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In the bestselling tradition of The Presidents Club and Presidential Courage, White House history as told through the stories of the best friends and closest confidants of American presidents.

These and other friendships—including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Bill Clinton and Vernon Jordan—populate this fresh and provocative exploration of a series of seminal presidential friendships.

Publishing history teems with books by and about Presidents, First Ladies, First Pets, and even First Chefs. Now former Clinton aide Gary Ginsberg breaks new literary ground on Pennsylvania Avenue and provides fresh insights into the lives of the men who held the most powerful political office in the world by looking at the friends on whom they relied.

First Friends is an engaging, serendipitous look into the lives of Commanders-in-Chief and how their presidencies were shaped by those they held most dear.

CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig exposes William Barr as the most corrupt attorney general in modern U.S. history, with stunning new scandals bubbling to the surface even after Barr’s departure from office.

Barr was corrupt from the beginning. His first act as AG was to distort the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, earning a public rebuke for his dishonesty from Mueller himself and, later, from a federal judge. Then, Barr tried to manipulate the law to squash a whistleblower’s complaint about Trump’s dealings with Ukraine—the report that eventually led to Trump’s first impeachment. Barr later intervened in an unprecedented manner to undermine his own DOJ prosecutors on the cases of Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, both political allies of the President. And then Barr fired the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York under false pretenses. Finally, Barr amplified baseless theories about massive mail-in ballot fraud, pouring gasoline on the dumpster fire battle over the 2020 election results and contributing to the January 6 insurrection that led to Trump’s second impeachment.

In Hatchet Man, Honig proves that Barr trampled the two core virtues that have long defined the department and its mission: credibility and independence – ultimately in service of his own deeply-rooted, extremist legal and personal beliefs. Honig shows how Barr corrupted the Justice Department and explains what we must do to prevent this from ever happening again

This is a story of a nation sabotaged—economically, medically, and politically—by its own leader, culminating with a groundbreaking, minute-by-minute account of exactly what went on in the Capitol building on January 6, as Trump’s supporters so easily breached the most sacred halls of American democracy, and how the president reacted. With unparalleled access, Rucker and Leonnig explain and expose exactly who enabled —and who foiled— Trump as he sought desperately to cling to power.

The true story of what took place in Donald Trump’s White House during a disastrous 2020 has never before been told in full. What was really going on around the president, as the government failed to contain the coronavirus and over half a million Americans perished? Who was influencing Trump after he refused to concede an election he had clearly lost and spread lies about election fraud? To answer these questions, Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig reveal a dysfunctional and bumbling presidency’s inner workings in unprecedented, stunning detail.

A classic and heart-racing work of investigative reporting, this book is destined to be read and studied by citizens and historians alike for decades to come.

In American Marxism, Levin explains how the core elements of Marxist ideology are now pervasive in American society and culture—from our schools, the press, and corporations, to Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and the Biden presidency—and how it is often cloaked in deceptive labels like “progressivism,” “democratic socialism,” “social activism,” and more. With his characteristic trenchant analysis, Levin digs into the psychology and tactics of these movements, the widespread brainwashing of students, the anti-American purposes of Critical Race Theory and the Green New Deal, and the escalation of repression and censorship to silence opposing voices and enforce conformity. Levin exposes many of the institutions, intellectuals, scholars, and activists who are leading this revolution, and provides us with some answers and ideas on how to confront them.

As Levin writes: “The counter-revolution to the American Revolution is in full force. And it can no longer be dismissed or ignored for it is devouring our society and culture, swirling around our everyday lives, and ubiquitous in our politics, schools, media, and entertainment.” And, like before, Levin seeks to rally the American people to defend their liberty.

A strange aircraft resembling an abandoned “tailless” fighter jet concept has been spotted in China.

Defence website The War Zone made the discovery while analysing satellite images of the test airfield at Chengdu Aerospace Corporation, one of the country’s pre-eminent fighter jet manufacturers, noting that the “puzzling airframe” seemed to have appeared some time in the first half of this year.

WASHINGTON, D.C.: Given the current dangerous tensions in the Solomon Islands—linked to Chinese activity in the country—in this edition of “Indo-Pacific: Behind the Headlines” we speak with the highly respected Solomon Islands leader, Hon. Peter Kenilorea Jr.

