AFP, FEER news veteran. Author of 'The King Never Smiles' bio of Thai king. American U SIS. Clarinet,tenor in DC. Less noise more signal @phand1.bsky.social

Washington DC
Joined August 2012
stayed up late tweeting
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Paul Handley retweeted
THE POPE, MELANIA TRUMP, AND THE UKRAINE CEASEFIRE 🕊️ Oct. 16: Pope Leo calls Putin. Pushes for a ceasefire 🕊️ Oct. 19: Pope Leo calls Zelenskyy. Same mission 😈 Oct. 23: Melania announces the ceasefire. The White House calls her the “exclusive intermediary” The Pope wasn’t even mentioned.
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Paul Handley retweeted
TRUMP on HIGH GAS PRICES: We’re making money like we’ve never made before. They’ll say: President Trump is bragging about all the money they're making while people are suffering at the pump. I don’t give a damn. We’re making a freaking fortune.
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Paul Handley retweeted
Sharing @edwardwhitenz's excellent Fifth Plenum preview in @FT. Glad to be quoted. Most China watchers think a revived Party chairmanship is very unlikely. I'm not so sure. Deng and Jiang ruled through bargains among elders and factions, so they could step back safely. Xi rules by fear. He has taken down even Zhang Youxia, Miao Hua and Zhong Shaojun, his own trusted generals who seemed untouchable. A ruler like this cannot let go. And power ends at death. Only Mao got around that. Deng, twice purged by Mao, still would not repudiate him, because repudiating Mao meant repudiating the Party itself. That is the height Xi needs. Short of it, he will be torn down after he dies. ft.com/content/d11b743a-cd2c…
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Paul Handley retweeted
Angie Nixon: "Laura Loomer calling me out of my name, JD Vance telling me I need to leave this country, I don't deserve to be here, Donald Trump, Ashley Moody, all of that stuff." Her answer: "Don't let them steal our joy." @AngieNixon @rolandsmartin youtu.be/2foyFOJvwV8
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Paul Handley retweeted
A 21-year-old was abducted from his home in the middle of the night and held for a year without charge. Israel killed a Palestinian hostage—and the media couldn’t care less.
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Paul Handley retweeted
Collective punishment is a WAR CRIME, forced displacement and targeting civilian homes are war crimes. Refusing to use that language normalizes it.
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Paul Handley retweeted
“Road junction” is certainly a creative way to describe a military checkpoint enforcing an occupation.
Two Palestinian gunmen attacked a road junction near Hebron on Friday, prompting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to direct Israel’s military to prepare for a “full lockdown” of the West Bank. The militant group Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack. wapo.st/47AMafU
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Paul Handley retweeted
Alexandria teen becomes first child in state functionally cured of sickle cell disease
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This is the kind of deal the Democrats need to investigate immediately if they take Congress. An oil deal in Alaska which actually might be a gift to the Russians with Trump involvement. ft.com/content/e9cfbfbb-e65a…
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Paul Handley retweeted
So Ramaswamy is making the argument that because his opponent was traumatized and abused as a child, she’s not qualified for office? Just astonishing how anti-human being this guy is. I have a feeling more voters will believe a candidate lacking shame or empathy is unqualified to represent a state the size of Ohio.
INSANE. Vivek Ramaswamy says Dr. Acton’s childhood sexual abuse makes her “flawed” while being confronted yesterday
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Trump is far more corrupt than you imagined. ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️
This Forbes investigation is a must-read. Donald Trump pulled in roughly $1.4 billion from crypto in 2025, plus more than $200 million from real estate, and faced a projected tax bill north of $500 million. So his company donated the "development rights" to his Jupiter, Florida golf course to a land trust, argued the course was a natural habitat worth protecting, and kept right on running the club. Forbes estimates the write-off could land around $825 million. He has done this at least five times since 2005. New York's attorney general alleged two of those appraisals were inflated. In Doral, he claimed a deduction of up to $323 million, more than double what he paid for the entire resort. A month after the Jupiter deal, he sued the IRS. The settlement his own Justice Department signed bars claims against him over matters that "could be pending," language that appears broad enough to cover this year's taxes. A federal judge found the case was brought to manipulate the judicial process. And the man now running the IRS, who took the job as this deal was being assembled, has a home backing onto those same Jupiter fairways. This is absolutely ridiculous. Nobody should be able to use the presidency to write his own tax bill. forbes.com/sites/danalexande…
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Paul Handley retweeted
ICE just locked up the man who feeds 8,000 Bronx neighbors a month, at his own immigration hearing. Now his food pantry is shut.🤬 Aleksander Nilaj, an Albanian immigrant who founded the Open Hand food pantry in the Bronx in 2012, showed up for his immigration hearing at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan. ICE agents detained him instead. He is now held at Delaney Hall, a detention center in Newark, New Jersey. bit.ly/4i8Uqse
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Paul Handley retweeted
For fuck’s sake
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Serious power move from GOP in Congress 🤷‍♂️ Sure Trump is concerned.
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Thousands of North Carolina ballots set to be rejected after GOP imposed strict new rules
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Paul Handley retweeted
NEWS: MAGA’s top voter fraud crusader Scott Presler caught committing voter fraud, letting out-of-state GOP operatives register at his Pennsylvania home so they could vote there in 2024, including one who voted in Florida in 2020 and again in 2025. Every accusation from these people is a confession, and Presler should be prosecuted for the same crime he’s spent years falsely pinning on Democrats.
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