What happens when a presidential impeachment inquiry runs into a presidential election year? The United States in uncharted territory.
As she took the stage in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on Friday night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted it was her “first time” in the key presidential primary state. But many of the thousands of people who came to see her campaign for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders were confident it wouldn’t be her last visit.
Tourists and Venetians alike have donned high boots and taken to temporary raised walkways to slosh through the high water that has hit much of the lagoon city.
Jordan's king announced Sunday that his country is retaking "full sovereignty" over two pieces of land leased by Israel, reflecting the cool relations between the neighboring countries as they mark the 25th anniversary of their landmark peace deal. King Abdullah II had said last year that he wouldn't renew the parts of the 1994 treaty that gave Israel a 25-year lease of the two small areas, Baqura and Ghamr. "Today, I announce the expiration of the Peace Treaty annexes on Ghamr and al-Baqura and the imposition of our full sovereignty over every inch of those lands," he said.
More than 50 people, mostly children, were injured by a man who broke into a kindergarten in southwest China and sprayed them with corrosive liquid, local authorities said Tuesday. The suspect, a 23-year-old surnamed Kong, entered the kindergarten by climbing a wall before spraying victims with sodium hydroxide, said local authorities in Kaiyuan city, Yunnan province. The attack took place on Monday at 3:35 pm (0735 GMT), authorities said on their Twitter-like Weibo account.
San Diego State freshman Dylan Hernandez died after attending a fraternity event, the school announced Monday.
An airline pilot who was arrested after being spotted naked in his hotel room overlooking Denver International Airport has been awarded a $300,000 wrongful arrest settlement from the Colorado city.The man, United Airlines pilot Andrew Collins, was arrested in September 2018, after employees saw him apparently touching himself through the 10th floor window of his hotel room.
(Bloomberg) -- Hong Kong faced a third-straight day of transit disruptions, after a night of pitched battles across the city between protesters and police.Commuters packed onto the first trains Wednesday morning amid calls by activists to impede rush-hour traffic in a show of anger over the government’s response and police tactics. Several MTR Corp. services including the Mong Kok and Tuen Mun stations and the entire East Rail Line were already shut due to vandalism. Numerous bus lines were halted and several schools had suspended classes.The protests which have been raging for five months in pursuit of greater democracy in the former British colony intensified Friday after a student died of injuries sustained near a protest. Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam -- with a fresh nod of support from Communist Party leaders in Beijing -- has vowed not to give in to violent demonstrations.Key developments:Some subway stations were closed and schools and universities shut their doors as protests sprung up around the city. Chinese University of Hong Kong was the site of the most intense protests.Tear gas was fired again in the heart of Hong Kong’s business and financial district as riot police confronted protesters in Central for a second day.The 21-year-old student protester who was shot and injured by police Monday was formally arrested.Hong Kong leader Lam has given two press conferences in less than 24 hours in which she has urged an end to the disruptions.District elections are still scheduled to take place on Nov. 24.Here’s the latest (all times local):Keeping kids home (7:52 a.m.) The Education Bureau said that parents could decide whether they want to send their children to schools Wednesday because of traffic disruptions, according to a statement on a government website. The government has so far decided against suspending public school classes despite the disruptions. Christmas tree burns (7:13 a.m.) Mapletree North Asia Commercial Trust said in a corporate filing that its Festival Walk mall in Kowloon Tong sustained extensive damage in protests Tuesday. Protesters, among other things, smashed glass panels at the entrances and set fire to a Christmas tree. The mall will be closed on Wednesday as the company assesses the damage. Some train services suspended (6:17 a.m.)East Rail Line service has been suspended due to vandalism at stations, the rail operator MTR Corp. said in statement. MTR said it won’t provide free shuttle bus service because of “adverse road conditions” after conducting a risk assessment. The Mong Kok, Tuen Mun and Tseung Kwan O stations were also closed.McConnell to work on legislation (4:30 a.m.)U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to work on legislation supporting pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, as some senators say they’re growing restless with the chamber’s failure to act. In a speech on the Senate floor, McConnell said “Beijing’s insatiable thirst for control” was undermining Hong Kong’s autonomy.McConnell said he would work “toward a strong and procedurally workable solution” with senators who’ve been pushing legislation designed to put pressure on China. A bill that would allow sanctions against officials responsible for Hong Kong and require annual reviews of the city’s special trading status has already pass the U.S. House.Clashes at university (11:45 p.m. Tuesday)Protests and clashes continue at multiple locations across the city including Mong Kok, Tai Po, Kowloon Tong and Tseung Kwan O. Riot police repeatedly fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators.The situation at Chinese University of Hong Kong “continues to intensify,” according to an update from the city’s police issued at 11:27 p.m. As officers were “retreating, rioters threw bricks, petrol bombs, launched arrows and even fired a signal flare” at them, according to the statement.Given that the violence had reached a “deadly level” and emergency services were being hampered, police deployed a so-called Specialized Crowd Management Vehicle to “facilitate retreat.” Clashes at the university appeared to abate.Police spray blue dye (10:29 p.m. Tuesday)Police fired streams of blue dye at students congregated in the area of a bridge at Chinese University of Hong Kong, after hours of confrontations, including multiple rounds of tear gas. Students set up barricades to stop riot police from charging. A number of students were injured, including one who was suspected to have been knocked unconscious after a head injury, according to Radio Television Hong Kong.More disruptions planned (8:09 p.m. Tuesday)Protesters called for disruptions to MTR train services starting at 6:15 a.m. on Wednesday, as the city’s busy rush hour kicks off, with people planning to board trains until at least 10:30 a.m. The calls came as clashes again escalated on the Chinese University of Hong Kong campus, with police firing tear gas and protesters and students throwing petrol bombs.\--With assistance from Karen Leigh, Fion Li and Gregor Stuart Hunter.To contact the reporters on this story: Dominic Lau in Hong Kong at dlau92@bloomberg.net;Natalie Lung in Hong Kong at flung6@bloomberg.net;Iain Marlow in Hong Kong at imarlow1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Scott at bscott66@bloomberg.net, John HarneyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
The Supreme Court's left-leaning justices on Tuesday appeared willing to allow a lawsuit filed by the parents of a Mexican teenager shot over the border by an American agent, but the case will depend on whether they can persuade a conservative colleague to join them. The high court heard arguments in a 2010 case where Border Patrol Agent Jesus Mesa Jr. fired into Mexico, striking and killing Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca. Mesa rode up on a bicycle, took Sergio's friend into custody, then fired across the border, killing Sergio with a gunshot wound to the face.