Hon. Kenilorea is the son of the first Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands and was elected to the national parliament of the Solomon Islands in 2019. He is also the President of the Organization of the African, Caribbean and Pacific States Parliamentary Assembly and the Co-President of the ACP-EU Parliamentary Assembly.

The United States has warned European Union allies that Russia may be weighing a potential invasion of Ukraine, according to reports.

Washington has been closely monitoring a build-up of Russian forces near the Ukrainian border, and on Wednesday warned Moscow against making another “serious mistake”.

Bloomberg now reports that US officials have briefed their EU counterparts on their concerns over a possible military invasion.

A lack of top-tier intelligence on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s inner circle is frustrating senior Biden administration officials struggling to get ahead of Beijing’s next steps, according to current and former officials who have reviewed the most sensitive U.S. intelligence reports.

Those officials, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive issues, say China is becoming a harder target, more opaque, just as the demand for insights into Xi’s decision-making is soaring and tensions with the U.S. are heating up over issues from Taiwan to high technology.

By blocking the release of all documents concerning the Kennedy assassination, US President Joe Biden has continued what is now something of a White House tradition. It is no wonder that most Americans believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone.

Neurotechnology is an umbrella term for a range of technologies which interact directly with the brain or nervous system. This can include systems which passively scan, map or interpret brain activity, or systems which actively influence the state of the brain or nervous system.

Governments and the private sector alike are pouring money into research on neurotechnology, in particular the viability and applications for brain–computer interfaces (BCI) which allow users to control computers with their thoughts. While the field is still in its infancy, it is advancing at a rapid pace, creating technologies which only a few years ago would have seemed like science fiction.

You’d think a generation of folks raised on making look-at-me posts on social media could never go work at the Agency. You’d be wrong.

When you pull up to the CIA headquarters in Langley, you have to shout your Social Security number out the window into a speaker, like when you’re ordering fries at a drive-through. Much like the Union that the Agency was formed to protect, the system, it seems, could be more perfect. But I am willing to do what it takes to get the inside story of how the CIA is recruiting and working with the next generation of spies.

Open source research has “come of age”, according to a recent article published by The Economist. What was once the niche realm of a relatively small number of individuals with free time and obsessive internet habits is now informing research and journalism in a wide range of fields and institutions. It’s hard to imagine a better time to roll up your sleeves and set off on the path of the open source researcher.

The promise of open source research is that anyone — not just journalists or researchers at select institutions — can contribute to investigations that uncover wrongdoing and hold perpetrators of crimes and atrocities to account.

Are we at the beginning of a fifth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic? If yes, is it dangerous and should we be worried about it? Alternatively, is the COVID-19 pandemic over? Has the COVID-19 pandemic evolved towards an endemic illness that is not more dangerous than the seasonal flu? Meanwhile, have we just accepted COVID-19 related death as a fatality, not worth our concern?

Coronavirus has highlighted how anxiety, uncertainty, and the reordering of democratic state-citizen relations can breed susceptibility to violent extremist thinking and action.

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the normative social order of democratic societies in profound ways: lockdowns, public health mandates, a range of restrictions on movement and behaviour, and the rapid development of new-generation vaccines. This disruption has occurred amid an environment of risk and uncertainty that threatens peoples’ sense of security, stability, and resilience. The rise of pandemic-led conspiracy thinking has therefore been predictable.

The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) is one of the longest-serving Whitehall committees. Its origins can be traced back to a decision in 1936 to remedy the lack of co-ordination within the secret world. Sitting at the top of the intelligence pyramid, the JIC comprises the heads of the main intelligence agencies and the leading civil servants in the policymaking departments, including the Foreign Office, Ministry of Defence, and Home Office. It looks down upon a multibillion-pound intelligence community, setting requirements and assessing performance, and looks upwards towards policymakers, producing an array of intelligence assessments. It is defined by its deliberate mixture of intelligence and policymaking officials, and the fact that consensus lies at the heart of everything it does.

While cloud technologies allow intelligence agencies to ‘crunch’ data at scale and maintain competency in a big data world, there are concerns over the contracting of third parties based outside of the UK, and questions about oversight mechanisms for commercial cloud technologies.