Tag: Take

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, must make a “meaningful” gesture if he wants to see sanctions lifted, Donald Trump said on Wednesday ahead of a second summit between the two men scheduled for next week. “The sanctions are on in full. I haven’t taken sanctions off,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “I’d love to be able to, but in order to do that, we have to do something that’s meaningful on the other side.” Trump and Kim Jong-un to meet again at second nuclear summit Read more Trump and Kim are due to meet in Hanoi to discuss progress on the issue of North Korea’s nuclear program since they first met in Singapore last year. “Chairman Kim and I have a very good relationship. I wouldn’t be surprised to see something work out,” Trump said, without providing further details. Trump reiterated his view that North Korea had “great” potential for economic development and suggested the Vietnam summit would not be the last. At their landmark meeting in Singapore last year, the US and North Korean leaders produced a vaguely worded document in which Kim pledged to work toward “the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.” Is progress with North Korea possible under Trump’s style of diplomacy? | Michael H Fuchs Read more But progress has since stalled, with the two sides disagreeing over what that means. White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders meanwhile said Trump spoke by phone with Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the two men “reaffirmed their commitment to achieving the final, fully verified denuclearization of” North Korea.

Anne Washburn’s new play does something you rarely see in the theatre: it takes Donald Trump seriously rather than as a subject for easy satire. In her previous shows at the Almeida, Mr Burns and The Twilight Zone, Washburn has invoked American popular culture. Here she examines the politics of the moment and, while her three-hour play sprawls and goes a bit bonkers towards the end, it has the supreme virtue of addressing the topic that haunts so many Americans today. Washburn sets most of the action in a snowbound farmhouse in upstate New York. In conventional drama, you might expect one of the characters to be murdered. Instead we watch a group of privileged white liberals obsessively arguing about Trump at a pivotal moment in his presidency: the period just after ex-director of the FBI James Comey offered damning testimony to the Senate intelligence committee. In a parallel narrative strand, Washburn explores the alienation of a young Kenyan from a kindly Christian couple who adopted him as a child. Any temptation to treat the liberals as pillars of virtue is resisted: their lives seem messy and confused and they are prone to excess as when they debate whether Trump could be the antichrist. But one of the group, a lawyer, seizes on a key moment when Trump, in a Republican primary debate, claimed that White House delegates pleaded with him to cool his opposition to the Iraq war. The lawyer goes on to say that Trump “makes himself up out of thin air and nobody cares”.

Ilhan Omar made history in January when she became the first Somali American and one of the first Muslim women sworn into the US Congress. The congresswoman apologized for the things that she said that were problematic and insensitive Logan Bayroth, J Street “Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has quickly created a reputation for herself as a young, bold progressive willing to take on and challenge some of Washington DC’s sacred cows, powerful interest groups and conservative godfathers like Elliot Abrams,” said Wajahat Ali, a New York Times opinion writer and commentator. “She apologized, it seems she gets it,” he said. The comment invoked the $100 bill, which features Benjamin Franklin, and led a Jewish journalist to ask Omar who she believed was “paying American politicians to be pro-Israel”. She nonetheless stood by her argument that the “problematic role of lobbyists” in US politics must be addressed. “And yet certainly from the rightwing and the Republican side of the aisle, there is a desire to try to exploit these controversies not to actually address questions of antisemitism and not to actually advance a better policy debate or outcomes, but to score political points.” ‘It wasn’t a question’ Omar’s tense exchange with Abrams, Trump’s envoy to Venezuela, fell into a similar trap. At a House foreign affairs committee hearing, Omar pressed Abrams over his past, including his role in the Iran-Contra scandal and support for brutal governments in Central America. Ilhan Omar is a Somali refugee. Although Gunson found Omar to be “ill-informed” on the situation in Venezuela, and how it differed from Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s, he said it was incumbent on lawmakers to ask tough questions of officials tasked with overseeing US policy. “It took [Republicans] what, 13 years to notice Steve King?”

For decades, federal law has prevented real research into cannabis — this law aims to change that. Steven Senne/AP/REX Shutterstock Proponents of a new effort to study marijuana on Capitol Hill believe their bill has the greatest chance of becoming law because it seeks to do something both relatively uncontroversial and completely novel: Remove politics from the debate over marijuana altogether, while putting the nation’s scientists in the driver’s seat. This latest effort, dubbed the Marijuana Data Collection Act, would require the National Academy of Sciences to release a scientifically rigorous report every two years on a range of topics involving weed, including its impact on public safety and health, the economy and what legalization — or the lack thereof — has meant for the criminal justice system. If that sounds simple, that’s because it’s intended to be. “Only those that have a more zealous position on this issue will oppose uncovering the truth, because they know that it will make it more likely that the federal government will just kind of retreat on the marijuana issue and let the states lead.” The bill isn’t specifically aimed at anti-marijuana Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but if passed it would offer proponents and opponents of marijuana better statistics and data than his Department of Justice currently provides. “We are in such a partisan, polarized political state that my fear was that if we allowed a branch of the federal government to do this, that no matter which administration was in power, the political party that was out of power was going to be concerned that this was a biased report,” Paul Armentano, the Deputy Director of the marijuana advocacy group NORML, tells Rolling Stone. “If we allowed the National Academy of Sciences to do this report we avoided that potential conflict.” Proponents eventually want marijuana to be rescheduled federally so it’s not viewed the same as heroin and even LSD, but they say the 31 states and the District of Columbia who have now legalized marijuana either medicinally, recreationally or both need more data as they write their marijuana laws. Still, the legislation is not without its opponents, even from some on Capitol Hill who have supported efforts to study the positive and negative health effects of marijuana. “That’s the question we should be asking, not going into states to see what’s happening in the states right now,” Harris says. “This is something that I would hope that whether people are opponents or proponents of cannabis law reform, they would at least want to have better data to inform their decision-making,” Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) tells Rolling Stone.

