Comment on Vladimir Putin: “What would you need Alaska for?”

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden has asserted executive privilege over audio of his interview with special counsel Robert Hur that’s at the center a Republican effort to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, the Justice Department told lawmakers on Thursday. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] It comes as the the House Oversight and Accountability Committee and the Judiciary Committee are each expected to hold a hearing to recommend that the full House refer Garland to the Justice Department for the contempt charges over the department’s refusal to hand over the audio. Garland advised Biden in a letter on Thursday that the audio falls within the scope of executive privilege.

Editor’s note: It is hard to briefly summarize the poignancy, vulnerability, and harrowing beauty of Another Word for Love, an exceptional new memoir from the journalist and podcaster Carvell Wallace, who infuses vignettes of his hardscrabble journey from boyhood to middle age with philosophical ruminations on culture; family, love, sex, inner torment, and just about everything else worth pondering. In the following short excerpt (printed with the publisher’s permission from a chapter titled “The Finger”) Wallace is a 15-year-old kid in Van Nuys, California, who decides it would be cool to emulate the Black TV detective Sonny Spoon by sidling up to a newspaper box outside a 7-Eleven and copping a free paper off someone else’s quarter.

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The North Cascades elk herd is a cluster of some 1,600 animals whose domain, like so many habitats, is riven by a highway. From 2012 to 2019, Washington state records show, at least 229 elk were killed by cars along a stretch of State Route 20 in the Skagit Valley.

Almost as predictably as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, the rich grow richer. “Wealth concentration in a few hands is the single most enduring economic pattern across all poli­ties from Mesopotamia to the present—rarely interrupted, and then only for brief intervals,” the political scientist Jeffrey Winters, who studies oligarchies (including the United States) at Northwestern Uni­versity, wrote in a 2017 paper. Maintaining dynastic fortunes once required physical might, Winters explained.

“Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) prepped his run for a fiercely contested Senate seat by bashing the incumbent for ‘abandoning the Democratic Party’ and Arizonans, and standing in the way of expanding voting rights and abortion access with her support for the filibuster,” the Washington Post reports. “Now, after Sinema decided not to seek reelection, Gallego says he would ‘love to have’ avowed centrist Sen.

“House Republicans are threatening to hold Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over audio of President Biden’s interview with a special counsel investigating his handling of government documents,” the New York Times reports. “The contempt resolution would have to go to the full House for a vote.