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[ad_1] Dr. Kovel metamorphosed from a conventional therapist into a Marxist who abandoned the medical profession as too corporate and commercial. He became a fierce critic of the Vietnam War, imperialists, Zionists and gas guzzlers, together with neoliberals and environmentalists who were insufficiently anticapitalist. Dr. Kovel was an intellectual father of ecosocialism. A Brooklyn-born son of Jewish immigrants, he also experienced in his later years what he called a Christian spiritual conversion. When he published his autobiography last year, after so many metaphysical meanderings, he titled it “The Lost Traveller’s Dream,” a nod to the poet William Blake’s reference to wanderers in the wilderness seeking to distinguish between good and evil. Dr. Kovel rarely defined his positions in shades of gray. He renounced psychiatry because, he said, he was fed up with “the pernicious system of diagnosis” dictated by professional associations and their manuals, and by insurance compan...

[ad_1] Fact Check of the Day President Trump claimed “all these investigators” are Democrats — an overstatement — and incorrectly said that Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, served under President Obama for eight years. President Trump addressing the National Rifle Association Leadership Forum on Friday in Dallas. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times President Trump said “So you have all these investigators; they’re Democrats. In all fairness, Bob Mueller worked for Obama for eight years.” the facts This is exaggerated. At least nine of the 17 lawyers on the team led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, have donated to Democratic campaigns, according to Federal Election Commission records. One has previously identified as a Democrat in a blog post . Three others are registered as Democrats, The Washington Post and PolitiFact have reported. But the political affiliations of the remaining four lawyers are unclear. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office confi...

[ad_1] And yet, Mr. Vekselberg, a native of Ukraine, has long-running business ties to the United States. He founded Renova in 1990 as a Russian-American joint venture, according to an archived version of the company’s website . And during a thaw in United States-Russian relations — the so-called reset orchestrated by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state — Mr. Vekselberg was appointed to help attract Silicon Valley investors to the technology park outside Moscow, known as Skolkovo. “The whole country needs some sort of breakthrough,” he told The New York Times in a 2010 interview about the effort. Mr. Vekselberg also donated to Fort Ross, a state park in California that is the site of a 19th-century Russian settlement, to keep it open during the state’s financial crunch in the recession. After making his fortune in aluminum and oil in Siberia in the 1990s, Mr. Vekselberg, together with partners, closed in 2003 what was at the time the largest private transaction in Russian ...

[ad_1] WASHINGTON — Two top F.B.I. aides who worked alongside the former director James B. Comey as he navigated one of the most politically tumultuous periods in the bureau’s history resigned on Friday. One of them, James A. Baker, was one of Mr. Comey’s closest confidants. He served as the F.B.I.’s top lawyer until December when he was reassigned as the new director, Christopher A. Wray, began installing his own advisers. Mr. Baker had been investigated by the Justice Department on suspicion of sharing classified information with reporters. He has not been charged. The other aide, Lisa Page, advised Mr. Comey while serving directly under his deputy, Andrew G. McCabe. She was assailed by conservatives after texts that she had exchanged with the agent overseeing the investigation into links between President Trump’s campaign and Russia were made public. In the messages, they expressed anti-Trump views but took aim at Hillary Clinton and other political figures as well. The decisions...

[ad_1] WASHINGTON — President Trump knew about a six-figure payment that Michael D. Cohen, his personal lawyer, made to a pornographic film actress several months before he denied any knowledge of it to reporters aboard Air Force One in April, according to two people familiar with the arrangement. How much Mr. Trump knew about the payment to Stephanie Clifford, the actress, and who else was aware of it have been at the center of a swirling controversy for the past 48 hours touched off by a television interview with Rudolph W. Giuliani, a new addition to the president’s legal team. The interview was the first time a lawyer for the president had acknowledged that Mr. Trump had reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the payments to Ms. Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels. It was not immediately clear when Mr. Trump learned of the payment, which Mr. Cohen made in October 2016, at a time when news media outlets were poised to pay her for her story about an alleged affair with Mr. Trump in 2006. ...

