rewards of virtual money or “limited edition” perks for keeping up daily “streaks” of use.

It rained during Trump's inaugural address. Then, at a celebratory ball later that day, Trump told the crowd that the rain "just never came" until he finished talking and went inside, at which point "it poured."

The President would say things that we could see with our own eyes were not true. And he would often do this brazen lying for no apparent strategic reason.

The most dangerous lie: The coronavirus was under control

This was more like a family of lies than a single lie. But each one -- the lie that the virus was equivalent to the flu; the lie that the situation was "totally under control"; the lie that the virus was "disappearing" -- suggested to Americans that they didn't have to change much about their usual behavior.

more than 386,000 Americans have died from the virus.

The most alarming lie saga: Sharpiegate

Trump tweeted in 2019 that Alabama was one of the states at greater risk from Hurricane Dorian than had been initially forecast. The federal weather office in Birmingham then tweeted that, actually, Alabama would be unaffected by the storm

Trump, however, is so congenitally unwilling to admit error that he embarked on an increasingly farcical campaign to prove that his incorrect Alabama tweet was actually correct, eventually showcasing a hurricane map that was crudely altered with a Sharpie.

The most ridiculous subject of a lie: The Boy Scouts

When I emailed the Boy Scouts of America in 2017 about Trump's claim that "the head of the Boy Scouts" had called him to say that his bizarrely political address to the Scouts' National Jamboree was "the greatest speech that was ever made to them," I didn't expect a reply. One of the hardest things about fact checking Trump was that a lot of people he lied about did not think it was in their interest to be quoted publicly contradicting a vengeful president.

A senior Scouts source -- a phrase I never expected to have to type as a political reporter in Washington, DC -- confirmed to me that no call ever happened.

The ugliest smear lie: Rep. Ilhan Omar supports al Qaeda

The most boring serial lie: The trade deficit with China used to be $500 billion

It was a problem for the country that the President was not only a conspiracy theorist himself but immersed in conspiracy culture, regularly stumbling upon ludicrous claims and then sharing them as fact.

So he said well over 100 times that, before his presidency, the US for years had a $500 billion annual trade deficit with China -- though the actual pre-Trump deficit never even reached $400 billion.

The most entertaining lie shtick: The burly crying men who had never cried before

according to the President, they kept walking up to him crying tears of gratitude -- even though they had almost always not previously cried for years.

The most traditional big lie: Trump didn't know about the payment to Stormy Daniels

he also lied when he needed to. When he told reporters on Air Force One in 2018 that he did not know about a $130,000 payment to porn performer Stormy Daniels and that he did not know where his then-attorney Michael Cohen got the money for the payment, it was both audacious -- Trump knew, because he had personally reimbursed Cohen -- and kind of conventional: the President was lying to try to get himself out of a tawdry scandal.

The biggest lie by omission: Trump ended family separation

ere's what he told NBC's Chuck Todd in 2019 about his widely controversial policy of separating migrant parents from their children at the border: "You know, under President Obama you had separation. I was the one that ended it." Yes, Trump signed a 2018 order to end the family separation policy.

The most shameless campaign lie: Biden will destroy protections for pre-existing conditions

When Trump claimed in September that Biden would destroy protections for people with pre-existing health conditions -- though the Obama-Biden administration created the protections, though the protections were overwhelmingly popular, though Biden was running on preserving them,

Trump himself had tried repeatedly to weaken them

The lie he fled: He got Veterans Choice

Trump could have told a perfectly good factual story about the Veterans Choice health care program Obama signed into law in 2014: it wasn't good enough, so he replaced it with a more expansive program he signed into law in 2018.

That's not the story he did tell -- whether out of policy ignorance, a desire to erase Obama's legacy, or simply because he is a liar. Instead, he claimed over and over -- more than 160 times before I lost count -- that he is the one who got the Veterans Choice program passed after other presidents tried and failed for years.

The Crazy Uncle lie award: Windmill noise causes cancer

At a White House event in 2019, Trump grossly distorted a 2013 quote from Rep. Ilhan Omar to try to get his supporters to believe that the Minnesota Democrat had expressed support for the terrorist group al Qaeda.

his 2019 declaration that "they say" the noise from windmills "causes cancer."

The most hucksterish lie: That plan was coming in two weeks

Trump's big health care plan was eternally coming in "two weeks."

