Witch Hunt! Mueller Report Spurs World Leaders to Adopt Trump Tactics

In the clear on ‘collusion,’ Trump’s claims of being unfairly harassed by opponents will boost embattled politicians globally.

Clasping hands with the American president on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted a diplomatic favor from Donald Trump — U.S. recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over Golan Heights, a disputed region in the Levant — with a peck on the cheek. “Israel has never had a better friend than you,” Netanyahu told Trump. Netanyahu was speaking for himself as well. The greater gift for Netanyahu, at least politically, was one that came up during a press conference after their meeting, when a reporter asked Trump about special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which concluded that Trump’s campaign did not collude with Russian interference efforts in the 2016 election.

The reprieve boosts a growing breed of world leaders like Netanyahu leading established democracies who have taken to claiming — like the American president — that the criticism they face is spurred by a “witch hunt.” From Israel to India, Brazil to Botswana and Mexico to Turkey, these leaders are well entrenched in power yet are nevertheless looking to fortify themselves domestically by painting their critics as clubby insiders, the “establishment” or representatives of the “deep state” out to get them: the very argument that marked Trump’s undermining of the Mueller report before it was finished.

Cape Town is running out of water, but professor Sue Harrison might have a solution.

Most bioprocess engineers wear crisp lab coats and work in ultra-clean stainless-steel reactors. While professor Sue Harrison, from the University of Cape Town’s chemical engineering department, is familiar with this sterile world, she’s increasingly drawn to muckier, less controlled environments. For the past 15 years, her focus has been on melding bioprocess engineering skills with nature-mimicking processes to challenge the very definition of waste.

Harrison is a pioneer of both bioprocess engineering (putting nature, often in the form of algae or bacteria, to work in industry, cities, businesses and elsewhere) and transdisciplinarity (she’s worked at the interface of chemistry, engineering and the life sciences for more than 30 years). Now, as the director of the Future Water Institute, UCT’s interdisciplinary research center, she is taking both obsessions to their logical extremes in a quest to improve the prognosis for water-starved South Africa, a country that, according to doomsday predictions, could run out of water by 2030.

The admission of the kingdom’s stocks comes just months after a journalist’s murder caused a global outcry.

A landmark year for Saudi Arabia’s stock market will have little to do with Saudi Aramco, the country’s oil giant whose initial public offering plan has been put on hold.

Instead, the world’s three largest index providers will funnel billions and billions of dollars into Saudi stocks after admitting them to benchmarks whose influence has grown alongside the rise of passive investing over the past decade.

The process, which began this week when FTSE Russell and S&P Dow Jones added the stocks to their indexes, raises questions over what investors will be buying given the country’s largest and highest-profile company, Saudi Aramco, remains state-owned.