President Trump's only real legacy? (Okay, Brexit too.)

The New York Times is being sued by Peter Brimelow over a Jan. 15 article that offered a chronology of racist and inflammatory comments by Rep. Steve King.

By Josh Gerstein @ Politico.com, Jan. 9

Peter Brimelow, an anti-immigration activist who hosts a website that has published the writings of white supremacists, is suing the New York Times for $5 million for labeling him an “open white nationalist” in an article last year.

The characterization of Brimelow that triggered the libel lawsuit appeared in a Jan. 15, 2019 article by Times political reporter Trip Gabriel that offered a chronology of racist and inflammatory comments by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa). The story mentioned Brimelow in passing while noting that the two men appeared on a panel together at the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference.

The suit says that after Brimelow complained about the description of him, the Times performed a “stealth edit” on the online version of the story, removing the word “open” but still branding him as a white nationalist. Brimelow rejects that label, preferring to be called a “civic nationalist.” [....]

Incredible:

@ TimesofIndia​.IndiaTimes.com, Jan. 9, 2020

[....] Why are envoys visiting Kashmir?
On August 5, the government abrogated Article 370, which granted special status to Jammu and Kashmir. Since the abrogation, several political leaders have been arrested, internet services remain suspended and the region has been under heavy security cover. The delegation has been invited to be briefed on the security situation in the region. The visit has also been planned as part of India's diplomatic outreach to rebut Pakistan's propaganda against it on the Kashmir issue [....]

By four-person team @ PewResearch.org, Jan. 8

My takeaway: all depends on your definition of "low"; there's still considerable support variable as to country! The median numbers on this chart show confidence/no-confidence numbers not that far from our 40/60 split on job approval!

The writer Javier Cercas helped launch Spain’s historical-memory movement. In his new book, he asks whether score-settling and sanctimony have come to distort the nation’s past and poison its future.

The price of Spain’s transition from Fascism to liberal democracy was a political amnesia about Franco’s victims.

By Giles Harvey @ NewYorker.com, Jan. 6, 2020

[....] Today, the means by which Franco’s legacy was buried has become the subject of contention. Around the turn of the millennium, the children and grandchildren of Franco’s “disappeared”—the tens of thousands of Republicans put to death during the Civil War and the dictatorship—started calling for the exhumation of mass graves and a reckoning with the past. The “historical memory” movement, though largely spontaneous, was catalyzed by a few figures, chief among them the novelist Javier Cercas, one of contemporary Spain’s leading writers.

At the time, Cercas was not an obvious candidate for the role of galvanizing truthteller. His early work was heavily influenced by the postmodern gamesmanship of American writers such as Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme [....]

Having drawn such a resounding response, Cercas might well have been tempted to go on producing work in the same moral key. Instead, he has spent much of his post-“Soldiers” career arguing against the very tenets of historical memory: what started out as a legitimate campaign for reparative justice, Cercas feels, soon degenerated into a pageant of sanctimony and opportunism [....]

By Justin Coleman @ TheHill.com, Jan. 7

Officials are prepared to hand over sealed records from Roger Stone’s search and seizure warrants to the media in 60 days, Courthouse News reported Monday.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper decided the documents, obtained during the FBI investigation into possible connections between President Trump’s campaign and Moscow, would be released after 60 days to media outlets that sued for access last year, according to Courthouse News. Federal prosecutors pushed for the 60 days over the 30-day timeline proposed by attorney Matthew Kelley, who represents the media outlets [....]