My personal favorite lie: Trump was once named Michigan's Man of the Year

Trump has never lived in Michigan. Why would he have been named Michigan's Man of the Year years before his presidency?He wouldn't have been. He wasn't.

The most depressing lie: Trump won the election

Trump's long White House campaign against verifiable reality has culminated with his lie that he is the true winner of the 2020 presidential election he clearly, certifiably and fairly lost.

“The first thing overlaying all of it is, just how do we get some things done?” says Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who ran against Mr. Biden in the 2020 primaries but has been an ally since

Biden advisers are blunt in describing the challenge they will face in dealing with China: Beijing’s behavior has produced a bipartisan alarm that now needs to be turned into an entirely new strategic approach. President Trump and his advisers began this work, but it still is at its very early stages.

The politics surrounding climate change has shifted dramatically in the past few years, and there is more bipartisan agreement than ever before on the desire for a coherent national action plan. The problem is finding agreement on what that might be.

But Mr. Trump continued to press Mr. Rosen after the meeting — in phone calls and in person. He repeatedly said that he did not understand why the Justice Department had not found evidence that supported conspiracy theories about the election that some of his personal lawyers had espoused. He declared that the department was not fighting hard enough for him.

As Mr. Rosen and the deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, pushed back, they were unaware that Mr. Clark had been introduced to Mr. Trump by a Pennsylvania politician and had told the president that he agreed that fraud had affected the election results.

As December wore on, Mr. Clark mentioned to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet — a comment that alarmed them because they inferred that he believed the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won the election. Mr. Clark also told them that he wanted the department to hold a news conference announcing that it was investigating serious accusations of election fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.

As Mr. Trump focused increasingly on Georgia, a state he lost narrowly to Mr. Biden, he complained to Justice Department leaders that the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, was not trying to find evidence for false election claims pushed by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and others. Mr. Donoghue warned Mr. Pak that the president was now fixated on his office, and that it might not be tenable for him to continue to lead it, according to two people familiar with the conversation.That conversation and Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him votes compelled Mr. Pak to abruptly resign this month.

Mr. Trump seemed somewhat swayed by the idea that firing Mr. Rosen would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department, but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results.

Unbeknown to the acting attorney general, Mr. Clark’s timeline moved up. He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, then informed Mr. Rosen midday on Sunday that the president intended to replace him with Mr. Clark, who could then try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results. He said that Mr. Rosen could stay on as his deputy attorney general, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless.

Unwilling to step down without a fight, Mr. Rosen said that he needed to hear straight from Mr. Trump and worked with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, to convene a meeting for early that evening.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue pressed ahead, informing Steven Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, about Mr. Clark’s latest maneuver. Mr. Donoghue convened a late-afternoon call with the department’s remaining senior leaders, laying out Mr. Clark’s efforts to replace Mr. Rosen.

Mr. Rosen planned to soon head to the White House to discuss his fate, Mr. Donoghue told the group. Should Mr. Rosen be fired, they all agreed to resign en masse. For some, the plan brought to mind the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of the Nixon era, where Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the president’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating him.

The Clark plan, the officials concluded, would seriously harm the department, the government and the rule of law

Mr. Clark was also focused on Georgia. He drafted a letter that he wanted Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators that wrongly said that the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in their state, and that they should move to void Mr. Biden’s win there.Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue again rejected Mr. Clark’s proposal.On New Year’s Eve, the trio met to discuss Mr. Clark’s refusal to hew to the department’s conclusion that the election results were valid. Mr. Donoghue flatly told Mr. Clark that what he was doing was wrong. The next day, Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen — who had mentored him while they worked together at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis — that he was going to discuss his strategy with the president early the next week, just before Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden’s electoral victory.

After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump ultimately decided that Mr. Clark’s plan would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay

It yielded a full DNA profile, and it’s not Cooper’s or any of the victims’ — but it hasn’t been matched to anyone else. Match that DNA, and we may quickly solve these murders.

Lee came to the attention of the authorities during the investigation after his girlfriend, Diana Roper, fingered him as the killer: She reported that he had returned home late on the night of the killings wearing bloody coveralls, in a car that resembled the Ryens’ station wagon

The DNA on the orange towel is not Lee’s, and he has denied to me that he was involved in the Ryen murders. It’s important not to try to free one innocent man by rushing to judgment about another. Still, the DNA testing and these witnesses add to the evidence that Cooper is an innocent man on death row.

