Republican Party Unravels Over Donald Trump’s Takeover

By seizing the Republican presidential nomination for Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night, he and his millions of supporters completed what had seemed unimaginable: a hostile takeover of one of America’s two major political parties.

Just as stunning was how quickly the host tried to reject them. The party’s two living former presidents spurned Mr. Trump, a number of sitting governors and senators expressed opposition or ambivalence toward him, and he drew a forceful rebuke from the single most powerful and popular rival left on the Republican landscape: the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan.

Panama Papers Source Breaks Silence And Offers To Aid Authorities For Immunity

BERLIN (Reuters) - Sueddeutsche Zeitung said on Friday that the source of millions of documents leaked to the German newspaper from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca had sent them a manifesto, saying his motivation was the “scale of injustices” the papers revealed.

The source had never before publicly stated why he leaked the documents, now known as the Panama Papers, said Sueddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s most reputable newspapers.

The GOP's 24-hour meltdown

Donald Trump on Tuesday night assumed the mantle of presumptive nominee and declared: “We want to bring unity to the Republican Party. We have to bring unity.”

Three days later, the GOP is tearing itself apart.

Friday brought another day of incredible division and revolt with Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham falling in line not behind Trump, but behind House Speaker Paul Ryan, who said a day earlier that he cannot yet support the brash real estate mogul as his party’s standard-bearer.

Top allies break with Ryan over Trump

Two prominent House allies of Paul Ryan broke with the speaker Friday over his decision to withhold support from Donald Trump, comments that point to a growing split among congressional Republicans over how to deal with the presumptive nominee.

Reps. Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia and Dennis Ross of Florida — who, as House whips, help Republican leaders muster support to pass legislation — told POLITICO in interviews on Friday that they disagreed with Ryan’s decision to break with Trump in a bombshell interview a day earlier. Both lawmakers said they believe their leader is in denial about how Republican voters feel about the real-estate tycoon.

Donald Trump Seeks Republican Unity but Finds Rejection

A hasty effort to make peace between Donald J. Trump and Republican Party leaders veered toward the point of collapse on Friday as Jeb Bush announced he would not back Mr. Trump in the general election and Mr. Trump unleashed a caustic personal attack on a prominent senator who declined to endorse his campaign.

Since a landslide victory in Indiana made him the presumptive Republican nominee, Mr. Trump has faced a shunning from party leaders that is unprecedented in modern politics. Mr. Trump has struggled to make peace with senior lawmakers and political donors whom he denounced during the Republican primaries, and upon whose largess he must now rely.

Former U.S. Diplomats Decry the U.S.-Backed Saudi War in Yemen

Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states that form the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have been brutally bombing Yemen for more than a year, hoping to drive Houthi rebels out of the capital they overran in 2014 and restore Saudi-backed President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

The United States has forcefully backed the Saudi-led war. In addition to sharing intelligence, the U.S. has sold tens of billions of dollars in munitions to the Saudis since the war began. The kingdom has used U.S.-produced aircraft, laser-guided bombs, and internationally-banned cluster bombs to target and destroy schools, markets, power plants, and a hospital, resulting in thousands of civilian deaths.

Florida Mayors Rush To Prepare For Rising Seas

Cindy Lerner and Carlos Gimenez are, in many ways, typical local politicians. Both are mayors, and both are intimately familiar with the trials and tribulations that their constituents face on a daily basis, from trash pickup to traffic. Both serve communities along the southeastern Florida coast — Gimenez is mayor of Miami-Dade County, the most populous county in Florida and the seventh-most populous county in the United States, while Lerner is mayor of the village of Pinecrest, a suburban village of about 18,000 residents located within Miami-Dade County.