A personal view of Australian and International Politics : 2018

Monday, 31 December 2018

John Kelly: judge me on what Trump didn't do while I was chief of staff

Retired general gives interview to Los Angeles Times
Statements on immigration and more likely to anger president

John Kelly looks on as Donald Trump meets with North Korean defectors in the Oval Office. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

As Donald Trump attracted criticism for blaming the deaths of children in US custody on Democrats opposed to his demands for a border wall, outgoing White House chief of staff John Kelly said he had “nothing but compassion” for migrants attempting to enter the US without documentation.

“Illegal immigrants, overwhelmingly, are not bad people,” Kelly said, describing many migrants as victims misled by traffickers. “I have nothing but compassion for them, the young kids.”
Two young Guatemalan children have died in US custody this month. Amid debate, the causes of death remain unknown.
Kelly, a retired Marines general, spoke in an interview with the Los Angeles Times conducted by phone on Friday and published on Sunday morning. He will leave the White House on Wednesday. His remarks, jarring with those of the president, echoed those of his successor as homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, who visited the border this weekend.
In a statement released around the same time on Saturday that Trump tweeted that “any deaths of children or others at the border are strictly the fault of the Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies”, Nielsen said: “The system is clearly overwhelmed and we must work together to address this humanitarian crisis and protect vulnerable populations.”
Nielsen also called on Congress to “act with urgency”. That is unlikely during a standoff over funding for Trump’s wall which has now led to a nine-day government shutdown.

Trump

Kelly, an immigration hardliner, also clashed with the man who is still his boss when he said: “If you want to stop illegal immigration, stop US demand for drugs, and expand economic opportunity” in Central America.
On Friday, Trump tweeted a threat to “cut off all aid” to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador for “doing nothing” about migration to the US and “taking our money”.
The chief of staff criticised the implementation of the family separations policy at the border, which in the summer “brought down a greater deal of thunder on the president”.
Of Trump’s demanded wall, for which he has shut down the US government despite campaigning on a promise to make Mexico pay, Kelly said: “To be honest, it’s not a wall.”
“The president still says ‘wall’,” he said. “Oftentimes frankly he’ll say ‘barrier’ or ‘fencing,’ now he’s tended toward steel slats. But we left a solid concrete wall early on in the administration, when we asked people what they needed and where they needed it.”
Citing the thorny question of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and Trump’s urge to pull out of Nato, the Times said Kelly “defended his rocky tenure, arguing that it is best measured by what the president did not do when Kelly was at his side”.
Kelly was one of the so-called “adults in the room” – many of them generals, who supposedly restrained Trump’s worst impulses. Another, defense secretary Jim Mattis, will also leave on 1 January, his resignation over the withdrawal from Syria brought forward by a president piqued by the favourable media attention it gained.
Trump has chafed at media accounts of experienced aides acting to calm his wilder behaviour. In September, in his bestselling book Fear, the veteran reporter Bob Woodward wrote that Kelly called Trump an “idiot” and said working for him was like working in “Crazytown”. Trump responded angrily and Kelly denied the quotes.
Telling the LA Times his was a “bone-crushing hard job”, Kelly echoed recent comments by fired secretary of state Rex Tillerson, who said Trump regularly pushed the limits of his authority under law.
The paper wrote that “Trump never ordered him to do anything illegal, Kelly stressed, ‘because we wouldn’t have’.” Kelly told the paper that “if he had said to me, ‘Do it, or you’re fired,’” he would have resigned.
In the end, after a succession of reports of infighting and arguments within a chaotic White House, Kelly did resign. He told the paper he decided to go after the November midterm elections, in which Republicans lost control of the House. Trump announced his departure on 8 December.
Amid near-meltdown at the White House, no permanent replacement has been named. Kelly was asked why he stayed 18 months. He said it was down to duty.

“Military people don’t walk away,” he said, two days before walking away.

