Month: February 2019

In a long-awaited decision, Israel’s Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced on Thursday that he intends to officially charge Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu with crimes related to corruption.

The attorney general plans to indict the prime minister on bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, charges related to three different corruption cases, the Israeli news outlet Haaretz reported. The indictment is pending the results of a hearing and is not final.

Israeli police recommended three times last year that Netanyahu be indicted on corruption charges — so Mandelblit’s decision didn’t come as a complete surprise. But it’s still pretty …

On February 28, President Donald Trump held a press conference with hundreds of reporters in Hanoi, Vietnam, after his historic discussions with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ended without a deal.

During the 35-minute session, he detailed why he didn’t make an agreement with the dictator, why he’s still hopeful they can strike an accord in the future, and even discussed major world events, like the current escalation between India and Pakistan. But mainly, Trump defended why he felt it was right not sign a pact with Kim — at least for now.

“Basically they wanted the sanctions lifted …

During a question-and-answer session with reporters aboard Air Force One in April 2018, President Donald Trump flatly denied having any knowledge of hush money paid just before the 2016 election to Stormy Daniels, a porn actress who claimed to have had an affair with him.

“Mr. President, did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?” a reporter asked him.

“No,” Trump replied.

But during his testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, claimed that Trump did not tell the truth — and he apparently has receipts to …

Michael Cohen’s prepared opening statement for his testimony before the House Oversight Committee Wednesday is out — and wow, is it a doozy. The New York Times obtained Cohen’s statement, and posted it online early Wednesday morning.

Perhaps Cohen’s most explosive claim is that he heard Roger Stone tell Trump about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s plans to release hacked emails during the presidential campaign — the most direct allegation yet that Trump was in the loop about WikiLeaks’s plans. Special counsel Robert Mueller has been investigating this issue, and has attributed the theft of these emails to Russian intelligence officers.…

The movies that push this artform we call “the cinema” forward aren’t always obvious from afar. Did anyone know Citizen Kane would change the language of how films are shot and edited? Was The Godfather, based on a disreputable potboiler and plagued with production problems, on anyone’s radar when it first hit theaters? Remember how 20th Century Fox had next to no faith in Star Wars?

And yet sometimes you can see a future cinematic classic coming from so far away that you add a Google calendar invite for yourself and everyone you know on the evening …

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Trump is optimistic about a trade deal with China; unrest during Nigeria’s national elections.

A China tariff deadline gets postponed

Alex Wong/Getty Images

• The US won’t increase tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods — for now. President Trump tweeted the decision Sunday, saying the US is making progress in trade talks with China. [Vox / Jen Kirby]
• There actually

It’s easy to view President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency as a joke, particularly when the president himself said while making the declaration, “I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster.”

Much of the conversation around President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency has focused on its partisan and procedural effects: how it will allow the president to frustrate Congress and redirect spending, how future presidents might use the precedent to do the same, the absence of any immediate emergency as the word is normally defined. And the aadministration has so far been unable …