WIKILEAKS HAITI. This week we announced partnership with the Haitian weekly newspaper, Haïti Liberté, on a series of groundbreaking reports about U.S. and U.N. policy toward Haiti, drawing from a trove of 1,918 diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks. Beginning June 1, a series of English-language reports will be published by The Nation each Wednesday, written by a variety of journalists with extensive experience in the country. By partnering with Haïti Liberté, and placing the cables in context for a US audience, we hope to heighten the impact of the Haiti releases in the United States and internationally.

This week’s report, “The PetroCaribe Files” by Veteran Haiti correspondent Dan Coughlin and Haïti Liberté editor Kim Ives, exposes how the US tried to interfere in and block an oil agreement between Haiti and Venezuela that would save the beleaguered country $100 million per year. Coughlin and Ives joined Democracy Now! Friday morning with more on Wednesday’s report. Watch that here. And read more about the weekly series here.

Catch Nation Columnist Melissa Harris-Perry on Realtime with Bill Maher tonight, on HBO at 10PM ET!

THE ASSAULT ON ELIZABETH WARREN. In “The Bank Lobby Steps Up Its Attack on Elizabeth Warren,” contributing writer Ari Berman takes stock of who’s bankrolling the assault on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and block appointment of Elizabeth Warren as its permanent director. In our regular audio feature, Nation Conversations, Managing Editor Roane Carey spoke to Ari about the CFPB and why it and Warren pose such threats to the predatory financial industry. Listen to that here.

REAL POLITICAL COURAGE? I argued this week in my Washington Post column, there was a time in America we defined political courage as a politician standing up for deeply held beliefs in opposition to party and president no matter the consequence. Today, however, our definition rewards those who claim to be making difficult choices when there’s really nothing hard about what they’ve chosen. Case in point: Rep. Paul Ryan. More here.

NEW BLOGGER: DANA GOLDSTEIN. We’re proud to welcome Dana Goldstein, who’ll be blogging with us at TheNation.com. A Spencer Education Fellow at Columbia University and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, Goldstein contributes regularly to national publications on the ramifications of President Obama’s education reform agenda. She’ll be covering a wide range of topics including women’s issues, public health and American politics. Previously, she was an associate editor and writer at The Daily Beast and The American Prospect. Her first post, “Jill Abramson, Feminist Journalist,” looks at the veteran reporter and editor who Thursday was named the first female editor of The New York Times. Read that here.

NEW PUZZLERS’ DEBUT. Congratulations to Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto, known to The Nation’s puzzler community as “Cosima K. Coinpott” in our contest in search of a new cryptic crossword puzzler. As Copy Editor Judith Long writes in “We Have a Winner!” "[Kosman and Picciotto] have been elected by a huge plurality of Nation puzzle-solvers to don the mantle of the late Frank W. Lewis, our British-type cryptic crossword puzzle constructor for more than six decades." Try your hand at their debut puzzle in the week’s issue!

——

As always, thanks for reading. I’m on Twitter–@KatrinaNation. Please leave your comments below.