The White House confirms that Trump reassigned a senior National Security Council adviser after he disagreed with the president’s Latin American policy, and South Sudan becomes the first country in six years to announce a famine.
—The government of South Sudan said some 100,000 of its people are facing starvation, and on Monday it became the first country to declare a famine in six years.
—The White House confirmed that Trump reassigned a senior National Security Council aide after he disagreed with the president’s policies for Latin America.
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
Trump Picks Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster as National Security Adviser
Kevin Lamarque / Reuters
President Donald Trump named Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster as his new national security adviser on Monday. McMaster is a well-respected Army officer who is also known for his scholarly work. His 1997 book, Dereliction of Duty, examined former-President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Joint Chief of Staff’s missteps and indecisiveness during the Vietnam War. He was also a critic of the Iraq War, in which he served. He led the 2005 counterinsurgency in the north of Iraq to secure Tal Afar, and was instrumental to the strategy used by General David Patraeus and that was credited with turning around the war. Foreign Policy magazine called McMaster “the brain behind Patraeus.”
Last week, Trump’s first pick for the job, Michael Flynn, stepped down from the position after reports showed he had misled the vice president about the nature of a conversation he had with the Russian ambassador. Trump then offered the position to retired retired Navy Vice Admiral Robert Harward, who turned the position down, reportedly because of the chaos inside the White House. McMaster is widely respected with the military. Some of his work may serve him particularly well; he recently led a high-level panel on how the Army should respond to Russia’s new posture, Politico reports. And in Derelection of Duty, he criticized Johnson for being “profoundly insecure and distrustful of anyone but his closest civilian advisers,” a description critics have applied to the current president, as well.
The Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Ivanovich Churkin, died in New York City on Monday a day before his 65th birthday. Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador told the Associated Press that Churkin was ill and taken to the hospital, although the cause of the illness is not known at this time. Churkin has been envoy to the UN for more than a decade. He has been a fierce defender of Russia’s foreign policies, including the intensive bombing Syrian rebels in Aleppo last year.
Trump Dismisses a Senior NSC Advisor for Criticising Administration Policy
Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP
The White House confirmed on Monday that President Donald Trump reassigned a senior National Security Council (NSC) adviser after he criticized the administration’s Latin American policy. The advisor, Craig Deare, was removed and sent back to his former role, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Monday. Deare had been assigned to the NSC by the administration, and while at a private meeting hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington think tank, he harshly criticized the president and top aides like Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, and complained of the dysfunction in the White House, POLITICOreported. Deare also allegedly recounted an embarrassing call Trump had with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Deare was appointed to the NSC by the Trump administration, and his release is just the latest example of the chaos being reported within the Trump White House. Last week, Trump dismissed his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, after it was revealed he misled the vice president about the nature of his conversation with the Russian ambassador.
South Sudan Becomes the First Country in Six Years to Declare Famine
Siegfried Modola / Reuters
More than 100,000 people in South Sudan face starvation, and on Monday it became the first country in six years to declare a famine. An ethnic conflict, which started three years ago, has driven people from their homes in some northern parts of the country, and combined with a failing economy, and drought, it has led to severe food instability. The famine so far has been contained to the northern areas of the country, but it’s expected to grow much worse this summer, and could possibly impact 5.5 million people, or about half the country’s population. A famine is only declared when a certain criteria is met. It requires at least 20 percent of homes facing extreme food shortages, and malnutrition rates of more than 30 percent. There is no binding obligation from UN member countries, but declaring famine often rallies relief groups to help deliver aid and brings international attention. South Sudan is one of Africa’s most unstable countries. It broke off from Sudan in 2011, and after a couple years of peace, the country has erupted in violence, with thousands of rebel factions fighting one another, often putting civilians in the middle.
The former California governor called President Trump’s attacks on John McCain “absolutely unacceptable.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger and John McCain saw in each other a willingness to buck the Republican Party and became fast friends and political allies. Mindful of McCain’s legacy, the former California governor said on Wednesday he couldn’t stay silent in the face of President Trump’s recent spate of attacks on the late senator.
He told me Trump’s swipes at McCain are both disgraceful and destructive. “He was just an unbelievable person,” Schwarzenegger said. “So an attack on him is absolutely unacceptable if he’s alive or dead—but even twice as unacceptable since he passed away a few months ago. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to do that. I just think it’s a shame that the president lets himself down to that kind of level. We will be lucky if everyone in Washington followed McCain’s example, because he represented courage.”
The biology of mental illness is still a mystery, but practitioners don’t want to admit it.
In 1886, Clark Bell, the editor of the journal of the Medico-Legal Society of New York, relayed to a physician named Pliny Earle a query bound to be of interest to his journal’s readers: Exactly what mental illnesses can be said to exist? In his 50-year career as a psychiatrist, Earle had developed curricula to teach medical students about mental disorders, co-founded the first professional organization of psychiatrists, and opened one of the first private psychiatric practices in the country. He had also run a couple of asylums, where he instituted novel treatment strategies such as providing education to the mentally ill. If any American doctor was in a position to answer Bell’s query, it was Pliny Earle.
Michael Jackson’s music is a gift. What do we do with it now?
The camera flies high above the palm trees of Hollywood, soaring north and west, all the way to the suburb of Simi Valley, where it slows down to seek out a certain street, and then slows some more until it finds a particular house. It hovers above it, and then swoops down, pushing in all the way to the doorstep, where it rests, impatient. It is the house where James Safechuck, one of the two men at the center of Leaving Neverland, an HBO documentary, grew up, but in a way it might as well be the Darlings’ house: “Peter Pan chose this particular house because there were people here who believed in him.”