America’s new year’s resolution: impeach Trump and remove him

Extract from The Guardian

Opinion

Donald Trump

Robert Reich

The shutdown, attacks on the judiciary, the politicization of the military. All confirm it: Congress must impeach. Now

Donald Trump speaks to members of the military during an unannounced trip to al-Asad airbase in Iraq. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

After his first bizarre year, Donald Trump’s apologists told us he was growing into the job and that in his second year he would be more restrained and respectful of democratic institutions.

Wrong. He’s been worse.
Exhibit one: the “wall”. After torpedoing Mitch McConnell’s temporary spending deal to avert a shutdown, he’s holding hostage more than 800,000 government employees (“mostly Democrats”, he calls them, disparagingly) while subjecting the rest of America to untoward dangers.
On-site inspections at power plants have been halted. Hazardous waste cleanup efforts at Superfund sites are on hold. Reviews of toxic substances and pesticides have been stopped. Justice department cases are in limbo.
Meanwhile, now working without pay are thousands of air traffic controllers and aviation and railroad safety inspectors, nearly 54,000 Customs and Border Protection agents, 42,000 coast guard employees, 53,000 TSA agents, 17,000 correctional officers, 14,000 FBI agents, 4,000 Drug Enforcement Administration agents, and some 5,000 firefighters with the US Forest Service.

"Some Americans no longer see his antics for what they are – escalating attacks on core democratic institutions"

Having run the Department of Labor during the 1995 and 1996 shutdowns, I’m confident most of these public servants will continue to report for duty because they care about the missions they’re upholding. But going without pay will strain their family budgets to the point that some will not be able to.
Shame on him for jeopardizing America this way in order to fund his wall – which is nothing but a trumped-up solution to a trumped-up problem designed only to fuel his base.
In his second year, he’s also done even more damage to the nation’s judicial-criminal system than he did before.
At least twice in the past month he has reportedly raged against his acting attorney general for allowing federal prosecutors to reference him in the crimes his former bagman Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to committing.
This is potentially the most direct obstruction of justice yet. He’s now pressuring an official whom he hand-picked and whose entire future depends on him, to take actions that would impair the independence of federal prosecutors.
Chief Justice Roberts issued a rare rebuke. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges,” he wrote, adding that an “independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for”.
Which prompted this rejoinder: “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’” followed by a baseless and incendiary claim that “they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country” and their “rulings are making our country unsafe! Very dangerous and unwise!”
In his second year, he has displayed even less commitment to keeping the military non-partisan than he did initially. During a teleconference with US troops and coast guard members last month he continued his rampage against the judiciary, calling the ninth circuit “a big thorn in our side” and “a disgrace”.
Then he turned last week’s surprise visit to American troops in Iraq and Germany into a political rally: praising troops wearing red “Make America Great Again” caps, signing a “Trump 2020” patch, and accusing Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats of being weak on border security.
Some Americans are becoming so accustomed to these antics that they no longer see them for what they are – escalating attacks on core democratic institutions.
Where would we be if a president could simply shut down the government when he doesn’t get his way? If he could stop federal prosecutions he doesn’t like and order those he wants? If he could whip up public anger against court decisions he disapproves of? If he could mobilize the military to support him, against Congress and the judiciary?
We would no longer live in a democracy. Like his increasing attacks on critics in the press, these are all aspects of his growing authoritarianism. We normalize them at our peril.
America’s democratic institutions remain strong, but I’m not sure they can endure two more years of this. Trump must be removed from office through impeachment, or his own decision to resign in the face of impeachment, as did Richard Nixon.
Republican members of Congress must join with Democrats to get this task done as quickly as possible. Nothing is more urgent. It must be, in effect, America’s new year’s resolution.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good.

