‘Security clearances don’t determine whom a president can trust — they reveal risks the president may not know’
Brian O’Neill at The Conversation
One of President Donald Trump’s “closest aides, Natalie Harp, worked in the White House for more than a year without completing the normal security clearance process,” and the “circumstances surrounding Harp are unusual, but the tension they expose is not,” says Brian O’Neill. Spies “do not need an aide to carry classified files out of the West Wing to gain something useful.” For “someone operating within the president’s immediate circle, an undiscovered vulnerability can carry significantly greater consequences.”
Read more
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Latest Videos FromThe Week
‘Rosh Hashanah offers a lesson from the lasting legacy of Sept. 11’
Yehuda Ceitlin at the Arizona Daily Star
The “25th anniversary of Sept. 11 falls this year on Friday, Sept. 11,” when Jews “around the world will celebrate Rosh Hashanah and welcome the Jewish year 5787,” says Rabbi Yehuda Ceitlin. Sept. 11 “taught us, terribly, how far a human action can reach.” But “human influence works in other ways too.” A “mitzvah can have an impact we may never see,” and “kindness can be remembered.” As “Rosh Hashanah begins this Sept. 11, perhaps that is worth remembering.”
Read more
‘10 years after Sinjar, the world still fails to protect vulnerable communities’
Cudi Zerey at The Hill
On “Aug. 3, 2014, fighters from the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq swept into Sinjar, the ancestral homeland of Iraq’s Yazidi minority,” says Cudi Zerey. Within “days, thousands were killed, thousands more were kidnapped and enslaved, and entire communities were uprooted.” But a “decade later, the most important lesson of Sinjar remains largely unlearned.” The “failure was not simply that ISIS committed atrocities.” The “failure was that nearly every layer of protection collapsed at the same time.”
Read more
‘Head Start offers a model for ending preschool pushout. Don’t weaken it.’
Hillary Linardopoulos at The Philadelphia Inquirer
RFK Jr. has “announced plans for sweeping deregulation” of the Head Start program, says Hillary Linardopoulos. But “suspensions and expulsions of our youngest learners, which are harmful to a child’s development and can profoundly impact their future, disproportionately harm Black and brown children.” Head Start policy “prohibits the expulsion of students in its programs and severely restricts suspensions to extraordinary circumstances.” This “policy is one that should be expanded.”
Read more
