Month: October 2019

President Donald Trump unleashed a load of venom on Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) over the course of several hours on Saturday, deeming him a “a pompous ‘ass’” and even calling for him to be impeached on Twitter.

The tweets came in response to Romney’s sharp criticisms the previous day of the president’s appeal to foreign countries to conduct investigations into Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, a potential political rival in 2020. “By all appearance, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling,” Romney tweeted on Friday.

The acrimonious exchange …

A second whistleblower is now considering filing a complaint about President Donald Trump’s conduct regarding Ukraine, the New York Times reported Friday.

This whistleblower has “more direct information about the events than the first whistle-blower,” according to the Times. It’s a claim that, if true, could bolster the credibility of the initial complaint that triggered the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into whether Trump solicited election interference from Ukraine.

The first whistleblower’s complaint, which was released in redacted form to the public in late September, alleged that on a July 25 phone call Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to push …

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign revealed on Friday that he had suffered a heart attack before the stent procedure he had earlier this week — a more detailed and concerning account of his health status than had been previously disclosed by his staff.

“After presenting to an outside facility with chest pain, Sen. Sanders was diagnosed with a myocardial infarction,” Arturo Marchand Jr. and Arjun Gururaj, the doctors who treated him at Desert Springs Hospital Medical Center in Las Vegas, said in a statement. A myocardial infarction is a medical term for a heart attack.

On Tuesday, Sanders asked for a …

Welcome to Vox’s weekly book link roundup, a curated selection of the internet’s best writing on books and related subjects. Here’s the best the web has to offer for the week of September 29, 2019.

A Storm of Swords

Any hardcore G.R.R. Martin fans will tell you that A Storm of Swords is, above everything else, a book about how to throw a wedding. Your Red Wedding-themed wedding will have your guests raving, “This music is too haunting to dance to” and “Oh God, are you wearing chainmail under your dress?” and “Why would you do this?” And the answer

President Donald Trump issued a proclamation Friday night barring immigrants who do not have health insurance and cannot afford to pay medical care costs from getting visas of almost any kind to enter the US.

Immigrants must now show that they will obtain health insurance within 30 days of their arrival in the US or otherwise demonstrate that they will be able to pay for their medical expenses. The executive order does not lay out clear procedures for determining whether immigrants meet these requirements — it will be up to individual consular officers charged with evaluating visa applications and the …

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Rundown of the Trump-Ukraine scandal so far; the British prime minister sends mixed messages on a Brexit delay.

How we learned to spell Volodymyr Zelensky

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

• Text messages show top diplomats discussed using the prospect of a White House visit to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Burisma, a company with links to Hunter Biden. Then one diplomat expressed alarm

House Democrats subpoenaed the White House for a slew of documents Friday, after the administration refused to voluntarily hand over information related to President Donald Trump’s July 25 call with the president of Ukraine.

The move is part of Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into whether Trump jeopardized national security and used the office of the presidency for personal political gain by asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son. Democrats are examining both this potential interference into the 2020 election as well as the administration’s alleged efforts to cover up their …

The CIA’s top lawyer sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on the now-famous whistleblower’s complaint about President Donald Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine. And no, that lawyer isn’t some deep-state conspiracist out to thwart the president: She’s a Trump appointee.

According to NBC News on Friday, CIA general counsel Courtney Simmons Elwood and another top official called the Justice Department on August 14 to make a criminal referral — weeks before the whistleblower complaint had become public.

“On that call, Elwood and John Eisenberg, the top legal adviser to the White House National Security Council, told the top …

The Hong Kong government has invoked a colonial-era law to ban face masks in an attempt to crack down on the months-long protest movement that’s gotten increasingly tense in recent weeks.

Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s embattled chief executive, announced the ban Friday. “The decision to enact an anti-mask law is not easy one, but it is a necessary decision considering the situation today,” Lam said at a press conference.

The law, which went into effect Saturday at midnight local time, bans protesters from wearing any sort of mask or face covering, including paint, at any public gathering, including both lawful …

Youth climate activist Greta Thunberg is on the move through North America after leading the largest climate protest in history, a pair of strikes last month that drew more than 4 million into the streets around the world.

“So happy to say that the following weeks I’ll travel slowly through the North American continent, moving southwest and then eventually through South America towards Santiago,” the Chilean capital where a UN climate change conference is planned for early December, she wrote on Facebook recently. At that meeting, countries are expected to nail down how they plan to meet their obligations to …