The Atlantic: The Double Damage of the President’s Trump Tower Admission

Both Trump and Trump Jr. have at times in the past denied that the purpose of the June 9, 2016, meeting was to get damaging information about Hillary Clinton, but the president has now flatly acknowledged it. Despite the limitations of the medium, the president packed a great deal of potential trouble into less than 280 characters. First, he seems to proceed from the assumption that by declaring the purpose legal, that makes it so, when in fact the acknowledgement points to the ways the meeting may have broken federal laws.

Second, by contradicting his earlier claims, the president again underscores his prior dishonesty. This is not just a matter of public trust: The changing accounts also get at accusations that the president obstructed justice.

Finally, the tweet is riddled with internal contradictions. If the president is unconcerned about his son, why is he tweeting angrily about the story? And if what happened was entirely legal, why is he so quick to deny that he knew about the meeting? [...]

Sunday’s tweet is the most direct statement yet that the purpose of the June 2016 meeting was to get damaging information from Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who has deep ties to the Kremlin. Trump Jr. had also been told in an email ahead of the meeting that the government of President Vladimir Putin supported his father’s candidacy. But declaring the meeting legal does not make it so. Over the last week, the president and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani have focused on the claim that “collusion” with the Russians, or anyone else, is not a crime per se.

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Vox: Saudi Arabia is waging diplomatic war on … Canada

But while the vague threat of another 9/11 may have been accidental and not sanctioned by the Saudi government directly, the message coming out of Saudi Arabia over the past several days has been clear: Don’t fuck with us, Canada.

The arrests of Badawi and others that Canada was objecting to are part of a wider government crackdown on human rights, ordered by Mohammed bin Salman, the 32-year-old crown prince who ascended to the position of next in line for the throne just a little over a year ago. [...]

This is a new, bold Saudi Arabia trying to make its mark on global and regional affairs. Led by the young and very brash Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (or MBS), this latest move is yet another red line that is being used to rile up nationalists and assert Saudi dominance. Expelling a Canadian ambassador is in keeping with the moves of a crown prince who allegedly took the Lebanese prime minister hostage, rounded up 200 of the most influential and richest Saudis and detained them until they paid part of their fortune back to the Saudi national accounts, and created a diplomatic firestorm with tiny neighbouring Qatar for not toeing the Saudi line on regional affairs. And this in under a year.

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The Guardian: The view from abroad? Britain has lost its balance, but doesn’t realise it

 Theresa May was also in France at the end of last week. She held talks with Emmanuel Macron at the Fort de Brégançon, a Mediterranean retreat for French presidents since Charles de Gaulle. Or rather, she talked and he listened. The disparity in how much was at stake for the two leaders shone through every account. The British prime minister was depicted as desperate for help from European capitals to rehabilitate a Brexit plan that is only a few weeks old but already ailing. There was no sense of Macron needing anything in return; no discussion of how he should play it.

Many French media reports digressed on to the symbolic question of Brégançon, how it was back in play as a diplomatic stage after a period of neglect. The semiotics of presidential power were more of a talking point than anything the president himself might actually do about Brexit. [...]

No one in Paris, Berlin or Brussels doubts that Brexit is dangerous for the EU and that the failure of talks would be disastrous. But what those who seek to mobilise that prospect for leverage in the negotiations fail to appreciate is how the whole threatening idiom – defiant swigging from the bottle marked “no deal” – completes the picture of a nation losing its balance, sliding out of control. British politics has turned crazy and the craziest politicians wave their craziness around as proof that they should be taken more seriously. The red-eyed, slurring drunk offers to demonstrate his sobriety by pouring out another drink without shpilling a shingle drop. [...]

Or maybe we just haven’t hit the bottom yet. Maybe British politics just has to ride out a few more cycles of mania and denial. It resembles an addict’s compulsion to keep going, to repeat the degrading pattern again and again, because carrying on feels easier than stopping; because to stop would mean a brutal audit of harm already done, relationships ruined, money squandered, poison already ingested. It is a painful reckoning, but not one that can be postponed for ever.

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The Washington Post: Long-lost Roman library reemerges in Germany after 2,000 years in darkness

But Germany posed a particular challenge. In the year 9 of our modern calendar system, the Romans suffered an embarrassing defeat in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest near the modern day city of Hanover. They never recovered from it and were permanently pushed back to the western side of the Rhine river, which separates Germany from south to north, 50 miles from Teutoburg. Centuries later, marauders from Germany finally brought an end to the western half of the Roman empire. [...]

Built about 150 years after the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, its walls recently reemerged after centuries of darkness during the construction of a new community center next to the city of Cologne’s famous cathedral. At first, when the walls were discovered last year, researchers assumed they had come across a community hall dating to the Roman era. But this summer, a more extensive analysis found the building was most likely used to store up to 20,000 scrolls of parchment. (The estimate would put the Cologne library in the same category as the vast Library of Celsus, which was built in Turkey at about the same time.) [...]

So far, Roman libraries have mostly been found in Egypt or Italy. The Cologne find may be the first such discovery in the Roman Empire’s northwestern regions, which at its peak spanned France, Britain and western Germany.

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The Hindu: 'Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War' review: Death of a city

Hisham writes, the rebels who captured the city from regime forces were directionless. The Free Syrian Army was a loose coalition of different groups and they were incapable of defending the land against Islamist attacks. “Islamists didn’t have to exert much effort to hijack the revolution — it was easily given up by the politically uneducated crowds who had started it.” The revolution which he believed in had now become “an arena of jihad, divided into halves, with believers versus unbelievers on one side, and nationalist believers versus takfiri mercenaries on the other.”

Brothers of the Gun doesn’t offer any analysis of the geopolitical complexities of the Syrian war. It doesn’t say much on how the anti-regime protests turned violent, where do money and weapons come from for the rebels. But the book is a helpless Syrian’s story to the world. He describes with pain how the country was destroyed, neglected and abandoned. Hisham doesn’t make a moral distinction between various actors of the war. The regime comes and bombs the city. The Americans, the French and the Russians all come and bomb the city. The IS, which he says “committed a historic blasphemy against our future,” occupies the city. Raqqans, he says, are at the receiving end. Hisham is not angry. Rather he’s anguished at his own plight and that of his fellow Syrians. “We became believers just when we most needed scepticism. We squabbled when we needed solidarity. In the words of the hadith, “As we were, we were governed,” he writes.  

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