The deans of four law schools and a former president of the American Bar Association have expressed concerns about the case. An excellent book, “Scapegoat,” has been written about it, and a documentary is in the works. Kim Kardashian visited Cooper in 2019 and has embraced his cause.

The D.A.’s office notes, for example, that Cooper’s blood was found on that tan T-shirt apparently worn by the murderer. That’s true: Testing years ago confirmed that it is Cooper’s blood — but also suggests that sheriff’s deputies spilled the blood on the shirt to frame him.

Cooper’s blood on that shirt had elevated EDTA in it; in other words, it seemed to have come not from his body directly, but from a test tube.

Relatives of the victims are convinced that Cooper is guilty, and San Bernardino authorities argue that there is plenty of forensic evidence against him — a bloodstain, shoe prints, cigarette butts, and so on. If you trust the sheriff’s office, it’s compelling.

So as he mounted this attack, Cooper was juggling three or four weapons? Pausing in midassault to change shirts? And how could a 155-pound man like Cooper enter the house, with the Ryens’ dogs presumably sounding an alarm, and then overpower both Doug Ryen, a former military policeman, and Peggy Ryen, strong and athletic — each of whom had a loaded gun by the side of the bed?

Yet California for almost 38 years has prepared to ignore all this and execute a Black man who is probably innocent. Democratic and Republican politicians alike have mostly averted their eyes, presumably in part for fear of offending voters who might be upset at the exoneration of a Black man convicted of a brutal crime against a white family.

Conservative law enforcement officials in San Bernardino County blocked comprehensive DNA testing for years, but so did Democratic politicians like Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris when they were attorneys general of California.

he British variant is spreading so quickly that Danish authorities project it will be the dominant strain of the virus in their country as early as mid-February.

cases involving the U.K. variant are growing exponentially in Denmark. British studies have estimated that the strain is 30 to 70 percent more contagious than the original.

Danish officials, crunching similar data slightly differently, estimate that it is about 20 to 50 percent more contagious than the original in their country, although they say their numbers are still so small that estimates may be inexact.

Danish officials say that at this stage, they are in a race to vaccinate as many people as possible before the British variant takes hold.

Now, as a new administration takes office and we look ahead to life after both Covid and Donald Trump, we need to face the fact that the world we live in is changing into something else, and that coping with the consequences of global warming demands immediate, widespread, radical action.

Dr. Brannon Traxler, the department's interim public health director, said that the variant's arrival is an important reminder that the fight against COVID-19 is far from over.

Noting the limited supply of vaccines, she added, "Every one of us must recommit to the fight by recognizing that we are all on the front lines now. We are all in this together."

But the one first seen in South Africa has more mutations in its spike protein than the one from the United Kingdom. Several of its mutations are also present in a variant that was first identified in Brazil.

The coronavirus variants have alarmed public health experts in recent months, posing a new challenge even as vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have raised hopes in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company said that when its vaccine was used against the variant from South Africa, the vaccine produced levels of virus-fighting antibody titers that were around six times less than when it's used against other variants.

As a result, Moderna said it will test booster doses of its vaccine, including one that would be tailored to fight strains that have recently emerged.

Earlier this week, Moderna said its COVID-19 vaccine offers protection against new variants of the coronavirus — but that the vaccine is more effective against the strain first identified in the U.K. than the one found in South Africa.

Researchers have found growing evidence that both of the variants circulating in South Africa and Brazil may be capable of evading the body's immune system, heightening the risk of reinfection, as NPR's Michaeleen Doucleff recently reported.

The first U.S. case of the strain from Brazil was identified earlier this week in the Minneapolis metro are

The problem echoes the country’s catastrophic stumbles early in the pandemic, when a lack of testing allowed the virus to spread widely. Currently, only a tiny fraction of all positive coronavirus tests in the United States are forwarded for further sequencing.

t if scientists don’t know what strains are moving through the population, the mutations that matter may pop up undetected.

