Rebel fighters sit on the rubble of damaged buildings as they wait to be evacuated from a rebel-held sector of eastern Aleppo.
Abdalrhman Ismail / Reuters
—President-elect Donald Trump criticized China’s “unprecedented” seizure of an underwater U.S. Navy drone in a Saturday morning tweet. More here
—A 7.9-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Papua New Guinea on Saturday, causing minimal damage. More here
—We’re live-blogging the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
Trump Says China Should Keep the U.S. Navy Drone It Seized
Lucas Jackson / Reuters
President-elect Donald Trump responded to China’s seizure of an unmanned underwater U.S. Navy drone by calling it an “unprecedented act” on his Twitter account on Saturday morning.
China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters - rips it out of water and takes it to China in unprecedented act.
The seizure took place in international waters Friday in the South China Sea, where China and neighboring countries have been sparring over disputed territorial claims. According to the U.S. military, the drone was part of an oceanic research project carried out by the Navy research vessel USNS Bowditch. The Chinese Defense Ministry accused the U.S. of “hyping up” the drone’s seizure on Saturday and said it would be returned “in an appropriate manner.” Trump’s tweet comes just two weeks after the president-elect spoke with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen by phone, the first contact of its kind between Taiwanese leaders and a U.S. president in almost four decades.
Update, 9:01 p.m. ET: President-elect Trump has revised his position on the drone’s status. In a tweet Saturday evening, he wrote China should keep the seized U.S. Navy property because “we don’t want the drone they stole back.”
We should tell China that we don't want the drone they stole back.- let them keep it!
Trump did not elaborate on his view. The stance marks a shift away from one taken earlier by Jason Miller, the Trump transition team's communications director, who credited the president-elect for China's announcement it would return the seized drone.
Suicide Car Bomb Kills At Least 14 Turkish Soldiers
Turan Bulut / Reuters
At least 14 off-duty Turkish soldiers were killed Saturday by a suicide car bomb, Turkish officials said. Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said another 56 people were injured. The explosion occurred next to a bus carrying the soldiers as it drove through Kayseri, a city in central Turkey. According to Agence-France Press, local officials blamed the attack on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, also known as the PKK, a Kurdish separatist movement that has battled the Turkish government for years. No public claims of responsibility have been made. The BBC reported that Turkish officials instituted a temporary press blackout shortly after the bombing, an increasingly common practice in the country. The bombing comes one week after two blasts outside Istanbul’s Vodafone Stadium killed 44 people, most of whom were police officers, and wounded dozens more shortly after a soccer match between two of the country’s most well-known teams. A PKK splinter faction claimed responsibility.
Henry Heimlich, Anti-Choking Maneuver's Inventor, Dies at 96
Henry Heimlich in 2014. (Al Behrman / AP)
Henry Heimlich, whose eponymous technique of using abdominal thrusts to save a choking person’s life became an international first-aid staple, died Saturday at a Cincinnati hospital. He was 96 years old. Heimlich, a thoracic surgeon, first published a paper about the method in 1974. The American Red Cross and the American Heart Association added it to their guidelines for treating choking victims two years later, leading to its wide use throughout the world. According to the BBC, the maneuver is believed to have saved over 100,000 people in the U.S. alone since its adoption. Heimlich himself performed the maneuver earlier this year at age 96 to save the life of a fellow retirement-home resident who had begun choking at dinner. Alongside the maneuver and his work on a chest valve to re-inflate collapsed lungs, Heimlich also received criticism for his controversial support of malariotherapy, in which weaker strains of malaria are used as treatments for illnesses ranging from cancer to HIV/AIDS. Its efficacy remains unproven.
7.9-Magnitude Earthquake Strikes Near Papua New Guinea
In this 2009 file photo, a geophysicist studies earthquake readings at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. (Hugh Gentry / Reuters)
A strong 7.9-magnitude tremor struck off the coast of Papua New Guinea on Saturday night local time, causing minimal damage and no reported injuries so far. The earthquake occurred 29 miles east of New Ireland, a Papua New Guinean island in the eastern Bismarck Archipelago, at a depth of about 61 miles beneath the Earth’s surface, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. As the Associated Press noted, tremors at lower depths tend to cause less damage. The quake nonetheless prompted tsunami warnings throughout the southwestern Pacific Ocean, including in Indonesia, Nauru, and New Zealand. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, those warnings have now ended without signs of serious waves.
A cowardly coup from within the administration threatens to enflame the president’s paranoia and further endanger American security.
Impeachment is a constitutional mechanism. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a constitutional mechanism. Mass resignations followed by voluntary testimony to congressional committees are a constitutional mechanism. Overt defiance of presidential authority by the president’s own appointees—now that’s a constitutional crisis.
If the president’s closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand. That duty may be risky to their careers in government or afterward. But on their first day at work, they swore an oath to defend the Constitution—and there were no “riskiness” exemptions in the text of that oath.
Acts of sabotage against the president are perilous to the American system of government. They're also self-serving.
The title of Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear, contains a multitude of meanings. For one thing, it describes the attitude of many of President DonaldTrump’s own aides toward his judgment.
It’s not just thatmany sources werewilling to tell Woodward damaging stories about Trump: The most stunning examples are those in which top aides reportedly thwarted his will. Even more stunning is an anonymous op-ed published in The New York Times Wednesday afternoon written by a purported “senior official in the Trump administration.”
The writer says that senior Trump officials “are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them.” The official adds: “We believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”
The sociologist Margaret Hagerman spent two years embedded in upper-middle-class white households, listening in on conversations about race.
When Margaret Hagerman was trying to recruit white affluent families as subjects for the research she was doing on race, one prospective interviewee told her, “I can try to connect you with my colleague at work who is black. She might be more helpful.”
