William Barr Is the Winston Wolf of Complex Republican Scandals

“Everyone will soon be able to read it on their own,” Barr wrote. Barr’s new letter lays out a timeline for the next steps of the hotly-debated process by which Justice Department officials are sharing the nearly 400-page report. In the letter, Barr said he does not plan to submit the report to the White House for review. "Although the president would have the right to assert privilege over certain parts of the report, he has stated publicly that he intends to defer to me and, accordingly, there are no plans to submit the report to the White House for a privilege review.”

In the Friday letter, Barr said he will also redact any information that would “potentially compromise sources and methods” of intelligence collection, and any information that would “unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties.”

“My March 24 letter was not, and did not purport to be, an exhaustive recounting of the Special Counsel’s investigation or report,” Barr wrote. “As my letter made clear, my notification to Congress and the public provided, pending release of the report, a summary of its “principal conclusions” - that is, its bottom line. The Special Counsel’s report is nearly 400 pages long (exclusive of tables and appendices) and sets forth the Special Counsel’s findings, his analysis, and the reasons for his conclusions. . . . I do not believe it would be in the public’s interest for me to attempt to summarize the full report or to release it in serial or piecemeal fashion.”

The new permit replaces the one Trump issued in 2017 that was blocked when the court said a new environmental impact statement needed to be issued. The pipeline project, proposed more than a decade ago, would carry Canadian oil sands crude from Alberta to the U.S. Midwest. Trump approved the project after President Barack Obama denied TransCanada a permit on environmental grounds.

Despite the embattled prime minister’s dramatic promise on Wednesday that she would hand over the keys to 10 Downing Street if her Tory colleagues backed the withdrawal agreement, parliament voted against it on Friday, by 344 to 286. The Commons vote was held on the day when Britain was meant to be leaving the European Union, as Parliament Square outside overflowed with raucous pro-Brexit protesters. A string of leave-supporting Conservative backbenchers who had twice rejected the deal, including Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab, switched sides to support the agreement. But with Labour unwilling to shift its position, and the Democratic Unionist party’s 10 MPs implacably opposed, it was not enough to secure a majority for May.

If Brexit has come crashing down to earth, the piece of Earth in question is a straggling, meandering, perplexing and porous line on the map: the 310-mile border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. It emerged as a temporary line of partition in 1920 - ironically during another episode in which a country was exiting a larger union. Catholic Ireland was breaking away from the United Kingdom. The Protestant-dominated Northeast wanted to remain. So it was agreed that there would be a short-term boundary until a permanent solution was found.

And then a wonderful thing happened. Britain, Ireland, the E.U. and the United States worked together to create one of the finest diplomatic achievements of the past 50 years: the Belfast Agreement of 1998 (also known as the Good Friday Agreement). With peace, the border more or less vanished. The military and police installations were removed, and because both Ireland and Britain were in the E.U., there was no need for customs posts, either. For 20 years, people have come and gone freely over about 300 crossings to work, trade and socialize - 105 million times a year. When I travel now from Dublin to Belfast, I struggle to remember where the border is - it is a line on a map, not a barrier on the road. The most the traveler is likely to encounter is a sign saying “Welcome to Northern Ireland." It would be hard to overstate how much this has contributed to the sense of normality and the building of ordinary human contact that underpin the hard-won peace. A generation has grown up with this physical and psychological freedom.

But along came Brexit. Its effects, if implemented in their pure form, would be not just to restore a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic but also to make it much more extreme than it ever was before. It would now be a major E.U. land border, a boundary between Britain on the one side and a 27-member bloc on the other. This would be profoundly unsettling for a peace process that has made huge progress but is still fragile.

The dinosaur, unveiled last week in The Anatomical Record, consists of a skeleton that's about 65 percent complete, including the skull and hips along with some of its ribs, leg bones, and tail bones. Nicknamed “Scotty,” the tyrannosaur was a senior by this species' standards, making it to at least the age of 28. Some 68 million years ago, the Canadian landscape Scotty knew was a subtropical coastal paradise-but life was no vacation. The dinosaur's remains include a broken and healed rib, a massive growth of bone in between two teeth-a sign of infection-and broken tailbones possibly maimed by another tyrannosaur's bite.

The find suggests that large predatory dinosaurs probably got older and bigger than paleontologists would have surmised based on currently available fossils. Among the known species, T. rex is one of the best represented extinct dinosaurs, with more than 20 fossil individuals identified.