Bloomberg slams Trump on climate change, which Brown likens to Nazism

Climate change

Billionaire and retiring California governor demand action
America’s year of extreme weather – in pictures

Tom McCarthy

@TeeMcSee

Michael Bloomberg and moderator Chuck Todd appear in a pre-taped interview on Meet the Press in Washington on 20 December. Photograph: NBC NewsWire/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

Michael Bloomberg slammed Donald Trump’s inaction on climate change on Sunday and said any candidate for president in 2020 – he himself might be one – must have a plan to deal with the problem.

At the same time, retiring California governor Jerry Brown likened the fight against climate change to the fight against Nazism during the second world war, saying: “We have an enemy … perhaps very much devastating in a similar way.”
Both men appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press. The billionaire former New York mayor said: “It would be a lot more helpful if we had a climate champion rather than a climate denier in the White House.
“You know, I’ve always thought Trump has a right to his opinions. But he doesn’t have a right to his own facts.”
A vocal critic of the coal industry, Bloomberg, whose fortune is estimated at $40bn and who spent $100m on his last mayoral race, has said he plans to make climate change a leading issue in the 2020 race, whether or not he runs.

“Any candidate for federal office better darn well have a plan to deal with the problem that the Trump science advisers say could, basically, end this world,” he said. “I can tell you one thing, I don’t know whether I’m going to run or not, but I will be out there demanding that anybody that’s running has a plan.”
Bloomberg paid his latest visit to Iowa, site of the first voting in the presidential election cycle, earlier this month. Joining him in a call on Sunday to make climate change a national priority was Brown, a presidential hopeful in the past now standing down after 16 years at the head of the Golden state. He said wildfires in California should serve as a wake-up call.
“We see it in the fear in people’s eyes, as they fled, many elderly who died,” Brown told NBC. “This is real, it’s dangerous. And we’ve got to wake up the country, wake up the world.”
Brown, one of the few governors to have implemented climate policy, compared the challenge of galvanizing public opinion to that faced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941.
Brown echoed Bloomberg’s criticism of the president.
“He is very convinced of his position,” Brown said of Trump. “And his position is that there’s nothing abnormal about the fires in California or the rising sea level or all the other incidents of climate change.”

Jerry Brown, seen at a bill signing ceremony in 2016.

Brown contended that US economic wellbeing, conventionally trumpeted by the Trump administration, was the key issue on which Americans should vote.
“We’ve got to get off this idea, ‘It’s the economy, stupid,” he said. “No, it’s the environment.”
Seventy percent of Americans believe “global warming” is happening, according to polling cited by NBC, but only 57% believe climate change is caused by humans.
A rejection of the human role in climate change is a central plank for political leaders who refuse to back environmental regulations and other policies to confront the problem.
“The world is getting hotter,” Bloomberg said. “There are bigger storms than ever before; there are droughts where we used to have floods and vice-versa; our water is getting less; and we’ve got to do something about it.

“The challenge is what we do about it. And the opportunity is the value of what we do.”

How songs from tiny villages in the Pacific are now floating in outer space

Pacific Beat

By Yara Murray-Atfield

Posted 46 minutes ago

Composite of The Sounds of Earth discs sent into space on the Voyager space probe.

Photo: The Sounds of Earth discs were sent into space on the Voyager space probes. (Supplied: NASA)

Just outside of our solar system, onboard the Voyager space probes, sits the Golden Record, a "message in a bottle" filled with songs and sounds from life on earth.

Key points:

The Golden Records onboard the probes are now both outside of our solar system
Of just 27 songs, designed to show aliens what Earth is like, two are from the Pacific islands
The records also contain 55 greetings in different languages and a collection of sounds

After blasting off earth in 1977, Voyager 1 left the solar system in 2012, and Voyager 2 has just gone interstellar, heading beyond our solar system.

Audio: Pacific music in space (Pacific Beat)

The probes both have a special cargo on board — a copy each of a copper-plated polygraph dubbed the Golden Record, containing 27 songs from all corners of the globe.
The record began a trend of sending physical artefacts into space, including diamonds, an advertisement for Doritos, and more recently 50,000 poems read by users on Chinese social media platform WeChat from around the world.