[ad_1] Be they reports on the questions the special counsel plans to ask President Trump or more revelations about a payment made to Stormy Daniels, here are six of the biggest stories driving American politics this week. President Trump confirmed that he reimbursed his lawyer for a payment to Stormy Daniels. In an explosive contradiction on Thursday, President Trump confirmed that he had paid a monthly sum to his former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, reimbursing a $130,000 payment made shortly before the 2016 presidential election to ensure a pornographic film actress did not come forward with allegations of an affair with Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump had previously told reporters that he had no knowledge of the payment made to the actress, Stephanie Clifford, who performs as Stormy Daniels. But Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the latest additions to the president’s legal team, said on Fox News late Wednesday that he had documentation showing that Mr. Trump had personally repaid Mr. Cohen. Mr. Giuli...

[ad_1] Still, the large and growing volume of data gathered shows that the N.S.A. continues to collect significant amounts of information about Americans’ phone and text messages after changes made by Congress in a 2015 law, the USA Freedom Act, which overhauled how the N.S.A. can gain access to domestic telecom data. That law ended a once-secret program by which the N.S.A. had systematically collected Americans’ domestic phone logs in bulk — billions of records per day. The program traced back to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and was revealed in 2013 by leaks from Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor, setting off a wide debate over surveillance and privacy. Though Congress ended that program, lawmakers still wanted the N.S.A. to retain its function: the ability to analyze links between people in search of hidden associates of terrorism suspects. So it authorized a new system in which the bulk records stay with the phone companies but the N.S.A. can get...

[ad_1] White House officials and others familiar with the situation said the circumstances surrounding Dr. Jackson’s fall from grace and Dr. Pena’s departure dated back many years, to longstanding divisions in the medical unit — which is part of the military — where there are two factions that do not get along. Dr. Pena — known to patients simply as “Dr. Jen” — submitted her memos about Dr. Jackson last fall to Nick Ayers, Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, who shared them with John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Both Mr. Ayers and Mr. Kelly directed Dr. Pena to go through her military chain of command to address the issue, the person said. CNN, which obtained the memos, reported that Dr. Pena had accused Dr. Jackson of having intervened in a medical matter involving Karen Pence, Mr. Pence’s wife, and possibly violating her medical privacy rights. She also s...

[ad_1] The last time the unemployment rate fell below the 4 percent threshold was in 2000, during a period of frenetic activity remembered as the dot-com boom. Nine years into a sustained, if less feverish, economic recovery, that milestone has been achieved again. The Labor Department said Friday that the jobless rate in April fell to 3.9 percent, raising anew the question of just how tight the labor market can get, and for how long. In the past half-century, only the late 1960s brought an extended period when the rate stayed below 4 percent. “We’ve continued to add jobs routinely every month for so long, and the unemployment rate we have reached is amazing,” said Catherine Barrera, chief economist of the online job site ZipRecruiter. President Trump crowed about the landmark on Friday, tweeting, “4% is Broken!” The steady-as-she-goes economy has produced a record 91 straight months of job growth. That may represent a healthier foundation than the dot-com era, when pride — or, as it w...

[ad_1] Even some of the world’s richest people may get duped, according to newly unsealed documents in a lawsuit filed on behalf of investors in the failing blood-testing company Theranos. High-profile investors who collectively lost hundreds of millions of dollars included Walmart’s Walton family, the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, as well as Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education and her relatives. The list of investors, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal , came to light as part of a class-action lawsuit brought in 2016 by Robert Colman , a retired Silicon Valley investment banker, who claims that Theranos misled investors about its business and technology. Theranos, founded by Elizabeth Holmes when she was a 19-year-old Stanford University dropout, promised to revolutionize the lab industry using a few drops of blood from a simple finger-prick to look for everything from diabetes to cancer, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional blood test. The company became a Si...

