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  Washington:  Several of former US president Donald Trump's impeachment lawyers have left his team a little over a week before his trial, US media reported Saturday. CNN cited unnamed sources as saying that five lawyers -- including two who were thought to be leading the team -- had parted ways with the Republican billionaire after disagreeing over his legal strategy. Trump had wanted the lawyers to continue his baseless claims of mass election fraud rather than focus on the legality of convicting a president after he has left office, CNN said, adding that he was "not receptive" to discussion. The lawyers included Butch Bowers and Deborah Barbier, expected to lead Trump's defense, CNN and other outlets reported, saying it had been a "mutual decision." "We have done much work, but have not made a final decision on our legal team, which will be made shortly," tweeted Trump advisor Jason Miller in response to the reports. ...

  The KGB ‘played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality’, Yuri Shvets, a key source for a new book, tells the Guardian Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian. Yuri Shvets,  posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to  “the Cambridge five”,  the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war. Now 67, Shvets is a key source for  American Kompromat,  a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the  disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. “This is an example where people were recruited when they w...

  When President Joe Biden swore in a batch of recruits for his new administration in a teleconferenced ceremony late last week, it looked like the country’s biggest Zoom call. In fact, Biden was installing roughly 1,000 high-level officials in about a quarter of all of the available political appointee jobs in the federal government. At the same time, a far less visible transition was taking place: the quiet dismissal of holdovers from the Trump administration, who have been asked to clean out their offices immediately, whatever the eventual legal consequences. If there has been a single defining feature of the first week of the Biden administration, it has been the blistering pace at which the new president has put his mark on what President Donald Trump dismissed as the hostile “Deep State” and tried so hard to dismantle. From the Pentagon, where 20 senior officials were ready to move in days before the Senate confirmed Lloyd J. Austin III as defense secret...

Washington, United States:  US Democrats' efforts to convict Donald Trump at his impeachment trial suffered a fresh blow Tuesday when almost all Republican senators backed dismissing the case, underlining the former president's continuing hold over the party. The motion failed after all 50 Democrats and only five Republicans in the Senate did not support the push to throw out the case before the trial has begun. The result confirmed Democrats will struggle to persuade 17 Republican senators -- the number needed for the required two-thirds majority -- to vote to convict Trump. Rand Paul, Republican senator from Kentucky, raised a point of order to hold a vote on the constitutionality of the impeachment trial as Trump has left office. Democrats then called for a vote to kill the point of order, winning 55-45. Paul said afterwards "that 45 Senators agreed that this sham of a 'trial' is unconstitutional... This 'trial' is dead on arriv...

  They meet mostly on Zoom, but I prefer to picture the members of this court, or council, or whatever it is, wearing reflective suits and hovering via hologram around a glowing table. The members include two people who were reportedly on presidential shortlists for the U.S. Supreme Court, along with a Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a British Pulitzer winner, Colombia’s leading human rights lawyer and a former prime minister of Denmark. The 20 of them come, in all, from 18 countries on six continents, and speak 27 languages among them. This is the Oversight Board, a hitherto obscure body that will, over the next 87 days, rule on one of the most important questions in the world: Should Donald Trump be permitted to return to  Facebook  and reconnect with his millions of followers? The decision has major consequences not just for American politics, but also for the way in which social media is regulated, and for the possible emergence of a new kind of tra...