Pete Buttigieg got in hot water with many loyal Democrats on Sunday when the Los Angeles Times reported that he cited the "failures of the Obama era" as part of why Trump's election happened. This inspired furious outrage from liberal partisans and party apparatchiks -- only soothed (and tweets deleted) when the reporter said he had misquoted Buttigieg, who was then quick to lavish praise on the ex-president.But as it turns out, Buttigieg previously said almost the exact same thing in a recent interview with Showtime's The Circus. "I don't think there's going back to Obama... the American political world we've been in from the day I was born, has been blown up," he explained, "[thanks to] its own failures which culminated in Trump. Look, if the old way worked, something like Trump would never have been possible."So this recent flap sure looks like another flip-flop from Payola Pete, mayor of Indiana's fourth largest city. But at least in his beta release form, I have to admit that Buttigieg was completely correct. Democrats really need to get over this worshipful reverence of Barack Obama.For one thing, it is simply beyond question that the Obama years were a political disaster. From having commanding majorities in both the House and the Senate, Democrats lost first the former, then the latter, and finally the presidency, as the candidate running as Obama's successor bobbled perhaps the easiest lay-up election in American history. Meanwhile, the party all but collapsed in many states, as devastating national defeats translated into the loss of over 1,000 state legislative seats.As I have written before, the primary reason for the Obama-era Democrats' initial crushing loss in 2010, which locked in Republican gains for a decade at least through their ensuing control of the state gerrymandering process, was policy error -- undershooting the size of the economic stimulus in response to the Great Recession on the one hand, and secretly using homeowner assistance money to bail out the banks on the other. The former was not entirely Obama's fault, as he had to get congressional approval for the stimulus, but the latter was entirely under his control. Millions were left out of work, and about 10 million people losing their homes wreaked further economic devastation. As any historian could tell you, being in power during a huge economic disaster is the surest possible way to get blown out of the water in the next election.If you take Obama out of the equation, what Buttigieg was saying before it looks like folks might stop sending those fat campaign checks is all but conventional wisdom even among liberals. Obama himself reportedly has grave doubts about what Trump means for his legacy. Clearly if the party could lose to the most unpopular major party nominee in the history of polling, whatever was happening before 2016 was not exactly working out.And from the other side of the fence, Obama has shown no inclination to fulfill the sort of leadership role loyal Democrats clearly crave. Despite the shattering national crisis that Trump presents, he has not gone on to a different office -- unlike, say, John Quincy Adams, who returned to the House after his presidency and fought slavery literally until his dying breath. Obama is not out there mobilizing day and night against Trump's migrant concentration camps, or his Muslim ban, or his blatant abuses of power.Only occasionally will Obama pop up to endorse candidates, often centrist or center-right white men like Emmanuel Macron or Justin Trudeau. He largely avoided campaigning in 2018 until the last few weeks before the election. He's mainly keeping to himself, hanging out with rich tycoons and celebrities, and making eye-popping sums giving paid speeches before big corporations and banks.He appears in public only occasionally -- and when he does, he has a tendency to indulge in get-off-my-lawn youth scolding that, as Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote back in 2013, was offensive and out of date when he did it as president. "This idea of purity and you're never compromised and you're always politically 'woke' and all that stuff," he said at a recent Obama Foundation summit. "You should get over that quickly. The world is messy, there are ambiguities." Just like the time when "we tortured some folks," but it was still important to "look forward as opposed to backwards" instead of enforcing the law, I suppose.Jokes aside, this almost beggars belief. President Trump is flagrantly stealing money from the American state, attempting to get foreign countries to gin up political persecutions of Obama's own vice president, and Obama is out here raising worries about exaggerated nonsense from America's most dimwitted and gullible columnists, and earning praise from loathsome trolls:> Good for Obama. (Not sarcastic!) https://t.co/cwq5mcDc7V> > -- Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) October 30, 2019Now, let me be clear: All this is, of course, Obama's complete right as a private citizen. It is, at least for the moment, still a free country. But Democrats should not follow the advice of the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin, who argues that "it is unheard of for a party following a two-term president not to run on his achievements," in part because "Republicans did that with former president Ronald Reagan for 30 years." She would know, from her previous incarnation as a prolific and absolutely shameless propagandist for Mitt Romney. But the grim fate of the GOP is precisely the problem.We see today what you get when a party loses the ability to think critically about its history, and treats its leaders as infallible saints no matter what they do: Donald Trump.Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week's "Today's best articles" newsletter here.More stories from theweek.com The coming death of just about every rock legend The president has already confessed to his crimes Why are 2020 Democrats so weird?