The U.N. special envoy on human rights in Myanmar says the military’s violent operations against Rohingya Muslims bear “the hallmarks of a genocide.”

Yanghee Lee told reporters Thursday in Seoul, where she is based, that she couldn’t make a definitive declaration about genocide until a credible international tribunal or court had weighed the evidence but “we are seeing signs and it is building up to that.”

Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s elected leader, richly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for her thirty-year non-violent campaign (much of it spent under house arrest) to restore democracy in the country…

Tactical calculations of political advantage cannot justify mass murder, and it has become clear that Suu Kyi is willing to ignore mass murder if the victims are Muslims. Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Bill Richardson, who has known her for more than 30 years, is close to despair.

“She’s changed,” he told CNN last week.

The Myanmar government regularly claims such massacres of the Rohingya never happened, and has acknowledged only one mass grave containing 10 “terrorists” in the village of Inn Din. However, the AP’s reporting shows a systematic slaughter of Rohingya Muslim civilians by the military, with help from Buddhist neighbors – and suggests many more graves hold many more people.

The lesson learned by extreme Nixonites was that their guy should have fought harder. Trump, who loves to talk about himself as a fighter, isn’t making that mistake. For this reason, we should expect more of the same, including the release of the Nunes memo, the possible resignation of Christopher Wray, and a deepening crisis for the nation. All of this in service to one man’s state of mind.

Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, made the claims in a letter to Nunes, accusing the committee chair of making “substantive” changes to the confidential memo before sharing it with White House counsel for release.

Those changes, Schiff said, were not approved by the full committee as protocol dictates.

The increasingly embattled Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a preemptive strike yesterday against the hotly anticipated foreign surveillance abuse memo in hopes of discrediting the document before it is released in coming days…

Its release could set in motion a process whereby bad actors in the government could go to prison. It may indicate that government officials relied on the tainted Fusion GPS dossier by former British spy Christopher Steele that is loaded with Kremlin-supplied misinformation to obtain the warrants. The dossier, as we now know, was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and was part of her bag of dirty tricks.

There is no elegant way to ban speech. Polish legislators may just want to end mention of “Polish death camps,” but they are also creating uncertainty for historians doing research on Nazi collaborators…I’d argue that bans on Holocaust denial, which exist in Israel and a number of European countries, are unnecessary: It’s much more useful to let deniers air their misguided views and have them debunked in public fora than to silence them and thus make them more attractive to young rebels seeking non-mainstream agendas.

Poland’s new law banning the attribution of collective guilt to the Polish people for the Holocaust is deeply troubling. The law, which stipulates a fine or a prison sentence of up to three years for offenders, is an authoritarian curb on free speech by Poland’s nationalist government, and joins the continued persecution of Holocaust scholars for investigating Polish atrocities.

The two sides seem to be talking past each other. Poland is not denying the Holocaust through a law designed to punish those who describe the death camps as Polish. The proposed law may be misguided and a bad way to go about dealing with history, but Poland is right: It is not responsible for the Holocaust and the Polish people resisted Nazism valiantly, more so than many other countries that ran to collaborate.

Trump considered keeping Yellen on for a second term. His decision not to do so could only have been political, not merit-based. She was a Democrat, Obama hired her — and so she had to go.

Fortunately, Trump’s choice, Republican Jerome Powell, is one of his best appointments: picked for the Fed’s board six years ago as a gesture of bipartisan comity by Obama, Powell is a veteran of both Washington and Wall Street who generally backed Yellen’s policies.

Trump inherited an economy and a stock market that Yellen played a major role in helping shape and revive. It’s not unusual for presidents to take a victory lap on economic achievements that weren’t entirely theirs. But Trump’s victory lap on Tuesday night was particularly glaring because he also just refused to reappoint Yellen — the woman who arguably deserves the most credit for the Trump economy so far.

Should the Fed stick to its current policy stance…? Yellen won’t have to make that call. The onus will be on Powell, who must be keenly aware that any hint of the Fed adopting a more hawkish approach will bring down upon him a Presidential Twitter fusillade and more—including the possibility of disruptions in the markets. Yellen certainly deserved another term, but she may be getting out at the right time.

Just last week, newspaper headlines announced that according to a new poll, 47 percent of Israeli Jews still support Palestinian statehood. The poll was carried out by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research, at Tel Aviv University.