For months, scientists have been sounding alarms and trying to ramp up genetic sequencing of test samples, but the effort has been plagued by a lack of funding, political will and federal coordination

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said Friday that the government is increasing the level of sequencing nationwide.“We have scaled up surveillance dramatically just in the last 10 days, in fact. But our plans for scaling up surveillance are even more than what we’ve done so far,”

Ultimately, the country needs real-time data — similar to the dashboards now used to track daily cases, hospitalizations and deaths — to track variants and their prevalence across the country

“None of that exists right now. We’re incredibly behind compared to other countries,”

The U.S. effort is so underdeveloped that it’s impossible to say exactly how many virus cases are sequenced daily.

The CDC has warned that the variant found in the United Kingdom — which British scientists said could be up to 70 percent more transmissible — could become dominant in the United States by March.

It also recently contracted with four private companies — Quest, Labcorp, Illumina and Helix — to conduct more sequencing. By mid-February, those contracts should hit full capacity, analyzing 6,000 samples per week, CDC officials said.

Illumina estimates that the country needs to sequence 5 percent of its coronavirus cases to detect a new variant when the variant represents about 0.1 percent to 1.0 percent of the country’s case

However, the United States so far has only sequenced about 0.32 percent of its total cases

the country ranks 38th out of 130 countries reporting whole-genome sequencing data.

The United States has sequenced 84,177 samples out of 25.7 million cases as of Friday, according to a Washington Post analysis. By comparison, the United Kingdom, in ninth place, has sequenced 214,000 genomes — almost 6 percent — of the country’s 3.7 million cases.

Unlike the United States, the U.K. invested in genetic sequencing early on in the pandemic, launching its genomics consortium in March with a $27 million investment and a multimillion-dollar boost late last year.

Even before the emergence of mutations such as the variants first discovered in South Africa and the United Kingdom, U.S. experts had been warning for months about the need for a national standard for genetic surveillance.

In May, the CDC launched a surveillance program for the coronavirus called SPHERES (SARS-CoV-2 Sequencing for Public Health Emergency Response, Epidemiology, and Surveillance). But, in practice, the program relied on a haphazard patchwork of academic labs contributing genetic sequencing on a volunteer basis.

A July report by the National Academies of Science said that “poor funding, coordination, and capacity” had led to a “patchy, typically passive, and reactive” U.S. sequencing effort.

Douglas, in an email, wrote that “people are attracted to conspiracy theories when important psychological needs are not being met.”

Conspiracy theories are essentially alarm systems and coping mechanisms to help deal with foreign threat and domestic power centers. Thus, they tend to resonate when groups are suffering from loss, weakness or disunity.

“Somebody who’s suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.’s airplane is not living in reality,” McConnell declared. “This has nothing to do with the challenges facing American families or the robust debates on substance that can strengthen our party.”

Will’s 1983 book, Statecraft as Soulcraft, had a significant intellectual impact on me. He questioned the Founders’ faith that moral balance and national cohesiveness will be supplied by the government’s doing little more than encouraging the free operation of “opposite and rival interests.”

when a political regime establishes, through laws and courts and customs and other matters, a particular political economy, it is establishing, it is choosing the kind of people that would live under that regime,”

The Conservative Sensibility suggests something else: that we should be attending more to the machinery of government and that government should be far less concerned about inculcating virtue in the citizenr

“It turns out that Madison was smarter than I am.” When he argued that America was ill-founded because insufficient attention was given to soulcraft, he explained, he hadn’t fully appreciated that the Founders were indeed arguing about statecraft as soulcraft—that a government really can inculcate virtue.

America was “ill-founded,” he wrote, because there was not enough attention to what he termed “the sociology of virtue.” Government needed to take a greater role in shaping the moral character of its citizens

He argues in The Conservative Sensibility that capitalism doesn't just make us better off; it makes us better by enforcing such virtues as thrift, industriousness, and the deferral of gratification.

long story short: I did not appreciate the extent to which Madisonian liberty with Hamiltonian energy is soulcraft.”

Will has claimed that Trump has done more lasting damage than Richard Nixon did during the Watergate scandal because, in Will’s words, “you can't un-ring the bell. You can't unsay what he has now said is acceptable discourse in the United States.

he hoped Trump supporters are right—but he’s pretty sure they are wrong when they say that what Trump is doing to our culture, our politics and our civic discourse is ephemeral.

