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When I walk into the Chappaqua dining room in which Hillary Clinton is spending her days working on her new book, I am greeted by a vision from the past. Wearing no makeup and giant Coke-bottle glasses, dressed in a gray mock-turtleneck and black zip sweatshirt, Hillary looks less Clinton and more Rodham than I have ever seen her outside of college photographs. It’s the glasses, probably, that work to make her face look rounder, or maybe just the bareness of her skin. She looks not like the woman who’s familiar from television, from newspapers, from America of the past 25 years, but like the 6

Earlier this year, reporter Lee Stranahan was in the White House press room when another journalist asked him which outlet he worked for. “Breitbart News,” Stranahan answered, recalling the exchange in a recent phone conversation. The other journalist laughed, thinking this had to be a joke. Breitbart, after all, was largely known, whether justly or not, as a hothouse where the alt-right tended to its most outlandish, paranoid creations: Clinton conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant fearmongering, garden-variety misogyny. One of its story tags was “black crime.” The tag is no longer used, yet it

1 “A competent woman losing a job to an incompetent man is not an anomalous Election Day surprise; it is Tuesday in America,” Rebecca Traister wrote in the first major profile of Hillary Clinton since her defeat (“Citizen Clinton,” May 29–June 11). Unsurprisingly, the profile elicited an outpouring of reactions (as Alex Shephard at the New Republic wrote, it “stirred the hornets’ nest that appears to follow Clinton wherever she goes”), including a fair bit of vitriol from the lock-her-up crowd. Commenter PolsciProfessor55 responded to this, writing, “I think one of the main reasons for the nas

The meeting was apparently jovial—though we have to take the Russians’ word for it. On May 10, Donald Trump received Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak, Moscow’s ambassador to the United States, in the Oval Office. But the American president barred the White House press corps from the meeting. Footage released by the official Russian news agency, Tass, showed the three men joking and laughing, and according to leaked accounts of the meeting, Trump bragged that he had “just fired the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was crazy, a real nut job.” The reason? “

Updated at 1 p.m. ET North Korea has released American college student Otto Warmbier, who is on his way back to the U.S. and won't be forced to serve a 15-year prison term, according to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Warmbier is in a coma, his father tells NPR. News of the University of Virginia student's medical condition came on the heels of his release. Fred Warmbier tells NPR's Emily Kopp that he's been told his son has been in a coma since sometime after his sentencing in March of 2016. Fred and Cindy Warmbier tell the AP that Otto Warmbier is now on a Medivac flight. "We want the worl

In February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Environmental Protection Agency to review the Obama administration’s Waters of the United States, or WOTUS, rule. The regulation, which was created in 2015 but was put on hold by a court later that year, aims to expand the federal government’s ability to apply anti-pollution statutes to a variety of bodies of water. This week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would be acting on the president’s order and rolling back the regulation. When he first called upon the EPA to review WOTUS, Trump cited its

Paul M. Barrett and Robert Langreth, with James Paton David Hernandez, a 44-year-old restaurant worker and Type 1 diabetic, didn’t have insurance from 2011 through 2014 and often couldn’t afford insulin—a workhorse drug whose list price has risen more than 270 percent over the past decade. As a result of his skimping on dosages, Hernandez in 2011 suffered permanent blindness in his left eye, and three years later he experienced kidney failure. He’s since received a lifesaving kidney transplant covered by Medicare and has drug coverage under a New Jersey program for the disabled. But Hernandez

If one thing emerged crystal clear from the muddy first months of his father-in-law’s presidency, it’s that Jared Kushner prefers the background. That’s where the camera found him in pretty much every official setting—among the flags and the rhododendron, stock still and strangely unchanged from one photo to another: spread collar, thin tie and dimpled, inscrutable smile. The senior adviser to the President was also the cipher of the White House—never heard in public, a blank page on which an anxious public could write its hopes. To moderates, he was the son of a prominent Democratic family,

More than 190 Democrats in Congress have joined together to sue President Trump on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. They say Trump is violating the U.S. Constitution by profiting from business deals involving foreign governments — and doing so without congressional consent. And they want the court to make it stop. Trump has "repeatedly and flagrantly violated" the Constitution's Emoluments Clause, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told reporters on a conference call. The clause says that "without the Consent of the Congress," the president can't accept benefits "of any kind

If you had to put a price on your life, what cash amount do you think it would be? What about $100,000? That was the amount, last June, that a group of kidnappers in Atlanta demanded in exchange for a woman’s life. Not high enough? Well, in a statistical sense, certain government agencies value a human life significantly more. In 2010, for example, both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration put a price on human life: $9.1 million (in proposing stricter air pollution regulations) and $7.9 million (in proposing new cigarette warning labels), respectively. On it