To Hagerman, that response was helpful in itself. She is a sociologist at Mississippi State University, and her new book, White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America, summarizes the two years of research she did talking to and observing upper-middle-class white families in an unidentified midwestern city and its suburbs. To examine how white children learn about race, she followed 36 of them between the ages of 10 and 13, interviewing them as well as watching them do homework, play video games, and otherwise go about their days.
American democracy is imperiled by Republicans enabling the president’s authoritarian impulses, not by self-aggrandizing op-eds from anonymous bureaucrats.
For political observers and reporters, every day since the November 2016 election seems to have contained some sort of absurd twist or development. The pace of the Donald Trump–era news cycle has made it difficult to separate signal from noise—the truly important, like a Supreme Court–nomination battle, from the simply bizarre or dramatic, like anonymous Trump officials testifying to the president’s incompetence.
On Wednesday, TheNew York Timespublished an anonymous op-ed from a senior official claiming to be part of the “resistance” inside the Trump administration. The piece sparked a media frenzy, with some commentators, including my colleague David Graham, alleging that government officials are engaged in a kind of coup against the elected president. “If protecting the rules requires tearing down the rules,” Graham writes, “what is there to be gained?”
Led by Cory Booker, senators are breaking the rules to protest the GOP’s speedy consideration of Brett Kavanaugh. But their effort is likely too little, too late.
Updated on September 6 at 2:57 p.m. ET
As the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh sailed this summer toward a presumed confirmation in the fall, progressive activists implored Democrats in the Senate to escalate their fight—even to abandon the chamber’s cherished norms, if necessary—in a bid to stop it.
On Thursday, they got their wish.
Led by Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee released documents from Kavanaugh’s service in the George W. Bush administration that had been labeled as “confidential” and withheld from public view as the federal appellate judge sat for his confirmation hearing. One set of emails, leaked to The New York Times, showed Kavanaugh casting doubt on the Court’s precedent legalizing abortion. And in a contentious moment as the panel reconvened Thursday morning, Booker announced that he would risk expulsion by releasing emails related to Kavanaugh’s views on affirmative action and racial profiling.
I grew up in a gun-loving town in Alabama. My grandfather’s store sells firearms. But only after I was shot did I begin to understand America’s complicated relationship with guns.
I was shot on a Sunday. It was late and it was hot and I was 21, on my way home from dinner during summer break. I’d rolled the windows down because the breeze felt good.
I pulled up to a red light, about half a mile from my home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “Yeah!” by Usher was playing on the radio. A silver Toyota Tacoma turned the corner. As it passed me, I heard a pop. Then my left arm was on fire.
If you’d asked me before that night how I might react to being shot, I would have said: I would call 911. I would get myself to the hospital. In fact it never occurred to me to call 911, only to want my dad.
A veteran Washington journalist describes the defense secretary as avoiding confrontation and showing respect. But the rest of the book may have blown up that strategy.
James Mattis has long distinguished himself as a canny survivor in Donald Trump’s shape-shifting inner circle, somehow managing to remain firmly entrenched at the Pentagon as fellow advisers such as Rex Tillerson and H. R. McMaster vanished into the vortex that is Trump’s bad side. Then Bob Woodward wrote a book. Now the defense secretary and retired four-star general has been thrust directly into the political maelstrom he’s so studiously avoided.
Excerpts from the journalist’s forthcoming account of Trump’s White House, first published Tuesday in The Washington Post, portray Mattis as scornful of the president’s intellect and judgment, and, in a boost to an already prominent narrative, as a vital check against the president’s dangerous instincts. Woodward depicts an agitated Mattis explaining to Trump in a meeting that the United States maintains a military presence on the Korean peninsula to “prevent World War III” and later deriding the president as “a fifth or sixth grader.” Woodward also claims that when Trump called up Mattis and suggested the United States “fucking kill” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against civilians in 2017, Mattis played along but then hung up the phone and told an aide, “We’re not going to do any of that,” and instead drew up plans for more limited air strikes that Trump ultimately authorized. (Both Mattis and Trump have denied this account.)
A favorite anecdote about the origins of the vibrator is probably a myth.
It’s among the most delectably scandalous stories in the history of medicine: At the height of the Victorian era, doctors regularly treated their female patients by stimulating them to orgasm. This mass treatment—a cure for the now-defunct medical condition of “hysteria”—was made possible by a new technology: the vibrator. Vibrators allowed physicians to massage women’s clitorises quickly and efficiently, without exhausting their hands and wrists.
The entrepreneur’s reaction to recent media coverage illustrates a common—and dangerous—misconception of reporting practices.
The earliest known use of the phrase “off the record” in print, according to Merriam-Webster, appears in a November 15, 1918 story in the New York Tribune by Theodore M. Knappen. World War I had been declared over a few days earlier, and Bernard Baruch, a businessman and adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, gave an interview to reporters.
Knappen wrote, “In an informal conversation with the newspaper men, in which nothing was ‘off the record,’ Mr. Baruch, happy in the victorious termination of the war, largely, as he saw it, through the magnificent spirit of American business in standing by the government at any sacrifice, would scarcely admit that there would be even a temporary period of disarticulation and suspension of business.”
Recent images of Croatia’s dramatic landscape, cities, parks, and shorelines
The Republic of Croatia has only been an independent country since 1991, but the region has been inhabited since prehistoric times. More than 4 million people call Croatia home today, living in rural villages, coastal tourist destinations, and modern cities, where Roman ruins can stand side by side with medieval defenses and 21st-century architecture. Croatia’s dramatic coastline along the Adriatic Sea includes more than a thousand islands, and its mountains are riddled with fascinating caves and karst formations. Gathered here: some recent images of Croatia’s landscape, cities, parks, and shorelines.
