Today's WorldView: Flynn's ties to Russia are a problem. But what about his Islamophobia?

• Another night, another embarrassing leak for the White House. The New York Times reported late on Tuesday that Trump campaign aides and other associates were in contact with senior Russian intelligence officials for a year before the election. The article noted there has been "no evidence" that Trump's team cooperated with Russia in hacking or attempting to work against Hillary Clinton. One of the aides, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, also said he had never "have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers."

But the article still adds to the growing pile of evidence that ties between Moscow and Trump Tower were deeper than believed — and more than Trump's camp was willing to admit.

• Some conservatives and Trump loyalists, including the scribes at far-right website Breitbart, are now directing their anger at White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, who they think is launching an internal putsch against Flynn, Bannon and other ultra-nationalists in the White House.

"I think this is Pearl Harbor for the true Trump supporters, the Trump loyalists," said Roger Stone, a former Trump campaign adviser, in an interview with the Atlantic’s Rosie Gray. “I believe Reince Priebus moved on General Flynn and I think he intends to move on Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller next. He is not serving the president well. The people he hired are loyal to the Republican National Committee, not the President of the United States.”

• Kim Jong Nam, the older half-brother of North Korean despot Kim Jong Un, was apparently killed in Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The details, as my colleague Anna Fifield reported, are straight out of a spy thriller: "A woman came from behind and covered his face with a cloth laced with a liquid," Police Chief Fadzil Ahmat told Bernama, the Malaysian state news agency. Kim, believed to be 45, had lived away from North Korea for more than a decade amid speculation over his estrangement from the ruling dynasty. He was said to move between homes in Beijing, Singapore and the Chinese territory of Macau.

In 2006, as a cub reporter for Time magazine in Hong Kong, I tagged along with Austin Ramzy — now at the New York Times — on a trip to Macau in search of the reclusive Kim. We didn’t find him, but we came across his house in a gated waterfront community. Its only distinguishing feature was an image of a sunflower posted on a window, bending to the rays of the sun — a sign of obeisance to Pyongyang.

• While both Republican and Democratic senators pledged to expand the investigation into Russian meddling in the American election, House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) welcomed a ruling that suggested Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway had violated federal rules by plugging the clothesline of Ivanka Trump – the president’s daughter – on national television. Despite his chairmanship, Chaffetz has been notably distinterested in investigating almost any aspect of the Trump administration's business entanglements or questionable foreign links.

"Under the present circumstances, there is strong reason to believe that Ms. Conway has violated the Standards of Conduct and that disciplinary action is warranted," wrote Walter M. Shaub Jr., the director of the Office of Government Ethics, in a letter. We’ll see what sort of "disciplinary action" follows — if any. The OGE’s recommendation is nonbinding.

• Politico editor Blake Hounshell wrote a dispatch from the sidelines of the World Government Summit in Dubai, a confab not dissimilar to the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering in Davos. Last year’s forum included a video speech from former president Barack Obama. But the Trump administration, eager to distance itself from all such conclaves of cosmopolitanism, had no presence this year.

"Using the kind of language usually applied to problems like terrorism, Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank chief appointed by Barack Obama, suggested that global institutions had a responsibility to address the anger that led to Trump," Hounshell wrote, quoting Kim's words: "It’s not enough to condemn xenophobia and populism; we need to engage with the root causes that make them fester."

He also noted "it was ironic to watch all this globalist soul-searching on display in Dubai, a city that has benefited from globalization perhaps more than any other — importing labor from all over the world and positioning itself as a symbol of openness in the closed-off Middle East, and a gateway between East and West."

You might call today's collection "Lost Causes." Here is advice for Angela Merkel in trying to arrest Turkey's seemingly permanent slide into autocracy, and for President Trump as he prepares to tackle both the endless conflict between Israelis and Palestinians as well as how to play the U.S.' weak hand in Ukraine. As for Russia, Julia Ioffe of The Atlantic examines what Michael Flynn's sacking may have cost the Kremlin.

It seems that everyone knows about China's mind-bogglng pollution problem, but it turns out the Middle Kingdom has nothing on India. A new air-quality study released by Boston's Health Effects Institute found that air pollution in India has gotten dramatically worse since 2010 — and more people are dying there from air pollution issues than in China. That means toxic clouds like this one, which descended on New Delhi in November, are becoming the new normal in many cities. (Harish Tyagi/EPA)