The anonymous Trump administration official appears to support Donald Trump’s general agenda of helping the richest Americans and ignoring everyone else. What worries the writer is not that Trump is failing “to put country first,” but that he is so emotionally disturbed that he will somehow screw up this corporatist agenda.   read more

Otgonbayar left the Foreign Ministry in 2004 to become secretary general of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP), now the Mongolian People’s Party. At the time, Mongolia was doing a lot of trading with China after years of being a client state of the Soviet Union. Otgonbayar worked to encourage trade with the United States, Japan, South Korea and the European Union as well. In 2006, Otgonbayar added leadership of the Ulaanbaator branch of the MPRP to his party duties.   read more

in January 2014, Yansané became Guinea's minister of mines and geology, where he oversaw his specialty: contracts for oil exploration. One of the companies he dealt with Hyperdynamics of Houston, gained the right to explore for offshore oil off the coast of Guinea. They found nothing and filed for bankruptcy in December 2017. Yansané emphasized bringing in foreign investors, who have long lusted after Guinea’s reserves of bauxite, iron ore, gold and other minerals.   read more

The recently installed ambassador from Lebanon is actually a Lebanese-American who lived in the U.S. more than 40 years. Shortly before the 2016 presidential election in Lebanon, Gabriel Issa of Detroit returned to Lebanon on a permanent basis and became a close advisor to Lebanon’s soon-to-be president, Michel Aoun. By the age of 21, Issa had founded two businesses, AAA Language Services and Iterotext Translation, which, along with several other businesses, he devoted his career to building.   read more

The plaintiffs say the Trump administration stopped interviewing program beneficiaries and froze their applications; stopped issuing decisions to likely parole candidates; and stopped scheduling the medical exams for parolees to travel to the U.S.– all in secret. Yet it continued to accept money from applicants, including $100 for medical exams and $1,400 for each child’s plane ticket to the U.S. The complaint also cites Trump’s racist statements made during the 2016 presidential campaign.   read more