Will argues that Trump’s agenda, to the degree it pleases conservatives, is what any Republican president would have done. “So the question is what does Trump bring that's distinctive?” Will said. “And it's all vulgarity, coarsening, semi-criminality.

asking about the concrete, tangible harm of Trump’s conduct.“The answer is in the terms themselves,” Will replied. “The norms, that is, what are normal and what are normative, cease to be normal. And cease to be normative.

“It’s amazing to me how fast, and we saw this in the 20th century in a number of ways, how fast something could go from unthinkable to thinkable to action,”

“And it doesn’t seem to me it’s going to be easy to just snap back as if this didn’t happen. It happened. And he got away with it. And he became president. And there will be emulators.”

Those who may have forgotten are now being reminded that government has a vital role in the cultivation and sustenance—or in the degradation and destruction—of political cultures. Which brings us back to Statecraft as Soulcraft.

“mankind is not just matter, not just a machine with an appetitive ghost in it. We are not what we eat. We are, to some extent, what we and our leaders—the emblematic figures of our polity—say we are.”

“What I’d like progressives to take away from the book is a reconsideration of their dilemma,

in 1964, when I cast my first presidential vote for Barry Goldwater, to whose memory the book is dedicated, 77 percent of the American people said they trusted the government to do the right thing all the time or almost all the time. Today it's 17 percent—and that 60-point evaporation of government prestige has accompanied a 60-fold increase in government pretensions.

their entire agenda depends on strong government and strong government depends on public confidence in the government.”

“What I'd like conservatives to take away from this book,” Will added, “is the sense of the enormous intellectual pedigree behind conservatism from Madison to Lincoln to Hayek and the rest.” Will said conservatives need to answer the question: What does conservatism want to conservative?

The most important of all revolutions, Edmund Burke said, is a “revolution in sentiment, manners and moral opinion.”

what we think Trump supporters either don’t understand or deny, is the destructive revolution in manners and mores that Donald Trump is ushering in, the enormous cultural and social blast radius of his presidency. Through his promiscuous lying and assault on demonstrable truths, his cruelty and crudity, his coarseness, bullying and dehumanization of his opponents, and his lawlessness and conspiracy-mongering—the whole corrupt, packaged deal—he has brought us into dark new realms.

Will, who earned his Ph.D. in politics at Princeton and later taught political philosophy

hen I probed Will on what has gone wrong with the American right, he mentioned the anti-intellectualism that inevitably comes with populism, which he called “the obverse of conservatism.”

“Populism is a direct translation of popular passions into governments through a strong executive. Someone who might say something like, ‘Only I can fix it.

Will argued that James Madison understood the need to “filter and refine and deflect and slow public opinion through institutions. To make it more refined, to produce what Madison called, in one of his phrases that I’m particularly fond of, ‘mitigated democracy.’

what would most concern the Founders about contemporary politics. “Political leaders today seem to feel that their vocation is to arouse passions,” he told me, “not to temper and deflect and moderate them.

Will has claimed that Trump has done more lasting damage than Richard Nixon did during the Watergate scandal because, in Will’s words, “you can’t un-ring the bell. You can’t unsay what he has now said is acceptable discourse in the United States.”

Will replied that he hoped Trump supporters are right—but he’s pretty sure they are wrong when they say that what Trump is doing to our culture, our politics, and our civic discourse is ephemeral.

Will argues that Trump’s agenda, to the degree it pleases conservatives, is what any Republican president would have done. “So the question is, What does Trump bring that’s distinctive?” Will said. “And it’s all vulgarity, coarsening, semi-criminality.”

Trump’s supporters on the right “misunderstand the importance of culture, the viscosity of culture, and I think they are not conservatives, because they don’t understand this,”

Donald Trump promised when he ran for president that he would overturn our norms, Will has said, and that’s one promise he’s kept.

All of us, including Will, have to deal with the fact that we are now confronted with a head of government who is systematically assaulting our ideals and virtues

“To revitalize politics and strengthen government, we need to talk about talk. We need a new, respectful rhetoric—respectful, that is, of the better angels of mankind’s nature.

And their dilemma is this: In 1964, when I cast my first presidential vote for Barry Goldwater, to whose memory the book is dedicated, 77 percent of the American people said they trusted the government to do the right thing all the time or almost all the time. Today, it’s 17 percent—and that 60-point evaporation of government prestige has accompanied a 60-fold increase in government pretensions.