In the new abnormal that defines the Donald Trump era, FBI officials sit around debating whether they should tell the president of the United States whether he’s part of an investigation into Russian subversion. Think about that. The story arc of the June 8 hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee may have been as simple to understand as the courtroom climax of any Law and Order episode: Who are you going to believe, the witness or the defendant? And make no mistake: Donald Trump was the off-stage defendant on Capitol Hill, while star witness James Comey all but pronounced the president

Updated for clarification at 12:15 p.m. ET Last month, Democratic Senator Ed Markey delivered what seemed like an explosive bit of news during an interview with CNN: A grand jury had been impaneled in New York, he said, to investigate the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. The only problem: It wasn’t true. The precise origins of the rumor are difficult to pin down, but it had been ricocheting around social media for days before Markey’s interview. The story had no reliable sourcing, and not a single credible news outlet touched it—but it had been fervently championed by The Palmer

Sunday was “trivialize violence against the media” day for President Trump. Thursday was “fly to Warsaw and champion Western values day.” As presidential speeches go, Trump’s address in Warsaw was fair. Ish. If you forget who is speaking and what that person has been saying and doing since Inauguration Day—since the opening of his campaign in 2015—and really through his career. But if you remember those things, the speech jolted you to attention again and again. “We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression.” This must be an example of what the grammaria

By 1997, the South Koreans were pretty cocky, and for good reason. For 30 years, the East Asian country had been one of history’s economic marvels, transforming itself from a poor, war-torn wasteland into a rich industrial powerhouse. The economy wasn’t perfect: Korea’s big companies were prone to amassing too much debt and investing it in outlandish projects. But the Koreans had shrugged off such problems again and again. The future seemed secure. It wasn’t. On July 2, 1997—almost exactly 20 years ago—authorities in Thailand relinquished their control over the national currency, the baht. Wi

Mikhail Ogorodnikov hadn’t been planning to speak at the rally until someone handed him a megaphone. It was a cold day in March in the Russian city of Vladimir, with dirty snow still stiff on the ground, and many in the crowd in front of Ogorodnikov were roughly his age, 16. As he gathered his thoughts, a strange fact occurred to him: the man they were rallying against, Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been in power longer than most of them had been alive. “For the past 17 years, this man has been robbing the country I love,” he shouted into the bullhorn. “He doesn’t want this country to

FOR ALL THE extensive legal jeopardy Donald Trump already faces in his very young presidency, it is striking that the greatest source of political jeopardy for both him and his party is not his possible Nixon-esque crimes but his Paul Ryan–esque health-care plan. Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey, while unpopular, is far less so than the health-care bill whose House passage he celebrated in the Rose Garden on May 4. One poll found 39 percent support for the Comey firing, which is twice the level of support for the House Speaker’s evisceration of the Affordable Care Act. Democrats runn

North Korea lit some nasty fireworks on July 4th, successfully testing a long-range missile capable of hitting Alaska. The test sent jitters up the spines of American national security officials—for good reason. The Hermit Kingdom hasn’t yet been able to put a nuclear warhead atop an intercontinental ballistic missile, but it is getting there faster than intelligence analysts expected. All the trend lines are bad. Yields from North Korea’s nuclear tests are getting larger. Its arsenal is too, with an estimated 20-25 weapons already, and enough fissile material to crank out a new nuke about eve

Watching the national controversy over the White House and Russia unfold, I’m reminded of Karl Marx’s oft-quoted observation: “History repeats itself: first as tragedy, second as farce.” I was a close witness to the national tragedy that was Richard Nixon’s self-inflicted downfall as president, and I’ve recently contemplated whether a repeat of his “Saturday Night Massacre” may already be in the offing. Given how that incident doomed one president, Trump would do well to resist repeating his predecessor’s mistakes—and avoid his presidency’s descent into a quasi-Watergate parody. The massacre b

At the bar of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, you can order a crystal spoonful of Hungarian wine for $140. Cocktails run from $23 for a gin and tonic to $100 for a vodka concoction with raw oysters and caviar. There’s a seafood pyramid called “the Trump Tower” that costs $120, or you can hit BLT Prime, a restaurant where the $59 salt-aged Kansas City strip steak comes with a long-shot chance of seeing the President sitting nearby. It’s the only restaurant in town where he has dined. If the urge to shop strikes, there’s a Brioni boutique in one corner that offers the same Italian s

Updated | By the time Michael Flynn was fired as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser in February, he had made a lot of bad decisions. One was taking money from the Russians (and failing to disclose it); another was taking money under the table from the Turks. But an overlooked line in his financial disclosure form, which he was forced to amend to detail those foreign payments, reveals he was also involved in one of the most audacious—and some say harebrained—schemes in recent memory: a plan to build scores of U.S. nuclear power plants in the Middle East. As a safety measure. In