A 'message in a bottle' to possible alien life

This illustration shows the position of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes just outside of the bubble-shaped heliosphere

Photo: NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes are positioned just outside of the heliosphere, a protective bubble created by the Sun that extends well past the orbit of Pluto. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

As the second probe left our solar system, family members of those who played the original traditional songs from the Pacific told the ABC they are "very, very happy" that pieces from their culture may be the first thing possible alien life could hear.
The probes' main purpose is to collect data and photographs from space and send them back to earth, but in 1977, NASA asked famous astronomer Carl Sagan to create a bonus: "Some message for a possible extra-terrestrial civilisation".
Mr Sagan and a group of others came up with the idea of The Sounds of Earth, widely known as the Golden Record, which writer and science communicator Ann Druyan then curated, leading the hunt for music and sounds for the disc.

A tiny speck of light in an otherwise dark image. The speck is Earth.

Photo: This pale blue dot, less than a pixel in size, was Voyager 1's view of Earth. (Supplied: NASA/JPL)

"This was our chance to create a kind of Noah's ark of human culture," Ms Druyan, who married Mr Sagan four years after the probes left earth, told Time Magazine in 2017.
Inside each Voyager vessel, the gold-plated and copper-etched records sit in aluminium cases, with 27 musical items, 55 greetings in different languages, and a collection of sounds that include a kiss, a dog barking, a whale song, and brain waves.
The capsule also includes a polygraph needle and etched instructions for how a possible alien might play the music.
Dr Glen Nagle from the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, which receives data from the probes, told the ABC the record was "a little time capsule".

"[It was] a message in a bottle that we were going to throw out into a giant cosmic ocean of the universe, to basically say 'this is who created this spacecraft, this is who we are, this is our place in the universe, and if you're there, learn about us, and maybe come and see us if you're curious like us'."

The songs include famous tracks like Chuck Berry's Johnny B Goode, and all-but-unknown traditional music from places like Milingimbi in Australia's Arnhem Land and villages in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands.

'Part of us is in space'

An historical black and white photo shows a man listening into a wireless, in a thatched hut in Solomon Islands.

Photo: Sergeant William "Billy" Bennett was a radio operator in World War II before becoming one of the faces of the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service. (Australian War Memorial: H A Mackenzie)

NASA lists one of the songs as "panpipes, collected by the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service", but the ABC has spoken to family members of the original panpipe group who confirmed the musicians were from the small village of Oroha, in the island province of Malaita.
There is no current data for how many people speak the Oroha language, but estimates in the past decade have put that number at only a few hundred people — and the particular style of music on the recording belongs just to them.

This is how aliens see earth

Decades of sending messages and images into space would present an odd picture of earth.

There were eight men playing the pipes for the recording and Sam Matanai, the nephew of one of the men, Isaac Houmawai, said the song was traditionally reserved for special occasions like feasts.
"We are very, very happy that our music, part of us, is in space," Mr Matanai told the ABC shortly after Voyager 2 had gone interstellar.
The song was recorded by William Bennett, a Solomon Islander who helped found the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service after fighting in World War II.
Mr Matanai said it was understood a copy made its way onto the Golden Record after being taken back to the UK by a visiting journalist.
The original recording now sits in the archive of what is now the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation, and current workers at the newsroom told the ABC they were happy to know it was there.
While Mr Matanai said there was pride in knowing his family's song was now floating just outside the solar system, there was even more pride in knowing his culture would live on in his village.

"We can pass this to other generations in [the] future, because we learned this very well, and we can dance this very well, we can blow this very well. This panpipe was ours, blown by our ancestors."

