Tulsi Gabbard is the director of national intelligence, tasked with overseeing the many intelligence agencies in the US. Although she tried desperately to suck up to Trump when it became clear that he was not happy with her for some reason, it was not enough for her to keep her job and today Trump fired her. You can read the twists and turns of her weird political journey here, where, like so many others, she sacrificed what she said were her strong principles in order to kowtow to Trump.

As usual, this kind of news is released on a Friday evening in the hope that most people will not be paying attention.

The White House forced Gabbard to resign, the Reuters news agency reported, citing a source familiar with the issue. Fox News was first to report Gabbard’s exit, citing her husband’s cancer diagnosis.

Trump was asking cabinet members last month whether he should replace Gabbard, according to two people briefed on the discussions.
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Gabbard already seemed marginalized last June, when Trump endorsed Israel’s decision to attack Iran before the US joined the war by ordering the bombing of the Islamic regime’s nuclear facilities.

The decision was a public repudiation of Gabbard’s earlier testimony on Capitol Hill that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. Trump seemed to add insult to injury by declaring he did not care what she said, and dismissing her assessment as “wrong”.

Within weeks, Gabbard made a public effort to get back into the president’s good graces by calling for Barack Obama and several top national security officials in his administration to be prosecuted, alleging that they had conducted a “treasonous conspiracy” to falsely depict Russia as interfering in the 2016 election on Trump’s side.

She is the fourth woman that Trump has fired, following Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer.

The big mystery is how FBI director Kash Patel still has a job. Patel is an incompetent grifter and clown. He should thank his lucky stars that he is male, since Trump seems to give men more leeway.

To no one’s surprise, the summit meeting between Trump and Chinese premier Xi Jinping did not produce any major agreements. Although Trump claimed to have settled a lot of issues, nothing was detailed about the main issues of Iran, Taiwan, trade, tariffs and rare earth supplies.

Trump took along with him a whole slew of business leaders and oligarchs from the US, but that did not seem to have produced any tangible benefit. It is not clear how they could personally contribute to such talks anyway. It seems like they were taken along because of Trump’s belief that having wealthy people along with him might somehow sway the Chinese to give concessions on technology and trade. That did not happen, as far as we know, and indeed despite the Boeing CEO being there, the deal on planes that was announced was for just 200 planes, a big drop from the 500 that had been expected before the summit.

Trump likes to play power games with foreign leaders such as with handshakes but this time it was Xi who came out on top. His mention of the ‘Thucydides trap’ seemed like a twofer. One was to show his intellectual superiority since it is certain that he knew that Trump would have no clue as to who Thucydides was, let alone what the trap was about. But his use of that trap also implies that it is China that is the rising power and the US the one in decline, and that the US should tread warily, especially on the issue of Taiwan.
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In the US, local media has been on a steady decline over decades, with local newspapers either closing or being bought up by giant national chains and their local reporting gutted and replaced with general stories that are written for all their newspapers across the country. This means that important local issues do not get covered and local politicians and institutions do not get the close scrutiny they deserve because local media do not have the resources needed to do investigative reporting.

ProPublica has tried to combat this news vacuum by collaborating with local journalists to cover important stories and then using their national networks to provide these stories with greater publicity by having them appear in major media, thus increasing the impact. ProPublica can provide the local allies with the kind of resources needed for on-depth work. This approach has garnered them various awards, including the prestigious Pulitzer and Polk awards that are shared with the local collaborator, giving them recognition that they would not have otherwise had.

In a recent article, they discussed the various successes they have had, such as the one where they joined forces with The Connecticut Mirror to expose how Connecticut’s unique towing laws enabled towing companies to ripping off low-income people by quickly selling the cars they they towed.
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Trump, currently in China for a summit meeting with the Chinese president Xi Jinping, is definitely in an inferior position.

Donald Trump has landed in Beijing, the first visit to China by a US president in nearly a decade, as he seeks to mend power and prestige weakened by the war in Iran.
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The war has entered its third month, with Tehran tightening its grip over the strait of Hormuz and Washington struggling to turn a fragile ceasefire into a lasting settlement.

Behind the scenes, US officials have spent weeks urging China – Iran’s biggest oil customer and one of the few powers with leverage in Tehran – to pressure the Islamic Republic into reopening the strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply ordinarily passes, while accepting US terms for peace.

The US recently sanctioned several Chinese firms accused of assisting Iranian oil shipments and supplying satellite imagery allegedly used in Iranian military operations. China condemned the measures as “illegal unilateral sanctions” and invoked a rarely used blocking statute prohibiting Chinese entities from complying with them.
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