| | | | The Big Takeaways from Comey's Testimony | | Former FBI Director James Comey's testimony Thursday before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee provides "strong evidence that President Trump committed obstruction of justice," argue Norman Eisen and Noah Bookbinder in the New York Times. But this is a long way from being resolved – if it ever is.
"The crime of obstruction requires an attempt to block an investigation with corrupt intent. Mr. Comey has now given us direct witness testimony of obstruction by the president in the form of the already famous statement 'I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.' Mr. Comey repeatedly added in today's questioning that 'I took it as a direction" that "this is what he wants me to do.' In a system governed by the rule of law, shutting down an investigation to benefit a friend -- or perhaps, to keep damaging information that friend may know from emerging -- is corrupt," they write.
The reason all this will take time is "because of the agonizing legal and political decisions that will need to be made after the evidence has been collected. Having worked with and against the F.B.I. special counsel , Robert Mueller, on previous cases, we know he will wrestle as thoughtfully as the special prosecutor Leon Jaworski did, when he had to decide whether he could indict Richard Nixon if the evidence justified it. Mr. Jaworski believed he could, and we agree, but many others differ." - "What will the testimony mean for Mr Trump's political fortunes? In isolation, probably little," the Financial Times editorializes.
"His disrespect for the traditions of American politics and the political establishment got him elected. His core supporters will be unmoved. What matters now is how Mr Comey's account fits into the larger Russia investigation. That inquiry must proceed unobstructed. Mr Trump would be wise to keep his distance. His image has taken a terrible beating; it is still possible to protect his office."
| | Why Brexit Could Hurt Extremist Fight | | Whoever ultimately wins Britain's general election could be faced with a thorny security problem – being cut out of crucial information sharing with Europe, writes Thomas Grose in U.S. News and World Report.
"[E]xperts say that the European databases remain a robust and useful tool in the fight against homegrown terrorism. British police, border and immigration officials tap into SIS [a border-control database operated by the European Commission] a whopping 1.4 million times a day," Grose says.
But "[o]nce Britain leaves the EU, it will simultaneously lose membership to Europol. If the two sides can't agree during the upcoming divorce negotiations on a way to allow it to continue as a full-fledged member, [Europol Director Rob] Wainwright has said Britain would be downgraded to a second-tier membership, which would greatly limit its ability to use the databases."
| | Iran and al Qaeda's Curious Deal | | Iran's ability to avoid terrorist attacks like the one that struck its parliament Wednesday was partly down to its "ruthlessly effective" security apparatus. But it could also have been thanks to a deal with al Qaeda, argues Thomas Joscelyn for the Daily Beast.
"The deal between al Qaeda and the Iranians has survived the wars in Syria and Yemen, despite the fact that they are on opposite sides in those bloody conflicts. It is one of the great curiosities in the jihadist world," Joscelyn writes.
"There is no question that al Qaeda and Iran's proxies are at each other's throats in those countries. At one point, al Qaeda even kidnapped an Iranian diplomat to force an exchange for senior jihadists and bin Laden family members who were held in some form of custody inside Iran."
But "ISIS can finally claim to have brought the Sunni jihadists' war to Iran, something al Qaeda has been unwilling to do."
| | ISIS Success a Sign of Weakness? | | The string of attacks claimed by ISIS over the past month are likely more a sign of the group's weakness than its strength, suggest Maria Abi-Habib and Raja Abdulrahim in the Wall Street Journal.
"The Pentagon estimates there are fewer than 1,000 Islamic State militants still in Raqqa, which was once the group's main population center and inhabited by Syrian, Iraqi and foreign fighters. At its peak, ISIS commanded some 25,000 fighters in both countries," they write.
"The iron grip with which Islamic State once ruled the city and its residents has loosened as the group's fighters struggle to hold on to territory. Current and former Raqqa residents have described a leadership in chaos, meting out fewer brutal punishments as residents break more of the group's strict rules."
| | China's Other Pollution Threat | | China's smog may grab the headlines, but another kind of pollution is likely to prove a far more intractable threat to health and farming in the country: Soil pollution, The Economist says.
"In 2014 the government published a national soil survey which showed that 16.1% of all soil and 19.4% of farmland was contaminated by organic and inorganic chemical pollutants and by metals such as lead, cadmium and arsenic. That amounts to roughly 250,000 square kilometers of contaminated soil, equivalent to the arable farmland of Mexico. Cadmium and arsenic were found in 40% of the affected land. Officials say that 35,000 square kilometers of farmland is so polluted that no agriculture should be allowed on it at all," The Economist says.
"With enough effort, it is possible to reduce air or water pollution, though it may take years or decades. By contrast, toxins remain in the soil for centuries, and are hugely expensive to eradicate. It took 21 years and the removal of 1,200 cubic meters of soil to clean up the Love Canal, a site covering just 6.5 hectares."
| | A recent European Union survey on tobacco use on the continent revealed something extraordinary: the daily smoking rate in Sweden is around 5%. The main reason? Something called snus, writes Joe Nocera for Bloomberg View.
"Sweden has adopted a 'harm reduction' strategy: it has largely replaced deadly cigarettes with a product that supplies users with both nicotine and tobacco yet doesn't increase the odds of dying the way smoking does," Nocera says. "A modern iteration of snuff, snus (rhymes with goose) are little pouches of moist tobacco that a user puts under his upper lip."
"What is truly maddening is that despite the powerful evidence provided by Sweden, most countries refuse to acknowledge it. The EU won't allow snus to be sold in most of its countries. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration last year turned down Swedish Match's application to be allowed to advertise snus as less harmful than cigarettes." | | | | | | |
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