'Something that represents the earth'

Video: Members of NASA's Voyager project explain why the probes are so significant. (Video: NASA) (ABC News)

The 27 songs came from all over the world, including from the Nyaura clan, from the Papua New Guinean village of Kandingei in what is now East Sepik Province.
As with the song from Solomon Islands, the detail from NASA is scant, only referencing the song as "men's house song, recorded by Robert MacLennan".

A slightly yellowed photo of a newspaper story. The photo is of a man handing a golden record to another man.

Photo: A front-page story in Papua New Guinea's The National newspaper on May 10, 1995 details ethnomusicologist and doctor Robert MacLennan (R) handing over the Golden Record to then-prime minister of PNG Sir Julius Chan (L). (Supplied)

"The recording that was chosen was performed by two different men on long flutes that are distinctive of the area, associated with men's initiation and men's houses," acting director of the Institute of Papua New Guinea studies in Port Moresby, Dr Don Niles, told the ABC.
Men's houses are less common in the modern era, but are men-only spaces used for initiation, ceremonies and discussion.
Dr Niles was a friend of Robert MacLennan, an Australian doctor who spent years in PNG before he died in 2013 — and according to Dr Niles, Dr MacLennan made hundreds of recordings of traditional music during his life.

"He very much fell in love with the place, with the music," Dr Niles said.

Dr Niles said Dr MacLennan was "always willing to share" the recordings with other people, but that the full story of how the music left PNG and made it onto the Golden Record was one Dr Niles was always "put off hearing" as he was waiting for the right moment.
"Unfortunately that never happened, as Bob died a few years ago," he said.
Since leaving Earth in 1977, the Voyager probes have collected a world of data and information about life in our solar system and beyond.
And in 2017, the record was made commercially available for the first time in decades, and even won a Grammy music award that year.
But Dr Niles said the record was much more than "just about Nyaura clan, about East Sepik Province, about Papua New Guinea".

"This is something that represents the earth, and its creations," he said.

A thatched hut photographed from a distance. It is surrounded by trees.

Photo: Many of the men's houses in Kandingei are now destroyed, but they had a similar structure to this building in Tambunum, which is also in the Sepik area of Papua New Guinea. (Creative Commons: EK Silverman)

Sunday, 30 December 2018

The Observer view on Japan’s decision to resume commercial whaling

Extract from The Guardian

Opinion

Whaling

Observer editorial

With many of the great cetaceans still endangered, Tokyo’s move is depressing – and has no economic justification

Japanese fishermen process whale carcass

Japanese fishermen process a whale carcass. Photograph: Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images

Whales have been hunted by humans for thousands of years. Their flesh, oil and blubber have been variously employed for food, to make wax for candles and to provide fuel for lamps. This kind of exploitation is no longer needed today. Modern society gets its protein and its lighting from other, more accessible sources. Hence the decision by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to place a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986.
Given that many species had already been brought close to extinction, the move was long overdue. Three decades later, the blue whale, the humpback whale, the North Atlantic right whale and many other great cetaceans are still struggling to rise out of the critically endangered state to which hunting had reduced them. Had whaling not been halted 30 years ago, many of these great creatures would no longer be swimming in our oceans. The world that we currently inhabit would have been greatly impoverished.
Given this worrying background, it is all the more difficult to understand the announcement by the government of Japan that it has decided that it will leave the IWC in June in order to resume commercial whaling the following month. By any standards, the move is depressing – and alarming. It has absolutely no economic or ecological justification and in preparing to slaughter some of the planet’s most intelligent creatures for food the plan is repugnant.