[ad_1] Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed the country’s most restrictive abortion bill into law Friday, outlawing the procedure once a “heartbeat” is detected, which is usually at about six weeks — a time when many people do not yet know they are pregnant. The bill has been dubbed the “heartbeat” bill, a highly loaded term, as one doctor pointed out in a HuffPost piece in 2016 , asking instead that they be referred to as “fetal pole cardiac activity.” The law has exceptions for cases of rape and incest. It was passed in the middle of the night earlier this week. Iowa had already banned abortions after 20 weeks. The law is sure to draw challenges in court, something the bill’s advocates say is actually part of their goal. “It is time for the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue of life,”  state Rep. Shannon Lundgren (R), the bill’s floor manager, said . Reynolds, who has in the past referred to abortion as “murder,” echoed that sentiment in a statement Friday. “I understand and a...

[ad_1] “The reason why the president endorsed me and asked me to run is he wants somebody who can help him get his agenda done, not somebody who’s going to vote against him,” Mr. Renacci said as he sat in a booth at a chicken-wing restaurant here. Mr. Renacci, with an estimated net worth of at least $34 million, according to Roll Call , boasts of a long and varied business career, with involvement in nursing homes, Harley-Davidson dealerships, a Chevrolet dealership and partial ownership of an arena football team. A quiet, casual demeanor helped ingratiate him with working-class voters in his district south of Cleveland even as he held on to the traditional Chamber of Commerce Republican vote. “Businessmen and businesswomen have different styles,” he conceded. “I’m more the quiet style.” Photo In Tuesday’s primary, Mr. Renacci faces competition for Trump voters who might again be drawn to someone who presen...

[ad_1] Mr. Giuliani’s verbal strikes began on Wednesday night when he appeared with Sean Hannity on Fox News and declared that the F.B.I.’s office in New York — with which he worked closely during his time as United States attorney in Manhattan — had behaved like “storm-troopers” in conducting raids on the president’s former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen. In the same interview, he called Mr. Comey “a disgraceful liar” and said he should be prosecuted. He also had strong words for the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, which he dismissed as “tainted” and “totally garbage.” On Thursday morning, after Mr. Comey shot back on his Twitter account, saying that the New York F.B.I. was “devoted to the rule of law and the truth,” Mr. Giuliani assailed Mr. Comey, his onetime colleague in the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, as a “sensitive little baby.” By Thursday afternoon, he had tossed another bomb, calling for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “step in” on t...

[ad_1] President Donald Trump harkened back to the racist attack he made on Mexican immigrants on the first day of his campaign in the summer of 2015 during a speech at the National Rifle Association (NRA) convention Friday. “These countries send up their worst,” Trump said, addressing the crowd assembled in Dallas, Texas. “R emember in my opening speech, I  got criticized for it.  Remember?  Well, guess what.  They’re not sending their  finest.  That I can tell you.”  In his opening speech nearly three years ago, Trump said Mexico was “not sending their best,” a racist attack that drove his campaign and eventually catapulted him into the White House. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said at the time. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He resorted to the same dishonest smear Friday. “W...

[ad_1] “It becomes a kind of Catch-22,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “One of their criteria is the issue of viability, but without their endorsement, viability becomes very tough, because so many people use them as their barometer of, ‘Oh, does this woman have a chance?’” Emily’s List has also faced criticism that it does not do enough to lift up women of color. Nina Turner, an African-American former state senator from Ohio who was endorsed by Emily’s List when she ran for secretary of state in 2014, said minorities may face higher hurdles than white women in raising money, because they are less likely to come from wealthy circles. “I got the money late when I needed it early because they were judging my ability to fund-raise more than where I stood on the issues,” Ms. Turner said, adding, “I don’t think they take into consideration the hurdles that black and Hispanic women have to jump when you judge viability.” Ms. ...