But the Safechucks are not the only people who believe, because here is another suburban house, and here again is that seeking, searching intelligence, the camera pushing closer and closer. It is the house in Brisbane, Australia, where the other subject of the documentary, Wade Robson, grew up. The implication is clear: Michael Jackson could have any little boy in the world; all he needed were parents who would serve up their sons to him.
A newly discovered giant virus turns its victims to “stone.”
The very first giant virus was discovered in a water-cooling tower in 2003. As the name suggests, giant viruses are unusually large and their genomes unusually complex, all of which went against the prevailing idea of viruses as small, simple, and primitive. Then one baffling giant virus became many, as scientists kept discovering different types: in water off the Chilean coast, in Siberian permafrost, in an Austrian sewage plant, and now in mud from a Japanese hot spring.
The newest giant virus is Medusavirus, so named because of the way it infects amoebas, single-celled organisms that commonly live in water. When Masaharu Takemura, a virologist at Tokyo University of Science, first grew microbes from the hot-spring mud in his lab, he noticed that some amoebas would die in the presence of the giant virus. The dead amoeba cells burst open. But others would shrivel and harden, which amoebas sometimes do when guarding against bacteria that also prey on them. (It’s a dangerous life out there for amoebas.)
When my wife was struck by mysterious, debilitating symptoms, our trip to the ER revealed the sexism inherent in emergency treatment.
Early on a Wednesday morning, I heard an anguished cry—then silence.
I rushed into the bedroom and watched my wife, Rachel, stumble from the bathroom, doubled over, hugging herself in pain.
“Something’s wrong,” she gasped.
This scared me. Rachel’s not the type to sound the alarm over every pinch or twinge. She cut her finger badly once, when we lived in Iowa City, and joked all the way to Mercy Hospital as the rag wrapped around the wound reddened with her blood. Once, hobbled by a training injury in the days before a marathon, she limped across the finish line anyway.
So when I saw Rachel collapse on our bed, her hands grasping and ungrasping like an infant’s, I called the ambulance. I gave the dispatcher our address, then helped my wife to the bathroom to vomit.
The justices will decide four new cases without strong partisan valence.
Big-agenda, partisan issues—the census, reapportionment and gerrymandering, the Second Amendment, abortion—are bearing down on the Supreme Court like a ship with black sails. I am not optimistic that a majority will defy Republican orthodoxy on any of these—and if that is correct, the Court will emerge next spring as both a very live political issue and a shadow of its former self.
Not every case is an agenda case, though. On Monday, the Court granted certiorari in four new criminal-justice cases that, by and large, lack a strong partisan valence. These cases will involve the Court doing, well, you know, law,and in particular, cleaning up some loose ends of its criminal jurisprudence.
Did I mention that they are really, really interesting?
A NASA spacecraft reached a space rock and found it orbited by tiny moons—a phenomenon that “has never been seen before in any solar-system object.”
Billions of years ago, something—perhaps the vibrations of an exploding star—jostled a cloud of cosmic gas and dust suspended in space. The cloud collapsed on itself and flattened into a spinning disk. The center grew heavy and ignited, forming our sun. The stuff that remained ricocheted, collided, and congealed. The biggest clumps of space stuff smoothed into spheres—the planets and moons. The smallest, the asteroids and comets, stayed as they were, like crumbs left over from an elaborate feast.
And right now one of those crumbs is exploding.
An asteroid named Bennu has been caught spewing particles into space—hundreds of gravel-size bits, hurtling from the surface at high speed.
The tiny explosions were spotted by a NASA spacecraft named OSIRIS-REx. The probe settled into an orbit around the asteroid in late December and noticed the first ejection within days. Over the next two months, OSIRIS-REx observed nearly a dozen of these events. And more are still being detected.
Unwritten rules underlie all of elite-university life—and students who don’t come from a wealthy background have a hard time navigating them.
Last Tuesday, the Justice Department charged 50 people with involvement in an elaborate scheme to purchase spots in some of the country’s top schools. The tactics described in the indictment were complex and multipronged, requiring multiple steps of deception and bribery by parents and their co-conspirators to secure their children’s admission to the schools of their choice. The plot purportedly included faking learning disabilities, using Photoshopped images to make it seem as if students played sports that they did not actually play, and pretending that students were of different ethnicities in an effort to exploit affirmative-action programs. The alleged scheme was led by a man named William Singer, who called his business venture a “side door” into college. On Tuesday, Singer pleaded guilty to all charges.
A few hours ago Bloomberg broke a story, by Alan Levin and Harry Suhartono, with a potentially significant detail about the first of the recent two crashes of the Boeing 737 Max. This was the crash last October of a Lion Air flight, into the sea off Indonesia, in which all 189 people aboard died. (The second, outside Addis Ababa, was of an Ethiopian Airlines flight this month, causing 157 deaths.)
Donald Cline must have thought no one would ever know. Then DNA testing came along.
Updated at 5:23 p.m. ET on March 18, 2019.
The first Facebookmessage arrived when Heather Woock was packing for vacation, in August 2017. It was from a stranger claiming to be her half sibling. She assumed the message was some kind of scam; her parents had never told her she might have siblings. But the message contained one detail that spooked her. The sender mentioned a doctor, Donald Cline. Woock knew that name; her mother had gone to Cline for fertility treatments before she was born. Had this person somehow gotten her mother’s medical history?
Her mom said not to worry. So Woock, who is 33 and lives just outside Indianapolis, flew to the West Coast for her vacation. She got a couple more messages from other supposed half siblings while she was away. Their persistence was strange. But then her phone broke, and she spent the next week and a half outdoors in Seattle and Vancouver, blissfully disconnected.