Not surprisingly, governments, scientists and wildlife groups across the planet have made clear their deep disgust at Japan’s proposed actions. Britain, Australia and New Zealand have all admonished its leaders while the conservation group the WWF rightly criticised Tokyo for acting as it has done at a time “when the planet’s whale species are under unprecedented threat from entanglement, the impacts of shipping, noise, plastic and chemical pollution, as well as climate change”.
An examination of the motives of Japan’s leaders is equally disquieting. In the past, the nation has provided itself with whale meat by exploiting a loophole in the IWC rulebook. This permits “scientific whaling” in international waters, in particular the South Atlantic. As a result, hundreds of whales have been caught there every year in the name of cetacean research. Meat from these “research” trips has then ended up in shops and restaurants. However, these South Atlantic hunts have generated a great deal of criticism from other nations and wildlife groups. As a result, Japanese whalers have been harassed by vessels operated by green activists. By moving, instead, into its own national waters, which stretch for 1.7m square miles, an area roughly equivalent to the size of India, Japan clearly hopes to do much more of its whaling on the quiet.
It remains to be seen if this move will succeed. It is also unclear if the current generation of Japanese consumers is that interested in whale meat. In the 1960s, almost a quarter of a million tonnes were sold across Japan, a figure that has since fallen to around 3,000. Indeed, much of the meat from Japan’s “scientific whaling” now ends up as pet food.

Nor is it clear how much consumers will be prepared to pay for whale meat. Japan’s “scientific whaling” trips were subsidised by its government. It is not yet obvious if their replacements – commercial whaling hunts inside national waters – will get support from government coffers. If not, whale meat will become even more expensive, a prospect that has already led specialist restaurant operators to express worries about sharp rises in price. Thus Japan will have earned itself intense global opprobrium without bringing itself any benefits at all. It will have harpooned itself in the foot. At least that is the outcome that Japan deserves and which most of the planet will now be anticipating.

How Nancy Pelosi signaled the end of Trump's easy ride

Extract from The Guardian

Nancy Pelosi

In one deft performance the top Democrat in the House owned the president, having faced down Republicans scare tactics and attacks from her own side

David Taylor in New York

Nancy Pelosi: ‘It goes to show you: you get into a tickle contest with a skunk, you get tinkle all over you.’ Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP

Nancy Pelosi was perched on the end of a sofa in the Oval Office when the balance of power in Donald Trump’s Washington decisively shifted in her favour.
The event in early December began as a simple photo call with Trump – the first attempt at bipartisan dialogue after the midterm elections saw Democrats take back control of the House of Representatives.
The president was in domineering form, making demands about funding for his stalled border wall and contemplating shutting down the government if a budget was not passed giving him $5bn for his unfulfilled promise.
“I think the American people recognise that we must keep government open, that a shutdown is not worth anything,” said Pelosi as Trump nodded. “And that we should not have a Trump shutdown.”
The president looked up and said: “A what? Did you say a Trump – ?”

After two years surrounded by loyalists and sycophants, Trump had got his first taste of what life will be like with Pelosi in control of one half of Congress. And as the cameras rolled, he quickly lost his cool, declaring he would be “proud to shut down the government”, trapped on live TV by his temper and the pincer movement of Pelosi and the top Democratic senator Chuck Schumer.

Trump in extraordinary clash with Pelosi and Schumer – video highlights

The confrontation showed that Pelosi can outwit Trump. It also marked a turning point for her after an election season when some Democrats disowned her, apparently seeing her as a liability in races where Republicans spent millions of dollars trying to turn her into a hate figure to galvanise their voters.
According to the Wall Street Journal, there were more than 135,000 adverts during the midterms attacking Pelosi by name, and some Democratic candidates ran for election vowing not to vote for her as speaker if they won.
Wendy Schiller, chair of political science at Brown University, called the attack ad strategy “wasted money, pure and simple”. Republicans “mistakenly believed that voter animosity towards strong women was interchangeable, so they tried to get the voters who disliked Hillary Clinton to see Nancy Pelosi the same way and then transfer that dislike to their local Democratic congressional candidate.
“That is just way too many connections for most voters to make, and it infuriated a lot of women. It is as if the GOP did not live in the same #MeToo moment as the rest of us.”

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer walk out of the West Wing after their meeting with Donald Trump on 11 December.

