Which Republican Will Have a Watergate Moment? | Policing While Female

Newark Police Commander Ivonne Roman is launching a fitness and mentorship program to give female officers a boost.

Ivonne Roman was two years into the highly selective Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science program in Washington when she pulled aside Maureen McGough, a senior policy advisor at the Department of Justice, for a wake-up call. “If you guys care about policing issues that are supported by data, why is nobody looking at the fact that there have been no more than 12 percent of women police officers in the country for decades and we’ve had all these recruitment efforts and nothing is changing?” Roman asked. “What are we going to do about it?”

McGough says that question — “in no uncertain terms, in her very endearing, New Jersey way” — changed everything.

The time may soon be at hand for a Republican leader to break ranks and pull support from Trump.

Former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin writes:

Could there be a Hugh Scott in 2019? I refer to Sen. Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, in office from 1958 to 1976, who came to mind because as a young Pennsylvanian during the Watergate crisis, he left an impression on me. An old-fashioned centrist Republican, Scott was one of the three senior GOPers who went to the White House in 1974 (with Sens. Barry Goldwater and John Rhodes) to tell President Richard Nixon that the party had lost confidence in him — the game was up, and it was time to resign or be convicted of impeachment.

This is of course not the Republican Party of 1974, but it may be approaching the moment when, as back then, one of its leaders looks in the mirror and has a Hugh Scott moment. Why should we expect that, given the circling of wagons the party has deployed through every scandal, indignity and abuse President Trump has dished out since 2016? Because the transcript the White House released of Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president, followed by exposure of the whistleblower report that mirrored that account, makes it near impossible to deny that Trump was cajoling a foreign leader to find dirt on his most likely challenger. To not see this requires a willful refusal to do so.

Palestinians are taking their economic future into their own hands, riding on an explosion in tech startups.

Ahmad Ramazi’s success has been a long time coming. Eight years after he graduated from Ramallah’s Birzeit University and jumped into entrepreneurship against the odds in a battered economy, Ramazi’s business-to-business crowdsourcing delivery and logistics company, WeDeliver, has turned into the fastest-growing startup in the Palestinian territories. Operating throughout the occupied West Bank, it is enjoying double-digit growth since its launch earlier this year and is the first startup to boast of a Palestinian angel investor.

WeDeliver’s emergence is part of a pattern that could transform the Palestinian territories. Since 1967, the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem have been under Israeli occupation. They’ve endured increasingly strict restrictions imposed by the Israeli military, which has choked the economy. A 2016 U.N. report concluded that the “economy of the occupied Palestinian territories might reach twice its size if the illegal Israeli military occupation was lifted.” But where most traditional businesses are unfeasible, a young generation of Palestinians is driving an explosion in tech startups as an alternative route to catapult the Palestinians forward.