I would think my progressive friends would be alarmed by this, because their entire agenda depends on strong government, and strong government depends on public confidence in the government.”

Will said conservatives need to answer the question, What does conservatism want to conserve?

For Will, the answer is the American founding, by which he has in mind three things: the doctrine of natural rights, understood as rights essential to the flourishing of creatures with our natures; a belief in human nature, meaning we are more than creatures who absorb whatever culture we’re situated in; and a government architecture, principally the separation of powers, that is essential to making good on what he refers to as the most crucial verb in the Declaration of Independence.

What conservatives like Will and me believe, and what we think Trump supporters either don’t understand or deny, is the destructive revolution in manners and mores that Donald Trump is ushering in

Through his promiscuous lying and assault on demonstrable truths, his cruelty and crudity, his coarseness, bullying ,and dehumanization of his opponents, and his lawlessness and conspiracy-mongering—the whole corrupt, packaged deal—he has brought us into dark new realms.

There was a time when Republicans and conservatives more generally insisted that culture was upstream of politics and in many respects more important than politics; that leaders needed to take great care in cultivating and validating standards of decency, honor, and integrity; and that a president who destroyed rather than defended cultural norms and high standards would do grave injury to America.

now Republicans are willing to sacrifice soul and culture for the sake of promised policy victories.

“If the great columnists got a single sentence in the history books,” I asked Will, “what would you want to say about your contribution?”

“It would be to convince people that politics is both fun and dignifies—that it has a great and stately jurisdiction, because and to the extent that it is a politics of ideas. Period.

“The American nation’s finest political career derived from Lincoln’s refusal to allow his country to be seduced into thinking of itself in an unworthy way,”

the civic virtues that Madison and the other Founders believed were essential for a free republic to survive “must be willed. It is folly to will an end but neglect to will the means to the end. The presuppositions of our polity must be supplied, politically.”

“If you are considered to be a spy of the hostile countries or a traitor, when in reality you are simply exercising your basic human rights, you can be suddenly taken by agents of the Ministry of State Security to a kwanliso and never be seen again,” Quintana said. “Suspects’ families are never informed of the decisions or of the whereabouts of their relatives.

North Korea has accepted 132 recommendations from other U.N. member states, including one “to grant immediate, free and unimpeded access to international humanitarian organizations to provide assistance to the most vulnerable groups, including prisoners.” He said this could lead to the first international access to places of detention, “and could therefore be an opportunity to improve prison conditions.”

Now that the parade of witnesses has started, Congress and the public will learn more about Trump's efforts to push Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. Bill Taylor -- the top US diplomat in Ukraine, who famously texted Sondland that it would be "crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign" -- provided devastating testimony Tuesday. In his opening statement, Taylor established clear as day that there absolutely was a "quid pro quo" of American foreign aid in exchange for Ukrainian investigations of Trump's political rivals.

Trump has defended himself by noting that Zelensky stated he felt "no pressure" while dealing with Trump over delivery of foreign aid to Ukraine. And indeed, Zelensky has said, "nobody pushed me." But even if Zelensky truly felt no pressure, it hardly matters criminally or in impeachment.

However, “there must be an objective, factual basis for initiating the investigation; a mere hunch is insufficient,” according to Justice Department guidelines.

It was not clear what potential crime Mr. Durham is investigating, nor when the criminal investigation was prompted.

Mr. Trump is certain to see the criminal investigation as a vindication of the years he and his allies have spent trying to discredit the Russia investigation.

Federal investigators need only a “reasonable indication” that a crime has been committed to open an investigation, a much lower standard than the probable cause required to obtain search warrants.

House Democrats are examining in part whether his pressure on Ukraine to open investigations into theories about the 2016 election constituted an abuse of power.Sign Up for On Politics With Lisa LererA spotlight on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with voters across the country. And a guiding hand through the endless news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.Sign Up* Captcha is incomplete. Please try again.Thank you for subscribingYou can also view our other newsletters or visit your account to opt out or manage email preferences.An error has occurred. Please try again later.You are already subscribed to this email.View all New York Times newsletters.The move also creates an unusual situation in which the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into itself.

Mr. Barr expressed skepticism of the Russia investigation even before joining the Trump administration. Weeks after being sworn in this year, he said he intended to scrutinize how it started and used the term “spying” to describe investigators’ surveillance of Trump campaign advisers.

