How many stories has the Times broken today?

How many people are still threatening to cancel their subscriptions to "send them a message"?

SNL season premiere this Saturday...wonder what the cold open will be

Giuliani set to make paid appearance next week at Kremlin-backed conference that includes Putin

Source: Washington Post

Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose actions as President Trump’s personal lawyer have helped set in motion an impeachment inquiry, is set to appear as a paid speaker at a Kremlin-backed conference in Armenia on Tuesday — an event expected to include the participation of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and other top Russian officials.

Giuliani confirmed to The Washington Post on Friday that he plans to take part in a panel at the conference sponsored by Russia and the Moscow-based Eurasian Economic Union, a trade alliance launched by Putin in 2014 as a counterweight to the European Union.

According to an agenda for the event posted online, Giuliani is set to participate in a panel led by Sergey Glazyev, a longtime Putin adviser who has been under U.S. sanctions since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine five years ago.

Giuliani’s decision to take part in the conference astounded national security experts. His scheduled appearance comes days after the release of a whistleblower complaint accusing Trump and Giuliani of pressuring Ukrainian for damaging information about Democrats.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/giuliani-set-to-make-paid-appearance-next-week-at-kremlin-backed-conference/2019/09/27/a15ab242-e133-11e9-8dc8-498eabc129a0_story.html

Otherworldly worms with three sexes discovered in Mono Lake

Donald Trump puts up an anti-Biden campaign ad

The Whistleblower Complaint as an audiobook

Fox News' Chris Wallace says whistleblower complaint is "serious"

Source: Axios

Fox News' Chris Wallace criticized Trump defenders on Friday, saying that their spin on the whistleblower complaint is "deeply misleading" to the public.

Why it matters: President Trump alleged without evidence Friday that the whistleblower obtained their "second-hand information" from a "leaker" or "partisan operative." He has also referred to the whistleblower as a "political hack."

Wallace: "I'm not saying therefore there's a hot, solid case and the president should be impeached. I'm not saying that, but what is clear from reading the complaint is that it is a serious allegation. A lot has been proven to be born out already."

"The whistleblower lays out a blueprint for talking to various officials in the White House, various officials in the State Department. And to dismiss this as a political hack, it seems to me to be an effort by the president's defenders to make nothing out of something. And there is something here."

https://twitter.com/fwdale/status/1177615443034607616

Read more: https://www.axios.com/fox-news-chris-wallace-trump-ukraine-whistleblower-5e513569-328c-4bfb-894a-5113e25a95dc.html

Why the New York Times published information about the Whistleblower

Joseph Wilson, Who Challenged Iraq War Narrative, Dies at 69

Source: New York Times

Joseph C. Wilson, the long-serving American diplomat whose clash with the administration of President George W. Bush in 2003 led to the unmasking of his wife at the time, Valerie Plame, as a C.I.A. agent, resulting in accusations that the revelation was political payback, died on Friday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 69.

...snip...

Mr. Wilson served in numerous posts, many in Africa, in a 23-year diplomatic career that began in 1976. One posting had been to Niger, and in 2002, by then a private citizen, he was asked by the C.I.A. to travel to that country to try to verify reports that Niger had sold a nuclear material, uranium yellowcake, to Iraq in the 1990s. At the time, the Bush administration was building to a crisis point with Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, and among the issues was whether Iraq had or was developing nuclear weapons.

Ambassador Wilson concluded from his trip that the reports of a Niger-Iraq deal were false. After President Bush, in his State of the Union Message in January 2003, said that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” and then ordered an invasion of Iraq seven weeks later, Mr. Wilson felt the record needed to be corrected.

On July 6, 2003, he wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times titled, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/joseph-wilson-who-challenged-iraq-war-narrative-dies-at-69.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

House Members Spar Over Impeachment at Election Security Hearing

Source: Bloomberg

House members sparred over the impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump at a hearing Friday as they debated how to prevent foreign interference in the 2020 election.

Opening a House Judiciary Committee hearing on election security, panel Chairman Jerrold Nadler took aim at Trump’s request that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy investigate Democrat Joe Biden. The revelations are shaping up as an even more serious threat to Trump’s presidency than the special counsel investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“President Trump has refused to acknowledge Russia’s attack, let alone publicly denounce it or outline clearly how he intends to deter future interventions,” Nadler said. “Now we have evidence that the president of the United States asked a foreign leader to interfere in our next election.”

Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican and ally of the president, said he worried that attempts to impeach Trump represent a bigger threat to democracy than election interference.

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-27/house-members-spar-over-impeachment-at-election-security-hearing