Three years ago, the Islamic State overran large swaths of Iraq and Syria, and soon declared a caliphate that straddled the border between the two countries. Today, the group's physical caliphate is declining — and the group is preparing its base of fighters for a future under siege. One of the ways it is doing that is through its musical propaganda. In the most austere interpretations of Islam, musical instruments are prohibited. But the a cappella hymn, nasheed in Arabic, is permissible. The Islamic State has used nasheeds to spread its message since its founding, disseminating battle hymns

In the beginning, it was almost possible to believe Donald Trump had a coherent worldview. There were those, like Walter Russell Mead in Foreign Affairs, who argued that the president had a purposeful, Andrew Jackson-inspired “America First” policy. Alliances and treaties, especially trade deals, would be measured according to a narrow definition of national interest rather than long-term global stability. This was a simplistic, nearsighted strategy, but at least it made some political sense. It was what his constituency wanted. The primacy of domestic electoral considerations has certainly be

Results in epidemiology often are equivocal, and money can cloud science (see: tobacco companies vs. cancer researchers). Clear-cut cases are rare. Yet just such a case showed up one day in 1984 in the office of Harris Pastides, a recently appointed associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. A graduate student named James Stewart, who was working his way through school as a health and safety officer at Digital Equipment Corp., told Pastides there had been a number of miscarriages at the company’s semiconductor plant in nearby Hudson, Mass. Women, especi

THIS SPRING, as President Trump fired FBI director James Comey; as his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, came under scrutiny for his secret conversations with Russians, including a bank executive close to Vladimir Putin; as The Wall Street Journal reported on the same bank’s murky connection to a foreign Trump development; as the commander-in-chief used his private club at Mar-a-Lago to host the Chinese president, to the delight of its dues-paying members (while also ordering a missile strike on Syria); as the House sought documents from Trump’s favored lender, Deutsche Bank, and the Treasury Departm

FEW THINGS ARE MORE IMPORTANT in a democracy than confidence that the law is applied equally and fairly to all. Which is why the written testimony of former FBI Director James Comey to Congress, released on June 7, was so unsettling. In it, Comey detailed an escalating effort by President Donald Trump to get Comey to pledge his loyalty and to back off elements of the probe into whether members of the Trump campaign team cooperated with Russia during and after the 2016 election. The difficult relationship between Comey and Trump began during the presidential transition in early January. After

Ilya Khrennikov and Alexander Sazonov Boris Nuraliev looks a lot like the Soviet-era statistician he once was, with his big wire-rim glasses and bushy mustache, shock-proof Timex watch, and vintage IBM laptop loaded with decades-old software. But there’s little Soviet about 1C, the company he founded 26 years ago that has grown into Russia’s No. 2 seller of enterprise accounting programs, making Nuraliev a billionaire. Today, millions of Russians use 1C Co.’s applications for payroll, financial planning, and controlling factories, and 300,000 coders can program in its proprietary language. “W

It all sounds so familiar. A celebrity turned Republican presidential candidate wins over the white working class with promises to restore American greatness, only to become ensnared in a scandal involving dubious dealings with a hostile regime. As the press digs in, the White House appears flustered, and the Justice Department appoints an independent counsel to investigate the president, as well as trusted members of his National Security Council and former campaign staff. Are you thinking Donald Trump? Well, yes. But also Ronald Reagan. Three decades ago, the Gipper was embroiled in a major

TARA JOHN FRENCH PRESIDENT EMMANUEL MACRON URGED Russian President Vladimir Putin to ensure the rights of LGBT people in Chechnya on May 29, the same day France welcomed its first gay Chechen refugee. The meeting followed reports of alleged persecution of gay men in the Russian republic. DEADLY PURGE The Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported in April that at least 100 men in Chechnya suspected of being gay had been tortured in detention facilities by authorities. Some were outed to their families upon release, prompting a spate of honor killings in the Muslim-majority region. The newspape

IF ONE RATES the Russia scandal on an impeachability scale of one to ten, with ten being a videotape of Donald Trump speaking in Russian to his handlers from the Kremlin, like Kevin Costner in the last scene in No Way Out, we’re currently at about 7.5. So far, the following events have been credibly reported: No fewer than five Trump associates (Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn, and Jared Kushner) have obscured or outright lied about their financial ties to or meetings with Russian officials. Kushner asked a Russian official during the presidential transition to communi

South Korean President Moon Jae-in watched his military test-fire a ballistic missile on Friday, after a string of North Korean missile tests were blamed for raising tensions on the Korean Peninsula. The military said the missile, a Hyunmoo-2 with a range of up to 800 kilometers (nearly 500 miles), hit its target accurately. When Moon won South Korea's presidency last month, he was seen as likely to return to the "Sunshine Policy" of engaging with North Korea through dialogue and economic aid. But today he said "dialogue is only possible when we have a strong military, and engagement policies