Image WASHINGTON — As President Trump prepares to name a new justice, one reality is increasingly clear about the Supreme Court — it has become another polarized institution in the polarized capital of a polarized nation. The string of politically charged 5-to-4 decisions that punctuated the end of the court’s term highlighted how thoroughly the tribal politics that have engulfed the White House and Capitol Hill have now ensnared the court. “It is clearly the most partisan court ever, where you can actually look at Republican and Democrat and use that as a proxy for voting and behavior on the court,” said Neal E. Devins, the Sandra Day O’Connor professor of law at the College of William and Mary, who has studied the partisan evolution of the court. With one recent poll showing that half of American voters believe the Supreme Court is driven mainly by politics, lawmakers in both parties worry that the perception is destroying trust in the court as a supposed neutral arbiter of the United States’ political and policy disputes. “People expect that the executive and legislative branches are going to be political, but the judiciary is supposed to be above the fray,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, whose vote is likely to be pivotal in the coming confirmation fight. But polishing the reputation of the court for its independence can be very difficult when the most notable decisions are being decided mainly along partisan lines and when political reliability has become a chief attribute presidents look for in making their Supreme Court picks. His tweet no doubt caused some discomfort for Chief Justice Roberts and others who pride themselves on the tradition of judicial independence, but it also represented exactly how many Americans view the courts. Mr. Devins, the law professor, said the difference between the current court and those in the past was that there was typically either a conservative appointed by a Democratic president or a liberal named by a Republican. “The parties now seek political advantage by demonstrating on that issue they are not like the other party,” he said of the nomination process. The hearings will be to replace Justice Kennedy, the last member of the court to be seated with a unanimous Senate vote.

Caption Why you should care For better or worse, business leaders have a greater responsibility to right society’s wrongs. “We’re going to connect with our partner school,” she says. It’s the brainchild of Daniel Lubetzky, the founder and CEO of KIND Healthy Snacks. “When my team asks me what keeps me up at night, they tend to be asking in terms of the business,” he says. Despite a reputation for being tight-lipped, business leaders like Lubetzky — including many who enter the political realm — have increasingly been willing to speak up on social issues. His past donations lead to criticism from groups like 2ndVote, a conservative watchdog that studies contributions from corporate leaders. “You don’t have to artificially raise funds,” he says, and increasingly, the model comes with a social responsibility too. There is this trend toward ‘corporate social responsibility’ or ‘corporate citizenship,’ and sometimes it’s just gimmicky.” Brand forays into activism can be treacherous. KIND itself faced scrutiny in 2015, after Lubetzky built his snacks on the promise of their health benefits, only to have the Food and Drug Administration ask that it remove the term “healthy” from its labels for having too much saturated fat. Empatico is a start.

During his first year in office, French President Emmanuel Macron outlined a series of proposals for reforming European institutions; now he is launching a campaign to shake up the European Parliament election in 2019. Though the official rollout has now been postponed, Macron’s latest project remains central to his presidency and to his conception of power. Macron’s “La Grande Marche pour l’Europe” will mimic the program that toppled France’s dominant political parties and transformed his La République En Marche ! Few are better acquainted with Macron’s thinking than French historian and philosopher François Dosse. Dosse recently published a book about Macron and Ricoeur titled Le Philosophe et le President. Similarly, Macron’s vision for Europe seems to reconcile the irreconcilable: his plan is both to preserve member states’ sovereignty and deepen EU integration. The second Ricoeurian concept underpinning Macron’s worldview is the idea of a European “refoundation.” Whereas the first wave of European integration was largely limited to economics, Macron now wants to focus on politics and culture, starting with the European Parliament election next year. To that end, he has considered creating a Europe-wide “En Marche !” movement that could nominate its own Spitzenkandidat to the European Commission presidency. But the creation of a European En Marche ! In his view, sovereignty in Europe can really be exercised only at the level of the EU.

Kentucky should establish an independent commission that oversees the state’s redistricting process, according to a new report from the Kentucky League of Women Voters. Currently, state lawmakers have the power to draw new boundaries for legislative and congressional districts at least once every 10 years. Susan Weston, a policy consultant with the Kentucky League of Women Voters, said an independent commission would help keep lawmakers from drawing districts that protect incumbents in elections. “Their charge would need to be: you are to make a map that meets the set of criteria of ensuring opportunities for minority communities and then getting districts as compact as you can,” Weston said. The original maps passed by the legislature and signed by then-Gov. Steve Beshear had to be redrawn after the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled state House and Senate districts were uneven in population and divided too many counties — a practice that is supposed to be minimized. But the League of Women Voters study argues that the districts still unnecessarily divide some urban counties — connecting slivers of adjacent counties to distort the electorate for political purposes. “When [the Kentucky Supreme Court] said ‘don’t divide a county unless you have to,’ it meant if you’re bigger than the size a district is supposed to be, they slice into you to solve four or five other counties.” Kentucky’s redistricting process requires a simple majority of each legislative chamber and the signature of the governor to approve maps for the districts in the state House, state Senate and Kentucky’s congressional seats. A handful of states have independent commissions that try to take the politics out of the redistricting process. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule this year on redistricting lawsuits from Maryland and Wisconsin that could change redistricting processes across the country.