Pelosi raised $135m for the Democratic campaign, yet when she got back to Washington celebrating a heavy victory, some in her own party said it was time to move on from her leadership.
The moment where she owned Trump in the Oval Office put a stop to all of that as she proved she could put him under pressure – and with the 2020 election in mind, hope to deliver him in a weakened state for whoever emerges as the Democratic presidential nominee.
To secure support for her speaker bid she agreed to serve no more than four years, but it was not much of a concession, given she would be 82 and presumably ready – at last – to retire.
So, on Thursday the 78-year-old will become the face of Democratic opposition to Trump in Congress.
Almost 12 years to the day since she made history as the first female speaker, Pelosi will be back, calling the plays against Trump and passing bills on Democratic priorities from gun control to reform of voter suppression laws.
Of course, those bills will be unlikely to get through the Republican-held Senate, but the strategy will help Democrats define Trump and the Republicans.
Cindy Simon Rosenthal, author of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the New American Politics, published in 2007 when the California congresswoman first took the House gavel, said: “It may not result in legislation making it all the way through, but Democrats would go into the 2020 election cycle with strong campaign issues where they would portray the Republicans as the party of gerrymandering, voter suppression and unbridled campaign ethics violations, a narrative that will be useful to Democrats.”
Pelosi will probably disappoint people hoping to see impeachment proceedings against Trump. Instead she will place the emphasis on investigations by Democratic-led committees in the House to keep the Trump administration in the crosshairs.
Policy issues including family separation at the border, the rolling back of environmental protections, and the president’s handling of the aftermath of deadly hurricanes will be examined, alongside the many scandals surrounding Trump’s business conflicts, Russian election interference and the president’s possible obstruction of justice.
Rosenthal added: “She will have enough issues that are common cause with progressives to keep them together.”
Do the new generation of progressive Democrats have a point? Is she too much of a pragmatist to lead their radical agenda – and too much of an easy target for Republican rage?
It is true she is a machine politician – brought up in the deal-making politics of Baltimore where her Italian-American father was in office throughout the 1940s and 50s as congressman and then mayor.

Nancy Pelosi was brought up in the deal-making politics of Baltimore.

She is not a great public speaker and often misspeaks, memorably triggering accusations of a lack of transparency over Obamacare by saying: “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.”
Perhaps she stands somewhere in the middle of the two cartoonish characterisations: on one side, the progressive left ready to dismiss her as a symbol of the status quo; on the other, Republicans who have branded her an extremist liberal radical feminist.
Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report, said she was the best and pragmatic choice for Democrats. “In hindsight, keeping Pelosi seems pretty obvious, but while the desire for someone new and younger was great, someone with less political skill than her would not have survived this challenge.”
What is in store for Trump? “She is as tough as he thinks he is,” Cook said. “He could not have a more tenacious adversary, the combination of Pelosi and Schumer is hard to beat. They have seen it all and are both shrewd as hell.”
Their White House meeting with Trump was “an omen of things to come”, Rosenthal said.

“There was a lot in that episode that is very familiar to women in the corporate world, women in politics – where they get talked over, minimised, and men underestimate them and frankly treat them not as equals. What she demonstrated is that she is a woman who knows all those tricks and is not gonna be defeated … you know, the president is gonna have his hands full.”

New Horizons set to fly over Ultima Thule, the most distant world we've ever explored

ABC Science

By Genelle Weule

Updated about an hour ago

First posted about 10 hours ago

Three years ago, we stared with awe at the first close-up images of Pluto captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. Now the spacecraft is set to make history again as it flies by an even more distant world.