F.B.I. agents discovered the offer shortly after stolen Democratic emails were released, and the events, along with ties between other Trump advisers and Russia, set off fears that the Trump campaign was conspiring with Russia’s interference.

The C.I.A. did contribute heavily to the intelligence community’s assessment in early 2017 that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and tried to tip it in Mr. Trump’s favor, and law enforcement officials later used those findings to bolster their application for a wiretap on a Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.

Mr. Mueller said that he had “insufficient evidence” to determine whether Mr. Trump or his aides engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians but that the campaign welcomed the sabotage and expected to benefit from it.

Law enforcement officials suspected Mr. Page was the target of recruitment by the Russian government, which he has denied.Mr. Durham has also asked whether C.I.A. officials might have somehow tricked the F.B.I. into opening the Russia investigation. Mr. Durham has indicated he wants to interview former officials who ran the C.I.A. in 2016 but has yet to question either Mr. Brennan or James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence. Mr. Trump has repeatedly attacked them as part of a vast conspiracy by the so-called deep state to stop him from winning the presidency.

Mr. Durham has delved before into the secret world of intelligence gathering during the Bush and Obama administrations. He was asked in 2008 to investigate why the C.I.A. destroyed tapes depicting detainees being tortured. The next year, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. appointed Mr. Durham to spearhead an investigation into the C.IA. abuses.

After nearly four years, Mr. Durham’s investigation ended with no charges against C.I.A. officers, including two directly involved in the deaths of two detainees, angering human rights activists.

Mr Trump promised that he’d turn the US into an energy superpower, and he’s attempting to sweep away a raft of pollution legislation to reduce the cost of producing gas, oil and coal.He categorised former US President Barack Obama’s environmental clean-up plans as a war on American energy.

The Beijing government is having difficulty persuading provincial leaders to abandon coal plants for which they have taken heavy loans.

Campaigners say these now represent nearly 70% of US GDP and nearly 65% of the US population.

China - the current top emitter - and India still have relatively low per capita emissions, but Mr Trump said they shouldn’t be allowed to phase out fossil fuels more slowly than the US.

Environmentalists say Mr Obama would have acted quickly to press Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro to tackle forest fires in the Amazon

As extreme weather events alarm the world’s scientists, diplomats will meet in a few weeks in Chile to figure out the path ahead.

the formal withdrawal would make it difficult for the US to be part of the global conversation.

President Trump said if he couldn’t improve that deal he’d pull out, but diplomatic sources said there’s been no major effort at renegotiation.

Mr Trump promised that he’d turn the US into an energy superpower, and he’s attempting to sweep away a raft of pollution legislation to reduce the cost of producing gas, oil and coal.He categorised former US President Barack Obama’s environmental clean-up plans as a war on American energy.

Campaigners say these now represent nearly 70% of US GDP and nearly 65% of the US population. If they were a country, this group would be the world’s second largest economy.The rebels are led by California, which is locked in a battle with the president over his plans to repeal their powers to impose clean air standards.

So far the biggest negative effect of Mr Trump’s stance has arguably been to relax pressure on countries like Brazil and Saudi Arabia to take action of their own.Environmentalists say Mr Obama would have acted quickly to press Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro to tackle forest fires in the Amazon, for instance. Mr Obama agreed in Paris that the US should take a lead on climate change because it’s contributed far more than any other nation to the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere.

China - the current top emitter - and India still have relatively low per capita emissions, but Mr Trump said they shouldn’t be allowed to phase out fossil fuels more slowly than the US.

His opponents warn the president is weakening US global leadership on the clean economy

The Beijing government is having difficulty persuading provincial leaders to abandon coal plants for which they have taken heavy loans.

As extreme weather events alarm the world’s scientists, diplomats will meet in a few weeks in Chile to figure out the path ahead.

“For the first time ever, we are having a national political conversation about billionaires in American life. And that is because many people are noticing the vast differences in wealth and opportunity,

Zuckerberg suggested Sanders’s call to abolish billionaires could hurt philanthropies and scientific research by giving the government too much decision-making power. Microsoft co-founder Gates criticized Warren’s wealth tax and mused about its impact on “the incentive system” for making money.

