The G-7 showed real courage in agreeing to maintain existing sanctions against Russia over its invasion and occupation of Ukraine.
Sure.
The nations agreed at a summit Saturday to maintain sanctions on Russia for its interference in Ukraine until the conditions of a peace process negotiated in Minsk, Belarus are fulfilled.
It’s too bad they didn’t strengthen the sanctions and set them to be predicated on fulfilling the conditions of the Budapest Memorandum.
Graham Allison, Director of the Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, had some thoughts in The Boston Globe. Here’s one that’s not in the usual political or military race discussion.
In STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)…[the PRC] annually graduates four times as many students as the United States (1.3 million vs 300,000).
A better measure would compare the quality of those graduates and their programs so as to arrive at similarly qualified graduates.
Still, numbers have a quality all their own. Let’s play a bit with these two. Suppose, for instance, that 80% or American STEM graduates actually know their material, i.e., the graduates didn’t just sleep-walk their way through a mediocre program; they actually got and understood a good, solid STEM education. That works out to 240k solid STEM grads.
Suppose that of the PRC’s graduates only 50% measure up to that standard. That still works out to 650k solid STEM grads, or for you non-STEM folks, 2.7 times more quality grads than we’re producing. That’s something to take seriously.
This is a long-term, generational, race that we can’t afford to lose.
…to Carter Page’s testimony—in whatever venue.
Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page has asked House lawmakers to let him testify in an open session to offer his side in the ongoing probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 race….
Page made his offer in a long letter to Congressmen Adam Schiff (D, CA) and Michael Conaway (R, TX), Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and acting lead on the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in our 2016 elections in place of the committee chairman Devin Nunes (R,CA), respectively.
So far, he’s received no response.
No matter.
He should feel free to write some op-eds if Congress declines to hear him formally. Either way—Congressional testimony or opinion pieces, the public then could evaluate the usefulness of his words.
During his visit to the Vatican, President Donald Trump gave gifts to Pope Francis, a normal exchange of gifts between heads of state.
Trump gifted Pope Francis a first-edition set of writings from Martin Luther King, Jr. The White House said the set includes the five books King wrote in his lifetime. Each one is custom-bound and the books are in a custom display case. It also included a piece of granite from the Martin Luther King, Jr, Memorial in Washington.
Maybe Trump should have included, in addition to those, a copy of Martin Luther King, Jr’s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, along with a section of the bar of the cell in which MLK was imprisoned while he wrote his Letter. A copy of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses would have been a good gift, too.
Regarding ex-NSA chief Lt Gen Michael Flynn’s (USA, Ret) refusal to “cooperate with” Congress’ subpoena to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee and to provide subpoenaed documents to it: he says he’ll invoke his 5th Amendment right not to testify against himself.
It’s certainly his right to invoke his right not to testify against himself, and no conclusion regarding his guilt or innocence of any crime can be drawn from that. Nor should one be.
However, he has no right not to appear before the committee and testify. The committee should send the capital police to get him and bring him before the committee to testify, even if against his will: his will has no bearing here; the subpoena has not been quashed. Then, the committee members should put their questions to him, one by each, putting each question onto the record and thereby putting each of his 5th Amendment invocations similarly on the record. The committee also should ask for those documents, one by each or by category, requiring him to invoke the 5th each time there.
The committee also should obtain and execute a search warrant to get those documents.
No more delays. No more stalling.