Key points

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft was launched in 2006
Its mission is to explore small objects in the Kuiper Belt — a region between 4.5 billion kilometres and 7.5 billion kilometres from the Sun
On New Year's Day it will zoom over a small world called Ultima Thule

Ultima Thule lies 1.6 billion kilometres beyond Pluto in the Kuiper Belt — a cosmic doughnut of small primitive objects.
No spacecraft has ever explored a world this far away from the Sun, said Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
"It took us almost 13 years to get there travelling at this amazing speed of more than a million kilometres per day," Dr Stern said.
At that rate, New Horizons is expected to zoom past Ultima around 4.30pm (AEDT) on New Year's Day.

What do we know about Ultima Thule?

Ultima Thule (ultima thoo-lee) — or 2014 MU69 as it is officially known — was discovered in 2014.
"Ultima is quite mysterious. We don't know much about its size and shape," Dr Stern said.
What we know so far is from its silhouette captured by telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope as the icy object passed in front of stars.
"From that we determine it's about 30 kilometres long, and it's shaped a little bit like a figure eight," Dr Stern said.
This suggests Ultima Thule could be two objects connected together, what's known as a contact binary, or two objects orbiting each other.
"We've been taking images of Ultima Thule ever since August from onboard the spacecraft, but it's just a dot in the distance that grows brighter and brighter and brighter."
As New Horizons homed in on its target in early December, extensive searches revealed no signs of moons, rings or any hazards near the object.

The first hints of what Ultima Thule really looks like will begin to emerge on December 31, when the piano-sized spacecraft is still further away from the object than the Earth is to the moon.
Then on January 1, New Horizons will zoom over Ultima at around 50,000 kilometres per hour, just 3,500 kilometres above the surface — three times closer than its approach to Pluto.
On board the spacecraft is a suite of seven instruments that will map the composition and topography of the object, take its temperature, search for signs of an atmosphere.
Travelling at the speed of light, messages from the spacecraft take more than six hours to make the 6 billion or so kilometres back to us.
"By January 2 we'll have detailed images that we can make maps from on the ground so this is all going to happen very fast," Dr Stern said.

Why explore the Kuiper Belt?

Ultima Thule is just one of thousands of objects that call the Kuiper Belt home, ranging from dwarf planets to comets.
The Kuiper Belt extends from around 4.5 billion kilometres from the Sun (Neptune) to 7.5 billion kilometres from the Sun.
The first small object — 1992 QB1 dubbed "Smiley" — was discovered in this region in 1992. Since then more than 2,000 objects have been discovered.
Some of these worlds rival Pluto in size, but most of the worlds are only tens to hundreds of kilometres across.
"We have a pretty good understanding of these worlds. Many of them have … moons, some even have rings," Dr Stern said.

YouTube: Kuiper Belt Source: NASA

These small worlds are ancient time capsules left over from the birth of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.
"We know that Ultima Thule was born at this very great distance from the Sun and has always been in that region of the solar system."
At that distance temperatures are freezing — almost absolute zero or -273 degrees C.
"Those temperatures should preserve the record of the formation of Ultima Thule very faithfully over all those billions of years," Dr Stern said.

Flying through the densest part of the region, New Horizons will pick up details never imagined by previous missions such as Voyager.
The Voyager spacecraft made their way above and below the Kuiper Belt in the 1990s, but were "blissfully unaware" of its existence.
"The Voyagers didn't even look at the Kuiper Belt because they didn't know there was a Kuiper Belt to look at," Dr Stern said.
"And of course they had, by today's standards, very primitive instrumentation based on 1970s technology."
"But never before New Horizons have any of these objects been studied up close with cameras and spectrometers and any of the gear we're taking along."

What happens beyond Ultima Thule?

The fly-by will produce enough data that will keep scientists busy for the next one and half years, Dr Stern said.
But New Horizons' journey doesn't stop at Ultima Thule. The team already has other Kuiper Belt objects in its sights.
"The spacecraft is very healthy, it's not using any of its back-up systems and it has power and fuel to operate for close to 20 more years," Dr Stern said.
"There's a lot of future exploration ahead for New Horizons."
For now, though, the team is waiting to celebrate on New Year's Day.