The poorest 60 percent of America has seen its share of the national wealth fall from 5.7 percent in 1987 to 2.1 percent in 2014, Zucman found.

At least 16 billionaires have in recent months spoken out against what they regard as the danger posed by the populist Democrats, particularly over their proposals to enact a “wealth tax” on vast fortunes, with many expressing concern they will blow the election to Trump by veering too far left.

Steyer has proposed his own wealth tax, but Schultz ripped the idea as “ridiculous,” while Bloomberg suggested it was not constitutional and raised the prospect of America turning into Venezuela.

Financial disparities between the rich and everyone else have widened over the past several decades in America, with inequality returning to levels not seen since the 1920s, as the richest 400 Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution

David Rubenstein, the billionaire co-founder of the Carlyle Group, told CNBC that a wealth tax would not “solve all of our society’s problems” and raised questions about its practicality. Also appearing on CNBC, billionaire investor Leon Cooperman choked up while discussing the impact a wealth tax could have on his family.

America has long had rich people, but economists say the current scale of inequality may be without precedent. The number of billionaires in America swelled to 749 in 2018, a nearly 5 percent jump, and they now hold close to $4 trillion collectively.

“The hyper concentration of wealth within the top 0.1 percent is a mortal threat to the American economy and way of life,” Boyle said in an interview. “If you work hard and play by the rules, then you should be able to get ahead. But the recent and unprecedented shift of resources to billionaires threatens this. A wealth tax on billionaires is fair and, indeed, necessary.”

“A lot of people in the Wall Street crowd still think the world is top-down,” Wylde said. “They think the people at the top of the pecking order are still making the decisions or driving the debate, as opposed to the new reality of grass-roots mobilization. They don’t realize the way pushback to their criticism goes viral.”

Lance Drucker, president and CEO of Drucker Wealth Management, said he has recently heard alarm from many of his millionaire clients over plans like Warren’s to implement a wealth tax on fortunes worth more than $50 million.

“Honestly, it’s only been the last month when people started getting worried,” said Drucker in an October interview. “These tax proposals are scaring the bejeezus out of people who have accumulated a lot of wealth.”

Some financial planners are urging wealthy clients to transfer millions to their offspring now, before Democrats again raise estate taxes. Attorneys have begun looking at whether a divorce could help the super-rich avoid the wealth tax. And some wealthy people are asking whether they should consider renouncing their U.S. citizenship and moving to Europe or elsewhere abroad ahead of Democrats’ potential tax hikes.

he has heard discussions about leaving the country and renouncing citizenship or other legal tax planning moves due to Democrats’ tax plans from several multimillionaires. “As the frustration mounts and tax burdens rise, people will consider it, just the way you have New Yorkers moving to Florida.

In just a few hours, the plane’s instruments identified six sites with unusually high methane emissions

Methane is loosely regulated, difficult to detect and rising sharply

Operators of the sites identified by The Times are among the very companies that have lobbied the Trump administration,

either directly or through trade organizations, to weaken regulations on methane,

Next year, the administration could move forward with a plan that would effectively eliminate requirements

By the E.P.A.’s own calculations, the rollback would increase methane emissions by 370,000 tons through 2025, enough to power more than a million homes for a year.

A worker went to check on the tank, climbing some stairs and walking into the plume.

The reporters drove to the sites armed with infrared video gear that revealed methane billowing from tanks, seeping from pipes and wafting from bright flares that are designed to burn off the gas,

The regulatory rollback sought by the energy industry is the latest chapter in the administration’s historic effort to weaken environmental and climate regulations while waging a broad-based attack on climate science.

The findings address the mystery behind rising levels of methane in the atmosphere. Methane levels have soared since 2007 for reasons that still aren’t fully understood.

Methane also contributes to ground-level ozone, which, if inhaled, can cause asthma and other health problems.

In the course of about four hours of flying, we found at least six sites with high methane-emissions readings, ranging from about 300 pounds to almost 1,100 pounds an hour, including at DCP Pegasus, which is part owned by the energy giant Phillips 66.

At the DCP Pegasus plant, south of Midland, the camera transformed a tranquil scene into a furnace. Hot columns of gas shot into the air. Fumes engulfed structures.

“This site’s definitely leaking,”

The companies found an administration willing to listen.

Before his appointment to the post of assistant administrator at the E.P.A.