But as with most news about Israel, you need to dig behind the headlines to find out the real story. In this case, the real story is the wording that the Steinmetz Center used. The question that got the 47 percent figure was loaded with false assumptions and completely unrealistic expectations. In other words, the poll offered a fantasy.

Along with many others, I have cautioned anyone who would listen that the window for the two-state solution is closing. Woe be the day, I warned, when highly-regarded public opinion polls finally showed that support for partition on both sides fell below 50 percent.

It appears that day has now finally arrived.

The latest Joint Israel-Palestinian survey poll from December 2017 found that only 46% of both Israelis and Palestinians currently support the two state solution. In other words, a majority of stakeholders on both sides reject the framework the international community has sought to implement…

Several analysts, including former US envoy to Israel Dan Shapiro and the Brookings Institution’s Tamara Cofman Wittes, also cast doubt over the findings, noting that the wording of the question is suspect.

“In the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, which side do you sympathize with more, Israel or the Palestinians?” Pew asked, giving respondents a binary choice that some say does not reflect the nuances of the conflict.

The umbrella explanation of central Europe is that populists are undermining the EU, and putting democracy there into crisis — that the so-called Visegrad Four — the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia — are descending into authoritarianism. Look closer, however, and you can see something else… They’re doing what democracies are supposed to do: reforming institutions to channel into government policy what their voters chose through elected politicians.

…liberalism in Eastern Europe is a Western import. Notwithstanding the Trump and Brexit phenomena, the US and the UK have deeply embedded cultures of political and social liberalism. In Eastern Europe, civil society is not just weaker; it is also more focused on areas such as charity, religion, leisure, and politics, rather than social issues.

Across the world, democratic norms are being eroded. Symptoms include curbs on freedom of speech, declining trust in institutions, a drop in popularity of mainstream political parties and erosion of civil liberties…

Spain’s democratic bona fides suffered as a result of its attempt to stop Catalonia’s independence referendum by shuttering polling stations, closing down websites and policing voters. In Eastern Europe, most countries performed even worse on the democracy index than usual, thanks to the rise of strongmen.

…a white pantsuit with a glowing white blouse — exactly the kind of outfit that became a symbol of her husband’s rival, Hillary Clinton, during the last election, and has since become widely accepted as sartorial shorthand for both the suffragists and contemporary women’s empowerment and something of an anti-Trump uniform, and also what the women gathered behind Kesha wore to display their sisterhood at Sunday’s Grammy Awards — seemed to be about as subtle a slap in the face as could be contained in a garment.

On the one hand, Daniels is allegedly obligated to deny (as has been noted in tedious detail already above) that she slept with the president or that she was paid to say she never did so. On the other, her promotional moment hinges on the public interest in whether or not she slept with the president and was paid to say she never did so. She’s a bell in a bell jar, silently ringing. The only questions anyone wants to ask her are the only questions she (reportedly) can’t answer.

Now that we’ve entered the realm of denials being denied, it seems worth revisiting everything Daniels has said over the years to interviewers, associates and the public about her relationship with the man who now sits in the Oval Office.

The inquiry is in early stages, they cautioned, and it’s too soon to conclude any enforcement will follow. Investigators are looking into public statements made by Apple on the situation, they added. While the slowdown has frustrated consumers, investigators are concerned the company may have misled investors about the performance of older phones.

Throttling gets more use out of a battery that would otherwise have degraded beyond its usefulness when paired with the iPhone’s CPU and GPU. This is particularly beneficial when the battery is not user-upgradeable.

Apple also did this because, within the confines of its design philosophy, it had no alternative. What makes Apple products appealing is also what frequently gets Apple in hot water: the tendencies toward total control and toward prescribing a solution to the user so they don’t have to think about it.

A wave of so-called right-to-repair or fair repair bills that would prevent companies from having repair monopolies have been introduced in states around the country. Last year, 12 states introduced bills that would require electronics manufacturers to make repair information available to consumers and third-party repair shops and would require them to sell replacement parts for electronics. It would also prevent them from using software locks to prevent repair or from remotely bricking electronics that use aftermarket parts. Already in 2018, 17 states have introduced fair repair bills.